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History of USA (1940 s) The forties are pretty well defined by World War II. US isolationism was shattered by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt guided the country on the homefront, Dwight D. Eisenhower commanded the troops in Europe. Gen.
Douglas MacArthur and Adm. Chester Nimitz led them in the Pacific. The successful use of penicillin by 1941 revolutionized medicine. Developed first to help the military personnel survive war wounds, it also helped increase survival rates for surgery.
The first eye bank was established at New York Hospital in 1944. Unemployment almost disappeared, as most men were drafted and sent off to war. The government reclassified 55 % of their jobs, allowing women and blacks to fill them. First, single women were actively recruited to the workforce.
In 1943, with virtually all the single women employed, married women were allowed to work. Japanese immigrants and their descendants, suspected of loyalty to their homelands, were sent to internment camps. There were scrap drives for steel, tin, paper and rubber. These were a source of supplies and gave people a means of supporting the war effort.
Automobile production ceased in 1942, and rationing of food supplies began in 1943. Victory gardens were re-instituted and supplied 40 % of the vegetables consumed on the home front. In April, 1945, FDR died, and President Harry Truman celebrated V-E Day on May 8, 1945. Japan surrendered only after two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States emerged from World War II as a world superpower, challenged only by the USSR. While the USSR subjugated the defeated countries, the US implemented the Marshall Plan, helping war-torn countries to rebuild and rejoin the world economy.
Disputes over ideology and control led to the Cold War. Communism was treated as a contagious disease, and anyone who had contact with it was under suspicion. Alger Hiss, a former hero of the New Deal, was indicted as a traitor and the House Un-American Activities Committee began its infamous hearings. Returning GI's created the baby boom, which is still having repercussions on American society today.
Although there were rumors, it was only after the war ended that Americans learned the extent of the Holocaust. Realization of the power of prejudice helped lead to Civil Rights reforms over the next three decades. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act, commonly known as the GI Bill of Rights, entitled returning soldiers to a college education. In 1949, three times as many college degrees were conferred as in 1940.
College became available to the capable rather than the privileged few. Television made its debut at the 1939 World Fair, but the war interrupted further development. In 1947, commercial television with 13 stations became available to the public. Computers were developed during the early forties. The digital computer, named ENIAC, weighing 30 tons and standing two stories high, was completed in 1945.
Soviet domination of Eastern Europe alarmed the west. The United States led the effort to create a military alliance to complement economic efforts at containment. In 1949 the United States and 11 other countries established the north Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance based on the principle of collective security. An attack against one was to be considered an attack against all, to be met by appropriate force. The next year, the United States defined its aims clearly. The National Security Council (NSC) undertook a full-fledged review of American foreign and defense policy.
The resulting document, known as NSC- 68, signaled a new direction in American security policy. Based on the assumption that the Soviet Union was engaged in a fanatic effort to seize control of all governments wherever possible, the document committed America to assist allied nations anywhere in the world which seemed threatened by soviet aggression. The United States proceeded to increase defense spending dramatically in response to Soviet threats against Europe and the American, British and French presence in West Berlin. Bibliography: Ambrose, Stephen E. Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938. Viking Penguin, 1991.
Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, & the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947 - 1952. Cambridge University Press, 1971.
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