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CHAPTER 22 Fighting for the Four Freedoms: World
War II, 1941–1945
This chapter concentrates on the history of World War II. Attempting to give the war an ideological meaning and to
convince the American public that it had to be prepared, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) linked the war’s meaning
with the freedoms that Americans had taken for granted for years. The chapter looks at FDR’s foreign policy in
Latin America, the road leading up to the European and Pacific wars, and America’s reluctance to intervene until
Pearl Harbor. Next, the war on the home front is examined. Americans mobilized quickly, and business and labor
worked to make America an “arsenal of democracy” while the Office of War Information (OWI) promoted the
“Four Freedoms” to the American public. The intellectual debates about how the postwar world might define
freedom are examined through the writings of Henry Luce, Henry Wallace, Friedrich Hayek, and FDR’s Economic
Bill of Rights. Ethnic minorities’ experiences during the war were varied. While Native and Mexican-Americans
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms Paintings
II. Fighting World War II
A. Good Neighbors
1. FDR made several departures from U.S. foreign policy.
2. FDR took steps to thwart German influence in Latin America.
B. The Road to War
1. Japan had expanded its reach in Manchuria and China by the mid-1930s.
2. Germany embarked on a campaign to control the entire continent.
3. Although Roosevelt was alarmed, he was tied to the policy of appeasement.
a. Munich conference
C. Isolationism
1. American businesspeople did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets in Germany and Japan.
2. Many Americans were reluctant to get involved in international affairs because of the legacy of World
3. Congress favored isolationism, as seen with various Neutrality Acts.
D. War in Europe
1. Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.
3. For nearly two years, Britain stood virtually alone in fighting Germany.
a. Battle of Britain
4. FDR wished to help Britain, but public opinion limited him.
E. Toward Intervention
1. Most Americans wanted to remain out of the European conflict.
2. In 1940, breaking with a tradition that dated back to George Washington, Roosevelt announced his
candidacy for a third term as president.
a. A “great arsenal of democracy”
a. Freedom House
F. Pearl Harbor
1. On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes, launched from aircraft carriers, bombed the naval base at Pearl
Harbor in Hawaii.
2. FDR asked for a declaration of war against Japan.
G. The War in the Pacific
1. The first few months of American involvement witnessed an unbroken string of military disasters.
2. The tide turned with the battles at Coral Sea and Midway in May and June 1942.
H. The War in Europe
1. The “Grand Alliance” united to defeat Germany.
2. The war in Europe was first fought in North Africa and Italy.
3. D-Day established the much-needed second front in western Europe.
III. The Home Front
A. Mobilizing for War
1. World War II transformed the role of the national government.
2. The government-built housing for war workers and forced civilian industries to retool for war
production.
B. Business and the War
1. Roosevelt offered incentives to spur production—low-interest loans, tax concessions, and contracts with
guaranteed profits.
4. The South remained very poor when the war ended.
C. Labor in Wartime
2. Unions became firmly established in many sectors of the economy during World War II.
D. Fighting for the Four Freedoms
1. To Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms expressed deeply held American values worthy of being spread
worldwide.
E. Freedom from Want
1. Roosevelt initially meant the phrase to refer to the elimination of barriers to international trade.
a. It came to mean protecting the standard of living from falling after the war.
b. Carlos Bulosan
F. The Office of War Information
2. Concerned that the OWI was devoting as much time to promoting New Deal social programs as to the
war effort, Congress eliminated most of its funding.
G. The Fifth Freedom
1. The war witnessed a burst of messages marketing advertisers’ definition of freedom.
a. Free enterprise
H. Women at Work
1. Women in 1944 made up more than one-third of the civilian labor force.
2. New opportunities opened for married women and mothers.
I. The Pull of Tradition
IV. Visions of Postwar Freedom
A. Toward an American Century
2. Henry Wallace offered a less imperialistic alternative.
3. Luce and Wallace both spoke the language of freedom.
B. The Way of Life of Free Men
1. The National Resources Planning Board offered a blueprint for a peacetime economy.
2. The reports continued a shift in liberals’ outlook that dated from the late 1930s.
a. Keynesianism
C. An Economic Bill of Rights
1. FDR called for an Economic Bill of Rights in 1944.
3. During 1945, unions, civil rights organizations, and religious groups urged Congress to enact the Full
Employment Bill.
D. The Road to Serfdom
1. The failure of the Full Employment Bill revealed the renewed intellectual respectability of fears that
economic planning represented a threat to liberty.
a. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom
V. The American Dilemma
A. Patriotic Assimilation
1. World War II created a vast melting pot, especially for European immigrants and their children.
a. Roosevelt promoted pluralism as the only source of harmony in a diverse society.
3. By the war’s end, racism and nativism had been stripped of intellectual respectability.
a. Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montagu
5. Intolerance hardly disappeared from American life.
B. The Bracero Program
2. The bracero program allowed tens of thousands of contract laborers to cross into the United States to
take up jobs as domestic and agricultural workers.
C. Mexican-American Rights
1. A new Chicano culture, a fusion of Mexican heritage and American experience, was being born.
a. “Zoot suit” riots
3. Texas passed the Caucasian Race–Equal Privileges Resolution.
4. Voices from Freedom (Primary Source document feature) showcases Mexican-American expressions of
D. Indians during the War
1. Native Americans served in the army.
a. “Code talkers”
b. The Iroquois issued a declaration of war against the Axis powers.
E. Asian-Americans in Wartime
2. Chinese exclusion was abolished.
4. The American government viewed every person of Japanese ethnicity as a potential spy.
F. Japanese-American Internment
2. Internment revealed how easily war can undermine basic freedoms.
a. Hardly anyone spoke out against internment.
b. The courts refused to intervene.
i. Korematsu v. United States
ii. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) includes part of the Korematsu decision
3. The government marketed war bonds to the internees and drafted them into the army.
G. Blacks and the War
2. The war spurred a movement of the black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and
3. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) includes an excerpt from a book by historian
Charles Wesley; What the Negro Wants (1944) explains that blacks were denied the Four Freedoms
while the war strengthened black internationalism.
H. Blacks and Military Service
1. During the war, over 1 million blacks served in the armed forces.
2. Black soldiers sometimes had to give up their seats on railroad cars to accommodate Nazi prisoners of
war.
I. Birth of the Civil Rights Movement
a. Executive Order 8802 and FEPC
3. Although the FEPC lacked enforcement powers, it marked a significant shift in public policy.
J. The Double-V
1. The double-V meant that victory over Germany and Japan must be accompanied by victory over
segregation at home.
K. What the Negro Wants
1. During the war, a broad political coalition centered on the left, but reaching well beyond it, called for an
end to racial inequality in America.
2. CIO unions made significant efforts to organize black workers and to win them access to skilled
positions.
L. An American Dilemma
1. An American Dilemma was a sprawling account of the country’s racial past, present, and future.
a. Gunnar Myrdal
3. By 1945, support for racial justice had finally taken its place on the liberal-left agenda alongside full
employment, civil liberties, and the expansion of the New Deal welfare state.
M. Black Internationalism
1. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a black international consciousness was reinvigorated.
3. World War II stimulated among African-Americans a greater awareness of the links between racism in
the United States and colonialism abroad.
VI. The End of the War
A. “The Most Terrible Weapon”
1. One of the most momentous decisions ever confronted by an American president fell to Harry Truman.
3. The Manhattan Project developed an atomic bomb.
B. The Dawn of the Atomic Age
2. Because of the enormous cost in civilian lives, the use of the bomb remains controversial.
C. The Nature of the War
1. The dropping of the atomic bombs was the logical culmination of the way World War II had been
fought.
D. Planning the Postwar World
1. Even as the war raged, a series of meetings between Allied leaders formulated plans for the postwar
world.
E. Yalta and Bretton Woods
1. The Bretton Woods meeting established a new international economic system.
F. The United Nations
1. The Dumbarton Oaks meeting established the structure of the United Nations.
a. General Assembly
b. Security Council
G. Peace, but not Harmony
1. World War II ended with the United States as the world’s dominant power.
2. It remained to be seen how seriously the victorious Allies took their wartime rhetoric of freedom.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Discuss the climate in America prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Why was isolationism prevalent?
• How did the United States pay for the war? What were the various economic tools used to raise money?
• Discuss the change in attitudes toward various ethnic groups during World War II, such as Indians, Mexican-
Americans, and Asian-Americans. How were they treated? What freedoms were extended or contracted?
• Discuss the importance of the GI Bill of Rights to American society.
• What was the double-V campaign? How did the war shape the modern civil rights movement?
• Use the Voices of Freedom document from Charles H. Wesley and explain how World War II shaped
African-Americans’ ideas about rights and freedom.
• Why were the Allies victorious in World War II?
• How did the United States shape the postwar world?
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Bracero Program
http://braceroarchive.org/
This site in English and Spanish is dedicated to collecting and making available the oral histories and artifacts pertaining to the
bracero program.
The best museum in the nation on World War II. The website provides articles, profiles, statistics, and the ability to research a
veteran of the war.
Native Americans in War
http://archive.defense.gov/home/features/2014/1114_native-american/
This U.S. Department of Defense site has profiles and images of Native American contributions to the U.S. military.
Patriotic Art
www.slideshare.net/szyksociety/arthur-szyk-world-war-ii
This slideshow by the Arthur Szyk Society includes a large collection of the artist’s art and cartoons of the World War II years.
“Zoot Suit” Riots
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1117&context=vocesnovae
The PBS American Experience series film The Zoot Suit Riots is about the 1942 Latino riots in Los Angeles. The website
provides an insightful article on the causes of the riots.
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Ambrose, Stephen. Citizen Soldiers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.
Borgwardt, Elizabeth. A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005.
Bradley, James. Flags of Our Fathers. New York: Bantam Books, 2000.
Dower, John. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.
Frydl, Kathleen. The G.I. Bill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Gordon, Linda, and Gary Okihiro, eds. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.
1965.
Stabler, Hollis. No One Ever Asked Me: The World War II Memoirs of an Omaha Indian Soldier. Lincoln: University of
1999.
1994.
Winkler, Allan. Home Front U.S.A.: America during World War II. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2000.
Zelitzer, Julian. Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—From World War II to the War on Terrorism. New
York: Basic Books, 2009.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Letter Writing from the Front
(2) why they believe the war is being fought (what democracy means to them). Ask the students to seal their letter and then
give it to another classmate or to the instructor to pass out to another student. After each student has a new letter, ask them
2. The Classroom as Supreme Court: The Korematsu case
Organize the class into the Supreme Court to decide the Korematsu case. As the instructor, you present the facts of the
