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 Ameri-
cans 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 had some opportunities, Japanese-
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.
C. Isolationism
1. American businesspeople did not wish to give up profitable overseas markets in Germany and Japan.
3. Congress favored isolationism, as seen with various Neutrality Acts.
D. War in Europe
1. Stalin signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler.
2. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
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.
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
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
2. The government-built housing for war workers and forced civilian industries to retool for war production.
B. Business and the War
2. Americans produced an astonishing amount of wartime goods and utilized science and technology.
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
E. Freedom from Want
1. Roosevelt initially meant the phrase to refer to the elimination of barriers to international trade.
F. The Office of War Information
1. Political division generated by the New Deal affected efforts to promote the Four Freedoms.
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.
H. Women at Work
2. New opportunities opened for married women and mothers.
I. The Pull of Tradition
2. The advertisers’ “world of tomorrow” rested on a vision of family–centered prosperity.
IV. Visions of Postwar Freedom
A. Toward an American Century
1. Henry Luce insisted that the United States embrace a leadership role in his 1941 book The American Century.
B. The Way of Life of Free Men
1. The National Resources Planning Board offered a blueprint for a peacetime economy.
a. Full employment
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.
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.
2. Government and private agencies eagerly promoted group equality as the definition of Americanism and as a counterpoint
to Nazism.
B. The Bracero Program
1. The war had a far more ambiguous meaning for nonwhites than for whites.
C. Mexican-American Rights
1. A new Chicano culture, a fusion of Mexican heritage and American experience, was being born.
a. “Zoot suit” riots
D. Indians during the War
1. Native Americans served in the army.
E. Asian-Americans in Wartime
1. Asian-Americans’ war experience was filled with paradox.
2. Chinese exclusion was abolished.
F. Japanese-American Internment
1. The military persuaded FDR to issue Executive Order 9066.
2. Internment revealed how easily war can undermine basic freedoms.
a. Hardly anyone spoke out against internment.
b. The courts refused to intervene.
3. The government marketed war bonds to the internees and drafted them into the army.
G. Blacks and the War
1. The wartime message of freedom portended a major transformation in the status of blacks.
2. The war spurred a movement of the black population from the rural South to the cities of the North and West.
H. Blacks and Military Service
I. Birth of the Civil Rights Movement
1. The war years witnessed the birth of the modern civil rights movement.
2. In July 1941, the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for a March on Washington.
a. Executive Order 8802 and FEPC
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
2. CIO unions made significant efforts to organize black workers and to win them access to skilled positions.
4. The South reacted to preserve white supremacy.
6. Wendell Willkie’s One World attacked “our imperialisms at home.”
L. An American Dilemma
1. An American Dilemma was a sprawling account of the country’s racial past, present, and future.
a. Gunnar Myrdal
2. Myrdal noted the conflict between American values and American racial policies.
M. Black Internationalism
2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and others developed an outlook that linked the plight of black Americans with that of
people of color worldwide.
VI. The End of the War
A. “The Most Terrible Weapon”
2. The atomic bomb was a practical realization of the theory of relativity.
3. The Manhattan Project developed an atomic bomb.
B. The Dawn of the Atomic Age
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.
a. Tehran
E. Yalta and Bretton Woods
F. The United Nations
1. The Dumbarton Oaks meeting established the structure of the United Nations.
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.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
Bracero Program
Japanese-American Internment
Holocaust
Museum of Tolerance
The National World War II Museum
Patriotic Art
Pearl Harbor Attack
Pearl Harbor National Memorial Hawai’i
Rosie the Riveter
“Zoot Suit” 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. New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 2006.
Keegan, John. The Battle for History: Re-Fighting World War II. New York: Vintage, 1995.
Kennedy, Paul. The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations. New York: Random House, 2006.
McMillen, Christian. Making Indian Law: The Hualapai Land Case and the Birth of Ethnohistory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
Murray, Alice Yang. What Did the Internment of Japanese Americans Mean? New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000.
2009.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Letter Writing from the Front
Ask the students to imagine that they are soldiers writing a letter home from the front lines. They can be in any service branch they choose and
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 case. Ask each stu-