History of the United States (1918–1945)

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This article covers the history of the United States from 1918 through 1945.

Era Overview

The after-shock of Russia's October Revolution resulted in real fears of communism in the United States, leading to a three year Red Scare.

The United States Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles imposed by its Allies on the defeated Central Powers; instead, the United States signed separate peace treaties with Germany and her allies. Disillusioned by the failure of the peace conference to achieve high ideals, the American people chose to act independently in foreign affairs. The nation was very active internationally in the 1920s, but its refusal to join the League presaged the isolationism of the 1930s.

In 1920, the manufacture, sale, import and export of alcohol was prohibited by an amendment to the United States Constitution. Prohibition ended in 1933 by another change to the constitution: it is considered to have been a failure.

During most of the 1920s, the United States enjoyed a period of sustained prosperity. Most sectors did very well, except for agriculture, which suffered after the bubble of high prices and skyrocketing land prices burst in 1920. Prices were stable and GNP grew at an annual rate of 3.2% from 1918 to 1945. Money earnings (after taking inflation, unemployment and short hours and into account) of all employees doubled over 1918-45. Setting 1918 as 100, the index went to 112 in 1923, 122 in 1929, 81 in 1933 (the low point) 116 in 1940, and 198 in 1945. Rural areas lost population to nearby towns and cities, made nearer by the rapid growth in automobile usage. Urban areas saw dramatic improvements in housing and urban planning. The boom saw an extension of credit to a dangerous degree, including in the Stock Market, which rose to dangerously inflated levels.

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression led to government efforts to re-start the economy and help its victims. The recovery, however, was very slow. The nadir of the Great Depression was in 1933, but the economy showed very little improvement through the end of the decade, and remained grim until the increase in U.S. military spending leading up to World War II. Real wages did not surpass 1929 levels until 1941.

By 1939, isolationist sentiment in America had ebbed, but the United States at first declined to enter the war, limiting itself to giving supplies and weapons to Britain, Nationalist China, and the Soviet Union. After the sudden Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States quickly joined the British-Soviet alliance against Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, known as the "Axis Powers". Even with U.S. participation, it took nearly four more years to defeat Germany and Japan.

Red Scare from 1918 to 1920

The roots of the Red Scare lie in the anger of the American people that dissidents and subversives were sabotaging the war effort. Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1918, making it illegal to impede the war effort by encouraging draft resistance.

After the war, fear of subversion resumed in the context of the Red Scare, massive strikes in major industries (steel, meatpacking) and violent race riots. Radicals bombed Wall Street and tried to shut down Seattle, in February 1919. During 1919, a series of more than 20 riotous and violent black-white race-related incidents occurred. These included the Chicago, Omaha, and Elaine Race Riots.

On May 1, 1919, a May Day parade in Cleveland, Ohio, protesting the imprisonment of the Socialist leader, Eugene Debs, erupted into the violent May Day Riots. A series of bombings in 1919 had further enflamed the situation. The mayor of Seattle received a homemade bomb in the mail on April 28, which was defused. Senator Thomas W. Hardwick received a bomb the next day, which blew off the hands of his servant who had discovered it, severely burning him and his wife. The following morning, a New York City postal worker discovered sixteen similar packages addressed to well-known people of the time, including oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. On June 2, a bomb partially destroyed the front of the house of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.

Palmer organized and conducted the Palmer Raids, a series of raids and arrests of socialists, anarchists, radical unionists, and immigrants. By 1920, over 10,000 arrests were made and the aliens caught up in these raids were deported back to Europe.

In the Wall Street bombing, on September 16, 1920, 100 pounds (45 kg) of dynamite with 500 pounds (230 kg) of fragmented steel exploded in front of the offices of the J.P. Morgan Company, killing 40 people and injuring 300 others. Anarchists have long been suspected as initiating the attack, which followed a number of letter bombs that targeted Morgan himself. However, the identity of the bombers has never been determined.

With the 1920s, the scare dissipated as public interest moved on to other areas.

Aftermath of World War I

A popular Tin Pan Alley song of 1919 asked, concerning the United States troops returning from World War I, "How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down On the Farm After They've Seen Paree?". In fact, many did not remain "down on the farm", as there was a great migration of formerly rural population to the cities. However, agriculture became increasingly mechanized with widespread use of the tractor, so fewer farmers were needed to produce a greater harvest of food.

Woodrow Wilson campaigned for the U.S. to join the new League of Nations, which he had been instrumental in creating, but the United States Senate voted on January 19, 1919 not to join the League.

War reparations from the Treaty of Versailles left post-World-War-I Germany in a state of turmoil and no payments flowing to the Allies. The Dawes Plan, among other factors, allowed Germany to regain a degree of prosperity in the mid-1920s and the country seemed to be on its way to becoming a stable democracy. After the Great Depression hit, it was clear that Germany could not again pay reparations. The Young Plan then replaced the Dawes Plan. After the German election of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Germany repudiated all reparations.

After a long period of agitation (beginning in 1869), U.S. women were able to obtain the necessary votes from a majority of men to obtain the vote. Women participates in the 1920 Presidential and Congressional elections.

The Roaring Twenties

In the U.S. presidential election of 1920, the Republican Party returned to the White House with the election of Warren G. Harding, who promised a "return to normalcy" after the traumatic years of World War I.

During most of the 1920s the United States enjoyed a period of unbalanced prosperity: prices for agricultural commodities and wages fell at the end of the war while new industries (radio, movies, automobiles, and chemicals) flourished. The unevenness was also geographic: the standard of living in rural areas fell increasingly behind that of urban and suburban areas which saw dramatic improvements in housing and urban planning. The boom was reflected by the extension of credit to a dangerous degree, including in the stock market, which rose to record high levels, which in retrospect after the Stock Market Crash of 1929 were dangerously inflated.

Jazz music became widely popular with the young (and was widely reviled as unmusical noise by much of the older generation). Dancing was a popular recreation.

Prohibition

Main articles: Prohibition and Temperance movement

In 1920, the manufacture, sale, import and export of alcohol was prohibited by the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in an attempt to alleviate high rates of alcoholism and, especially, political corruption led by saloon-based politicians. It was enforced at the federal level by the Volstead Act. Most states let the federals do the enforcing. Note that drinking or owning liquor was not illegal, only the manufacture or sale.

National Prohibition ended in 1933, although it continued for a while in some states. Prohibition is considered by most (but not all) historians to have been a failure because organized crime was strengthened. It did represent the first instance of a U.S. constitutional amendment that directly regulated social activity. The 18th Amendment also represented the growing strength of the state in the early 20th century.

The KKK

Ku Klux Klan, is the name of a number of past and present organizations in the United States that have advocated white supremacy and anti-Semitism. It practiced anti-Catholicism and nativism. It was infamous for violently attacking its opponents, which included African Americans, people of non-conservative Protestant faiths, immigrants, and people supporting equal rights for any of the above.

The Klan's first incarnation lasted from 1865-70, during the initial phrase of Reconstruction in the South.

The founding, in 1915, by William J. Simmons of a second distinct group using the same name was inspired by the newfound power of the modern mass media, via the film The Birth of a Nation and inflammatory and anti-Semitic newspaper accounts surrounding the trial and lynching of accused murderer Leo Frank. This second Klan fought to maintain the dominance of white Protestants over Blacks, Asians, Catholics, and Jews. This group, although preaching racism and accused of violent activities, operated openly in the South and Midwest, and, at its peak in the mid-1920s, claimed millions of members. Many politicians at all levels of government were members, and the organization secretly or openly influenced some state governments, including Oregon and Indiana. Scandals involving rape, murder, and support for the Nazis destroyed its popularity in the late 1920s and, by 1928, the Klan was orders of magnitude smaller and weaker.

The \"Scopes Monkey Trial\"

The "Scopes Monkey Trial" of 1925 pitted lawyers William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow (the latter, with the ACLU representing teacher John T. Scopes) in a Tennessee court case that tested a law passed on March 13, 1925, which forbade the teaching, in any state-funded educational establishment in Tennessee, of "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." This is often interpreted as meaning that the law forbade the teaching of any aspect of the theory of evolution. By teaching from a state-mandated biology textbook that discussed evolution, Scopes believed he had broken the anti-evolution law.

Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution, but the verdict was overturned on appeal.

The federal government in the 1920s

Main articles: Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover

While in retrospect the 1920s are sometimes seen as the last gasp of Robber Baron capitalism, the era actually saw an ever increasing role for the federal government. In addition to Prohibition, the government took on new powers and duties such as funding and overseeing the new United States Highway system. Federal expansion of the money supply led to an unprecedented expansion of credit which contributed to both the boom and subsequent bust.

The Harding administration was rocked by the Teapot Dome scandal. It looked like the President himself might be shown to be involved in the corruption, but Harding died in office on August 2, 1923. He was succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge was a taciturn, personally honest New Englander who generally saw his role as to stay out of the way of the booming economy. He was elected to a full term of his own in 1924 under the slogan "Keep Cool With Coolidge."

When Coolidge declined to run again in the 1928 election, the Republican Party nominated engineer and Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, who was elected by a wide margin. Hoover was widely seen as one of the most promising technocrats of his generation. He was the only person elected to the U.S. Presidency who previously held neither national nor state elected office, nor was a victorious general in war.

Hoover had said, "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land." Within months of his election, however, the Stock market crashed, and the nation's economy spiraled downward into what became known as the Great Depression.

After the crash, Hoover announced that, while he would keep the Federal budget balanced, he would cut taxes and expand public works spending. However, he signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs, and later, the Revenue Act of 1932, which hiked taxes and fees across the board. These acts are often blamed for deepening the depression, and being Hoover's biggest political blunders. Moreover, the Federal Reserve System's tightening of the money supply (for fear of inflation) is also regarded by most modern economists as a mistaken tactic, given the actual monetary situation.

The Great Depression

In 1929, the world's most prosperous nation was the United States. But despite the buoyant optimism in the United States and the apparent economic well-being in other industrialized countries, the world economy could not withstand a depression that originated in the U.S. and spread across the globe in a matter of months.

Historians and economists still have not agreed on the Causes of the Great Depression, but there is general agreement it began in the United States in late 1929, and was either started or worsened by the "Black Thursday", the stock market crash of Thursday, October 24, 1929. Sectors of the U.S. economy had been showing some signs of distress for months before October 1929. Business inventories of all types were three times as large as they had been a year before (an indication that the public was not buying products as rapidly as in the past); and other signposts of economic health—freight carloads, industrial production, wholesale prices—were slipping downward.

The events in the United States triggered a world-wide depression, which led to deflation and a great increase in unemployment.

The Roosevelt administration

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The Great Depression and the election of 1932

The Wall Street stock market crash had ushered in a world-wide financial crisis. In the United States between 1929 and 1933, unemployment soared from 3 % of the workforce to 25 %, while manufacturing output collapsed by one-third.

Where it existed, local relief was overwhelmed.

Thrown out of their homes, the unemployed and poor moved into "Hoovervilles".

For many, their next meal was found at a soup kitchen, if at all.

Helplessness, hopelessness, homelessness and hunger stalked the land.

Adding to the misery of the times, drought arrived in the Great Plains in 1933. By 1934, the plains had been turned to a desert Dust Bowl. Those who had lost their homes and livelihoods were lured westward by advertisements for work put out by agribusiness in western states, such as California. The migrants came to be called Okies, Arkies, and other derogatory names as they flooded the labor supply of the agricultural fields, driving down wages, pitting desperate worker against desperate worker.

In the South, the always fragile economy collapsed further. To escape, rural workers and sharecroppers migrated north by train with hopes to work in auto plants around Detroit. In the Great Lakes states, farmers had been experiencing depressed market conditions for their crops and goods since the end of World War I. Family farms that had been mortgaged during the 1920s to provide money to “get through until better times” saw foreclosure as their owners failed to make payments.

Worldwide, desperate governments sought economic recovery by adopting restrictive autarkic policies--high tariffs, import quotas, and barter agreements--and by experimenting with new plans for their internal economies. Britain adopted far-reaching measures in the development of a planned national economy. In Nazi Germany, economic recovery was pursued through rearmament, conscription, and public works programs. In Mussolini's Italy, the economic controls of his corporate state were tightened. Some observers throughout the world saw in the massive program of economic planning and state ownership of the Soviet Union what appeared to be a depression-proof economic system and a solution to the crisis in capitalism.

In the United States, upon accepting Democratic nomination for president in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt (known as "FDR") promised "a new deal for the American people," a phrase that has endured as a label for his administration and its many domestic achievements. The Republicans, blamed for the Depression, or at least for lack of an adequate response to it, were easily defeated by FDR.

Unlike many other world leaders in the 1930s, however, Roosevelt entered office with no single ideology or plan for dealing with the depression. This "new deal" would be often contradictory, pragmatic, and experimental. What some considered incoherence of the New Deal's ideology, however, was the presence of several competing ones, based on programs and ideas not without precedents in the American political tradition.

The New Deal consisted of many different efforts to end the Great Depression and reform the American economy. Many of them failed, but there were enough successes to establish it as the most important episode of the twentieth century in the creation of the modern American state.

The First Hundred Days

The desperate economic situation, combined with the substantial Democratic victories in the 1932 Congressional elections, gave Roosevelt unusual influence over Congress in the "First Hundred Days" of his administration. He used his leverage to win rapid passage of a series of measure to prop up the tottering banking system, reform the stock market, aid the unemployed, and induce industrial and agricultural recovery.

The \"bank holiday\" and the Emergency Banking Act

On March 6, two days after taking office, FDR issued a proclamation closing all American banks for four days until Congress could meet in a special session. Ordinarily, such an action would cause widespread panic. But the action created a general sense of relief. First, many states had already closed down the banks before March 6. Second, Roosevelt astutely and euphemistically described it as a "bank holiday." And third, the action demonstrated that the federal government was stepping in to stop the alarming pattern of bank failures.

Three days later, President Roosevelt sent to Congress the Emergency Banking Act, a generally conservative bill, drafted in large part by holdovers from the Hoover administration, designed primarily to protect large banks from being dragged down by the failing smaller ones. The bill provided for Treasury Department inspection of all banks before they would be allowed to reopen, for federal assistance to tottering large institutions, and for a thorough reorganization of those in greatest difficulty. A confused and frightened Congress passed the bill within four hours of its introduction. Three-quarters of the banks in the Federal Reserve System reopened within the next three days, and $1 billion in hoarded currency and gold flowed back into them within a month. The immediate banking crisis was over.

The Economy Act

On the morning after passage of the Emergency Banking Act, Roosevelt sent to Congress the Economy Act, which was designed to convince the public, and moreover the business community, that the federal government was in the hands of no radical. The act proposed to balance the federal budget by cutting the salaries of government employees and reducing pensions to veterans by as much as 15 %.

Otherwise, Roosevelt warned, the nation faced a $1 billion deficit. The bill revealed clearly what Roosevelt had always maintained: that he was as much of a fiscal conservative at heart as his predecessor was. And like the banking bill, it passed through Congress almost instantly-- despite heated protests by some congressional progressives.

Farm Programs

The celebrated first Hundred Days of the new administration also produced a federal program to protect American farmers from the uncertainties of the market through subsides and production controls, the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which Congress passed in May 1933. The AAA reflected the desires of leaders of various farm organizations and Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace.

Relative farm incomes had been falling for decades. The AAA included reworkings of many long-touted programs for agrarian relief, which had been demanded for decades. The most important provision of the AAA was the provision for crop reductions--the "domestic allotment" system, which was intended to raise prices for farm commodities.

The most controversial component of the anti-deflationary domestic allotment system was the large-scale destruction of existing crops and livestock to reduce surpluses. At a time in which many families were suffering from malnutrition and downright starvation, it was a difficult measure. However, gross farm incomes increased by half in the first three years of the New Deal and the relative position of farmers improved significantly for the first time in twenty years.

Other initiatives

The First Hundred Days also saw the creation of a new federal regulatory agency to oversee the stock market, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a reform of the banking system that included a system of insurance for deposits. But the most successful in alleviating the miseries of the Great Depression were a series of relief measures to aid some of the 15 million unemployed Americans, among them the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).

The early New Deal also began the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), an unprecedented experiment in flood control, public power, and regional planning.

The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)

Roosevelt realized that these initial actions were nothing but stopgaps, that more comprehensive government programs would be necessary. In the roughly three years between the Great Crash and FDR's First Hundred Days, the industrial economy had been suffering from a vicious cycle of falling prices and production (deflation). Desperate for salvation, many business owners demanded that the government enforce trade association agreements to help raise prices.

The Roosevelt administration, under increasing pressure to do more to alleviate unemployment, insisted that business would have to ensure that the incomes of workers would rise along with their prices. The result was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the most important undertaking of the First Hundred Days, passed by the Congress in June 1933. To implement the NIRA, two new federal agencies, the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) were created.

These and other early initiatives created broad popular support for the Roosevelt administration and halted the rapid unraveling of the financial system. They did not, however, end, or even significantly abate, the Great Depression and the attendant suffering of the people.

Setbacks of Roosevelt's second term

Although Roosevelt's landslide 1936 victory produced large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, which led to predictions of great new achievements from the president's supporters, the administration encountered a long string of frustrations. Ambitious reform ideas often floundered because of bureaucratic constraints, such as the absence of a government bureaucracy with sufficient strength and expertise to administer them, and because of rising business opposition.

Political constraints were crippling both in Congress and among the public at large, where conservative inhibitions remained strong. However, the Supreme Court would perhaps be the most formidable opponent. Several crucial New Deal programs violated conservative constitutional theory. The NRA, the AAA, and others were invalidated by the Court, which was dominated by conservatives with a narrow view of the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution, the basis of much New Deal legislation.

The recession of 1937 and recovery

The Roosevelt administration was under assault during FDR's second term, which presided over a new dip in the Great Depression, beginning in the fall of 1937 and continuing through most of 1938. It was, in the largest measure, a result of a premature effort by the administration to balance the budget by reducing federal spending. The administration reacted by launching a rhetorical campaign against business monopoly power, which was cast as the cause of the new dip.

But the administration's other response to the 1937 dip had more tangible results. Ignoring his own Treasury Department, Roosevelt embarked on an antidote to the depression, reluctantly abandoning his efforts to balance the budget and launching a $5 billion spending program in the spring of 1938, an effort to increase mass purchasing power and attack deflation.

Roosevelt explained his program in a fireside chat in which he finally acknowledged that it was up to the government to "create an economic upturn" by making "additions to the purchasing power of the nation."

World War II and the end of the Great Depression

It was not until the administration was forced into large scale Federal spending to support World War II, that the nation's economy fully recovered.

Between 1939 and 1944 (the peak of wartime production), the nation's output almost doubled. Consequently, unemployment plummeted--from 14 % in 1940 to less than 2 % in 1943, as the labor force grew by ten million. The war economy was not so much a triumph of free enterprise as the result of government bankrolling business. While unemployment remained high throughout the New Deal years; consumption, investment, and net exports--the pillars of economic growth--remained low. It was World War II, not the New Deal, which finally ended the crisis. Nor did the New Deal substantially alter the distribution of power within American society and economy; and it had only a small impact on the distribution of wealth among the population.

Legacies of the New Deal

Although the New Deal did not end the depression, many believe that it helped to prevent the economy from decaying further by increasing the regulatory functions of the federal government in ways that helped stabilize previous trouble areas of the economy: the stock market, the banking system, and others. It also produced a new political coalition that sustained the Democratic Party as the majority party in national politics for more than a generation after its own end.

Laying the foundations for the postwar era, Roosevelt and the New Deal helped enhance the power of the federal government as a whole. FDR also established the presidency as the preeminent center of authority within the federal government. By creating a large array of protections for various groups of citizens-- workers, farmers, and others--who suffered from the crisis, enabling them to challenge the powers of the corporations, the Roosevelt administration generated a set of political ideas-- known to later generations as New Deal liberalism--that remained a source of inspiration for decades and that help shape the next experiment in liberal reform, the Great Society of the 1960s.

On the other hand, the Roosevelt administration and its 'liberalism' became the source of a vigorous 'conservative' reaction, initially by businessmen and other wealthy Americans who perceived a threat to their power and way of life, but expanding over the following decades and into the 21st century to include not only economic, but also social and religious conservatives, who together were to achieve political control of the U.S.

World War II

For details, see the main Homefront-United States-World War II article.

Isolationist sentiment in America had ebbed, but the United States at first declined to enter the war, limiting itself to giving supplies and weapons to the United Kingdom, the Republic of China, and the Soviet Union. American feeling changed drastically with the sudden Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. quickly joined the British-Soviet alliance against the Empire of Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, known as the "Axis Alliance". Even with American participation, it took nearly four more years to defeat Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire. Though the Soviet Union suffered far more casualties than its allies, America's active involvement in the war was vital to preventing an Axis victory.

Having been re-elected to unprecedented third and fourth terms as President in 1940 and 1944, FDR did not live to see the end of the war. On April 12, 1945, he died in office from a stroke. His Vice President, Harry S. Truman, assumed the office of the presidency and continued most of Roosevelt's wartime policies.

After the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany, the Western Allies celebrated "V-E Day" on May 8, 1945. On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, effectively destroying it. This was followed up on August 9 by an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The Japanese surrender a few days later was followed by the signing of official surrender papers on September 2, 1945 (V-J day).

Unlike the hysteria during World War I, the U.S. domestic scene in World War II was relatively peaceful. German and Italian aliens were rounded up and interned. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of Japanese American citizens were interned by the U.S. government. Though these camps did not involve heavy labor, forced isolation and sub-standard living conditions were the norm.

The United Nations (UN) was established on October 24, 1945 to serve as a world body to help prevent future world wars. By a vote of 65 to 7, the United States Senate, on December 4, 1945 approved U.S. participation in the UN. This marked a turn away from the traditional isolationism of the U.S. and toward more international involvement.

See also

History of the United States
Timeline:	Pre-colonial · Colonial · 1776–1789 · 1789–1849 · 1849–1865 · 1865–1918 · 1918–1945 · 1945–1964 · 1964–1980 · 1980–1988 · 1988–present
Topics:	African American · Diplomatic · Economic · Expansion (continental) · Expansion (overseas) · Female · Immigratory · Industrial · Jewish · Military · Musical · Postal · Religious · Southern

 

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