The 1940s and the decade preceding were some of the grimmest years in U.S. history. In the 1930s, the Great Depression had shaken the U.S. economy to its core and with it, Americans’ faith in their democratic system. On the heels of this crisis came World War II in 1939. Nazi Germany’s dictator, Adolf Hitler, had begun his conquest of western Europe and changed the balance of power throughout the world. Freedom and prosperity had never seemed so fragile as they did at the dawn of the new decade, and the national mood was far from hopeful.
By 1937, the severe economic convulsions brought on by the Great Depression had subsided slightly, though the country was in a recession and unemployment remained high. Unemployment had shrunk to 15 percent from a peak of 25 percent in 1933, but this was not enough to lift America out of its grim mood. True, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal had used taxpayers’ dollars to put millions of people to work for the federal government, constructing dams, highways, bridges, buildings, and organizing arts projects for the Works Progress Administration (WPA). But as the new decade approached, more than eight million people out of a total U.S. population of 132 million were still without a job.
Disillusionment with the New Deal ran high as America failed to recover. Millions were still jobless, homeless, and hungry. The American dream became out of reach of many ordinary Americans.
Rising Fear
Along with this disillusionment came an undercurrent of fear, particularly among better-off white Americans. President Roosevelt’s relief programs seemed dangerously radical. Some saw the New Deal as thinly veiled socialism. They feared that with America’s crumbling capitalist economy and the rise of communism and fascism abroad, democracy could not survive.
As the United States watched Germany and Italy grow stronger under fascism, American weaknesses seemed more pronounced. In response, Congress established the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1938 to investigate reports, most unfounded, of both Communist and Fascist subversion in the United States. But the average family was simply too worried about surviving from paycheck to paycheck to give much attention to theories of Communist conspiracy.
The Great Depression had altered the nation. Job security, not affluence, was the main goal of most Americans. Most people wanted a government that would cushion the hard blow struck by the sour economy. Laws were passed guaranteeing a minimum wage for workers, Social Security, collective bargaining for labor, the five-day work week, stricter child labor laws, and banking reforms. These laws remain an important part of the American system today.
During the thirties, people craving a cheap escape from their troubles listened to the radio and attended the movies in huge numbers. Americans listened an average of 4.5 hours per day to adventure shows such as "The Lone Ranger" and "Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century" and the comedy and variety of Jack Benny, George Burns, and Gracie Allen. With sound, movies had become glamorous extravaganzas offering audiences a respite from their worries, and movie revenues soared to an all-time high. In 1939, the decade culminated in the epic Civil War film, Gone with the Wind. Running 222 minutes and costing $5 million, it was the longest and most expensive movie to have been made until then.
In the thirties, America’s evolution from a nation of small rural towns to a nation of urban centers had gained speed as more mechanized farming and the Depression lured displaced country dwellers to the cities in search of work. Cities became glutted with slums and poverty. Suburbs had just begun to ring the cities as WPA-built highways opened America up to car travel as never before.
African-Americans suffered acutely during the difficult thirties, long before any civil rights legislation existed. Many individuals and institutions alike displayed an appalling willingness to separate people on the basis of skin color alone, and in many states, segregated schools, churches, public transportation, even public toilets were not only common, they were the law. Not until 1941, the year the U.S. entered World War II, would President Roosevelt establish the Fair Employment Practices Commission. African-Americans had threatened to march on Washington in August 1941 to draw attention to civil rights, but this early effort at civil rights protest did not even begin to remedy the inequities of racial injustice.
If anything, the late thirties and early forties were a time of increasing racism and antisemitism — for immigrants as well as for African-Americans and American Jews. Isolationist sentiment had taken a firm hold of the public. Immigration quotas were established, limiting the number of people who could come from each country. Even with the horrific evidence of Hitler’s extermination of European Jews, for example, Congress refused to allow an additional ten thousand Jewish children to emigrate to America and escape the horrors inflicted by the Nazis.
