Chapter 18 Section 2

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Chapter 18 Section 2

• The Home Front

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Promoting the War

• By this time most Americans supported the war.
• The government urged the media to do their part
  in keeping morale high
• Movie stars advertised war bonds and traveled
  overseas to entertain troops
• Hollywood studios began making hundreds of war
  films
• Radio stations broadcast war news that was
  controlled by the government-run Office of War
  Information
• The war affected the regular programs. Stations
  cut spy and sabotage programs during the duration
  of the war and others programs banned certain
  sound effects they used such as sirens

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Life During Wartime

• Americans cut back their use of luxuries to help
  the war effort
• Americans also planted victory gardens
• Fearing an attack on the mainland, cities began
  practicing nighttime blackouts (because they
  thought brightly lit cities would make easy
  targets for Japanese bombers) and practicing
  air-raid drills
• Broadway musicals like Oklahoma became popular as
  well
• Also as a result of interest in the war more
  people starting reading non-fiction books
• War time also brought about the first appearance
  of paperback books in 1939

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• For sixty years Norman Rockwell showed the
  positive side of American life in his
  illustrations. His most famous are the ones he
  drew for the covers of Saturday Evening Post.
  Rockwells illustrations reminded people of the
  reasons behind the war and why we were there
  without downplaying the difficulty of the
  struggle.

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Rosie the Riveter

• Once again women in America were asked to return
  to the workforce in the absence of soldiers.
  Advertisements promoted Rosie the Riveter, the
  symbol of patriotic working women. Womens
  participation in the workforce gave many a sense
  of pride. Without the efforts of American women,
  the United States could not have produced the
  materials necessary to win the war

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Discrimination During the War

• African Americans who went to war were still
  segregated into their own units
• For some African Americans that stayed home
  during the war, many moved into higher paying
  jobs
• Others had a hard time finding work because
  despite the no-strike pledges, some white
  workers staged hate strikes to keep black
  workers out of high paying factory jobs
• Fearing the possible riots, Roosevelt issued an
  executive order prohibiting discrimination in
  defense plants and government offices in order to
  keep A Phillip Randolph from marching on
  Washington
• On June 25, 1941 Roosevelt created the Fair
  Employment Practices Committee to enforce the
  order
• The FEPC investigated companies to make sure all
  qualified applicants, regardless of race, were
  considered for jobs
• The FEPC was strengthened be an executive order
  requiring nondiscriminatory clauses in all war
  contracts

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Continued.

• Mexican Americans also helped American labor
  needs and faced discrimination
• Carlos E. Castaneda served as an assistant to the
  chair of the FEPC
• In 1945 the FEPC ordered a Texas oil company to
  stop discrimination against Hispanics
• Under a 1942 agreement between the U.S. and
  Mexico thousands of Mexican farm and railroad
  workers-known as braceros- came north to work in
  the Southwest during WWII
• Mexican American youths had adopted the fad of
  wearing zoot-suits
• In Los Angeles June 1943 U.S. sailors roamed the
  streets looking for zoot-suit clad Mexican
  Americans in what came to be know as the
  zoot-suit riots.
• The government eventually came down on the
  sailors but not after they had brutally beaten
  many Mexican Americans

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Japanese American Relocation

• During WWII the United States committed a huge
  injustice against the Japanese Americans.
• The United States enforced the internment, or
  the forced relocation and imprisonment, of
  Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast
• In 1941 about 119,000 people of Japanese ancestry
  lived in California, Oregon and Washington.
• About 2/3 of them had been born in the United
  States and were American Citizens
• There was no evidence of disloyalty by the
  Japanese Americans, but because of the
  anti-Japanese attitude in America at the time
  they were forced into detention camps.
• Because Hawaiis Japanese population was to large
  to relocate, the islands were placed under
  martial law for the duration of the war

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The entrance to Manzanar, the Japanese internment
camp during World War 2, near lone pine
California.