Complete Idiot’s Guide to American History

by Alan Axelrod

More programs followed the Hundred Days. In 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was formed, which put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943—when the program ended. The employees built public projects out of concrete and steel, and they also created cultural works through the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Writers’ Program, and the Federal Art Project. The most enduring of the New Deal programs was Social Security, introduced in 1935, which created old-age pension funds through payroll and wage taxes. None of the New Deal programs brought full recovery, but they helped restore confidence in the American government and propelled Roosevelt to a landslide second-term victory over Republican Alf Landon in 1936. A “Second New Deal” went into effect, which concentrated on labor reforms.

  Urban War

  In the end, it would take the approach of World War II, with its demand for the materials of strife, to end the Great Depression. But years before the United States entered that war, another, different kind of combat was being waged on the streets of the nation’s cities. Prohibition had spawned a gangster culture in the 1920s, which many Americans found colorful, almost romantic. After all, the urban outlaws supplied the public with the good times that government denied them.

  Then came St. Valentine’s Day, 1929, the day Al Capone decided to eliminate rival Chicago gangland leader “Bugs” Moran. Capone dispatched gunmen, disguised as policemen, who rounded up seven members of the gang, stood them up against the wall of Moran’s commercial garage, and brutally executed them with Tommy guns. (Moran himself wasn’t present and escaped assassination.) Mobsters had been rubbing one another out for years, but the blatant butchery of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre finally outraged the public. Capone and other gangsters were no longer viewed as Robin Hoods, but as cold-blooded murderers. Yet, as gangsters became more viciously violent, they also became increasingly organized.

  In the same year as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, Capone proposed to the gang leaders of New York and other cities that they meet to organize crime throughout the United States. The meeting took place in Atlantic City and included such underworld luminaries as Lucky Luciano, Joe Adonis, Alberto Anastasia, Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky. The national crime Syndicate was born, consolidating nationwide gambling, prostitution, extortion, and liquor trafficking. After 1933, when the 18th Amendment was repealed, thereby ending Prohibition, the Syndicate began to enter the trade in narcotics, hoping it would replace booze as the public’s illicit substance of choice.

  The economic conditions of the 1930s produced at least two durable legacies into American life: one, a federal government that takes an active role in the welfare of its citizens (even today, when many conservative politicians clamor to slash “welfare budgets,” few are foolhardy enough to suggest reducing the Social Security program) and two, organized crime.

  A New War

  The Great Depression brought the United States close to the brink of revolution, but a deeply ingrained tradition of democratic capitalism, combined with FDR’s ability to restore and maintain faith in the government, averted a violent breakdown. In Europe, also hard hit by the Depression, the people of Italy and Germany hungered not for democracy, but for the strongman leadership promised by a journalist named Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and a failed artist, sometimes house painter, and full-time political agitator named Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Exhausted humanity had assumed that the horrors of World War I, combined with the peaceful prosperity of the 1920s, guaranteed the permanent rise of international stability and liberal constitutionalism. But Germany, crippled by the harsh conditions of the Versailles treaty, was robbed of postwar prosperity. Then the Depression drove its people to desperation. In Germany and Italy, militaristic authoritarianism burst into iron blossom with promises of a return to national glory and national prosperity.

  Europe Darkens, Then Dies

  In Germany, Hitler and his Nazi party won a popular following that propelled him to the position of chancellor under the aged and infirm President Paul von Hindenberg and into absolute dictatorship after Hindenberg’s death in 1934. Hitler took Germany out of the League of Nations in 1933 and, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, initiated a massive rearmament program. In 1936, the dictator sent troops into the Rhineland, which had been demilitarized by the Versailles treaty. The League of Nations stood by helplessly, as did the Allies of World War I. Indeed, one of those erstwhile Allies, Italy, openly sided with Nazi Germany. Seeking an easy foreign conquest to solidify popular support, Benito Mussolini, like some monstrous incarnation of a schoolyard bully, sent Italy’s modern army into Africa against Ethiopians who were armed chiefly with spears. Ethiopia collapsed by 1936, and although the nation’s emperor, Haile Salassie (1892-1975), appealed to the League of Nations with great dignity and eloquence, the world body, once again, proved impotent.

  Hard on the heels of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia came the Spanish Civil War (193-639), a complex struggle between factions allied with the nation’s liberal-leftist republican government and Fascist-sympathizing rightists led primarily by General Francisco Franco (1892-1975). Hitler and Mussolini eagerly sent military aid to Franco, and Hitler’s Luftwaffe (air force) in particular used Spanish towns as practice targets in preparation for the greater conflict looming on the dark horizon. While Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) gave military equipment to the Spanish republicans, the United States, Britain, and France—fearing the outbreak of a general war—remained neutral.

  Their reluctance was as understandable as it was tragic. After all, in 1914, a tangle of alliances had escalated a local Balkans war into a conflagration that engulfed the world. Yet while the former Allies waffled and waited, Germany and Italy forged the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936. That same year, in Asia, the Empire of Japan concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact (an alliance against Communism) with Germany; in 1937, Italy signed on to the pact as well. The following year, 1938, Hitler invaded Austria and annexed it to his Third Reich. The year 1938 also saw Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland—western Czechoslovakia, where many ethnic Germans lived—be joined to the Reich. France and Britain were bound by treaty to defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia, but they nevertheless yielded the Sudetenland to Germany in an effort to “appease” Hitler. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain told the world that the cession of the Sudetenland (the Munich Agreement) insured “peace in our time.”

  He was wrong. In 1939, Hitler seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, then took a part of Lithuania and prepared to gobble up the so-called Polish Corridor, a narrow strip of land that separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. At this time, Mussolini’s Italy annexed Albania. Finally, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded—and crushed—Poland. France and Britain could no longer stand by. World War II had begun.

  Infamy at Pearl

  While American eyes focused nervously on Europe, Asia was heating to the point of crisis. Despite a 1922 pledge to respect China’s territorial integrity, Japan invaded Manchuria in 1931 and established the puppet state of Manchuko the following year. The League of Nations protested, resulting in nothing more than Japan’s withdrawal from the organization in 1933. By 1, 93 7, Japan and China were engaged in full-scale war. On September 27, 1940, Japan signed the Tripartite Pact with Italy and Germany, thereby creating the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis.

  Although it remained officially neutral, the United States, guided by Roosevelt, edged closer to war. The sale of military supplies was authorized, and then, in March 1941, Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act, permitting the shipment of material to nations whose defense was considered vital to U.S. security—Great Britain and, later, China and the U.S.S.R. In September 1940, the first peacetime draft law in U.S. history had been passed, authorizing the registration of 17 million men. In August and September 1941, U.S. merchant vessels were armed for self-defense. The powder was packed in the keg. All it took was a flame for the war to explode upon America.

  It came on December 7, 1941. At 7:50 on that quiet Sunday mornin
g, Japanese aircraft struck without warning at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, where some 75 major U.S. Navy ships were moored. By 1.0 am, the attack was over.

  The next day, President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war, calling December 7, 1941, a “day which will live in infamy. “ Suddenly, the Great Depression ended in a headlong rush of young men into the armed forces and of others, men as well as women, into the nation’s factories. Industries now tooled up—for the second time in the century—to serve as the “arsenal of democracy.”

  The Least You Need to Know

  Although unjust, Herbert Hoover is often blamed for having caused the Depression; however, the federal government did not take major steps to bring economic relief until Roosevelt assumed office.

  The massive programs of the New Deal probably averted social breakdown and revolution in the U.S., but it was the economic demands of World War II that finally ended the Great Depression.

  Word for the Day

  Fascism, a system of government marked by centralization of authority under an absolute dictator, was masterminded in Italy by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945). The name comes from the Latin word fasces, a bundle or rods bound together around an ax, which was the ancient Roman symbol of authority. Communism, as proposed by Karl Marx (1818-83), is a system of collective ownership of property and the collective administration of power for the common good. In practice, Communism is a system of government characterized by state ownership of property and the centralization of authority in a single political party or dictator. Totalitarianism describes any system of government in which the individual is wholly subordinate to the state.

  Stats

  Despite the New Deal, 9.5 million people remained unemployed by 1939.

  Main Event

  The Depression-born longing for a bright future was summed up in two great World’s Fairs. The Century of Progress Exhibition of 1933-34, held in Chicago, did much to popularize modern architecture. And the New York World’s Fair of 1939-40 was built around the theme of “The World of Tomorrow”—even as the nightmare of total war broke once again upon Europe.

  The “Good War”

  (1941-1945)

  In This Chapter

  Early defeats

  Turning points: victory in North Africa and at Midway

  Collapse of Germany

  Use of the atomic bomb against Japan

  When America had entered World War I, it rushed to mobilize forces for a European war. Now, even as Europe was being overrun by Nazi Germany, Japan had struck directly at United States territory (Hawaii did not become a state until 1959). Preparations for war were even more urgent in 1941. than they had been in 1917, and the blow at Pearl Harbor was just one of many Japanese assaults. Japanese forces attacked Wake Island and Guam (both U.S. possessions), British Malaya, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, Thailand, and the Philippines (at the time a U.S. commonwealth territory). The U.S. garrison on Guam was overwhelmed and surrendered. On Wake Island, Marines repelled a first Japanese attack but yielded to a second. Britain’s crown colony of Hong Kong collapsed, soon followed by Singapore (another British possession), and then the Dutch East Indies. Burma likewise fell, despite the efforts of Claire L. Chennault (1890-1958), a former U.S. Army Air Service officer and now air adviser to China’s premier Chiang Kai-Shek. Chennault led his famous Flying Tigers—a small force of U.S.-made Curtiss P-40 fighter planes—in crippling action against the enemy’s aircraft.

  For the United States, as for the rest of the formerly “free” world, the opening years of World War II were humiliating, dismal, and terrifying.

  I Shall Return

  The hardest blow in the Pacific came in the Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur (1880-1964), commanding 55,000 Filipinos and Americans, made a heroic stand on the Bataan Peninsula, but at last, in February 1942, was ordered to escape to Australia to assume command of the Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific. Regretfully, MacArthur left his troops to their fate. “I shall return,” he pledged—but it would take until 1944 for the Allies to put him into a position to redeem that pledge.

  Under Lieutenant General Jonathan M. Wainwright, the Filipino-American forces held out until May 6, 1942, when they surrendered and were subject to unspeakable brutality at the hands of Japanese captors.

  Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo

  Desperate for a counterstrike against Japan, the Army Air Force approved the plan of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle (1896-1993) to take 16 B-25s aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet and launch, on April 18, 1942, a surprise bombing raid on Tokyo. This attack was the closest thing to a deliberate suicide mission American military personnel ever undertook during the war. Everyone well knew that the twin-engine bombers could not carry sufficient fuel to return to any American base. Even if they had had enough fuel capacity to return to the Hornet, the bombers, not designed for carrier flight, would have been unable to land. The plan was to ditch the planes in China, find safe haven among Chinese resistance fighters, and somehow, find a way to return home. Miraculously, most of the bomber crews were, in fact, rescued, and while the damage to Tokyo was minor, the psychological effect was great. The attack shocked the Japanese, who were forced to tie up more fighter aircraft at home, and American morale was given a terrific boost.

  Home Front

  for all its horror, World War 11 is recalled by many Americans as an almost magical time, when the nation united with single-minded purpose in a cause both desperate and just—a struggle, quite literally, of good against evil. Everyone pitched in to produce the materials of war, and women joined the work force in unprecedented numbers as the men were inducted into the armed forces.

  Activity on the home front also had an ugly side. On February 19, 1942, responding to pressure from West Coast politicians, FDR signed Executive Order 9066. The order required all Japanese-Americans living within 200 miles of the Pacific shores—citizens and resident aliens alike—to report for relocation in internment camps located in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. Military officials feared sabotage, but non-Japanese farmers in the region feared competition even more and were eager to get rid of their Japanese-American neighbors.

  Afrika Korps

  In 1941, Northern Africa was held by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (1891-1944), known as the “Desert Fox,” whose Afrika Korps was seemingly invincible. The British and Americans agreed to conduct a North African campaign, defeat the Germans there, and then attack what Britain’s great wartime prime minister Winston Churchill called the “soft underbelly of Europe.” Forces under British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery and American generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton decisively defeated the Germans and Italians in North Africa by May 1943, and an Italian invasion was launched.

  Coral Sea and Midway

  While the Germans began to lose to their grip on Africa, U.S. forces also started to turn the tide in the Pacific. During May 3-9, 1942, the navy sunk or disabled more than 25 Japanese ships, blocking Japan’s extension to the south and preventing the Japanese from severing supply lines to Australia. However, the Japanese soon returned to the offensive by attacking the island of Midway, some 1,100 miles northwest of Hawaii. Marshalling a task force of 200 ships and 600 planes, the Japanese counted on the element of surprise to achieve a rapid victory. But, unknown to them, American intelligence officers had broken Japanese codes, and the navy had advance warning of the task force.

  The battle commenced on June 3, 1942, and U.S. aircraft, launched from the Hornet, Yorktown, and Enterprise, sank four Japanese carriers. Reeling from this blow, the Imperial Navy withdrew their fleet, but the Americans gave chase, sinking or disabling two heavy cruisers and three destroyers, as well as destroying 322 planes. Although the U.S. Navy took heavy losses—the carrier Yorktown, a destroyer, and 147 aircraft—Midway Island remained in American hands, and the Japanese were never able to resume the offensive in the Pacific.

  Island Hopping

  After su
ffering defeat at Midway, the Japanese turned their attention to mounting a fullscale assault on Australia. They began by constructing an airstrip on Guadalcanal in the southern Solomon Islands. In response, on August 7, 1942, a U.S. task force landed Marines at Guadalcanal, where the Japanese resisted for six months. Guadalcanal was the beginning of a U.S. strategy of “island hopping”: a plan to take or retake all Japanese-held islands, thereby gradually closing in on the Japanese mainland itself. The campaign promised to be a very long haul. Guadalcanal, having taken six hellish months to conquer, was fully 3,000 miles from Tokyo.

  The next step was to neutralize the major Japanese air and naval base at Rabaul, on the eastern tip of New Britain Island, just east of New Guinea. Under General MacArthur, U.S. and Australian troops attacked through the Solomons and New Guinea. When the Japanese rushed to reinforce their position on the islands of Lae and Salamaua, on March 3-4, 1943, U.S. B-24 Liberators and B-17 Flying Fortresses attacked troop transports and their naval escorts with devastating results. The Battle of the Bismarck Sea cost the Japanese 3,500 men; the Allies lost only five planes. The defeat was a severe blow to the Japanese presence in the southwest Pacific. By the end of 1943, Rabaul had been neutralized, severing some 100,000 Japanese from any hope of supply, support, or reinforcement.