cling to the status quo.
For the decision to keep on using dollar-a-year men did nothing less than preserve the existing corporate control of American industry; not just because the dollar-a-year man did things on purpose to safeguard that control, but because the possible alternatives to the dollar-a-year man system were all so far-reaching.
“Far-reaching” alternatives might have included giving the rank-and-file workers in industry an important say in economic decisions, and reducing corporate profit in order to give the benefits to the nation’s low-income groups. If the war was to bring about any genuine extension of democracy at home as well as abroad, it would have to do something about industrial democracy—at the point of production, where trade unions had fought for a small voice in conditions of work. (Walter Reuther, president of the United Automobile Workers, did suggest labor’s participation in production decisions, and ultimately labor-management committees were set up in about five thousand factories; but they came to function as devices for increasing production and cutting down absenteeism—that is, as disciplinary groups rather than as forums for democratic decision-making.)
A report submitted shortly after the end of the war to the Senate Small Business Committee, entitled “Economic Concentration and World War II,” noted that the government spent a billion dollars during the war years for scientific research in industry, aside from money spent on atomic research. The billion dollars went to two thousand corporations, with sixty-eight of them getting two-thirds of the total and the ten largest corporations in the United States getting 40 per cent of the total. Furthermore, in 90 per cent of the contracts, the patents for new developments were handed over to the contractor, who then controlled the commercial applications of the government-financed research.
Catton, recollecting his experiences in war mobilization, writes: “We had been put in the position of fighting for the preservation of the status quo; the status quo at home, where reaction had found its voice again, and, by logical extension, the status quo abroad as well. … The big operators who made the working decisions had decided that nothing very substantial was going to be changed.” One of the most important elements of the status quo was that, despite all the self-congratulatory talk in the United States about democracy, decisions would continue to be made at the top. Whether conservatives or liberals were in power in Washington, the decision-making process and the intent of the decisions would remain the same. As Catton describes it: “Hidebound businessmen had one approach and doctrinaire New Dealers had another. Different as they were, both groups shared one controlling emotion: a distrust of the naked processes of democracy.”
This distrust manifested itself in something which, much later in the postwar period, during the Vietnam War, was termed the “credibility gap”—a growing realization that the government was concealing facts, distorting truths, and just plain lying. The wartime government became obsessed with what was said and shown to the people, rather than what was actually done. It seemed easier to get the people to believe that something had been done than to do it; the most important consideration was what became known as “image.” In November, 1942, a dollar-a-year consultant on the staff of the War Production Board wrote a memo entitled “Public Relations.” It proposed the use of advertising men to promote public goodwill, and suggested: “The deficiencies of WPB are naturally seized upon by press and radio with more glee than its successful achievements. Methods must be found, therefore, to give true value to WPB’s really significant results.”
As suggested earlier, though the Allied powers won the war, antidemocratic, even totalitarian, ideas dominated the postwar world to a significant degree. One of these ideas was that dissenters from the government policy—especially in wartime—should be silenced by intimidation and, if they refused to remain silent, put in jail. On the eve of war, in 1940, Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed, the Alien Registration Act, known as the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence in speech or writing, or to “affiliate” with organizations urging such action. It was therefore made a crime to advocate what Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had advocated in the Declaration of Independence. In the midst of the war to end repression, the American government prosecuted and sent to prison a number of leaders of the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) for violating the Smith Act by what they wrote and said. What the government was anxious about was not the imminence of revolution—the Socialist Workers Party was tiny and weak—but the fact that the party criticized the war, questioning its objectives and arguing that its real intent was to preserve capitalism at home and imperialism abroad.
The government not only punished speechmakers and writers during World War II, it put in detention camps (some called them concentration camps) tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans, including those born in this country—not for doing anything, but simply for being of Japanese descent. The argument was that they were potential threats to the war effort. Both the Smith Act prosecutions and the removal of the Japanese families from their homes into camps were ultimately approved by the Supreme Court. In World War II, as in previous wars, civil liberties were put aside at a time when freedom of discussion about life-and-death issues was most urgently needed.
The reconsideration of World War II in this chapter does not mean to ignore the fact that the war destroyed one of the most cruel governments in history—that of the Nazis’, as well as the aggressive imperialisms of Italy and Japan. It does not mean to deny that the war had tumultuous effects on many parts of the world, leading to the overthrow of old, oppressive regimes and to the development of revolutionary movements for independence and change. Nor does this reassessment mean to deny that the war created an atmosphere of hope that may have been an instrumental factor in the struggles for freedom that have taken place in many parts of the postwar world, including the United States. The intention here has been to show that these undoubted results must be weighed against other facts: that while the war enlisted the energies and sacrifices of tens of millions of ordinary people, it was directed by power elites in a few major nations. The chief concern of these elites was the expansion of their own power, the perpetuation of their own systems at home, and the extension of their domination over other parts of the world—facts as true of the United States as of the Soviet Union.
The intention has also been to show that the war not only left intact the existing systems, not only concentrated world power even more tightly than before, but that it perpetuated the identical values the victors claimed to be fighting against. The stockpiling of weapons continued; so, too, did the system of military alliances. Indiscriminate war on civilian populations as an instrument of international politics did not cease, nor did governmental control of information, the political use of racial hatred, the monopolization of wealth by a few, and the destruction of civil liberties—facts as true of the “totalitarian” Soviet Union as of the “democratic” United States.
There is no point, now, in answering the question: Should Americans therefore have fought the Nazis? Historians need to be concerned more with the future than with the past, and no crisis appears in exactly the same form twice. But there are phenomena that, if not exactly alike, have the same general characteristics at different times and places in history, and to know this may help us make the specific decisions that any particular situation requires. One of the characteristics of war is that it always represents a multiplicity of interests within each fighting nation. Also, the dominant values in American society may be so close to those the United States claims the enemy represents as to call into question how much human sacrifice can be justified for the traditional objective of military victory. As Yossarian said in Catch-22, when it was suggested that his anti-military talk was “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”: “The enemy is whoever wants to get you killed, whichever side he’s on.” And in a play by Bertolt Brecht, there is a frightening line of dialogue for all people called to war: “Let’s go fishing, said the angler to the worm.”
The problems America sees now in the postwar period are not dramatic deviations from that time of idealism and victory that was World War II; they were visible in wartime America, if anyone had cared enough to look. In World War II, despite the rhetoric of a crusade,
