of the big powers rather than the dreams of freedom that many thought the war would make real. The trusteeship system—by which former Japanese and German territories were to be supervised by the big policemen—was a way of delaying independence for those territories. As for the colonies held by the West European Allies, they were to move only gradually, if at all, toward independence. Hull wrote in his Memoirs: “At no time did we press Britain, France, or the Netherlands for an immediate grant of self-government to their colonies. Our thought was that it would come after an adequate period of years, short or long. …” From the American point of view, as Kolko points out, the “concept of trusteeship blended well with United States desires to acquire bases in the Japanese Pacific islands and elsewhere. …”
World War II fell upon a world dominated by a few imperial nations. In liberating people from the special brutality of the Axis, they were concerned with their own influence over these people, and with the perpetuation of the traditional prerogatives of empire. So it was with the English in India, Burma, Malaysia, Egypt, Palestine, East Africa; the French in Indochina, Algeria, West Africa; the United States in the Philippines and Latin America; the Dutch in Indonesia; the Belgians in the Congo. As for the Russians, they created a new “socialist” empire of their own, embracing Finland, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. The Western powers and the Soviet Union cooperated in maintaining hegemony in their respective spheres.
Furthermore, the so-called advanced liberal nations not only extended their control over other peoples, they maintained economic systems at home that labor strife and years of economic crisis after 1929 had proved both inefficient and unjust. They carried “democracy” only to the point of elections and parliamentary governments, but without the real day-to-day participation of popular bodies in decisions. If the war were to justify the deaths of tens of millions of people, it would seem reasonable to expect that its end would bring the liberation of subordinate peoples everywhere as well as critical changes in the societies of those nations that had waged the war. Instead, the victors continued to be much more concerned with maintaining the status quo.
For the United States, this meant that its national political leaders, during the war, never evinced any great interest in moving away from prewar conceptions. American society as a whole stuck to its traditional values. What were some of these traditional values? The idea of Manifest Destiny—the rightness of America’s growing power over other countries; white superiority in a population that was 10 per cent black; the inviolability of capitalism, the profit system, and corporate power and privilege.
Racism, ostensibly, was one reason the war was fought—to wipe out the race doctrines of Hitler. But in the United States, the idea of white supremacy in the North and South proved greater than the libertarian enthusiasm generated by the war. The most striking and bitter irony was that black soldiers fought in the war in segregated units, in separate and unequal situations. When soldiers were jammed onto the Queen Mary for transport to the European combat zone, the black soldiers not only ate and slept apart, they were consigned to the lower depths of the ship, near the engine room. On the home front, similar ironies occurred. Donations of blood to the armed forces were separated by race in the Red Cross blood banks, with government approval. (A black physician, Charles Drew, had been largely responsible for the blood-bank system; he died years later for want of blood after being denied admittance to a “white” hospital.) Blacks seeking employment in defense industries encountered the hostility of trade unions, the prejudice of fellow workers accustomed to seeing blacks as domestics and laborers, the discriminatory policies of business firms, and the complacency of the government. One West Coast aviation factory spokesman said: “The Negro will be considered only as janitors and in other similar capacities. … Regardless of their training as aircraft workers, we will not employ them.” Roosevelt did not issue Executive Order 8802 setting up a Fair Employment Practices Committee until black labor leader A. Philip Randolph in 1941 threatened a mass demonstration in Washington. The FEPC, as it turned out, was not powerful enough to enforce its own orders.
The war created the conditions—blacks moving into northern cities and into new jobs—for exposing the magnitude of racism in America; it did not stimulate eagerness in either the government or the public for dealing with the causes of racism. Poverty and over-crowdedness in the cities, bigotry in the minds of the people continued to exist. Two race riots occurred during the war. One was in Detroit in June, 1943, where white-black conflicts led to looting and property damage by blacks, police action, and the deaths of twenty-five blacks and nine whites. In Harlem that same year, blacks rioted when a white policeman tried to arrest a black woman. During the looting and burning that followed, six people died and five hundred were injured.
The war against fascism not only did little to curtail the power of customary racism in the United States, it did little to change the traditionally subordinate status of American women. One of the distinguishing features of the Fascist societies was the avowedly inferior role played by German, Italian, and Japanese women; their status was based on the recognition of men as the primary workers, and although women might work as society required—certainly in the home, and sometimes out of it—neither their status nor their wages were the same as those of men. The anti-Fascist crusade of World War II paid little attention to the similar status of American women.
In 1940 an attempt to get labor leader Sidney Hillman, a member of the National Defense Advisory Commission, to appoint a woman to his staff was rejected. “It was apparent,” says a government report published in 1952 by the Women’s Bureau of the United States Department of Labor, that the commission “did not favor the participation of women in the development of policy with respect to women’s expanding integration into the labor market.”
When the War Manpower Commission was set up in 1942 to coordinate the use of the home-front labor market, the effort of women to join the policy-making group was rebuffed—even though women were needed for the work force and were entering it in large numbers. Mary Anderson, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, asked the manpower commission’s Management-Labor Policy Committee to appoint one or two women as members; the proposal was turned down. Rather—on the request of the Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs—a women’s advisory committee was appointed to the War Manpower Commission. Despite a promise from the commission’s executive director that the chairman of this advisory committee would have voting membership on the Management-Labor Policy Committee, this voting right was not granted. Moreover, the chairman initially sat on the sidelines at policy meetings, and only after several sessions was she invited to join the others at the conference table.
The 1952 Women’s Bureau report, commenting on the subsequent work of the advisory committee, raises the question as to why the committee “did not concern itself to a greater extent with problems pertaining to wages and hours for women workers. …” The report conjectures that the “Committee may have felt that it was necessary to subjugate the interests of special groups to the needs arising from the national emergency.” Nevertheless, the bureau report expresses cautious criticism of this neglect of the equal-pay problem:
… it is believed by some reviewers in retrospect that a good opportunity was overlooked by the Committee to gather more data and develop important information on the subject of equal pay, since this was a period in which women were entering the labor market to an unprecedented degree and performing many jobs held before almost exclusively by men. There is evidence that discriminatory pay and work opportunity practices did exist; the issue of equal pay and its corollary, equal opportunity, may have helped to create obstacles to the fullest possible integration of womanpower at a time when the labor supply was most critical. Although the Committee embodied the equality principle in all of its basic policy and program releases, there was comparatively little emphasis on equal pay.
Here was shown the traditional view that women should be reticent and avoid vigorous protest. The bureau report says “women were wary of attracting unpopular attention to issues in their own behalf,” adding that “in the climate of war crisis,” it was easy for men of the national administration to dismiss the requests for action as unnecessarily feminist—thereby reacting in accordance with tradition. The report also notes the existence of “doubts and uneasiness” on the War Manpower Commission “concerning what was then regarded as a developing attitude of militancy