"LET’S
REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR…"
Remember
September 11? Or rather, remember how it was supposed to change
us all, and usually for the better?
Probably
the most amusing prediction was that it would lead to "the
end of irony"—the sort of earnest prognostication that
is bound to seem, well, ironic in retrospect. Yet an even
more civic-minded call came from Robert D. Putnam, who let us
know that this was our chance to get back to the good old days
of World War II.
Dr.
Putnam is the Harvard professor who blazed his way up the bestseller
lists in 1995 with the publication of Bowling Alone, The Collapse
and Revival of American Community. Citing the decline of participation
in everything from political activism to labor unions to bridge
clubs to bowling leagues, Putnam claimed that America was experiencing
an alarming loss of "social capital" and "generalized
reciprocity—the practice of helping others with no expectation
of gain." We were letting the very ligaments of our society
ossify, abandoning our traditions as a vibrant, participatory,
community-based democracy, and becoming a nation of disaffected
and distrustful individuals.
Meticulously
researched, perceptive, and filled with telling anecdotes, Putnam’s
book struck a chord in Americans all along the political spectrum,
many of whom had already suspected the social trends that he seemed
to quantify. Some argued that his conclusions were overly dire;
that fewer people were bowling in leagues, for instance, because
more of them were bowling with their families.
Yet
Putnam returned with an updated edition in 2000 that confirmed
most of the trends he had previously noted—and a number of
suggestions as to what governments, businesses, and individuals
might do to reverse the fragmenting of America. Then came 9/11,
and what seemed like an unexpected opportunity in the midst of
adversity.
Writing
in The New York Times, just over a month after the terrorist
attack, Putnam found a nation "achingly familiar" to
the America that had been stunned by the surprise attack on Pearl
Harbor. He went on to depict the vast, government-backed, grassroots
effort that "taught ‘the greatest generation’ a
lesson in civic involvement"—an effort that included
everything from the Civil Defense Corps to the Red Cross, from
victory gardens to Boy Scouts collecting scrap and selling war
stamps
"All Americans felt they had to do their share, thereby enhancing
each American's sense that her commitment and contribution mattered,"
he wrote. "As one said later in an oral history of the home
front: ‘You just felt that the stranger sitting next to you
in a restaurant, or someplace, felt the same way you did about
the basic issues.’"
Dr. Putnam is no doubt well-meaning, but his characterization
of the home front in World War II is also an object lesson in
just how careful one has to be in making the future over in the
image of the past.
The
war effort at home was undoubtedly one of the proudest episodes—and
probably the most important episode—in our history,
perhaps even more vital than the great sacrifices made by our
men at the front. It was U.S. production that sustained not only
our own forces but those of all our allies, and that brought victory
around the world. This was not merely a victory of quantity, either,
but one accomplished while preserving most of the rights and privileges
of a free people. The war proved that a democracy could triumph
over any totalitarian ideology in the modern age—something
that had seemed very much in doubt just a few years before.
The
triumph was incontrovertible, but it did not come out of a Norman
Rockwell painting. The America of the Second World War was a turbulent
and often frightening place, characterized by immense social upheaval
and dislocation.
It
might well have been true that the stranger sitting next to you
in a restaurant felt the same way about things—unless, that
is, they happened to be of a different race. As color was the
deepest fissure in American society, it is not surprising that
during the war it fractured most often along this line.
The
most infamous case, of course, was the forced detention of some
120,000 Japanese-Americans in barren, Western camps while their
property was sold off for a pittance—and their sons formed
some of the most decorated fighting units of the war.
But racial hysteria was hardly restricted to Asian-Americans.
There were no fewer than 47 race riots, as the war sparked an
epic migration of both poor Southern blacks and whites into urban
ports and industrial centers. The worst was in Detroit, in 1943,
where white mobs ended up roaming through the city’s downtown,
shouting "Here’s some fresh meat!" while they beat
and shot any African-Americans they found—often with the
help of the local police. Some 34 people died before it was all
over, and pictures of the riot were gleefully plastered across
the pages of Signal, Germany’s leading picture magazine,
as proof that such a "mongrel" country could not win
the war.
Other
riots soon followed, from Springfield, Massachusetts to El Paso,
Texas; from Hubbard, Ohio to Philadelphia. In Los Angeles, Pasadena,
Long Beach, and San Diego, mobs of sailors and soldiers passed
their time in port assaulting young, lavishly dressed Mexican-American
pachucos, in the "Zoot Suit" riots. The L.A. city council
responded—by banning zoot suits.
Discrimination
remained routine in all industries, with blacks making less money
for the same jobs whites did—and whites frequently refusing
to work with them anyway. The great black labor leader A. Philip
Randolph had to threaten to lead a massive protest march in Washington
before the Roosevelt administration would commit to equal pay
for equal work on war projects.
Elsewhere,
protests were not so availing. Mob assaults on black civilians
and even soldiers continued throughout the states of the Deep
South, and the sad fact remains that "the greatest generation"
was also "the last lynching generation."
The
other great social transformation the war brought was the mass
entrance of women into the workplace, especially those workplaces
formerly reserved for men. The enduring image of this phenomenon—and
rightly so—is "Rosie the Riveter," determined and
capable, the sleeves of her work shirt rolled up as she grasps
a wrench.
Largely
forgotten today, though, was the enormous problem posed by two
working—or fighting—parents caused in a country virtually
unequipped with day care. Desperate mothers tried locking children
up in cars or homes, even chaining them to trailer homes. Others
roamed the streets in new "zip-gun" gangs, and every
train and bus depot had its own coterie of underaged "victory
girls." Venereal disease and illegitimacy rates soared, and
it was during the war that the term "juvenile delinquency"
first came into common parlance.
The
business of the war was just as sordid. Harry Truman’s Senate
committee turned up one case after another of war profiteering,
and the Office of Price Administration estimated that between
one-quarter and one-half of all companies did some business on
the black market. Even the unprecedented wealth now spurring the
economy brought on a deep social uneasiness. Boomtowns sprung
up all across the nation, full of transient men and women—unable
to spend their newfound wealth anywhere else—piling into
twenty-four-hour movie theatres and raucous new bars.
"No
country could have survived America’s convulsive transformations
of 1941-45 without alterings its essence and its view of itself,"
William Manchester writes in The Glory and the Dream. "The
home front was in reality a battleground of ideas, customs, economic
theory, foreign policy, and relationships between the sexes and
social classes."
We
should not be too shocked. Democracy is a messy business, and
freedom is built on struggle. Government interventions and private
initiatives would mitigate the worst of the wartime excesses and
produce the means for a renewal of liberty at home. Interracial
boards and commissions were set up in many cities for the first
time, while Philip Randolph’s threatened protest would eventually
become Martin Luther King, Jr.’s March on Washington and,
in Chicago, A.J. Muste and James Farmer began a series of peaceful
sit-ins and protests to desegrate restaurants and other businesses.
Despite a concerted propaganda effort to get women to return to
the home, they never would—not in anything like the same
percentages they had been before the war.
Yet
we should also give ourselves credit for having largely spared
ourselves these same excesses. True, we have yet to endure—so
far—anything like the sustained pressure that World War II
brought to bear on our society. And the days after the attack
on the World Trade Center saw some, inexcusable assaults on Arab-
and Asian-Americans, and on civil liberties. The executive branch’s
ungrounded assertion that it may now, at its own behest, order
up secret trials and punishments on all non-citizens is particularly
disturbing.
Overall,
though, we have kept a remarkably even keel, compared to past
wars. There have been no race riots, no mass imprisonments, no
vast social disruptions. Leaders at all levels have made strong
pleas for tolerance, most civil liberties have been respected,
and demonstrations of every kind have continued to be held without
incident. The American reaction has been decidedly free of panic
or paranoia.
With
nations as with individuals, it is hard to believe that a traumatic
event actually changes their character; more likely, it illuminates
just what that character already is. Dr. Putnam’s fears notwithstanding,
could it be that our ironic, mistrustful, uni-bowling society
has also reached a new level of democratic maturity, one that
serves it very well indeed against the hazards of the twenty-first
century?
©
2002 Copyright Forbes Inc.
