As World War II broke out in Europe, the United States was, for the most part, determined upon maintaining its neutrality
and the isolationist policy that had become a national
characteristic in the wake of World War I and the Great
Depression (Johnson, 1997). Even while providing some financial
and material support to Great Britain via the Lend-Lease
Program, the U.S. in general and the Roosevelt Administration in
particular remained somewhat removed from "Europe's War" -
until, of course, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941. After the attack, the United States moved rapidly to
amass a large military machine and to provide that machine with
all of the resources that were needed to wage war on two
disparate fronts. AS Paul Johnson (2000, p. 779) has commented,
Pearl Harbor was, Axis Powers, a "woefully small
military return for the political risk of attacking an enormous,
intensely moralistic nation like the United States."
After the bombing, the U.S. embarked on a mobilization of
human, physical, and financial resources that was without
precedent in history (Johnson, 1997) .The economic doldrums of
the Great Depression, and the isolationist posture of the
majority of American citizens and leaders, were erased in a
single day (Foner, 1998). Eric Foner (1998) stated that few
events have transformed American life as broadly and deeply as
World War II -touching in some way and to some degree upon all
groups within the nation. Among the immediate effects of the War
was the gearing up of dormant or stagnating industrial complexes
for wartime materiel production, the increase in the size of
government bureaucracies at the federal level, the doubling of
the gross national product (GNP), and the eradication of
unemployment as war production finally conquered the Depression
(Chadwin, 1968; Jeffries, 1996). As Chadwin (1968) has
commented...