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Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II ReviewWithin the vast literature of World War II, one of the most interesting categories includes books about home-front life in the United States. Although this conflict has been called the "good war," Ronald Takaki, professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and a leading authority on the history of race and culture in the U.S., asserts: "The `Arsenal of Democracy' was not democratic: defense jobs were not open to all regardless of race." Making high-paying jobs in the defense industry available to people of color is, perhaps, the most important theme in this book. According to Takaki, Americans of all races and ethnicities "insisted that America live up to ideals and founding principles" and "stirred a rising wind of diversity's discontent, unfurling a hopeful vision of America as a multicultural democracy." Relying on reminiscences of Americans of color who lived and worked during the war, drawn from a wide variety of printed sources, as well as interviews Takaki conducted, it is quite an achievement!
The racial aspect of the war was summarized by a black draftee who declared: "Just carve on my tombstone, `Here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man.'" Takaki explains that the Army's policy of segregating black soldiers, "symbolized white domination in America." In addition to discrimination in housing and training programs, according to Takaki, "blacks were given "servile work assignments," and "[s]killed blacks found themselves occupationally downgraded." Takaki also writes: "At the beginning of the war, blacks were in especially dire economic straits...The war revived the American economy as an `arsenal of democracy.' But, as it turned out, defense jobs were not democratically distributed; most of them were reserved for whites only. Seventy-five percent of the war industries refused to hire blacks." Although Takaki does not provide the source of that statistic, it is not implausible. Takaki explains: "Confined to the unskilled and the service occupations before the war, African Americans wanted the better and higher paying factory jobs generated by the war." In 1941, civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph organized a march on Washington for July 1. Meeting with President Roosevelt on June 18, Randolph told FDR that 100,000 people would participate. A week later Roosevelt signed an executive order prohibiting "discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or Government." However, Takaki writes that, "as black and white workers followed the defense jobs into the cities, they often clashed violently." For instance: "By 1943, Detroit was a racial tinderbox." On June 20, after a scuffle in a crowded park, "urban warfare" erupted between whites and blacks, and it took 6,000 federal troops to restore order. Five weeks later, according to Takaki, in New York City, where "blacks were still being excluded from many defense industry plants, "Harlem exploded," resulting in six deaths and 500 injuries. During the war, 45,000 Indians, more than 10 percent of the Indian population, served in the U.S. armed forces. Indian workers also were attracted to work in defense industries, but, according to Takaki, they "often received lower wages than that of whites." "Almost 20 percent of all reservation Native Americans in the armed services came from the Navajo Nation in the Southwest." According to Takaki, in 1941, nearly 40 percent on the Navajos' annual per capita income of $128 came from wages, mostly from temporary government employment." "Pushed by poverty, the Navajos were also pulled into the military because they possessed something uniquely valuable to the U.S. military - their tribal language." In May 1942, "the first group of Navajo code talkers was sent to San Diego for training." According to Takaki, the Navajo code talkers "hit every beach from Guadalcanal to Okinawa." Many Mexican Americans worked in agriculture, which was considered a "war industry." The had more difficulty, however, breaking into other fields. A 1942 study of the airplane industry in Southern California reported that "payrolls showed almost no Mexicans employed." Later in the war, Mexican Americans were able to get jobs in steel, armaments, and aircraft, but "they found themselves relegated to the low wage jobs." Their efforts were not always welcomed. On June 3, 1943, "after some fights between young Mexican Americans and servicemen in downtown Los Angeles, hundreds of soldiers and sailors went on a rampage... [chasing] young Mexicans dressed in zoot suits, condemning their victims as draft dodgers." Incidents such as this had great propaganda value to the enemies of the United States. According to Takaki, "the Japanese media gleefully reported the violence as another example of racism in America." According to Takaki, "only 85 Italians were detained as security threats, and a proposed evacuation of `enemy' Italian aliens was ruled out." In contrast: "The 120,000 Japanese on the West Coast were evacuated and imprisoned in concentration camps; 40,000 of them, born in Japan, were classified as `enemy aliens.'" A decade before he became a crusading Chief Justice of the United States, California Attorney General Earl Warren "urged federal authorities to evacuate Japanese from sensitive areas of the West Coast," warning that the Japanese `may well be the Achilles heel of the entire civilian defense effort.'" The Japanese American evacuees were transported to internment camps in Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, California, and Wyoming, mostly in remote desert areas. During the war, nevertheless: "33,000 Japanese Americans...decided to seek equality and justice by serving in the U.S. Armed Forces."
World War II had many dimensions. For every book such as James Bradley's marvelous Flags of Our Fathers, which depicts Americans in war at their very best, there needs to be another such as Ronald Takaki's Double Victory telling a different part of the story. While millions Americans fought against Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese imperialism around the world, millions of others were struggling at home to make the United States fully live up to the ideals and founding of American democracy. Appreciating World War II as a multicultural event is essential to a complete understanding of the American experience in the war.
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