The Darkest Year:  The American Home Front 1941-1942, by William K. Klingaman

I must admit that I read this book with a high degree of concern that the author would show a particular bias for leftism that I found in the first book I had read by him, but I must admit that the author dealt with a contentious subject, namely the state of the American home front in the year after Pearl Harbor, in a very masterful way.  He simply provided quotes and paraphrases of what a variety of people had to say about diverse matters and kept his own personal editorializing to a minimum.  To be sure, the author’s sources were a bit of a convenience sample and he leaned a bit too heavily on some elite sources and did not include the sort of down-home common-folk that would have been most impressive to hear about, but given the way this could have been a strident work with a heavy-handed political agenda, the way that the author included a variety of sources with very different worldviews means that anyone who reads this book will find some people who they agree with in terms of government intervention (or lack thereof) in the economy and the skill (or lack thereof) of America’s early efforts at striking back at the Axis during the early days of its presence in World War II.

This particular work of about 300 pages is organized chronologically with an introductory section that discusses, somewhat improbably, the hopes that retailers had about the 1941 Christmas shopping season, before moving into a look at the way that the United States entered World War II and then how the war affected the home front.  The chapters of this book are filled with various anecdotes that talk about quotas of various items, including rubber tires, gasoline for cars, and sugar.  The housing shortages faced by workers, the riots over the rising status of blacks, the entrance of many women into the workforce, and the political struggle over the conduct of war take up a large amount of space, as does the general reluctance of the American public to turn off their lights at night.  The author spends a lot of time discussing and providing quotes about the way that actors and writers thought about things, which turns out to be sometimes quite uncharitable at times.  In this accomplished work, the author demonstrates that World War II did not bring with it a sense of national unity, no matter how nostalgically it may be remembered in retrospect.

What was the home front like for Americans during World War II?  Well, for one, while a great many men volunteered for service or were drafted (including a lot of baseball players), and a lot of nurses left hospitals to help out with military efforts, a great many people attempted various means, like getting married or even catching sexually transmitted diseases, to avoid military service.  The author details some corruption within government circles and the way that some people lacked any interest in following the laws and rules that were designed to ensure adequate logistics for the military.  It may have been thought that the United States did a good job at preserving both guns and butter, but the book demonstrates that hoarding and panics for such items as golf balls were frequent and that the home front was a good deal less quiescent than was often thought to be the case.  FDR and Republicans in Congress had to finely balance political concerns with the larger goal of winning the war while also providing as well as possible for the well-being of the American people, and there were (and are) many varying views as to how this was done and how it could have been done better.  Quite against my expectations, the author demonstrates how one can write thoughtfully about such subjects by letting one’s own sources do as much of the editorializing as possible and leaving the reader to decide for oneself whose accounts are the most plausible and reasonable to assent to.