American Decades

The Public Prepares.

Though the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor virtually wiped out isolationist sentiment and unified the United States for war, there was little public romanticism or glorification of war, as there was when the country entered World War I. The American public understood that the war would be costly and disruptive of everyday life. To meet the challenge the American people were encouraged by wartime propaganda to expect and accept the intrusion of government into daily affairs. Though somewhat conditioned to government intervention by federal programs during the Great Depression, the scale on which the government ran the war economy and invested in it caused many in public life to worry about a possible long-term alteration in American traditions. They feared that the defeat of the totalitarian Axis powers might well require the United States to adopt some their enemies' methods of social and economic...