United States in the 1940s

The 1940s were both a turbulent and a transformative decade for the United States as a nation. Often referred to as “the War Years,” the decade saw the United States heavily engaged on the global stage with World War II (1939–1945) and its aftermath, which led to the beginnings of the Cold War (1947–1991) between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective international allies. The Cold War went on to exert a shaping influence over the global geopolitical landscape for much of the remainder of the twentieth century.

United States participation in World War II began when Japan perpetrated a sneak attack on a US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise bombing resulted in the deaths of 2,403 US citizens including sixty-eight civilians, according to an official tally issued by the US Census Bureau. Germany and Italy jointly declared war on the United States three days later, drawing the United States into a conflict that a significant faction of domestic isolationists had sought to avoid. The United States entered the war on the side of the Allied powers, fighting alongside partners such as the United Kingdom (UK), France, Canada, and the Soviet Union. The Allies ultimately prevailed in the conflict, definitively ending it in August 1945 when the United States deployed its newly developed atomic bomb technology in Japan, which had refused to surrender even after leading Axis power Germany capitulated in May 1945. The dramatic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which immediately killed an estimated one-hundred-twenty thousand people while exposing many more to fatal levels of radiation, forced Japan’s military concession and signaled the beginning of the postwar period.

Almost immediately after World War II’s conclusion, a new avenue of geopolitical tension and intrigue emerged over rising tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Though the two nations had fought together on the Allied side during World War II, their opposing political and economic ideologies began generating conflict as the victorious Allied powers began their joint administration of postwar Germany. Committed to democracy and a market economy, the United States was quickly consolidating its position as a dominant global power during the 1940s, which the Communist Soviet Union sought to challenge through an aggressive campaign of expansionism in eastern and central Europe.

The optimistic promise of an era of strong and harmonious international cooperation, expressed through the 1945 founding of the United Nations (UN), soon gave way to anxieties over the potential for the emerging Cold War to erupt into a conflict even more destructive than World War II as both rival superpowers continued developing their nuclear weapons technologies. In 1949, the United States led the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a political and military alliance designed to deter ongoing Soviet aggression and expansionism. In the twenty-first century NATO continued to function as a major international security institution.

Meanwhile, rapid economic growth and suburban development in the United States reshaped the concept of the “American Dream,” making a life of relative prosperity and stability broadly attainable to the middle classes. This emerging iteration of the American Dream would prove to be a key source of the pro-US propaganda that became a pervasive feature of the Cold War cultural battle that deepened in the decades that followed.

Society

The 1940 US Census counted a domestic population of 132,164,569, marking a 7.3 percent increase over 1930. That growth rate ultimately proved to be the lowest of any decade in the twentieth century and was largely due to the economic fallout of the Great Depression (1929–1939), which led to widespread poverty in the United States and many other countries. By 1950, the US population had increased to a census count of 150,697,361, increasing by 14.5 percent over 1940 levels and effectively doubling the growth rate of the 1930s. This accelerated rate of population growth, commonly referred to as the “Baby Boom,” has historically been attributed to the vastly improved economic situation in the United States and other Western countries, which gave couples the financial stability to support larger families. People born during the midcentury period belong to a generation commonly referred to as the Baby Boomers.

Two presidents led the United States during the 1940s: Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945), who died in office and was succeeded by Harry S. Truman (1884–1972). Roosevelt, frequently referred to by his initials “FDR,” provided what many observers and historians characterize as strong and effective leadership during World War II. However, the stress of being a wartime president is widely believed to have affected Roosevelt’s health, likely contributing to his 1945 death from a cerebral hemorrhage. Truman, Roosevelt’s vice-president, assumed office following FDR’s death and was elected to a second term in 1948. Truman implemented two defining pieces of 1940s US policy: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. The Truman Doctrine was a multilateral strategy for containing the expansionist ambitions of the Soviet Union and played a defining role in the early stages of the Cold War, while the Marshall Plan was a sweeping economic aid package designed to help Europe rebuild following World War II.

Relative to the economic desolation of the 1930s, the rapid growth of the 1940s vastly improved the nation’s financial standing. From a sociocultural perspective, this had two key impacts. First, it made a new iteration of the American Dream a feasible reality for the masses. The American Dream of the 1940s mainly centered on suburban home ownership, stable employment, and a disposable household income. The second (and connected) major impact related to suburban development, which was spurred by legislation such as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), commonly known as the G.I. Bill of Rights or the G.I. Bill. It provided education funding and financial assistance to servicemembers returning to civilian life after World War II, enabling many to purchase homes. The Levittown projects, which was a series of planned communities built in Long Island, New York, by the Levitt & Sons property development company, came to be viewed as a stand-in for the broader nationwide pattern of suburban growth that unfolded over the course of the decade. The rise of the suburbs redefined American life, shifting people from living in densely populated inner cities to expansive, newly built neighborhoods on their peripheries.

The 1940s also witnessed a surge in women’s participation in the workforce, which soared during World War II while many male members of the labor force were assigned to military duties. Though women’s labor force participation regressed to near pre-war levels by the mid-1940s, the phenomenon played an influential role in redefining the economic mobility and participation of US women, helping establish the foundations for future waves of gender-role reform and activism.

Race relations during the 1940s bore the shadows of openly exclusionary and discriminatory policies, which Black activists began to challenge. Though Roosevelt had invited Black Americans to become fuller participants in US society through his Great Depression-era New Deal economic policies and famous fireside chats, systemic racism continued to function as a major impediment to the economic and social fortunes of Black Americans. While the racial segregation policies of the American South were absent from the legal codes of other states, an unofficial form of “soft segregation” largely divided US society along racial lines. For instance, Black Americans were largely excluded from the suburban developments that redefined the American Dream during the 1940s, depriving many of a path to home ownership and a source of generational wealth transfer. Expert analysts note that the aftereffects of this socioeconomic racial discrimination remain visible in the contemporary United States.

Other developments foreshadowed the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In a direct response to the activism of Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 in June 1941. The order opened military service to Black Americans just months before the Pearl Harbor attack drew the United States into World War II. Meanwhile, sports legend Jackie Robinson (1919–1972) broke Major League Baseball’s color barrier in April 1947, becoming the first Black player in modern Major League history.

Science and Technology

Many major scientific and technological advancements of the 1940s were rooted in military- and security-related research and development. Plutonium, a chemical element that plays a key role in nuclear weapons technology, was first identified and isolated in December 1940 by a research team working at the University of California, Berkeley. The element later became a central focus of scientists affiliated with the Manhattan Project, a World War II-era initiative of the US federal government with the dual goal of developing nuclear weapons technology and keeping that technology out of the hands of rival and adversarial countries. Nuclear weapons later figured prominently in the decisive final events of World War II and the early Cold War arms race, which saw the Soviet Union acquire nuclear weapons technology by the decade’s end.

Jet engines, which generate powerful forward momentum through the reverse-direction discharge of specialized fuels, became viable technologies in the early 1940s. Advanced by the independent work of international scientists, jet propulsion was further developed in the United States during the 1940s at institutions such as the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which achieved innovations with both military and commercial applications. Among other noteworthy effects including the subsequent development of supersonic jet technologies, these breakthroughs led directly to the rise of mass-scale, long-distance civilian air travel.

Other familiar inventions created and developed in the 1940s include experimental color televisions, which were first introduced to US consumers in the early 1950s, along with early mobile telephone prototypes and the microwave oven. The radar technologies used in early-generation microwave ovens also found extensive applications in meteorology, vastly improving scientists’ ability to observe, measure, and predict the course of weather patterns. Computer technology improved during the 1940s, moving beyond the rudimentary and functionally limited previous systems to yield advancements such as the electronic numerical integrator and computer (ENIAC), now recognized as one of the first machines capable of carrying out generalized computing functions.

Though the human toll of World War II was immense, it prompted multiple key advancements in the fields of general medicine and surgery. Doctors developed new techniques for treating battlefield injuries, leading to major improvements in established methods of carrying out skin grafts, blood transfusions, and other trauma treatments. American and British scientists also collaborated on experiments designed to facilitate the large-scale production of antibiotics such as penicillin, which had been discovered in 1928 but remained available only in relatively limited quantities due to production-process limitations. A technique known as deep-tank fermentation, which was developed during the 1940s, ultimately provided the breakthrough that made the mass manufacture of penicillin viable. Widely used to treat infections resulting from battlefield injuries, penicillin migrated into civilian markets and quickly became a common, essential, and lifesaving medication. Streptomycin, another potent and highly useful antibiotic, was first isolated in 1943. By 1945, streptomycin was being used as an effective treatment for tuberculosis, a potentially fatal type of bacterial infection that had been a persistent public health problem for centuries. Many other breakthrough drugs, including quinine, chloroquine, methotrexate, and synthetic cortisone, were invented or developed as viable treatments for various diseases and ailments over the course of the 1940s.

Nobel Prize laureate Charles B. Huggins (1901–1997), who spent much of his career working at the University of Chicago, made a major discovery in 1941 by noting that certain types of cancerous tumors responded to hormone-based treatments. Huggins won the 1966 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his 1941 discovery, which is now recognized as the point at which hormone-based treatments became a specific focus of oncology. Another important medical innovation took place in 1949, when American physician and medical researcher Leon O. Jacobson (1911–1992), also a longtime University of Chicago professor, performed the first successful bone marrow transplant. Jacobson was also a key contributor to the early development of chemotherapy treatments for cancer.

Among many other noteworthy technological advancements and breakthroughs, the 1940s also saw the invention of the defibrillator and radiocarbon dating. A defibrillator is a medical device designed to deliver a powerful electric current to the heart as an emergency response to cases of cardiac arrest. Harvard University-educated American cardiologist Paul Zoll (1911–1999) is credited with inventing the first functional defibrillation machine in 1947 during his medical residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. Radiocarbon dating, an advanced technique that yields accurate estimates of the ages of artifacts, fossils, and other archeological discoveries, was pioneered by University of Chicago scientist Willard Frank Libby (1908–1980) during the late 1940s.

Economic and Cultural Trends of the 1940s: Economic Growth and Performance

US involvement in World War II has historically been credited with jolting the nation’s economy out of the financial misery of the Great Depression, which persisted for most of the 1930s. During the 1940s, Roosevelt implemented a series of policies designed to stabilize the US economy and encourage increases in consumer spending. These broadly built on his Great Depression-era New Deal plan, which created a series of public work programs and economic reforms designed to regulate the economy to better protect it from future crashes and establish more effective safeguards for the economic interests of the nation’s middle and working classes. During the 1940s, Roosevelt continued to focus his administration’s economic policy on job creation and home ownership. Under Roosevelt’s administration, the US federal government began guaranteeing mortgage loans for the first time, which is credited with providing a level of financial security that increased the disposable income of everyday consumers.

During his 1949 State of the Union address, Truman announced his Fair Deal program, which has been broadly described as an effort to continue FDR’s New Deal. Truman’s Fair Deal called for a more equitable distribution of economic opportunity and made specific recommendations regarding minimum wage increases, civil rights reforms, and a potential framework for a nationwide health insurance program. Though few of Truman’s proposed reforms were implemented, he and Roosevelt stewarded the US economy to impressive growth over the course of the 1940s. The country’s nominal gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of its total economic output, nearly tripled over the course of the 1940s, rising from approximately $103 billion in 1940 to $300 billion in 1950. The decade’s economic growth rates peaked during the World War II years, summiting at 18.9 percent in 1942 for the highest year-over-year growth rate of the twentieth century as tracked by the official measurements first conducted in 1929.

Media and Popular Culture

Advancements in radio broadcast technology and improvements in the design and functionality of coin-operated juke boxes helped fuel the continued growth of popular music during the 1940s. In the United States, the decade’s popular music landscape was dominated by jazz music and a jazz subgenre known as the “big band sound,” which came to be strongly associated with the Swing movement. Major US recording artists associated with the 1940s include Frank Sinatra (1915–1998), Ella Fitzgerald (1917–1996), Nat King Cole (1919–1965), Bing Crosby (1903–1977), Cab Calloway (1907–1994), Count Basie (1904–1984), Artie Shaw (1910–2004), Dizzy Gillespie (1917–1993), Glenn Miller (1904–1944), and the brothers Tommy (1905–1956) and Jimmy Dorsey (1904–1957). Other noteworthy popular musicians of the decade include Harry James (1916–1983), Perry Como (1912–2001), and Dinah Shore (1916–1994).

The “big band sound” gave rise to a family of popular and energetic jazz dancing styles collectively known as Swing, which includes individual dances such as the Lindy Hop, Collegiate Shag, Balboa, and Charleston. Other popular dances associated with the World War II era include the Foxtrot, Mambo, Rumba, and Samba, with the Rumba and Mambo being specifically associated with the Latin influences integrated into some rhythm-driven genres of 1940s popular music.

Film historians commonly characterize the 1940s as the final phase of the so-called golden age of Hollywood, which is often said to have ended with the 1948 Supreme Court case of United States v. Paramount. The 1948 judgment found that Paramount—and other major and minor players in the Hollywood studio system—was in violation of federal antitrust laws due to its vertical integration business practices. In the studio system era, vertical integration referred to each studio’s complete control over its own film production, marketing, distribution, and exhibition, which enabled the five major film studios of Paramount, Fox, Warner Brothers, RKO, and MGM to function collectively as a de facto monopoly over the US motion picture industry. The court’s decision had major implications for the Hollywood film industry, which was forced to significantly restructure its operations.

According to unadjusted domestic box office totals reported by the movie history portal Filmsite, the ten top-grossing films of the 1940s were, in descending order, Bambi (1942), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Song of the South (1946), Mom and Dad (1945), Samson and Delilah (1949), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), This Is the Army (1943), and Duel in the Sun (1946). The 1940s also produced Citizen Kane (1941) and Casablanca (1942), both of which are widely regarded as ranking among the greatest American motion pictures of all time. Popular movie stars associated with the 1940s include Cary Grant (1904–1986), Humphrey Bogart (1899–1957), Gary Cooper (1901–1961), James Stewart (1908–1997), Orson Welles (1915–1985), John Wayne (1907–1979), Ingrid Bergman (1915–1982), Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003), Dorothy Lamour (1914–1996), Lana Turner (1921–1995), and Judy Garland (1922–1969).

About the Author

Jim Greene is a freelance writer and Canadian expatriate currently based in the European Union. A graduate of the University of Guelph (BA, English), Toronto Metropolitan University (BFA, Film Studies), and the University of Southern California (MFA, Creative Writing), he has been writing professionally since 2001 through his owner-operated editorial services and consulting firm.

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