Fighting over the American soldier: Moral economy and national citizenship in World War II

"Fighting over the American Soldier" is a history of ordinary citizens' encounters with the federal government during World War II. A distinctive political culture emerged during the war that shaped national citizenship and planted the seeds of the "rights revolution" that emerged in the postwar period. This political culture legitimized the "big government" erected to carry out the war mobilization by cloaking it in the bloody garb of an idealized combat soldier. Civilians accepted the legitimacy of federal authority---which expanded to unprecedented levels during the war---by relating their own contributions on the "home front" to the idealized figure of the GI. But if the combat soldier was a culture hero, he was also a contested idol. For every claim to affinity with the combat soldier, there were as many counterclaims as there were competing interests within the superheated war economy.; This study focuses on the experiences of industrial workers, consumers, taxpayers and war bond holders as they contributed to the war mobilization effort. It explores the myriad ways in which federal agencies shaped everyday life, habituating citizens to government authority and inadvertently prompting rising expectations of fairness within the war economy. These rising expectations, diverse and widespread as they were, inevitably clashed, playing out in cultural contests over the meaning of the combat soldier. Early in the war, rumors suggested that soldiers' sacrifices were undermined by subversives "pampered" by the "liberal" government. In 1943, at the peak of the war effort, self-righteous servicemen reasserted their authority by attacking the seemingly unpatriotic consumption of Mexican American youths during the Zoot Suit riots. As wildcat strikes crested toward the war's end, so too did anti-labor sensibilities, eliciting popular proposals for national service. These and other episodes of cultural warfare over the soldier ultimately limited the government's power to manage the national economy after the war, and restricted claims of full national citizenship to the returning GIs. Yet civilians also emerged from the war with a nascent sense of national citizenship which, though thwarted, would prove significant in the postwar period.