8.2 The Home Front

Notes

Winning the war required the whole nation's economy and people.

• Factories switched to war production, and unemployment almost disappeared. The Depression ended.
• Rationing limited goods like sugar, meat, gasoline and tires. Americans bought war bonds and grew victory gardens.
• Millions of women took factory jobs, symbolized by "Rosie the Riveter."
• Black Americans pursued the Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad and racism at home. The Tuskegee Airmen were Black fighter pilots. FDR banned discrimination in defense industries (1941).
• Navajo code talkers used their language for codes the Japanese never broke. Mexican workers came under the Bracero Program.
• Executive Order 9066 (1942) led to the forced removal and incarceration of about 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them U.S. citizens. The Court upheld it in ***Korematsu v. United States* (1944)**. In 1988 Congress apologized and paid reparations.