V Was for Victory.... (11)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (11). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“…incarcerate thousands of guiltless Japanese-Americans in internment camps that the Army preferred to call ‘relocation centers’…the most blatant mass violation of civil liberties in American history.” p. 155.

“Though neither aliens nor enemies, American blacks during World War II suffered, as ever, from white hostility and oppression.” p. 182.

Lloyd Brown, an American black soldier on his experience in Salina, Kansas: “The people of Salina would serve these enemy soldiers [POWs] and turn away black American GIs….” p. 191.

Pauli Murray: “What’d you get, black boy/  When they knocked you down in the gutter,/ And they kicked your teeth out,/ And they broke your skull with clubs,/ And they bashed your stomach in? / …What’s the Top Man say, black boy? / Mr. Roosevelt regrets….” p. 207.

To be continued.