A research project on the history of the U.S. home front during World War II is wrapping up, and its findings are expected to be published in early 2025.
The project focused on the home front histories of Latinos, Native Americans, the LGBTQ community, disabled people and the environment. The study is “shedding light” on some overlooked areas of research, said John Flynn, PhD candidate in history and the assistant director of the American West Center.
The project, done in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS), includes, among other things, written reports on all 50 states, theme essays and documentation for potential historic landmarks. These help make up a publication titled “World War II and the American Home Front, Volume 2.” This is an update to NPS’ 2007 report and part of the agency’s National Historic Landmarks Theme Studies.
Flynn, for example, researched the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles as a potential National Historic Landmark.
“It’s difficult to pick one property for a National Historic Landmark that would encapsulate [the riot] because it moved throughout the whole city,” he said.
Zoot Suit Riots
Racial tensions were simmering in Los Angeles between its Latino community, city officials and the LAPD leading up to the Zoot Suit Riots, Flynn said. He pointed to the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder trial as an example.
The case saw 22 young Latino men indicted without evidence for the murder of José Gallardo Díaz. Seventeen were convicted for crimes ranging from assault to first-degree murder. All convictions were reversed on appeal.
The Zoot Suit Riots, named after the puffy, wide-leg suits popular among Latinos at the time, started after an altercation between a U.S. serviceman and a Latino man wearing a zoot suit. However it expanded throughout L.A., consuming the city with racial violence for five days.
“It’s called the zoot suit riot, but really, it was [predominantly] U.S. servicemen rampaging through the city and attacking at first anybody wearing a zoot suit, but then later on pretty much anyone from the Latino community,” Flynn said.
The LAPD aided the servicemen in the violence, and the five-day-long riot would later target the African Americans, Flynn said. City officials later banned zoot suits, blaming the young Latino men for the violent outbreak.
Zoot suits later became a symbol of the Chicano movement in the Post-War era. They were also a sign of protest against unjust treatment in the job industry during the war, Flynn said.
“When there is this rationing going on, including textile materials, zoot suits which use a lot more material … was a form of protest against that,” he said.
Native American and Indigenous History
Most histories of Native Americans in the WW2 era take a “top-down” approach, focusing on John Collier and the Indian New Deal. The study aimed to add more nuance to the overarching narrative, said Nicholas Backman, PhD candidate in History and research associate at the American West Center.
Native lands were confiscated during the war to build army bases, airfields and other military facilities. They were also taken to build Japanese incarceration camps. The Gila River War Relocation Camp in Arizona, which was built on native land against tribal wishes, is one case study the research focuses on, Backman said.
“It brings up really complex questions about sovereignty and self-determination, and it challenges that Collier top-down narrative,” he added.
Urbanization
The job opportunities created by wartime production motivated a large migration of Native Americans to cities. The government used this mass urbanization as an assimilation tactic, said Matthew Basso, lead researcher and associate professor of History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah. But, native people developed strategies to keep their cultural identity alive and fostered pan-Indian communities.
Indian boarding schools and industrial schools also contributed to wartime production. California’s Sherman Institute, which taught native men and women how to work high-paying jobs in manufacturing sectors like the aircraft industry, is one case example the study investigates.
“If you stop the story there, it doesn’t play out to the reality that native peoples were commonly among the first to be fired when soldiers began returning after the war,” Backman said.
While some native people migrated to cities for work, resource extraction became a key form of employment on tribal lands. Uranium mining on the Navajo Reservation is a notable example.
“Uranium mining secretly starts to become a bigger deal on the reservation, and that provides some decent paying work,” Basso said. “But the cost, we come to find out, is monumental. It poisons the land and more importantly, it has dramatic detrimental health impacts on the people.”
Militarization and the Environment
Resource extraction in the forms of forestry, metals mining and energy development for war mobilization altered America’s physical landscape dramatically. It also changed America’s ideology surrounding the environment and the role the military should play in society, Basso said.
“Our region itself, the West, would not look anything like it does today without the militarization that took place initially during World War II,” He said. He added that defense contractors and military facilities moved onto western lands, sparking population growth in the region.
“Population flow happens both during the war and especially after the war because of these thriving militarized economies,” Basso said. “But they also caused significant environmental destruction, both in the short term and in the long term.”
LGBTQ Community
While people often look to the Stonewall riots as the birth of the modern-day gay rights movement, Basso said it was World War II that laid the groundwork for demands of equal treatment. By bringing young men and women from rural areas into city centers and military bases, people who felt the same same-sex attraction were able to form communities. The formation of gay bars is one of the more famous examples. Basso also added that the drag scene emerged in this era.
“The backlash we see against it now, there was a little bit of that during World War II … but there was also a really strong embrace of drag as a fun mode of expression, both within the LGBT community and also straight folks who very much enjoyed it,” he said.
The Physically Disabled in the Workplace
Vocational work for disabled people emerged after World War I to re-integrate injured veterans into the workforce. However, many disabled people were forced out of the workplace during the Great Depression. World War II brought a desperate need for labor in the home front and the resurgence of vocational rehabilitation for people with disabilities to fill in the roles once occupied by the able-bodied. This also pushed for making workplaces more accessible for the physically disabled.
“Perhaps most importantly, these changes were pushed by disabled Americans themselves who wanted to be contributors to the war effort and sought further independence as well as seeking a society that was friendlier towards people that were disabled,” Basso said.
While people suffering from physical disabilities saw improvements during the war, Basso said the mentally disabled did not. Many of them were housed in over-populated and understaffed mental asylums where they faced “horrific” conditions. Still, some people were able to speak against the mistreatment.
“The workforce at these asylums, most famously conscientious objectors, did succeed in raising national awareness by the end of the war to the really terrible conditions of these places,” Basso said. “There was an effort to improve them after the end of the war with some limited success.”
The NPS will make “World War II and the American Home Front, Volume 2,” freely available to the public once finished for publication.
