A Wartime Tale of Two Cities

Abstract

Now that memories of World War II are over half a century old, popular culture has cast it as the last “good” war, one in which participants knew good from evil. Since there was no ambiguity, it was easy for everyone to pull together to crush America’s enemies. Moreover, as Americans worked at home and overseas to destroy monstrous evils such as Hitler and his Third Reich, they pulled themselves out of the Great Depression, the worst economic disaster in the nation’s history. The people on the home front set the stage for the tremendous postwar economic expansion that waned only in the 1970s.