Chapter 26: America’s Rise to Globalism

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CH 26 STUDY GUIDE AMERICA’S RISE TO GLOBALISM

PEOPLE, PLACES & EVENTS

1. The attack on Hawaii and isolated

2. U.S. diplomacy between the world wars

3. Hoover’s Secretary of State, Henry Stimson & the Japanese takeover of Manchuria

4. The “Good Neighbor Policy”

5. American internationalists versus isolationists

6. U.S. isolationism

7.The Nye Committee hearings

8. The Neutrality Legislation of the 1930s

9. World War II & the Grand Alliance

10. Background to the Pearl Harbor attack

11. FDR & assistance to Great Britain after the fall of France in 1940

12. The Atlantic Charter

13. The Pearl Harbor attack

14. The war against Japan from 1942 to 1945

15. Allied strengths in WWII

16. Campaigning on the Western front in the European theater of operations 1942-44

17. The impact of World War II on American society

18. Motivating soldiers to fight

19. American economic activity during World War II

20. The “miracle” of war production

21. Federal funds for the war

22. WWII war work for women

23. Minority groups during World War II

24. The New Deal during the war

26. Winston Churchill’s vision for the postwar world

27. Poland & the Yalta conference

28. The RooseveltChurchillStalin Yalta Conference of 1945

29. The Potsdam Conference

30. The first atomic bomb

COMPLETION

  1. The battle of [ ] halted the Japanese advance and broke Japanese naval supremacy in the Pacific.
  2. With the development of [ ], the typical battlefield “front” as in World War II disappeared.
  3. Though they were American citizens, [ ] were confined in camps during the war.
  4. According to your text, nothing during World War II raised more wrenching questions of human good and evil than what is known as [ ].
  5. The harnessing of [ ] meant Americans could no longer feel fully safe in the world.

IDENTIFICATION QUESTIONS

Students should be able to describe the following key terms, concepts, individuals, and places, and explain their significance:

Terms and Concepts

isolationism / non-recognition
Mexican oil expropriations / Neutrality Acts
Benito Mussolini (Il Duce) / Quarantine Speech
Panay incident / fascism
neutrality / quarantine
cash-and-carry / fission
total war / balance of power
war conversion / voluntarism
concentration camps / Issei
Nisei / bracero program
GI Bill of Rights / anti-Semitism
Stimson Doctrine / Lend-Lease Act

Individuals and Places

Winston Churchill / Joseph Stalin
Munich Conference / Midway
General Douglas MacArthur / WACs
D-Day / Yalta Conference
“Rosie the Riveter” / A. Philip Randolph
Zoot Suiters / John L. Lewis
George C. Marshall / Thomas Dewey
Henry Morgenthau / Harry Hopkins
Leslie Groves / Hiroshima
El Alamein / Admiral Chester Nimitz

MAP IDENTIFICATIONS

Students have been given the following map exercise: On the map on the following page, label or shade in the following places. In a sentence, note their significance to the chapter.

  1. Midway
  2. Potsdam
  3. Teheran
  4. El Alamein
  5. Normandy
  6. Stalingrad

Critical Thinking

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (MAPS)

  1. Looking at the map of World War II in Europe and North Africa (page 871), why do you suppose the Americans favored an invasion at Normandy over Churchill’s proposal to attack Europe’s “soft underbelly” along the Mediterranean Coast?
  2. Looking at the map of World War II in Europe and North Africa (page 871), why would it have been natural for Hitler to expect the Allies to invade France at Calais?
  3. In what ways do the maps on pages 871 and 891 highlight the supply problems the Allies faced during World War II?
  4. Looking at the map illustrating the Pacific campaigns of the war (page 891), why would Roosevelt have been eager to have Stalin declare war on Japan? Looking at a map of the world, why would Stalin have been reluctant to declare war on Japan?

EVALUATING EVIDENCE (ILLUSTRATIONS)

  1. The picture on page 862 of sandbags in front of the telephone company in San Francisco suggests one reason West Coast Americans feared a possible attack by Japan. What else in the picture suggests a reason for fear among some residents of San Francisco?
  2. Hitler was a master in the manipulation of patriotic propaganda. What are some of the techniques revealed in the photograph on page 865?
  3. Examine the chart on government spending on page 888. How does the level of government spending rise during the Depression years? How does that rise compare with the level of government spending during World War II?
  4. Critics of the New Deal charged that the budget deficits accumulated through government spending programs did not bring the United States out of the Depression, but that World War II did. What does the graph on page 888 suggest about that argument? What does it suggest about the relationship of government spending and deficits and economic recovery? In what ways might critics counter this argument?

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Students have been asked to read carefully the following excerpt from the text and then answer the questions that follow.

Had Roosevelt known the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming? For months American intelligence had been cracking some of Japan’s secret codes. Much information indicated that Pearl Harbor was at risk. Yet Roosevelt left the fleet exposed, seeming almost to provoke an attack to bring the United States into the war. Was it mere coincidence that the vital aircraft carriers were at sea? That only the obsolete battleships were left at Pearl Harbor? Some critics have charged that Roosevelt deliberately contrived to bring war about. But the argument is based on circumstantial, not documentary, evidence. Roosevelt wanted to fight Germany more than Japan. If he had wished to provoke an incident, one in the Atlantic would have served him far better. More important, the intelligence signals were confusing and analysts lost track of the Japanese fleet as it moved toward Hawaii.

In the end, cultural misperceptions explained the coming of the war better than any conspiracy theory. American leaders were surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor because they could not believe the Japanese were daring or resourceful enough to attack an American stronghold 4000 miles from Japan. Japanese militarists counted on a surprise attack to give them time to build a line of defense strong enough to discourage weakwilled westerners from continuing the war. As it turned out, both calculations were wrong.

PRIMARY SOURCE: Two Views on the Evacuation of JapaneseAmericans[*]

When President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, he authorized the evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Soon after, a Congressional Committee heard testimony from both California public officials and representatives of the Japanese community who both favored and opposed evacuation. The following excerpts are from California Attorney General Earl Warren (later the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court) and from James Omura.

EARL WARREN: Unfortunately, however, many of our people and some of our authorities ...are of the opinion that because we have had no sabotage and no fifth column activities in this State since the beginning of the war, that means that none have been planned for us. But I take the view that that is the most ominous sign in our whole situation. It convinces me more than perhaps any other factor that the sabotage we are to get ... [is] timed just like Pearl Harbor....

We believe that when we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them, and we believe that we can, in dealing with the German and Italians, arrive at some fairly sound conclusions because of our knowledge of the way they live in the community.... But when we deal with the Japanese we are in an entirely different field and we cannot inform any opinion we believe to be sound. Their method of living, their language, make for this difficulty....

JAMES OMURA: It is doubtlessly difficult for Caucasian Americans to properly comprehend and believe in what we say. Our citizenship has even been attacked as an evil cloak under which we expect immunity for the nefarious purpose of conspiring to destroy the American way of life. To us—who have been born, raised, and educated in American institutions and in our system of public schools, knowing and owing no other allegiance than to the United Statessuch a thought is manifestly unfair and ambiguous.

I would like to ask the committee: Has the Gestapo come to America? Have we not risen in righteous anger at Hitler’s mistreatment of the Jews? Then, is it not incongruous that citizen Americans of Japanese descent should be similarly mistreated and persecuted? ...We cannot understand why General DeWitt can make exceptions for families of German and Italian soldiers in the armed forces of the United States while ignoring the civil rights of Nisei Americans. Are we to be condemned merely on the basis of our racial origin? Is citizenship such a light and transient thing that that which is our inalienable right in normal times can be torn from us in times of war?

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[*]From Hearings before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, House of Representatives, Washington, 1942.