V Was for Victory; Politics and American Culture During World War II

New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. First Printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. xii, 372 pages. Notes. Index. Ink name and date inside front flyleaf. Some soiling to fore-edge. Some soiling and some edge wear to DJ. John Morton Blum (April 29, 1921 - October 17, 2011) was an American historian, active from 1948 to 1991. He was a specialist in 20th-century American political history, and was a senior advisor to Yale officials. He attended Phillips Academy and Harvard University. Upon graduation in 1943, he was commissioned as an ensign in the United States Navy, serving in the Caribbean, the South West Pacific theater of World War II, and Iwo Jima. In 1950 he returned to Harvard to write his Ph.D. under the direction of Frederick Merk. He taught at MIT from 1948 to 1957 before moving to Yale University in 1957. He retired in 1991. Blum is the author of several historical works, including Joseph Tumulty and the Wilson Era (1951) (about President Woodrow Wilson's private secretary Joseph Patrick Tumulty), The Republican Roosevelt (1954), V Was for Victory (1977) (about World War II), and Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974 (1992) (covering U.S. politics from the inauguration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy to the resignation of U.S. President Richard Nixon). This work is about how the wartime experience of Americans, nurtured in their culture and expressed in their politics, shaped American expectations about the postwar period at home and abroad. Derived from a Kirkus review: The war was to be won as fast as possible, Roosevelt decreed; and other claims--ideals or principles--must bow to necessity. So, G.I. heroes took shape as small-town athletes whose brave new world was home sweet home. After years of depression, incomes and spending soared, and the ads promised a consumer paradise after the war. Big business, subsidized by cost-plus government contracts, doubled its share of the national pie--while trumpeting the glories of free enterprise. Japanese-Americans were interned, European Jews were left to die, and black Americans continued to be denied jobs, homes, and dignity. The presumption of American material and moral superiority flowered. In a fluent narrative that's a model of synthesis Professor Blum, displays diverse facets of our former--and present--selves, then subsumes them in a lively chronicle of wartime politics. The '42 Republican upsurge ensconces Halleck and Dirksen, Vandenberg, Dewey, and Taft. It is no time for the crusading Wendell Willkie of One World or the visions, however practical, of Henry Wallace; but Roosevelt, the old fox, rides out the country's discontents to an easy fourth-term victory. Expert history, with solid new material on the struggle to save small business and the growth of the Negro protest movement in particular.