The home front was bigger than the mainland

*"Help Bring Them Back To You! Make Yours A Victory Home!" Office of War
Information, 1943. Northwestern University Libraries.*

The usual picture of the Second World War draws a clean line: the war was
over there, and the home front was over here — factories, ration books,
war bonds — with Pearl Harbor as the one exception. It is a tidy picture, and
it leaves a great many Americans out of it.

The war over here

Mobilisation did remake the mainland. People moved across the country to
work and to train. Factories re-tooled and ran around the clock; whole
industrial towns went up with their own worker housing. Cars, toys and
refrigerators vanished from the shops. Doctors and nurses became scarce.
Food and gasoline were rationed.

But Americans at home also saw conflict directly. Civilians watched for enemy
aircraft and blacked out their windows at night. Submarines patrolled
American waters. Parts of the United States were attacked and occupied,
and American civilians were killed — in the takeovers, and again in the
liberations that followed.

*A blackout bulb, Wabash Appliance Co., Brooklyn. Painted black except for a
yellow tip, it lit a room without being seen from outside. Spurlock Museum,
University of Illinois.*

What "the United States" meant in 1939

Forty-eight states — and a set of territories and possessions, some held
since the mid-1800s and some far more recent, plus the Indigenous nations
with their own treaty relationships to the federal government. In most of
those territories civilians lived and worked; a few were military only. By
1945 the country had lost some of them and gained others.

The military, the press and the public tended to treat these places as
foreign soil. That is how the war that reached their doorsteps fell out of
the story of the home front. The reasons were several: how new some of them
were to American rule, the isolationism that followed the First World War, a
wish to look anti-colonial abroad, and the plain foreignness of their
languages and landscapes to mainland eyes.

A name for the larger country existed as early as 1904 — the **Greater United
States** — and maps of the time often drew it: the mainland with insets for
Alaska, Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Samoa and the Canal Zone.
The practice had mostly gone by the First World War.

*"Map of the United States Showing Territorial Expansion of a Century —
1804 to 1904," August R. Ohman. David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford.*

How we know, and what was lost

One way into the home front is its material culture — the buildings,
landscapes and things people made and used, from the functional to the
symbolic. The evidence is photographs, newspapers, films and posters; letters
and oral histories; museum collections, archaeology and surviving buildings.

Much of it is gone. Buildings came down "in part because no one knew they
were important." Metal objects went into scrap drives and out of the record.
Ordinary things were not collected because nobody thought them historic.

*Mess hall at the Tanforan Assembly Center, where Japanese Americans were
held behind a racetrack, screened from the race-goers by trees. "Here in
camp, we lost other things which money cannot buy." Drawing by Kenneth Iyeki,
August 1942. Densho.*

Sources

Written from Megan E. Springate's introduction to *The American Home Front and
World War II* series for the National Park Service Cultural Resources Office
of Interpretation and Education, a work of the United States government in
the public domain.