Essentially, the Great Depression and, really, the movement of the New Deal ends with the beginning of the Second World War. The Second World War, in the United States, goes from 1941, with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, until 1945. One of the significant things that we always have to remember when we're thinking about social welfare during the Second World War is the internment of the Japanese. America had, in the late 19th century, received a lot of Japanese immigrants. These immigrants had largely become farmers in the valleys of California, Oregon, and Washington. They were successful truck farmers, and produced a great deal of America's food. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the president, and the Supreme Court, and the Congress, together, essentially removed the citizenship rights of Japanese Americans. And so Japanese Americans were marginalized and forced to move into concentration camps. They spent the entire period of the war in these concentration camps. They lost their land, they lost their businesses, and when they came out of the concentration camps at the end of the war, they had to start over again. So this is a great shame in America's history. The US government has now decided that we should pay reparations to the Japanese that were interned. This raises, of course, the issue of reparations, which is an important issue when we think about slavery, and we'll come back to that topic later. During the Second World War, we began with segregated armed forces units. So there were white units, and black units, and Latin units, and the black and Latin units would have had white officers. Very much the picture of the American apartheid, with white people in charge of black people, who are kept separate and apart. During the war, actually, the armed forces begins to integrate, and so you have black and Latin people part of units that are white, and black and Latin people beginning to become officers. And this movement to integration in the armed forces creates relationships amongst Americans, especially American men, that are part of one of the shaping forces that assist the formation of the civil rights movement. We have lots and lots of refugees during the war. Europe is torn apart, Asia is torn apart. We're more open to European refugees than we are to Asian refugees. And after the war, we take many, many refugees and integrate them, particularly European refugees, and integrate them into the wider society. During the war, there's a number of ships that arrive in America full of Jewish refugees, and they are refused the right to port and discharge passengers. The antisemitism of America at that period of time, which Roosevelt and the government in general held, were unwilling to take large numbers of Jewish refugees. These refugee ships tended to continue on to Latin America, and Jewish communities grew up in Argentina, in Honduras, in Guatemala, and in Brazil, where the refugees were received and hosted. So often, if you're living in modern America, it's a little hard to remember that, as recently as the Second World War, we had this kind of systematic, nationally imposed antisemitism. And that we could simply remove the citizenship rights of American citizens because of their ethnicity. During the war, many, many men go off as soldiers, and the war required lots of goods to be produced in the factories. And so white women, for the first time in a patriarchal society, are moved into the workforce, and women have their own paychecks, they establish careers, and this is a very big change in America. Black women, and Latin women, and American Indian women had always been working out of the home, but this is the first time that white women, significantly, were working out of the home. And it's a very important thrust in the building of the second women's movement. The great migration continues, of course, because the factories need workers, and African Americans from the South, Puerto Ricans from the islands come north to work in the factories. So we see, during the war, that changes happen in social welfare, changes happen in the structure of society, and in some ways, the worst of America is represented. So we'll come back in the next course to talk more about how this turns out after the war.
