War crises redeploy workers with new skills to new locales and launch important episodes of industrial and manufacturing development. In the process, wars set authorities off-balance and undermine social norms. Wars can, it seems, help to liberate oppressed groups, even if in an indirect and piecemeal fashion. On the other hand, there is a darker, authoritarian side of war resulting from heightened economic regulation and social regimentation. In grave crises, central authorities ration foodstuffs and fuel, set prices and wages, tax commerce and incomes, and police and conscript citizens in an effort to organize and deploy a maximum level of destructive force.
Wars produce similar contradictions in historical studies of American race relations.
The two world wars caused the employment and enfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of black Americans who seized new opportunities to escape the rural South and the most repressive forms of white supremacy. But this race vanguard also faced new obstacles to individual achievement and interracial amity. In what appears to be a pattern, racial crowd violence in this century has coincided with wars and their immediate aftermath. Overall, wars have produced both ameliorative and repressive federal race policies, including the heightened surveillance of African American organizations. To try to make sense of this ambivalent but seemingly recurrent historical record, and in particular to explain central authorities' roles in these episodes, I turned to two theoretical perspectives on wars' effects on race politics.