I hope to demonstrate that the connection between these two endeavors is found in the strategic motivations of American statesmen, who in their planning and direction of this particular mobilization followed enduring rules of Western warmaking. War has a curious bipolar character in studies of the political prospects of American social groups. On the one hand, social histories of war are replete with descriptions of the new economic and political opportunities encountered by racial and ethnic minorities and women. 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.