By Derek Seidman
This article was originally published by Truthout
Historian Tejasvi Nagaraja explains how wartime mobilization generated wider organizing around labor, race, and empire.
World War II was a period of enormous mobilization in U.S. society that brought together tens of millions of “war workers” — soldiers and laborers in war-essential industries, spanning the globe. While mainstream mythologies persist of the World War II years as a period of “consensus,” Black Americans fought in a Jim Crow military while Japanese Americans were interned by the U.S. government. Moreover, the wartime mobilization generated massive conflict and resistance around labor, race, and empire.
Tejasvi Nagaraja is a historian of labor and racial capitalism at Cornell University, and the author of Troop Movements: Labor, Race, and Global Freedom Struggles in America’s World War II. As he shows in this new book, soldiers and defense workers, stationed across much of the world, waged and linked struggles for labor and civil rights and against colonialism and imperialism throughout the 1940s. Furthermore, many World War II veterans and war workers, drawing on wartime political experiences forged in a period of rising anti-fascist consciousness, went on to lead and provide guidance for major postwar U.S. social movements into the 1960s and beyond.
In this exclusive Truthout interview, published on Veteran’s Day, Nagaraja discusses Troop Movements and what lessons its history might hold for organizers and activists today. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Derek Seidman: The military is sometimes imagined as separate from the rest of society, but your book shows how blurred these lines really were during the 1940s. Can you elaborate on this?
Tejasvi Nagaraja: World War II was, at least for the United States, the closest thing to a total war mobilization. Most employment was converted to military service in the armed forces and to working in war-essential industries. Virtually every family and community had members in the military and defense industries.
The story I tell about World War II is about what happened in this realm, where tens of millions of people were in the armed forces and defense industries, and their experiences at home, but also abroad — in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.
Labor during World War II was not just working at a Michigan auto factory or Appalachian coal mine, but also cooking and cleaning on a military base in Texas and Mississippi or France, or building the Ledo Road across China, Burma, and India. These were sites of labor experience and labor struggle.
The 1930s and 1940s were a peak period of union membership growth and strike activity in U.S. history. Wildcat strikes were happening in defense industries during World War II. Service members in the Army, Navy, and Air Force engaged in wildcat strikes, hunger strikes, and mutinies to protest labor conditions.
Black men and women protested labor, policing, and jailing conditions. They experienced race and class struggles — not just in Georgia, but in Massachusetts, as well as in France, India, and the Philippines. Their struggles linked up to global questions.
There was a real blurring of defense industry and service member labor, and civil rights and worker struggles, at home and abroad. It was a time of global anti-fascist struggle and global decolonial possibility, linking the U.S. working class, in some moments, to working people from other regions.
A huge part of the U.S. working class was tied to the war machine during World War II. How did leftists and anti-imperialists who opposed war and militarism engage with this reality?
The 1940s were a crucible through which the longer struggles of economic, racial, and global politics were transformed. In this context, labor, civil rights, and global justice activists navigated a contradictory and double-edged terrain. They sometimes made a devil’s bargain that we can understand as partly a question of choice and political ideology, but also of not making history as we please and having to navigate things bigger than oneself.
Labor unions, for example, embraced a no-strike pledge in exchange for winning union security in some defense industries. Even left-leaning Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO) unions had a seat at the table of the warfare state. In the textile mills of Georgia and North and South Carolina, union activists waged daring campaigns to unionize the very anti-union South, and they gained some openings when the War Department intervened in mid-1940s strikes to keep war production going.
At times, the Pentagon even partnered with CIO unionists to stand up to recalcitrant Jim Crow capitalists. After the war, however, those unions were left to fend for themselves and faced a reactionary push by the region’s Jim Crow capitalists.
As U.S. foreign policy shifted from anti-fascism to anti-communism and Third World interventionism, the military-industrial complex proved durable while the labor openings for more emancipatory possibilities became constrained by that very security state that arose during FDR’s anti-fascist war but then was consolidated in the Cold War anti-communist turn.
Again, you have these double-edged bargains: the civil rights movement navigating openings through defense industries and military service, but also brokering these civil rights possibilities around a U.S. becoming more permanently militarized.
How was this 1940s protest moment expressed within the military?
Service members and veterans themselves debated the postwar stakes for U.S. militarism. Active-duty service members stationed in the Philippines and Calcutta had mass meetings in 1945 and 1946 asking whether the U.S. would become an imperialist power of its own.
These service members debated how they could use their veteran identity to push for a wider vision of social democracy and civil rights in a peaceful United States. Even in a so-called “Good War” with popular support, many of them were critical of militarism and imperialism more generally.
Some service members were actually the first critics of postwar U.S. foreign policy, protesting in 1946 the U.S. aiding European colonial allies and U.S. policy toward the Philippines or Saudi Arabia.
Today, far fewer people work in defense industries. We have an all-volunteer army that has made war-work sectors more invisible and weakened the possibilities for democratic claims that could be made by service members. We think of military service now as a private individual choice — though service member identities would also be contested during the wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
Your book shows how World War II veterans and war industry workers played critical roles in postwar movements around labor, civil rights, and anti-colonialism. Can you elaborate?
I argue that this “greatest generation” of 1930s and 1940s labor, civil rights, and other social movements was also the vanguard of the 1960s movements, serving as middle-aged elders to the younger generation and setting in motion some of their movements. It built a bridge from the 1930s labor movement to the 1960s civil rights and antiwar movement.
A total war brings everybody together in a transformative experience. Before the war, when different people worked for different employers in different settings, it was harder to think about a bigger picture that links a national and international economy and politics.
But when tens of millions of people are working all over the world for this new thing called the Pentagon, directly as service members or indirectly as defense workers, they can see a bigger picture.
For example, Ossie Davis became a famous actor and senior statesman of labor, civil rights, and global justice movements, along with his partner Ruby Dee, from the 1940s to the 1960s. Davis spent most of the World War II years in West Africa, seeing, as a Black working-class American, the U.S. Army projecting power abroad. He saw Firestone Tire and Rubber Company — one of the biggest corporations in the world, with Pentagon war contracts — controlling the biggest rubber plantation in the world in Liberia.
All this was formative for Davis developing a larger vision — seeing how working-class and Black struggles in Georgia or Harlem were linked to global capitalism and global war.
The interracial labor and civil rights movements, and even early queer and feminist movements, of the 1940s would grow into the movements of the 1960s. And many key people in those 1940s movements were formed in this culture of CIO unionism, and of a labor-civil rights-veterans coalition, as active-duty service members, returning veterans, and defense workers in the 1940s. They came into their political life in this moment of anti-fascist consciousness during a global war.
Mainstream commemorations of Veterans Day tend to ignore the robust tradition of GI and veteran organizing for peace and justice. How does your book help us counter the right’s capture of veteran history and identity?
Service member and veteran identity is a contested thing that’s always been fought over.
World War II saw a mass service member experience where people from all walks of life were drafted into the armed forces. CIO union and civil rights organizers went into the Army and Air Force and engaged in civil rights and anti-imperial mutinies and strikes from Indiana to the Philippines.
Many of these people asserted their veteran identity in labor, civil rights, and veterans’ groups from the mid-1940s onward to make a claim on U.S. citizenship to criticize reactionary capitalist, racist, and imperialist trajectories.
It was only with the 1950s Red Scare that conservative hegemony asserted itself over veteran identity. But in the 1940s, you had groups like the American Veterans Committee, with a mass membership linked to the NAACP and the CIO unions, advocating for peaceful social democracy.
Some of the first protesters of a U.S. global empire in 1945 and 1946 were CIO organizers in the army mobilizing mass protests in Honolulu, Paris, and Manila, demanding speedy demobilization to go home and criticizing the new U.S. imperialism and aid to European colonialism.
There were bitter conflicts over veteran identity during the Vietnam War. Some mobilized to support the brutal U.S. war, but others engaged in widespread GI and veteran resistance.
It’s different in the post-Vietnam era with the turn to an all-volunteer army. You have groups like About Face using their veteran identity in critiquing U.S. foreign policy, but there’s also much fewer people engaging in military service.
What do you think left organizers and movement activists today can learn from the history you write about?
Bigger lessons from World War II still hold today. How do you stitch together a broader populist base moving in a progressive direction, led by some people who have a more daring and even radical vision?
I write about the “Bring the Boys Home” demobilization movement in 1946. Some participants were not very political and just wanted to go home, but they were mobilized by people with a left-leaning vision.
Today, with Trump’s unpopular war on Iran, you have everyday expressions of service member defiance, like on the USS Gerald Ford, which aren’t necessarily politicized. How could activists connect up with that?
In our moment, there’s widespread defiance against U.S. foreign policy and a broader discontent among even more apolitical working-class people. There’s an opening to challenge the bipartisan foreign policy elite and assert something new — not just what’s good for us, but for the wider world.
Local struggles around labor, race, policing — they’re deeply interconnected with global wars and global capitalism. When people see the foreign and the domestic, the local and the global, as linked, it can embolden a horizon of anti-fascist urgency. In the 1930s and 1940s, this allowed for positive fights for racial and economic justice.
Today, as we face neo-fascism in our times, it’s an opportunity to confront not only the worst horrors in the Middle East or ICE at home, but to imagine a positive reconstruction, linking global justice with our local racial and economic justice work. Studying this history has painful lessons — Japanese Americans faced mass incarceration, and Black Americans faced Jim Crow segregation — but also lessons of tremendous success that can help us move in a positive coalitional direction and with a cross-issue vision for our own times.
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