What We’re Reading: America at War and a Killer in the Streets of Bucharest

A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II Maury Klein “A Call to Arms” is the story of the reindustrialization of the United States after the Great Depression deindustrialized it. Deindustrialization is perhaps the wrong term, since the industrial plant still existed. What was gone were the customers and the workers, who were to a great extent the same people. In this sense, Maury Klein’s story is close to becoming the United States’ story today, save for the fact that his focus is on how the Depression ended and the workers returned to the factories. The customer was the federal government, which was rearming the nation for war and, while doing so, resurrecting transport, agriculture and all things necessary not only to wage war but to sustain the workers essential for making war. The historical memory celebrates this as a fantastic achievement. And indeed, it was a great achievement, if you forget the politics, inefficiency and profiteering that are inevitable in such a system. What is fantastic is that the massive war effort ever got started at all. The American phase of the war began in 1942, for all practical purposes, but World War II began in 1939. […]