Outcomes of World War II Essay

Outcomes of World War II Essay

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Outcomes of World War II Essay

What were the causes, major leaders, outcomes of World War II, and the great depression, Cold War and Liberalization around the world?

write two full pages on What were the causes, leaders, and outcomes and consequences of World War I?

World War II had a profound and multifaceted impact on the American economy. Most obviously, it lifted the nation out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. As late as 1940, unemployment stood at 14.6 percent; by 1944 it was down to a remarkable 1.2 percent, and the gross national product (GNP) had more than doubled. But the wartime economic mobilization did more than end the Depression. It greatly increased the size, power, and cost of the federal government. It corroborated the argument of the British economist John Maynard Keynes that deficit spending could stimulate economic growth, with consequences not only for government fiscal policy, but also for the agenda of New Deal liberalism. It virtually revolutionized the tax structure by vastly increasing the number of taxpayers, making personal income taxes a larger source of federal income than corporate taxes, and inaugurating the withholding system. It enlarged the economic and political power of big business, spurred the mechanization of agriculture and the further consolidation of big agribusiness, and increased the size and influence of organized labor. It catalyzed major breakthroughs in science and technology, including the development of the atomic bomb. It contributed to the resurgence of conservatism in Congress that had begun in the late 1930s. And among its other consequences, it made the United States overwhelmingly the dominant economic power in the world.

As the United States became the “arsenal of democracy” during World War II, economic mobilization brought a double victory for the American people by ending the decade-long Great Depression at home, as well as playing a pivotal role in defeating the Axis Powers abroad. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s had contributed to economic improvement after the calamitous collapse of the American economy that had led to unemployment of at least 25 percent by 1933. It had also provided essential assistance to the impoverished and unemployed. But the New Deal had not ended the Depression. Indeed, after some recovery from 1933 to 1937, the sharp recession of 1937 to 1938 sent economic indexes plummeting again, with unemployment reaching 19 percent. The economy then headed up again, but in 1940 unemployment still stood at a Depression-level 14.6 percent.

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World War II involved combatants from most of the world’s nations and was considered the deadliest war in history. Around 85 million military and civilians died as a result. The end finally came on Sept. 2, 1945, when Japanese officials signed the surrender documents aboard the battleship USS Missouri at Tokyo Bay, Japan.

By 1940, however, the war in Europe and the American national defense program provided economic stimulus, and in 1941 and 1942 defense spending and mobilization for war began to send the economy to new levels of prosperity. With the United States accounting for about 40 percent of all war goods produced worldwide by 1944, the GNP rose from $91 billion in 1939 to $126 billion in 1941, to $193 billion in 1943, and to $214 billion in 1945. Civilian employment increased by eight million workers, to some fifty-four million, between 1939 and 1944, at the same time that the armed forces mushroomed from one-third of a million to 11.5 million.

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Unemployment virtually vanished, falling to just 1.2 percent in 1944. National income soared from $73 billion in 1939 to $183 billion in 1944. And as the United States prospered, the economies of the other major nations were distorted and damaged by the war. In 1947, the United States produced about half of the world’s manufactured goods, three-fifths of the world’s oil and steel, and four-fifths of the world’s automobiles. Such newer industries as aviation, petrochemicals, and electronics also grew in size and importance because of the war—as did new technologies in those and other areas, including computers. One leading economic historian has argued that such American economic dominance was perhaps “the most influential consequence of the Second World War for the postwar world.”

Outcomes of World War II Essay

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