1940s

The 1940s in the book are a decade of approaching war, divided political commitments, and careers reaching turning points. Its historical profiles set industrial production and public debate alongside the lives of people whose work began earlier or continued later. The decade is not presented as a single experience: it appears through Ford’s declining capacity to lead his company, political arguments over isolationism and intervention, and the records of activists, officials, and athletes whose paths crossed the era’s larger conflicts.

War, Industry, and Political Alignment

The decade changed the practical demands placed on American industry. As war approached, Henry Ford’s company shifted toward defense production; during the war it made B-24 bombers at the large Willow Run facility. Charles Lindbergh, who had supported isolationism alongside Ford, was hired there as a consulting adviser. The factory’s wartime role thus stands in pointed contrast to the political position Ford and Lindbergh had taken as the conflict expanded.

Ford’s own final years were shaped by illness and the transfer of responsibility. After suffering a second stroke during 1941–1947, he could no longer run the company and resigned in 1945. He died in April 1947, and 100,000 mourners viewed his body. Most of his vast fortune in company stock went to the Ford Foundation, which soon became the world’s wealthiest private foundation. His personal decline and the company’s conversion to wartime production give the period a double movement: the weakening of its founder’s control and the continuation of the industrial enterprise on a new footing.

Political Disagreement and Public Advocacy

The decade’s politics are represented through figures who occupied markedly different positions on war, fascism, and public life. Herbert H. Lehman’s career linked state government and national politics: he served as New York’s lieutenant governor under Governor Roosevelt, succeeded Roosevelt as governor from 1932 to 1942, and supported the New Deal. Described as a strong interventionist, he later served as a Democratic senator from New York from 1949 to 1957 and became an early opponent of Joseph McCarthy. His record places the decade’s political divisions within a longer career in public office.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s public work likewise extended across social and political causes. As First Lady, she spoke for liberal social causes, addressed the status of minorities, the underprivileged, and women, opposed fascism, and wrote a daily syndicated column carried by sixty newspapers. During World War II she was cochair of the Office of Civilian Defense. These roles show how the decade’s conflict coincided with continued public advocacy rather than displacing it.

Dorothy Thompson appears as a journalist and political activist whose opposition to Nazism and Hitler began early and whose criticism of Lindbergh’s politics was bitter. Syndicated in 170 newspapers during the 1930s, she carried a national platform into the decade. Her later opposition to Zionism and support for Palestinian Arabs in the 1940s and 1950s also locate her views in debates that continued beyond the war years. The decade thus appears not only as a period of military crisis, but as one in which political argument and public commentary remained consequential.

Antisemitism, Labor, and Electoral Politics

Gerald L. K. Smith’s profile records the persistence of organized antisemitism during the 1940s. A minister and orator, he had been allied with Huey Long and later with Father Coughlin and Henry Ford, who supported his hatred of Jews. His magazine, The Cross and the Flag, blamed Jews for the Depression and World War II. In 1942, he received 100,000 votes as the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan. His political claims also included assertions that Roosevelt was Jewish and that The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was authentic; after the war, he denied that the Holocaust had taken place. The chronology makes clear that the end of the war did not, in his case, end antisemitic agitation.

Labor politics form another strand of the period’s public conflicts. John L. Lewis had broken with the American Federation of Labor in 1935 to help form the organization that became the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1938. Initially a supporter of Roosevelt, he backed Republican Willkie in the 1940 election and resigned as CIO president after Willkie’s defeat. Strikes by the United Mine Workers during the war further strained Lewis’s relationship with the administration. His trajectory connects wartime labor action to an earlier organizational split and to changing political alliances.

Individual Careers in the Decade

The profiles also register the decade through more particular contests and cases. Allie Stolz, a lightweight boxer from Jewish Newark, won 73 of 85 fights. In the 1940s he lost two title fights: first, a controversial fifteen-round decision to champion Sammy Angott; then, in a thirteenth-round knockout by champion Bob Montgomery. The second defeat led to his retirement in 1946. These precise results make a sporting career’s end one of the decade’s clearest personal turning points.

David T. Wilentz’s career is tied to the prosecution of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case, which led to Bruno Hauptmann’s conviction and execution. He served as New Jersey attorney general from 1934 to 1944, placing that prosecution within a state office he held across the opening years of the decade. He later became influential in New Jersey Democratic politics and advised three Democratic governors. Taken together, these careers show the 1940s as both a period of large-scale change and a span measured in particular outcomes: a resignation, a retirement, a political realignment, and the continuation of public influence beyond the decade.