Divided arsenal

by Daniel Kryder

"World War II indisputably led to the reform of federal racial policies. Daniel Kryder, in Divided Arsenal, asks why that reform turned out to be limited in scope. To do so, he examines the wartime roles of blacks in the Army, in factories, and in agriculture. Kryder finds that central governments have two main goals during war - the full mobilization of wartime production and survival in office. Limited racial reform, then, represented a means to serve the central government's larger concerns and was not an end in itself. Nevertheless, Kryder argues, these modified reforms, by both stanching and stimulating insurgency and thus contributing to the ongoing struggle between advocates and statesmen, shaped both the scale and scope of the future American state and the subsequent civil rights movement."--Jacket.