In opening his England 1914–1945, legendary British historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote, “Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.” This all changed, Taylor continued, with the outbreak of World War I. People's lives “were shaped from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs … the history of the English state and the English people merged for the first time.”Footnote ¹ War, of course, has often served to increase the powers of the nation-state; faced with the necessity of victory, many governments throughout history have used a period of conflict to bolster their level of influence over everyday life. In the United States, however, the popular conception, for the most part, remains one of a state that has historically been weak rather than omnipresent. “The phrase ‘the American State’,” William Novak argued in a provocative recent essay, “is seen as something of an oxymoron in a land of alleged ‘anti-statism’ and ‘statelessness.’”Footnote ² But in his important new book, Warfare State, James Sparrow challenges such notions by suggesting an argument akin to that of Taylor outlined above: that the role of the state in American life was transformed by US participation in World War II. As had been the case in World War I Britain, the role of the American state in people's lives after 1941 was fundamentally altered by the experience of total warfare on a previously unprecedented scale. “More than any other period since the Civil War,” Sparrow explains in reference to the shifts wrought after 1941, “changes in government politicized everyday life, touching nearly every American” (4).

In adopting this approach Sparrow does not just take aim at those arguing against the historical presence of a powerful American state, but also argues convincingly that it was the struggle against Nazi Germany and Japan, rather than the reforms implemented under the auspices of the New Deal, that provided the catalyst for a much tighter relationship between the state and ordinary Americans. To be sure, the author recognizes that this was at odds with the national tradition. “How was it,” he asks,

The key to understanding this, Sparrow argues, lies in the inexorable link between a shared sense of nationalism that underpinned the war effort and the subsequent legitimacy that this compelled the populace to convey upon the federal government. A shared sense of involvement and participation persuaded millions of Americans to back the government's increasing role in their lives. “The leviathan that Americans rapidly erected to meet the challenges of this global cataclysm required legitimacy, accorded by citizens who were invested somehow – materially or ideologically – in the power of the national government” (9, original emphasis). As Americans in all walks of life came increasingly to feel like they were part of the war effort, then, so they increasingly accepted the necessity of a stronger state. Great emphasis, consequently, is placed on explaining the way that Americans were persuaded to buy into the war either monetarily or in terms of increased output. The nationwide effort to persuade millions of Americans to buy bonds to support the war effort, for instance, which combined peer pressure, enforcement and subtle propaganda, illustrates how so many people were moved to pour billions of dollars into the nation's coffers. Equally, the depiction of the way that the government utilized propaganda to give industrial workers a clear sense that they, as much as the soldiers on the front line, were part of the war effort works neatly in drawing parallels between the efforts of the state and the all-important morale of the workers churning out tanks, planes and ships in ever-increasing numbers.

Yet this process also had a flip side. For the corollary to this broad acceptance of the need for a stronger American state during a time of war was that Americans – and especially those groups that had typically been disenfranchised or sidelined from the mainstream – came to expect more from the federal government. Workers in factories, women, African Americans and soldiers serving overseas all saw this process as an opportunity to demand full citizenship. “Mass conscription and economic mobilization for total warfare,” Sparrow explains,

The process of empowering people to believe in the national war effort, and the upheaval that inevitably followed total mobilization, created a situation whereby citizens foresaw an opportunity for significant change. Some of the most captivating sections of this important book, therefore, are those where the author details the tensions within this new “warfare state.” Challenges to the accepted order – such as African Americans gaining employment in industries they would not previously have done, and which seemed to threaten the job security of white workers still scarred by the impact of the Great Depression – had the potential to provoke “hate strikes in war centers around the country” (184) as white workers feared their role in society becoming diminished. Similarly, black workers saw their increased importance to the national economy, and the promises made by the federal government, as an opportunity to improve their position in postwar America. The result of these two trends was an inevitable collision, but at the same time it was clear that, irrespective of deep-rooted racial tensions in the workplace, many of the strikes that took place were ostensibly for similar reasons. “Hate strikes and other racial conflicts occurred because both white and black expectations had been elevated by the war effort, and preexisting racial mores convinced most whites that economic opportunity was a zero-sum game in which whites could only lose if African Americans advanced” (186). The prospect of greater citizenship for previously disenfranchised groups, then, could still lead to civil disorder.

Hence this was not a stronger state blindly accepted by the American people. It was, rather, a complex mix of greater civil participation, rapidly evolving social trends, and a two-way relationship between state and citizen that served to transform America. In detailing this process as it unfolded, and in charting the impact that it had on the lives of ordinary Americans, Sparrow has provided a significant corrective to the accepted sweep of American history in the twentieth century. By doing so, finally, he helps to tackle one of the key questions set out by William Novak in his aforementioned article: to link the present-day American state, which appears formidably strong, to its historical predecessors that were supposedly weak. As this compelling and lively account clearly illustrates, the changes implemented during World War II – under the auspices of the warfare state – had a profound effect upon the United States. By 1945, in fact, “Americans had already learned to live with the leviathan and accept its demands as legitimate during the ‘good war,’ whose Manichean imagery and overtones of Armageddon lived on to define postwar political culture” (243).