Chapter 6 argues that World War I was the moment the Constitution was asked to operate as a framework for “total war” – not merely to authorize entry into conflict, but to mobilize an entire society to fight “over there.” The chapter shows how Congress’s Article I powers expanded in practice to meet industrial demands: raising a mass expeditionary army through selective service, reorganizing production, and delegating sweeping regulatory authority to executive administrators. Mobilization at home became a theater of war, and the Supreme Court largely accepted a sharp wartime recalibration of federal power and individual rights, from conscription to economic controls and wartime speech restrictions. The chapter then shifts from war-making to war termination. World War I exposed a constitutional problem that earlier wars had only hinted at: How wars end, who has authority to turn wartime powers off, and how long “necessity” can justify exceptional measures after the guns fall silent. With the Armistice and the failure to secure a Senate-approved peace treaty, disputes over termination migrated into fights over demobilization, lingering emergency regulation, and judicial deference to political judgments about when “wartime” truly lapses.

Chapter 7 traces how interwar fears of entanglement and executive adventurism reshaped constitutional war powers – and how World War II then blurred the line between neutrality and war. It begins with Congress’s effort to constitutionalize restraint: proposals like the Ludlow Amendment and, more durably, the Neutrality Acts, which used trade, finance, and foreign commerce powers to reduce the risk of sliding into conflict. The chapter then examines the era of “almost-war” from 1939 to 1941, when Roosevelt and Congress invoked emergency authorities and defense measures while the nation remained formally at peace. In this era, war-powers authority expanded gradually rather than at a single moment, leaving unclear when and how constitutional checks were meant to engage. Once war came, total mobilization deepened World War I precedents, but the constitutional “switch” from peace to war mattered less after the New Deal expanded baseline federal power. The chapter also confronts the civil-liberties costs of judicial deference, most starkly Japanese–American internment, before turning to the postwar constitutional challenge of reconciling the UN’s collective-security commitments with a war-powers system designed for autonomy and non-entanglement.

Sets French black-market experience in the context of recent research on black markets and economic controls in belligerent powers during the Second World War. It provides analysis of why the French case is so important and interesting, including conclusions on why black market was so extensive in France, how French policies and their enforcement alienated popular support for measures that claimed to ‘equalize sacrifice’ (and failed to do so), and the essential need for government regulation to protect property and market access to essential goods (Vichy controls failed on both counts).