The 1940s begin with the world at war after Hitler’s September 1939 invasion of Poland. America does not enter the war immediately. A desire for isolationism left over from World War I lingers, though it is waning fast, and Naziism still has admirers in the United States. Even though the economy has improved under the New Deal, the Great Depression is not yet over.
At the decade’s dawning, a Michigan State Bar Journal subscription is $3.50 a year ($4 for foreign subscribers) for nine issues. Sporting the table of contents on the cover, most issues include local and state bar news, case notes, committee reports, one or two articles, and similar features of general interest to lawyers as well as the occasional joke and poem. On the agenda for the 1940 State Bar meeting in Lansing — tucked in among a few educational programs — are a “Speechless Dinner Dance and Floor Show,” a meeting for lawyers under 36 “in terested in forming a Junior Bar Section,” a women’s program with “a Recital and Tea” arranged by the “Wives of Members” for “Ladies attending the Convention,” and an ox roast. Presaging the plain English column that will debut later in the century, an article titled “Better Opinions — How?” discusses a recent ABA survey showing that “a great majority of lawyers prefer” short opinions and the “omission of pure dicta.” Long opinions “are lacking in clarity and concise ness,” “result in an overburden of and confused statements of the law and in excessive burdens upon the work of the research law yer,” and “cause difficult, if not unbearable, expense to the lawyer who makes an effort to buy the published decisions of the courts of the country.”
The Dec. 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor plunges the nation fully into World War II. Meat, sugar, milk, and other food staples; tires and other rubber products; and cars are rationed. Having produced war materials for our allies since December 1940 as part of FDR’s Arsenal of Democracy, Detroit manufacturing plants begin full-bore production of tanks, planes, and armaments for Uncle Sam. With men enlisting or being drafted, women take jobs in those factories and elsewhere. Blackouts and dim-outs are ordered on the East and West coasts and in Detroit and other industrial areas. Nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans are interned in camps in the United States in the name of national security. Countless land, sea, and air battles are fought in the Pacific, Europe, and north Africa with staggering casualties. Almost nothing stays normal or routine.
The Bar Journal reflects what is happening in the country. In 1942, it publishes appeals for lawyers to mobilize in all manner of capacities — enlistment, civil defense, assisting local draft boards, legal help for service members and veterans — and includes a form that lawyers can return to the State Bar expressing their willingness to enlist or assist “in some form of civilian defense work.” There are rosters of lawyers in the military and exhortations to buy war bonds. Lawyers are asked if they are “performing services essential” to the country or the war effort, discouraged “from seeking soft spots for pleasant work,” and encouraged to “enter the combat troops” to demonstrate leadership and “develop themselves individually for their own betterment following the war.” We are told that the Navy can use lawyers. The Bar Journal publishes the obituary of Joseph Leo McInerny, who died on Aug. 9, 1942, the first SBM member “to make the supreme sacrifice in this war.” Articles with titles like “Termination and Settlement of Ordnance Contracts” appear. Guidance is given for lawyers to “assume an especial responsibility in relation to our alien population.” Concerns are raised about “War Time Social Protection,” prompted by the significant number of men rejected for military service because of syphilis or gonorrhea infections and the reported increase of prostitution in Michigan, especially among adolescent girls.
Not all Bar Journal pages are devoted to the war, however. The article “Portrayals of Lawyers, Judges and Court Scenes in Motion Pictures During the Year 1943” analyzes whether they are “sympathetic,” “unsympathetic,” or “touched upon so slightly as to be called ‘indifferent’” or played as “straight” or for “comedy.”
When World War II finally ends in September 1945, more than 16 million Americans have served in the armed forces, almost 675,000 of them from Michigan; 130,000 Americans were prisoners of war. An estimated 70 to 85 million people have died, almost 420,000 of them Americans. The war’s aftermath includes trials of war criminals. In Europe, from November 1945 to October 1946, the International Military Tribunal conducts the Nuremberg trials, prosecuting notorious, high-level Nazi war criminals such as Martin Bormann, Albert Speer, and Hermann Göring. A series of subsequent trials from December 1946 to April 1949 involve Nazi defendants who worked in or ran concentration and death camps. In Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East holds similar trials for Japanese war criminals from April 1946 to November 1948.
The Bar Journal published an article by Walter I. McKenzie, a Detroit bankruptcy referee serving as an assistant counsel in the Tokyo trials. In a letter to the editor captioned “Judge Swearingen Writes from Nurnburg,” alternate tribunal member Victor C. Swearingen recounts some of his experiences and those of three other Michigan lawyers — Robert M. Toms, Don C. Noggle, and DeHull N. Travis — at the subsequent Nuremberg trials.
As troops return to the United States, the country does its best to rebound. Many military personnel return to work, usually displacing both the women who took on the jobs of the fighting men and the Rosie the Riveters who produced the war materials they needed. Others don’t have jobs to go back to. Many use financial benefits offered by the GI Bill: low-cost loans and mortgages and money for education. Others cannot, or cannot benefit as fully, because of the GI Bill’s discriminatory aspects. Women are generally encouraged to return to the home. Americans, deprived of many goods by wartime rationing, eagerly buy cars and appliances made in factories that no longer produce the tools of war.
The August 1945 Bar Journal reports that 657 members are returning from the service. In 1946, it publishes an article titled “The Veterans Return to the Law.” Another feature addresses lawyers whose business cards announce their return to practice, criticizing the cards’ additional mention of war-related public service as serving no purpose other than improperly suggesting “unusual qualifications.” The Bar Journal experiments with proto-theme issues, like one collecting articles on “aeronautical law.”
The format changes in 1947, adding slicker pages, black-and-white photographs, and covers graced by Michigan luminaries. The war has mostly receded from the Bar Journal’s pages, though it publishes a commissioned article called “How Law Is Being Restored in Germany.” A new column called “Irrelevant and Immaterial” features humorous anecdotes from members, “preferably about lawyers and courts and clients.” They range from “true incidents” to “real hoary old chestnut favorites long stored in memory” with “nothing barred except what the Hays Office or the Postmaster General might censor.” The first anecdote comes from Marquette County Prosecutor John D. Voelker, who will later became a Michigan Supreme Court justice and bestselling author. Articles about members’ hobbies appear — fly fishing, archery, curling. Both features disappear at year’s end. Women lawyers are still guests at teas.
The Bar Journal becomes monthly in 1948 and subscriptions jump to $5 a year ($6 foreign). It experiments with point/counterpoint-style articles: a question followed by discussions labeled “Yes!” and “No!” The 1949 meeting of the Inter-American Bar Association is held in Detroit. The association, which includes almost all the countries in North and South America, first met in Havana in 1941 and subsequently met in Rio de Janeiro; Mexico City; Santiago, Chile; and Lima, Peru.
While the country’s economy and optimism expand postwar, new and potentially more deadly challenges emerge. Germany had worked intensively to develop an atomic bomb during the war. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed to the world that the United States had succeeded in doing so, and other countries race during the second half of the decade to produce their own atomic bombs, particularly our former ally, the Soviet Union. Under wartime Allied agreements, Europe is now divided by an Iron Curtain with the Soviets controlling the eastern and central countries as well as the newly formed East Germany and East Berlin. The Soviet Union blockaded access to West Berlin — wholly surrounded by East Germany — and the U.S. and Britain organize a massive airlift of food and critical supplies. The Cold War has started. And just as they began for the United States, the 1940s end with another war looming on the horizon, this time in Korea.