Chapter 18 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of totalitarian states on the left and the right and the march toward humanity’s most horrific acts of self-destruction and “urbicide” during World War II. The chapter begins with a section on the promising urban gender, sexual, and racial revolutions of the 1920s that opened up new urban spaces of pleasure and expression for many people who had lived far more circumscribed roles before. Nonetheless, totalitarians found ways to leverage many different urban spaces into power. They rebuilt cities to strengthen their grip, then to arm themselves for a war of annihilation. New facilities devoted to drilling for petroleum, transporting it, and refining it became central to the course of the war. Acts of mass imprisonment, torture, and racial extermination led to the construction of some of world history’s most horrific built spaces. Meanwhile, the aerial bombing of cities and civilian neighborhoods became routine, culminating in fire bombings and the nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Mr. Chief Justice STONE1 delivered the opinion of the Court.

The petitioner, Fred Korematsu, was born in Alameda County, California, and is of Japanese ancestry. He is an American citizen by birth. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1889). That his parents were born in Japan and, with the commencement of war, became formally classified as enemy aliens is of no moment in this case.2 No question has been raised as to petitioner’s loyalty to the United States.

Petitioner was convicted in a federal district court for remaining in San Leandro, California, a “military area,” contrary to Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the Commanding General of the Western Command, U.S. Army, which directed that after May 9, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry should be excluded from that area.

The conclusion brings together the arguments and themes explored in the book, suggesting that appreciating capitalism’s triumph in World War II and its subsequent postwar progress, owes much to overcoming the challenges of the 1930s, a decade in which J.P. Morgan & Co. was at the heart of how American financial capitalism changed. The Morgan bank survived by discarding its partnership model and incorporating – a step that was emblematic of the choices forced on banks and businesses in the crisis decade of the 1930s.

The great Migration started in World War I as the demand for war work rose. The United States broke the European stalemate and ended the war. The Treaty of Versailles created a lot of economic trouble that led to World War II. Unrest during the 1920s led to women’s suffrage and immigration restrictions. The Great Depression was partly the result of the Versailles Treaty. Roosevelt’s New Deal alleviated American worker’s problems, but Blacks were excluded from the New Deal programs. World War II enlisted Black soldiers who were victimized as they returned to Southern homes after the war.

In the early 1990s, my car gave me a black eye and introduced me to the world of human factors psychology. People often desire to blame themselves for such accidents rather than the design, but human-centered design has a long and fascinating history. The reader will meet Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, the first of many to scientifically study how humans interact with technology, along with the psychologists who prevented airplane crashes in World War II all the way up to the twenty-first century. These improvements depended on understanding the human mind: human perception, human cognition, biases, and physical limitations. This Introduction is an overview of the many topics important in human factors psychology and a hint at how each will be linked to real-world stories throughout the book.

Chapter 1, “Warsaw Besieged: September 1939,” describes the September 1939 siege of Warsaw during Case White (the September Campaign or Polish Defensive War) by the German Wehrmacht and Nazi SS personnel and the city’s eventual capitulation. The first of four chapters on how Nazi Germany dismantled the Polish state and nation for long-term occupation by targeting the Warsaw intelligentsia, the description of the siege frames the project. The military invasion revealed German brutality and weak Polish military performance, and provoked a Polish government evacuation crisis. The evacuation created chaos, ruptured Poles’ faith in their government, and triggered the creation of a Polish government-in-exile in western Europe far from occupied Warsaw. The people of Warsaw, led by Mayor Stefan Starzyński, coordinated military-civilian cooperative defense efforts, setting the tone for elite behavior during the coming occupation. This chapter argues that the siege-time cooperation was the foundational experience of the capital’s intelligentsia, and framed responses to the persecutions of the coming occupation.

Chapter 1 examines how Italians responded to the interracial encounters that took place during the war and in the immediate postwar years. In the midst of economic difficulties, fears of crime dominated public opinion, and foreigners were blamed (especially if they had a dark skin) along with the women who associated with them. The fraternization between Allied soldiers and civilians generated tensions that triggered frequent clashes between Italian men and the male occupiers, competing for the favors of Italian women. Interracial sex was often cast as a form of moral degradation, obscuring the genuine love relationships that also occurred between Italian women and non-white Allied soldiers.

This chapter revisits the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and some thinkers who addressed social rights in its time, arguing that it is best understood historically as a charter for social citizenship. There is little evidence that the UDHR was intended – let alone noticed – as a call for supranational protection or a lodestar for non-governmental pressure. Rather, the UDHR was a template for a new kind of state, thus both national and governmental in its implications. This unprecedented new kind of state, birthed by the Second World War and ultimately consecrated around the world, afforded social protections and perhaps even egalitarian distribution. The restoration of the UDHR to its time poses new questions about how it was that human rights could indeed become at a later date so strongly associated with the supranational and non-governmental even as any commitment to distributive equality evaporated. Put in terms of a formula, the UDHR is an artefact of a pre-neo-liberal age that found itself celebrated in a neo-liberal one – but only once it was reinvented first.

In the eyes of many US military commanders, the martial and the marital were, and ought to remain, worlds apart. Whether and whom enlisted men should marry preoccupied the armed forces in the twentieth century. This chapter explores the fitful progression of the services‘ marital policies and the various aspirations that underpinned them. These motives have included avoiding the cost of providing for dependents; preventing “gold-diggers” from entrapping servicemen; safeguarding operational efficiency by minimizing domestic distractions, and, conversely, boosting recruitment by incentivizing marriage and promoting “family-friendliness.” The armed forces have often presented their interventions as insulating naive young servicemen from bad marital choices. Whether servicewomen could marry, on the other hand, was (in commanders‘ eyes) less bound up with negative judgments about their partners‘ motives and emotional staying-power than with issues of procreation and maternity. In the twenty-first century, while the armed forces now accept more non-traditional partnerships and families, they continue to intervene in couples‘ lives through programs aimed at building spousal resilience.

Ellison spent more time in New York City than in any other place. The half-century Ellison lived in post-World War II New York coincided not only with the city’s ascendance to the global center of arts, letters, and finance, but also with the transformation of the U.S. into a global hegemon. By the 1970s Ellison had become an important figure in several of the city’s institutions. As one of the nation’s foremost writers, and a resident of Harlem, Ellison’s life in New York highlights the artistic center and the cultural margins of the city.

At the outbreak of War in 1939 the drug control system stood as a mixture of contradictions and uncertainty. On the one side were the strict control advocates, led by the United States. On the other side were producing states, agrarian countries whose economic, cultural and political systems were entwined with the very drugs the system sought to limit. In the middle were the old colonial powers, recognised the role opium played within many their colonies. The outbreak of war would fundamentally reshape international drug control. Moreover, it was driven by US-led bilateral efforts, utilising its wartime leverage, while other states were confined to rear-guard defensive actions. The reshaping of control during wartime was in many ways the result of aggressive wartime diplomatic manoeuvring by Harry Anslinger and key members of the Washington drug control lobby. The most radical wartime departure occurred in 1943 when Britain and Holland promised to adopt a policy of total prohibition of opium smoking and monopolies in many of their colonial territories. This shift, enabled Anslinger to bring new pressure to bear on the traditionally recalcitrant states such as Iran and Afghanistan to impose stricter controls and prohibitions.

In this chapter I focus on interspecies relationship in moments of open insurrection and disorder. It first applies an animal lens to the history of the Hsaya San rebellion which swept across the colony at the end of 1930 and took more than a year and in excess of 10,000 troops to suppress. It then explores the shifting material and symbolic place of animals in the colonial order as Rangoon fell to the Japanese in 1942, focussing particularly on the zoo.

This chapter argues that, while Shakespeare was deployed in World War II Britain for propaganda purposes, references to the playwright or his works also exposed rifts or contradictions within the national culture he was called upon to embody. It focuses on three major media in which Shakespeare was performed, adapted, or appropriated: the theater, the radio, and the cinema. Whereas state intervention fostered the performance of Shakespearean drama throughout the nation, the BBC underwent dramatic changes that meant that, while Britain’s national poet remained central to its mission, he was also associated with an elitist model of broadcasting whose hegemony was overturned during the war years. As for film, wartime Shakespearean appropriations show that the playwright could trouble propaganda imperatives as well as support them. In sum, while Shakespeare was a cornerstone of British wartime nationalism, he additionally served as a register of cultural, regional, and social difference.

This chapter addresses one of Mailer’s most notable literary influences, Ernest Hemingway. Mailer wrestled with the looming influence of Hemingway to such an extent that the relationship merits its own focused study. When it was first published, The Naked and the Dead invited immediate comparisons to Hemingway, which had much to do with the two authors similar thematic concerns. For years, Mailer alternately fought against and embraced these comparisons, wrestling with Hemingway’s influence, writing about him on more than one occasion (in pieces such as 1956’s “Nomination of Ernest Hemingway for President” and 1963’s “Punching Papa” among others), and writing an unanswered letter to him as well.

Chapter 9 details Tinbergen’s activities during World War II when he was working at the Central Bureau of Statistics. It uncovers crucial details about his relationship to the German occupiers and the peculiar deal he struck with them, in particular, Ernst Wagemann, to maintain some degree of independence for the institute. It also seeks to understand his attitude toward fascism, which he strongly condemned at a personal level, but whose economic policies he repeatedly praised in his writings, both before and during the war. The restrictions imposed on research at the CBS during the war meant that Tinbergen could not continue his studies into the business cycle, which had been declared a relic of the past by the Germans. In response to these restrictions Tinbergen wrote some of his more systematic work in economic theory and economic growth, further removed from policy. What is most striking is that precisely during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s a notion of an autonomous economic system emerged in his work. This detachment from politics and society is analyzed in detail. The chapter closes with a discussion of his efforts during the early Reconstruction years as director of the newly founded Central Planning Bureau.

Chapter 6 examines the creation of the positive laws of war in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing specifically on the diplomatic negotiations that led to the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions and the 1923 Hague Draft Rules on Air Warfare. It shows how emotional framing shaped the creation of the idea of lawful military targets in international law. Further, it examines the permissive effects of the laws of war by examining how norms regarding lawful military targets shaped Allied bombing policies in the European theatre of World War II. Although anti-civilian targeting norms were certainly violated many times during World War II strategic bombing, this chapter shows that these norms did have an effect in some situations. Further, they shaped how the Allies justified their policies to the public.