US Events During WWII

During WWII, all men were needed to fight for the Allied cause, including Major League Baseball players. With the baseball risking survival in the US, women stepped in to save the sport while the men fought in the war. Philip K. Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs and a chewing gum factory worried greatly about what would happen to baseball when all the players would be needed to fight in the war. Inspired by the fact that women started taking men's places in the work force, Wrigley believed that the women of the country could play baseball as well. Wrigley, along with others invented a type of baseball-a mixture between hard ball and soft ball-for the women to play. The idea was a success. Women played exhibition games for soldiers at their training camps, visited hospitals, taught children how to play ball and sold war bonds. Not only that, but the women were paid well. To find players, Wrigley sent out recruiters to high schools in the US and Canada, churches, and industrial leagues. Baseball even became a huge war effort because it gave civilians something to enjoy, a means to escape worries. Although the women's leagues did not last after the war was over, they played an important role while it was waging.

Similar to back then, women's baseball leagues are popping up all over the country. One example is that of the Northern American Women's Baseball League. This league gives women the opportunity to play real baseball, a sport often reserved for males. There are many leagues across the nation and it is one of the NAWBL's goals to one day join all those leagues into one with teams throughout the country. It seems that the leagues during WWII were a mere spark that ignited the future of women's professional baseball.


A very horrible and significant event of US history during WWII, was the placing of Japanese Americans into internment camps. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, for national safety, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued what is called the Executive Order 9066. This order began the movement of 120,000 people of Japanese descents in America into camps. They were forced to leave their homes and jobs for these internment camps and were given only forty eight hours to pack and prepare themselves. But injustices did not end there. The camps themselves were horrible places to live and over half of the people forced into them were innocent children. Some Japanese Americans died because of emotional stress and not proper medical care. Some were even killed by guards, who reported that the citizens had not obeyed orders. Out of all the people imprisoned in these camps, not one of them committed any act of treason against the US. It has been stated that these camps "were motivated by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and a failure of political leadership"(www.pbs.org).

Today, physical internment camps do not exist in the US, but the terrorist attack on 9-11 has caused a similar spread of racism and prejudices that the attack on Pearl Harbor did years ago. Just like the Japanese Americans, many Muslim Americans are being persecuted. A lot are judged unfairly based on their appearances and religion. Thankfully Muslims in America have not been rounded up and put into camps, but the way they are often treated as enemies is very similar to the way Japanese Americans were treated during WWII. Muslims may not be physically separated from society, but too many times there is a barrier of racism and fear put between them and our communities. In this way, the events can be connected across time.