1942

The U. S. Congress gives the Office of Price Administration (OPA) authority to set maximum prices on nonfarm goods and rents with the Emergency Price Control Act. The OPA freezes prices at March 1942 levels and implements rationing programs for the duration of the war.

President Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066, which enables the relocation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast to military-supervised camps. More than 110,000 Japanese Americans are incarcerated under the order.

Admiral Chester Nimitz is named commander of the U. S. Pacific Fleet; General Douglas MacArthur is named supreme commander of the armed forces in the southwest Pacific.

William Donovan becomes director of the Office of Strategic Services, which coordinates military intelligence in World War II and is a forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Despite resistance by Filipino and American forces, the Philippines falls to Japan. Japanese forces drive 60,000 Filipinos and 10,000 Americans to prison camps in the Bataan Death March.

The Office of War Information is established to manage dissemination of government information at home and abroad during World War II.

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer leads research on atomic weapons at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

U. S. naval forces halt the Japanese in the Battle of Midway, and U. S. troops land on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a civil rights organization committed to the nonviolent confrontation of racism and segregation, is established.

The United States and Mexico establish the bracero program to import Mexican seasonal farmworkers to alleviate U. S. agricultural labor shortages.

Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman star in the movie Casablanca.

U. S. troops invade North Africa; they are led by General Dwight D. Eisenhower and General George S. Patton.

In one of his fireside chats, President Roosevelt urges U. S. citizens to help participate in a scrap-rubber drive to help locate rubber that can be used in the war effort.

The Revenue Act of 1942 greatly expands the number of people who pay taxes and leads to the system of withholding. Within two years, individual income tax revenues exceed corporate tax revenues for the first time.