Yes, Virginia, there were polls back then

Josh Marshall reminds us there there were public opinion Polls in the United States during the Second World War (Talking Points Memo 07/16/07. He links to a full-size Graph Showing Public Opinion During World War II 06-21-2006 in his site's document collection.

Unlike the argument by John Mueller based on the Korean and Vietnam Wars that American public opinion about a war is driven by American casualties and essentially that alone, the data from the Second World War do not show such a trend.

The percentage of Americans between Pearl Harbor and V-E Day (a shorter amount of time than the Iraq War and Afghanistan War have been going on) who were "willing to make peace with Hitler" rose above 20% only once, and then only briefly. The percentage "saying they have [a] clear idea of what [the] war is about" rose sharply in the early months of the war and then stayed between 60-70% the entire time (with one very brief exception). Franklin Roosevelt's approval ratings generally tracked the percentage saying they had a clear idea of what the war was about.

As Marshall summarizes:

The key point is that many polls were taken during the war. And approval of the president's conduct of the war, understanding and belief in the goals of the war and other similar measurements all remained constant at very high levels or in some cases actually went up. One key data point you can see on the chart is the number of Americans will to make peace with Hitler - that is, an negotiated end to the war rather than the unconditional surrender which was a key allied war demand. The number was under 10% for most of 1942 and 1943. Then it briefly surged up to just over 20% in early 1944 (roughly the time of the invasion of Italy) before falling back down to about 15% for duration of the war in Europe.

Given the flimsiness of the rationale and the incompetence of the execution of the war in Iraq, a more perplexing question is why support for the war held on as long as it did. But the reason for the drop is not the time the war has dragged on - though it's now as long or longer than almost any other war in US history - or how many have been killed. The death toll in the Second World War dwarfs the numbers of those killed in Iraq.

Marshall is addressing in particular the argument made by Iraq War supporters that the US could never have held out in the Second World War with the attitudes of today's war critics.

I find the figures more interesting in light of Mueller's arguments based on his book War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (1973). His arguments create a misleading view of what drives American public opinion on wars.

And his argument that opposition to a war is essentially directly related to the increase in American military casualties is used by air power advocates in particular, but by the military more generally, to justify the use of air power and heavy artillery in situations like the Iraq War where they may create large numbers of civilian casualties and make achievement of the political goals of the war far more difficult if not impossible.

The polling figures from the Second World War do not support his interpretation.

Tags: john mueller, second world war