We're Still Believing It

Much of what Americans "know" about WWII was shaped by wartime propaganda. The idea that the war was a clean fight between good and evil? Propaganda. The image of total American unity on the home front? Propaganda — it erases Japanese internment camps and widespread racial segregation.

Even the phrase "Greatest Generation" is retrospective myth-making, coined decades later in 1998. The propaganda didn't stop when the war did. It hardened into history, textbooks, and national identity — and the most effective of it worked by exploiting prejudices people already held.