Gotham at War: A History of New York City from 1933 to 1945

Gotham #3

by Mike Wallace

The culminating volume in the acclaimed Gotham series, Gotham at War delivers an unforgettable portrait of America's greatest city during history's most catastrophic conflict.

Gotham at War unveils the history of New York and the Second World War, from isolationism and factionalism to crucible of the American effort and the Allied Cause in a total and global war.

Kaleidoscopic and immersive, Gotham at War captures the full spectrum of New York and the war from every possible aspect-social, political, economic, and military. Even before the war had started street battles between New York's homegrown fascists and the workers' movement-allied with immigrants from all over the world and their children in the barrios of Gotham-played prelude. Set in the generation after race "scientists" based in the elite warrens of the Upper East Side championed and then imposed national immigration restriction, Gotham at War sees New Yorkers struggle to shake off the city's eugenic past.

Between 1933 and 1945, the city wrestled with itself, starting from the rise of Hitler through isolationism and growing interventionism; through Pearl Harbor and a full-throated war effort, when millions of American soldiers and sailors and billions of tons of materiel passed through New York's waterfronts to the warfronts. Along the way Mike Wallace's saga traces the transformation of New York, embracing garment workers and skyscrapers; the subway and Wall Street; gangsters and idealists; pols and reformers; nightclubs and boardrooms; Nazi infiltrators and FBI gumshoes; magazines and movies; shuls and cathedrals; every neighborhood, every industry, and all the peoples of the city swept up in a world that had caught fire.

Here is a portrait of a city and a war like no other. Gotham at War traces the transformation of New York from Depression-wracked mother of exiles to a front in the Second World War, and ultimately to the seat of the United Nations and a very contested "capital of the world."

Genres: History, Nonfiction, New York, Politics, American History, Cities

976 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2025

About the author

A graduate of Columbia University, Mike Wallace was Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1971, and director of the Gotham Center for New York City History. He won the Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 and was the founder, co-publisher and editor of the Radical History Review.

Reviews

[alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow, pat on the back to me for such a sense of accomplishment after finishing this trilogy. This one was mainly about the leadup to war and the war effort, which was interesting but after the last one, I was really here for all the social history. There wasn't as much in this one and what I really liked in the last two were the updates it gave on various groups in the city (racial, social etc) and what was going on for them in the specific time period. I think this one missed out on that a bit. Nevertheless, it's still one of the easiest and digestible history tomes I've ever read. Overall, a great conclusion to an epic trilogy about New York and I learned a lot.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

For starters, this book is a TOME. I have a severe dislike of eBooks, but if you are at all inclined in that direction, this is one to get in eBook form.

Before I get into this, because I realize that I mostly recorded my gripes as I went along, I will say that this book is great at what it does, which is to touch on a bit of everything, give an overview of NYC during WW2, and provide names and organizations that interested people can dig into further.

This book is very comprehensive, in that it covers pretty much all aspects of life in NYC during WW2 and the years leading up to it as well as the contributions of prominent New Yorkers to the wider effort on the homefront, with a strong focus on policy/planning/organizations/politics and movements. Despite the size of the book, most things are covered only to a very shallow depth, so while it is comprehensive in some ways, in others it is simply a launching point for a deeper dive into subjects of interest. There are also allusions to things that are not explained at all. However, Wallace has an EXTENSIVE bibliography that interested people can dig into (or just start looking up names like I did). Wallace does clearly lay out his narrative, but it is stated according to his interpretation with little to no consideration of other possibilities or points of view.

The book is organized by subjects, so it does jump around in time. Usually, this is ok however there were a few chapters where it jumped around in time within the chapter, and this got very confusing.

My first gripe with this book is that it BADLY needs a list of acronyms. There are so many different organizations with 3 and 4 letter abbreviations, and it is impossible to keep them straight. Along with the long lists of names, there is no way I can remember what an acronym from 3 chapters ago stood for! There were even a few where I could not for the life of me figure out where they were introduced the first time.

One nice thing about this book is that there are photographs sprinkled throughout. Some of these didn't feel totally relevant and/or their relevance was never explained, such as a scene from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a photo of Marines practicing to abandon ship in a chapter about the Communist schism, and The Bid Duck in Flanders, Long Island. I'm wondering if Wallace picked more obscure pictures because he assumed his readers would already have seen the more famous ones, such as the Bund Rally in Madison Square Garden decorated with banners of George Washington, American Flags...and swastikas. I think some like that would have had a bigger impact on the audience, even if some of them have seen the photos before.

The book does give addresses for pretty much everything mentioned in the book. As a non-NYCer, this admittedly didn't mean a whole lot to me, but I imagine it would be interesting for locals.

The book does often bog down in lists of names and organizations and often felt like it was name dropping just for the heck of it. In some chapters, I felt like I was reading through the part of a corporation's "about us" website that gives the bios of their board of directors.

Wallace does make an attempt at turning this into a multicultural history, and succeeds where Black and Jewish people are concerned, but that's really it. Asians barely get a mention, and Latinos aren't mentioned until talking about the music scene and the Latin influence on it. Then they are forgotten again until a chapter on Puerto Rico and colonialism. Also, how is Adam Clayton Powell Jr "almost blond"?

Overall, while I have picked many nits here, this is a very good book, especially for anyone from NYC with an interest in local history. I picked up many interesting tidbits and came away with a better appreciation of the homefront in WW2.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent journey through NYC before and during the war. It is encyclopedic but so well written that the stories are easy to retain.

[Alexis · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with the first two volumes, this is a masterful and wide-ranging history of New York City, this time covering the war era of 1933-1945.

While Wallace's skills as a historian and a writer are still in evidence, I did find this volume slightly weaker than its predecessors. There are two flaws. First, rather than a general survey of the period, Wallace has chosen to focus more narrowly on the war and its buildup. I'm not blaming Wallace for choosing where to direct his energies, but given the previous volumes, a reader might expect a broader perspective. The title is literal in this case, not merely a symbol for the period. As interesting as it is, I couldn't help but miss the broader picture. In addition, Wallace could have benefited from more active editing. The book is comprised of many short chapters (unlike the previous two, which used longer chapters with subheadings), breaking up the flow. There's also enough small errors to make me question whether OUP bothers with copy-editing any more.

[Ted Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow, is this book a heavy lift (literally- its 862 pages of dense, small font text, and an extra hundred pages of index and sources gives it a weight of five pounds). The book is the third, and final, volume of the author's history of New York City. The first volume was over 1200 pages long, but it covered everything from the island's prehistory to its consolidation with Brooklyn in 1898. The second volume covered the first two decades of the 20th century in about 1000 pages. And while the books got shorter, so did the time period covered, so they read more and more like encyclopedias. I was surprised that the author did not produce a study of New York in the 1920's and the Great Depression, but can obviously write about whatever he wants. And I suppose I understand why he is ending his study in 1945. These books must have taken a tremendous amount of research and energy to produce. But I ended this book somewhat disappointed. I gather that his thesis is that New York City was the essential city during World War II, which is hard to argue against, but I'm not sure why he went into so much detail about so many obscure topics and issues. The chapters that addressed the political divisions concerning the nation's foreign policy both before and after the war were at times mind-numbingly tedious. So many organizations, so many names. There were a number of sections of the book that I did enjoy- the stories of LaGuardia, the chapters about the city's culture, to name a couple. But I was disappointed that the book did not focus more on the achievements of the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes. One could argue that this art movement was very peripheral to the war, but why was a Wyoming native whose art had nothing to do with the war (Jackson Pollock) given so much attention? But my biggest disappointment was in the section of the book that presented the story of the Jewish organizations in the City that were pushing for some type of rescue mission into Europe to save Jews. The book leaves the reader with the impression that nothing came from these efforts. I cannot believe that the author did not include the story of New York City native Ruth Gruber, who went on a one-woman crusade to pressure FDR to allow her to embark on a rescue mission. In the end, FDR made Gruber a military officer and assigned an old transport vessel to journey to Naples, Italy, to bring about 1000 Jewish refugees back to the United States. Given the details that the book presents about incredibly esoteric topics, I cannot believe that the story of this heroic woman was not even mentioned. (Read Gruber's book about the mission: "Haven".) In short, while this book has some very valuable sections, I cannot say that the weeks that it took me to read it was time well spent.

[DW Rowlands · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919, this is an enormous book, making it hard to summarize it or even really characterize it. I did feel, however, that it was less limited to and focused on New York than the former book: on some level, it seemed like Mike Wallace was writing a history of American society during the years in question and simply using New York as a connecting thread. That said, I definitely learned a lot, and now sort of feel like I need to read a biography of Fiorello La Guardia.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Literally everything you could want to know about New York City leading up to and through WWII. The author's research could not be more extensive. The narrative at times could do more to tell a story or draw implications beyond the long lists of groups or people involved in this or that aspect of the times. But it is satisfying for New Yorkers in particular to learn such detail about the city and everyone will find things that happened in their neighborhoods or circles that you did not know. While the general tone is that NY and its denizens were at the center of everything, the book brings out the ugly side of race relations and politics as well as the heroics of war-time common purpose.

[Carl Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading…

My parents entered adulthood in New York in this period and lived here during the War, both working as civilian employees of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Indeed, that’s how they met—on a telephone call in late 1943. They raised me (born 1951) to be part of their generation.

The events and participants portrayed in this hugely readable history cast their shadows to the present day. Indeed, the tendrils of the seeds that period planted in the region, nation, and world have grown into the good things and evils of today.

Learn history and apply its lessons, or bad history repeats itself.

[Bill Lucey · Rating 5 out of 5]

An exhaustive, but lucidly written history of New York City during WWII, with a strong emphasis on the cultural and ethnic diversification of the city, which exploded to great heights during this time.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much detail----read about 00 ps