Jack of Harts

World War II fundamentally changed Texas both in her economic and her cultural sectors. The federal government needed factories, hospitals, schools, and military bases, and Texas had plenty of young men looking for better opportunities. Nearly a million of them volunteered to go fight, and hundreds of thousands of farmers found much better jobs in the vacated industries. Women, Mexicans, and Negroes went to work in important positions in unprecedented numbers to fuel the sudden requirement of maximum production of all war supplies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans came to Texas for military training, and nearly a hundred thousand German prisoners were sent to Texas to work the fields for years. Texas saw people and ideas from all over the world, and that shattered the political and cultural dominance the Democrats had crafted in the last century.