On a nationwide reporting tour, Dos Passos conducts a survey of the American home front during World War II. He finds an industrial colossus at work, from San Francisco to Houston to Detroit to Mobile and Jamestown, North Dakota. He finds a people prepared to volunteer many hours for the sake of victory.

“People will tell you,” Dos Passos writes in State of the Nation, “that individual liberty as our fathers and grandfathers knew it was only possible in a country of constantly expanding frontiers…It is just not true…The most casual trip through any six of the fortyeight states will show you that the country has been barely settled yet. Our people are still frontiersmen.”