The United Automobile Workers (UAW) has begun to sell a new set of tee shirts and hoodies, easily purchased by heading to the union website. On the back of the T-shirt is the classic UAW wheel logo with the phrase “The Working Class is the Arsenal of Democracy” curving around top and bottom. On some shirts, on the front, there is also a small drawing of a B-24 bomber a few inches below the right shoulder. The word “Liberator” is just below the plane.

A lot of politics and history is embodied in these shirts — much of it radically progressive, but some quite ambiguous.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) made the phrase “arsenal of democracy” world-famous in a speech delivered on December 29, 1940, nearly a year before the United States formally declared war on Germany and Japan. FDR had already called for ramping up military output, including the production of an astounding fifty thousand airplanes a year. Now, he put the United States squarely behind the United Kingdom and other nations — soon including the Soviet Union — fighting the Nazis and Imperial Japan. Once Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act late in the winter of 1941, a huge flow of military weapons and other supplies helped sustain both the UK and the USSR on the battlefront.