The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Even farmers flourished in the boom, and for a significant reason. At first, wary of the surpluses which had been their undoing in the past, they had held back. By the fall of 1942 their leaders had convinced them that they must become the breadbasket of the world, and when they returned to their fields their crops were 25 percent more bountiful than ever before. Therein lies the significance: during the Depression inventors, chemists, engineers, and horticulturalists had developed new fertilizers, high-yielding seeds, insecticides, and new machinery. Technology had emerged to alter the face of the land. It was the same elsewhere. Forced by the war to work together, scientists, military officers, economists, corporate executives, and public officials were pooling their talents and finding immediate solutions not only to wartime problems but to the challenges of the postwar world. Inventions which had been gathering dust throughout the 1930s were helping win the war. Young men with a managerial bent, like Robert S. McNamara, assistant professor of business administration at Harvard, saw no reason why radar, prefabricated housing, frozen foods, diesel power, and catalytic cracking of crude oil should not contribute to an abundant life in years of peace. The war boom had created the nucleus of a mass market; it seemed clear that a greater mass market would lie beyond victory. “Certainly there took place during the war a cross-fertilization of thinking that was stimulating to all concerned,” Frederick Lewis Allen wrote. “All in all, during the war American technology underwent a hothouse growth.”

  Thirty years later, when the production miracle had long since been taken for granted, its long-range implications began to emerge. World War II gave tremendous impetus to egalitarianism. Traditional criteria vanished; wealth, social class, age, race, sex, and family identity no longer commanded instinctive deference. What James MacGregor Burns has called the war’s “equality of bodies” destroyed the tradition that men were entitled to respect because of “background.” Sing Sing would no longer treat men like Richard Whitney as honored guests. Even position based upon achievement would mean little. The scientists and engineers who had helped unlock America’s productive capacities, making the new world of technology possible, would soon be dismissed as “eggheads.”

  All this was not the work of World War II. The social revolution had been gathering momentum for more than a half-century. World War I, Prohibition, the Depression, and, later, the cold war and the impotence of all leaders in the shadow of nuclear warheads, helped discredit all symbols of authority, from the flag to the cross, from Presidents in the White House to each father in his home. Nevertheless, the years between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day were decisive, partly because national mobilization blurred the lines between the classes by putting everyone shoulder to shoulder. Even more important, the war led to the transfer of economic power to the disfranchised. Before the boom America had been a country in which people sought products. With the postwar arrival of the consumer society, products would seek people, and the origin of lower-class affluence would lie in the accumulated pay envelopes of the early 1940s. At the time, big spending was considered unpatriotic, and scarcities and anti-inflation controls discouraged buying sprees anyhow. Still, bankrolls were thickening, and economists worried. By the summer of 1943 the Treasury Department estimated that Americans on the home front had saved some seventy billion dollars in cash, checking accounts, and redeemable war bonds. Randolph Paul, the department’s general counsel, called it “liquid dynamite,” which, considering what it would eventually do to the character and quality of American life, hardly seems an overstatement.

  ***

  Until victory had been assured, such considerations yielded to expediency. It would have been presumptuous, and even dangerous, to brood over the challenges of peace until the Axis had been defeated. In 1942 the administration did propose a study of postwar issues by the National Resources Planning Board, but Congress killed that by abolishing the board. At times the President himself seemed to have difficulty focusing on domestic issues. To a correspondent who lingered after his December 28, 1943, press conference he confessed that he was weary of the phrase “New Deal.” Ten years earlier, he said, “Dr. New Deal,” an internist, had treated the country for an acute internal illness. After recovery, however, the patient had suffered “a very bad accident” on December 7, 1941. Dr. New Deal, knowing nothing about curing such afflictions, had referred his patient to “an orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Win-the-War.”

  Editorial writers rejoiced. Wrote Time: “DEATH REVEALED: The New Deal, 10, after long illness; of malnutrition and desuetude. Child of the 1932 election campaign, the New Deal had four healthy years, began to suffer from spots before the eyes in 1937, and never fully recovered from the shock of war. Last week its father, Franklin Roosevelt, pronounced it dead.” But had he? Reform by any other name was still appealing to FDR, and he was preparing two major pieces of legislation for the Hill: the GI Bill of Rights, providing educational and other rights for veterans of the war, and a proposal that men in uniform be permitted to vote.

  He had to move warily with Congress these days. The years when he was received there as a constitutional monarch were past. The conservative coalition had picked up strength in the new 78th Congress. Yet it is notable that isolationism had become a dead issue. Senator Arthur Vandenberg was in the middle of his long, historic swing toward advocacy of a world community. Only Hiram Johnson of California, dying with his cause, continued to argue that America should “go it alone.” In the autumn of 1943 Johnson delivered the last major isolationist speech. Then, on the question “Should the Senate resolve its willingness to join in establishing international authority to preserve peace?” the vote was 85 yes, 5 no, 6 absent. The House had already passed a similar resolution—introduced by young Representative J. William Fulbright of Arkansas—360 to 29. The way was then clear for the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in Washington, which drew up a preliminary draft for American participation in the U.N. The Senate ratified it, 89 to 2, and in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, diplomats hammered out agreements providing for an international bank and a world fund for stabilizing currencies and rebuilding war-torn countries. It seemed that Wendell Willkie had chosen precisely the right title for his 1943 book: One World.

  ***

  Meanwhile the great assembly lines were moving round the clock, preparing the armies of Russia, Britain, the Commonwealth, the Free French, and America’s own servicemen for the decisive assaults of 1944. Typewriter factories were making machine guns; auto plants, bombers. In Connecticut Igor Sikorsky had opened the world’s first helicopter assembly line. Another Connecticut plant, in Stratford, was making more than 6,000 Corsair fighter planes. Chrysler was turning 25,507 tanks over to the Army.

  Because of the complexity of sophisticated machines, there was no way to predict what next week’s civilian shortage might be. Only a professional hoarder, with a large staff and unlimited funds, could even have attempted to stay a jump ahead of the quirky market. Sugar, butter, alcohol, meat, cigarettes—scarcities of these made sense; they were needed for the troops or war industry. But why was it that in the very week that cigarettes came back, every store was out of book matches? How did it happen that tire-rationed motorists, deciding to ride bicycles, hurried downtown to find that bicycle rationing had begun only yesterday? And why on earth did the war effort absorb hair curlers, wigs, kitchen utensils, lawn mowers, paper, girdles, tea, diapers, bronze caskets, electric toasters, waffle irons, egg-beaters, tin soldiers, electric trains, asparagus tongs, beer mugs, spittoons, birdcages, cameras, cocktail shakers, corn poppers, exotic leather goods, and lobster forks? The invariable answer to every plaintive question was the snarl, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Well, yes, one knew, but still…

  It still didn’t make much sense, a fact well known to Jimmy Byrnes, who ran his Office of War Mobilization in the cramped East Wing of the White House, which was still being built. (Byrnes’s news ticker was in the men’s room.) In many cases the makers of the missing oddments were now producing cams and cogs for
the war machine, of course; like civilian pleasure boats, waffle irons and lobster forks weren’t going to be manufactured for the duration. But that was no excuse for not unloading backlogs of stock. The only real answer was that a nationwide mobilization of this size was bound to be marred by kinks and foibles. You couldn’t expect to issue sugar ration cards to an estimated 122,604,000 Americans—91 percent of the population—without something going awry. There were blunders, some of them incredible. The Philadelphia ration office had to close down temporarily because it had neglected to ration fuel for itself. Everyone plagued by the housing shortage had heard the story of the Los Angeles murder. A local reporter named Chick Felton arrived at the scene, verified that the corpse was dead, and headed for the victim’s address at a run. “Can I rent his apartment?” he panted. The landlady shook her head and said, “I already rented it to that police sergeant over there.”

  Apart from black marketeers, or strategically placed civilians—like the Detroiters who slipped across the Canadian border and stripped bare the shelves of prosperous Windsor—most home-front civilians had to resign themselves to involuntary asceticism, and did so cheerfully. It did, after all, take some gall to gripe while standing beneath a war bond poster showing a dying GI and the legend: “He gives his life—you only loan your money.” Naturally some wants were easier to bear than others. Except for the inhabitants of skid rows, few Americans felt frantic about the War Production Board’s whiskey drought, which lasted from the autumn of 1942 to the summer of 1944. (Incorrigible drinkers put up with unappealing substitutes like Olde Spud, bearing spirits distilled from waste potatoes and skins, just as incorrigible smokers puffed desperately away at such obscure cigarette brands as Fleetwoods.)

  Transportation was another matter. On February 1, 1942, when the last auto assembly line was converted to war production, Detroit had 500,000 precious new cars in stock. The OPA took title to all of them, stored them in government warehouses, and doled them out to applicants with airtight priorities, such as country physicians. By July 1944 only 30,000 autos were left—a three-day peacetime supply for the country’s car salesmen, even in the shabby 1930s—and the monthly OPA quota was arbitrarily cut by 22 percent.

  If you already had a car, you had to face the gasoline shortage. An ordinary citizen without a defense job received a black “A” stamp on his windshield entitling him to three gallons a week. This was death for racetracks and roadhouses; they had to fold. Trolley cars were popular in cities. When distances were short, walking seemed a sensible solution, but even this posed special problems; civilians were rationed two pairs of shoes a year, and J. Edgar Hoover reported that shoes were third on hijackers’ lists, behind liquor and rayon. In the last year of the war remarkable varieties of vehicles were to be seen in America: horses and buggies, resurrected bicycles built for two, elegant Baker Electrics, and puffing Stanley Steamers, the most recent of them made in 1925, when the Stanley company went out of business.

  People were fed up with red tape and bureaucratic arrogance; here young Richard Nixon had correctly diagnosed a national mood. Men didn’t mind wearing pants without cuffs or coats without lapels, women didn’t object to painting “bottled” stockings on their legs and drawing seams down them with mascara pencils, children became accustomed to little butter, less beef, and no bacon; but the tokens and ration stamps in those little OPA books remained a mystery to millions, including the grocers, who almost lost their minds when meats, fats, and cheeses were added to the point system. What made this particularly insufferable was that everyone had heard, from a friend of a friend, of how well captured Nazis were eating in their plush POW camps.

  Now and then the government felt it must resort to stern measures. Roosevelt seized the railroads and put their executives in colonels’ uniforms; it was the only way he could get the engineers back in their cabs. Sewell Avery, the board chairman of Montgomery Ward, was carried from his office by soldiers because he refused to obey a directive from the War Labor Board. (The boff that week was, “Know what’s going to be on the cover of Montgomery Ward’s new catalogue? ‘We take orders from everybody.’”) And War Manpower Commissioner Paul McNutt did “freeze” in their jobs 600,000 Detroit craftsmen, 110,000 merchant seamen, and 1,500,000 aircraft workers on the West Coast.

  In 1942, the war’s darkest year, the Axis destroyed 1,664 ships—over 7,790,000 tons. Admiral Dönitz had calculated—and he was dead right—that if his wolf packs could average 700,000 sunken tons a month, Britain would starve. Elated by his successes, he wanted to send every U-boat he had to the American seaboard. It would have changed the whole complexion of the war, with unfathomable (and chilling) consequences, but Hitler restrained his admiral. He had just had one of his attacks of intuition. Norway, he said emphatically, would be “the zone of destiny.” Norway? Dönitz was incredulous. He spread out a chart. Only a dozen German submarines were lying off the American shore, and in a few weeks they had sunk nearly a half-million tons of shipping, 57 percent of it in tankers. Hitler rolled his eyes toward Scandinavia. “Norway,” he repeated, and there the sub reserves went, right where the Allied admirals wanted them.

  The Allies were unaware of the maneuver then, of course. The Atlantic threat was far from over; the Germans were building new U-boats every week, and the figures for sunken tonnage continued to rise. The British were grim. The Americans told them to take heart. If there was no other way to win the Battle of the Atlantic, they would simply have to outbuild the U-boats. It was at this moment that Henry J. Kaiser, an aggressive, sixty-year-old industrialist, entered American history. Kaiser had played key roles in the building of Boulder Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, Bonneville Dam, Grand Shasta Dam, and the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge. In March 1942 he had just acquired shipyards in California and Oregon, and there he was introducing revolutionary techniques of prefabrication and assembly which would lead to the mass production of shipping without loss of quality.

  From the outset Kaiser’s industrial triumphs became legend. Beginning with an initial keel-to-delivery time of over two hundred days, he cut the average work time on a Liberty ship to forty days, and that September, in the tenth month of the war, he established a world record by launching the 10,000-ton Liberty ship John Fitch just twenty-four days after laying the keel. By then he had a hundred ships in the Atlantic. And that was only the beginning. In 1944 he was launching a new escort aircraft carrier every week—and he and his fellow shipbuilders were turning out entire cargo ships in seventeen days. During the first 212 days of 1945 they completed 247 of these, better than one a day, but long before then Kaiser had cast an eye elsewhere. If he could make Liberty ships, he argued in Washington, why couldn’t he build cargo planes, too? Immediately he was surrounded by government designers and engineers telling him his plans were impossible. But mastering the impossible had been the story of his life, and this time he acquired a partner, Howard Hughes, who had done almost everything Kaiser had done and established a few flying records besides. In late 1942 they struck a bargain: each would invest 50 percent of the capital and harvest 50 percent of the profits.

  Kaiser and Hughes were charismatic; they became celebrities. Yet they are best remembered as representatives of their time. The production miracle was accomplished by thousands of hard-driving executives and millions of workers, some skilled veterans and some young women fresh from the kitchen or the bargain counter. American resources and American freedom had united them in a joint effort that Nipponese emperor worship, Mussolini’s rhetoric, and Albert Speer’s productive genius could not match. To a generation which has grown up under the sound of supersonic booms, some miracles doubtless seem unimpressive. Aerospace designers of the 1970s, for example, are inclined to regard the B-17 Flying Fortress as merely quaint, like a World War I Spad or a De Havilland Tiger Moth. But in the early 1940s the B-17 was a technical triumph, just right for its time. If the passage of a quarter-century has rendered obsolete the weapons which came off World War II assembly lines, it cannot touch
the exploits of those who toiled there, competing with equally determined workers in Krupp, Fiat, and Mitsubishi factories and overwhelming them.

  To put U.S. military production in perspective, it may be useful to note that on May 10, 1940, when the Wehrmacht burst through the Lowlands and the Ardennes, its historic blitzkrieg was supported by 3,034 aircraft, 2,580 tanks, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 4,000 trucks. In the five years following the French collapse, America turned out:

  Warplanes 296,429

  Tanks (including self-propelled guns) 102,351

  Artillery pieces 372,431

  Trucks 2,455,964

  Warships 87,620

  Cargo ships 5,425

  Aircraft bombs (tons) 5,822,000

  Small arms 20,086,061

  Small arms ammunition (rounds) 44,000,000,000

  At Teheran, late in 1943, Marshal Stalin proposed a toast: “To American production, without which this war would have been lost.” Twelve years earlier, the U.S. government had doled out streetcar tokens to its commanding general’s chief (and sole) aide, Major Eisenhower. In 1938 General George C. Marshall had testified that American armed forces were too weak to repel an invasion of the country. In August 1941 Hitler told Mussolini that the United States was a soft country “whose conceptions of life are inspired by the most grasping commercialism.” He should have read the papers of his World War I predecessor. After the Armistice in 1918 Paul von Hindenburg had summed up American war production in one sentence: “They understood war.”