Over Seabreezes or Martinis at the typical Manhattan dinner party the general discussion of the gathering guests might touch upon Larry MacPhail’s coup in picking up the Yankees for three million dollars; Nicholas Murray Butler’s retirement from Columbia University; the Pope’s creation of four new American cardinals; and, on a gloomier note, a report from the University of Denver’s National Opinion Research Center: 36 percent of Americans expected the country to be at war again within twenty-five years and another 23 percent within fifty years. Only 20 percent thought World War II was the last global struggle. And the poll had been conducted late in 1945, before the public knew how shaky relations with Stalin had become.
Buffet dinners were not acceptable in the lower East Seventies during these years, nor was dress optional. Wearing black tie and evening gowns, the guests found their places at a linened table, the guest of honor at the host’s right, and all flanked by members of the opposite sex to whom they were not married. You were expected to divide your conversational time between them until, with the last wineglass empty and the candles burning low, the sexes took leave of one another. The men gathered around their host for brandy and Havana cigars, while the women went upstairs to do whatever women did on such occasions. It seems likely that at least part of the time they discussed prevalent topics of special interest. Yale pediatrician Arnold Gesell’s The First Five Years of Life was still selling briskly and usually sparked interest in powder rooms. (The Robe and Peace of Mind were better sellers, but to mention them in this company would have been social suicide.) There was a current rage for matched purses and hats, adhesive black silk “beauty patches” for the face, and new dress fabrics featuring huge portraits of the wearer. Women were very much aware of the technological revolution, and like their sisters out on the farm they were grateful for it. Synthetic fabrics were changing their lives in Manhattan as well as in Iowa. Servants had almost vanished, but so had many of the reasons for hiring them. Electric clothes dryers had appeared in appliance stores less than a year after V-J Day, and during each year in the late 1940s women were buying 225,000 automatic dishwashers and 750,000 garbage disposal units. Frozen orange juice had come in 1947. Of course, some of the new devices were absurd. A young Chicago industrial designer named Jean Otis Reinecke was taking out a patent on an electric guitar which could be tuned up to such a pitch that it challenged the endurance of the human eardrum. Well, people said, it was a free country, and everybody knew it took all kinds, but some people were the absolute limit.
Advertising was about to enter a kind of Golden Age. A Navy veteran’s best-selling roman à clef (Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters, 1946) was making Madison Avenue a household word. Yet the very heralds of advertising’s prosperity—the mass circulation magazines—would later become the communications industry’s most prodigious failures. During the war periodical publishers had been as busy as foremen at Willow Run. Between Pearl Harbor and V-J Day each of them had gained, on the average, a quarter-million subscribers. Before the war they had sold at most a few thousand copies abroad; now that America was the acknowledged leader of the West, their readers included hundreds of thousands of Europeans. In one two-year period alone they increased their advertising income by a hundred million dollars. Even in the full flush of this prosperity, however, there were warnings of trouble ahead. Surveys by advertisers, John Fischer reported in Harper’s, had disclosed that literate Americans were turning more and more to periodicals aiming at specific clienteles—Yachting, Holiday, The New Yorker. As for the mass audience, it was restless. Diverting it was no longer enough; it wanted to be captivated, enthralled, carried away. The days of the newsstand giants would be numbered, once the public discovered TV.
Television made stimulating conversation in the early Truman years, but it didn’t make much else, certainly not money. The early DuMont sets were tiny, expensive, and limited in number, and there usually wasn’t much to see. Two sports telecasts hinted at its great potential: TV’s coverage of the Louis-Conn fight on June 19, 1946, and of the 1947 World Series. In each case the spectator who stayed home by his set saw more than men who had paid fifty dollars for a ringside or Yankee Stadium seat. But advertising sponsors were waiting before committing themselves. There were still far too few sets in living rooms to justify big budgets for the tube—only 172,000 of them as late as January 1, 1948, with fewer than twenty television stations. So radio remained smug. Hollywood didn’t. The movie moguls came hat in hand to the great Madison Avenue advertising agencies, where brisk account executives mounted a nationwide offensive, suggesting to readers of hoardings and subway and trolley ads, “Why Not Go to a Movie Tonight?” and reassuring them that “Movies Are Better Than Ever.” It wasn’t true, and it didn’t work; as word spread that nearly a quarter-million television sets a month were going into American homes, it couldn’t. But that didn’t seem to matter. The admen and their half-brothers the P.R. men were the alchemists and sorcerers of postwar society, the wizards whose florid wartime institutional advertising had softened up the market for the new fabrics and appliances, the new canned beer, and cigarettes double-wrapped in cellophane. When they cleared their throats at a Manhattan party, in Detroit’s auto styling suites, or among oilmen and lobbyists, others fell silent. The image makers were known to have special insight. Attention must be paid. Everyone understood that polling skills and manipulative techniques were the experimental stage, like Newton watching the apple fall or Fleming finding the penicillin mold in his laboratory, but give it time, give it time; its possibilities knew no horizon, and some visionaries, remembering the rout of Upton Sinclair’s EPIC in 1934, thought that one day its refined techniques might even be used in a presidential campaign.
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Determining the communications industry’s precise role in the boom was impossible, but media influence had clearly grown during the war, and it wasn’t confined to the marketplace. Already ads and magazine articles were trying to form internalized profiles of what an individual was, or ought to be. Thus GIs had been bombarded with the puerile assurances that they were fighting for blueberry pie, while the girl next door—or the young bride left in the trailer camp at the point of embarkation—was wondering how much Joe had changed and what he was like now. She had his letters, of course, but censorship was crude and most soldiers were inarticulate about the things that really mattered. So she stopped at the newsstand or corner drugstore and turned to articles whose authors were only too eager to help her understand her faraway loved one, now about to return.
They told her that a “readjustment” problem lay ahead, and that she had better be ready to solve it. “Has Your Husband Come Home to the Right Woman?” the Ladies’ Home Journal asked. Psychiatrists, sociologists, and writers explained over and over that Joe couldn’t be the same. Good Housekeeping counseled patience: “After two or three weeks he should be finished with talking, with oppressive remembering. If he still goes over the same stories, reveals the same emotions, you had best consult a psychiatrist.” To House Beautiful the solution was obvious. “Home must be the greatest rehabilitation center of them all!” it trumpeted, displaying the living room decor for a shell-shocked general. There were even primers on taking the bends out of WACs and WAVEs. Surprise her, her parents were urged, by redecorating her bedroom: “GI Jane will retool with ruffles.” Irresponsible newspapers dwelt on the threat of deranged ex-servicemen at large. CRAZED VET RUNS AMOK, ran one headline.
Through Bill Mauldin and others, rumors of this sort of thing had reached the troops overseas. Anger flared when they heard embroidered versions of home front advice or outright lies; in 1944 the story made the rounds that Eleanor Roosevelt had recommended that combat divisions be quarantined in a Panama detention camp before their homecomings, to be taught how to behave among civilized people, and that even after discharge they should be required to wear conspicuous armbands warning decent girls that a potential rapist was in the vicinity. They weren’t that way at all, the guys on the line said i
ndignantly. It wasn’t true that they were preoccupied with sex.
But they were.
After the Battle of El Alamein a Reuters correspondent reportedly asked an Eighth Army Tommy, “What’s the first thing you’re going to do after the war?”
“Hump my wife,” was the soldier’s instant reply.
“And the second thing?”
“Take off these goddamned hobnail boots.”
It was much the same in all armies, and has been true of troops since the beginning of military history. Once the Betty Grable pinups came down and skirts were hoisted in bedrooms and parks, talk of readjustment disappeared; “the veteran question,” noted William L. O’Neill, “never materialized…. Of all the surprising developments in the postwar years, the easy accommodation of this mass of men was perhaps the most astonishing.”
In the 1940s, love American style was marked by three distinct features. The first was the speed with which wartime marriage contracts had been drawn, the second the frequency with which they were dissolved after the gunfire died down, and the third the swiftness with which nurseries became overpopulated. Before Hiroshima quick weddings were chic. The communications industry encouraged them; in a memorable film, The Clock, Robert Walker went to the altar with a girl exactly twenty-four hours after he had encountered her in Pennsylvania Station, despite the fact that they came from different backgrounds, didn’t know each other’s families, and had nothing in common except physical attraction. On some military bases near cities teeming with girls, nuptials were encouraged by the construction of special chapels. The press made much of celebrity weddings: Artie Shaw to Ava Gardner, Oona O’Neill to Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland (after divorcing David Rose) to Vincente Minnelli, Gloria Vanderbilt (twenty-one) to Leopold Antoni Stokowski (fifty-eight), and, after starring in twenty-four Westerns together without exchanging a kiss, Roy Rogers to Dale Evans. Then the boys came home, and romances began to disintegrate. One of the chief reasons was limned in The Best Years of Our Lives, a movie about middle-class homecomings. Dana Andrews played a young flier who had married on impulse just before sailing. During his absence his bride, a shallow blonde, dreamed of him as he had been then, silver wings, smashed-down pilot’s cap, and all. Mustered out, he couldn’t wait to get back in civvies, and when she took one look at him in them she was as good as on the train to Reno, which in 1946 granted eleven thousand divorces, still an all-time high.
In those years, these matters—among them the engaging case of Loveless v. Loveless—attracted the interest of the young veterans’ wives, who might have been found attending any one of several thousand kaffeeklatsches in, among other communities, Los Angeles. They were all a winning lot; unless they had suffered from prolonged malnutrition in the Depression, they showed no outward sign of those desperate years. (When they smiled the effect may have been different. Orthodontists and braces had been a luxury when they were young. Some would be wearing dentures before they were thirty.) According to a study of fifteen thousand girls completed in 1945 by New York’s American Museum of American History, the average young American woman that year had longer legs, fractionally heavier hips, and a slightly thicker waist than her grandmother in 1890, but was slimmer-hipped and less voluptuous than Aphrodite of Cyrene. On her wedding day she stood about 5 feet 3 1/2 inches (slightly taller if she had been born in California) and measured 33.9–26.4–37.4. By the time she had become eligible for L.A.’s morning kaffeeklatsches, motherhood had scored a few local gains in the battle of inches, but she continued to be trim, pert, and celebrated by European journalists of the time for her readiness to laugh at almost anything, including, self-deprecatingly, herself and her friends—“We’re such a bunch of cows here,” she would say, “just a yard of cackling hens.” Her hair was brown, her eyes blue, and “dear,” the most popular term of endearment in her parents’ generation, had been succeeded by “honey.” Unless she was a college graduate or a member of the League of Women Voters, her interest in public affairs was nil. She took pride in belonging to “the uncommitted generation.” She and her husband seldom scanned a newspaper. All she expected of him was that he hold a steady job, and as a child of the Depression himself, that was what he expected of himself. The name of the game was security.
Except for patios and their tiny subtropical gardens, these young women could have been found anywhere in the country. They were in California because it was growing faster than any other state, was especially attractive to veterans ready to settle down, and had become known as the birthplace of postwar America’s life-style. In these years the number of American supermarkets was tripling and would soon pass the twenty-thousand mark, but San Francisco’s Crystal Palace Market, their prototype, had opened in 1922. Before Pearl Harbor, California had pioneered in the development of drive-in theaters, restaurants, banks, churches, and machines which would wash and wax a car with the driver in it; after it they popularized backyard barbecue pits and kidney-shaped swimming pools. California engineers laid out the first eight-lane superhighways, designed the first cloverleaf interchanges, and developed the exact-change toll booth. The first guest to arrive at a dinner party in a sport shirt was a Californian; so was the first wearer of an electric blue tuxedo jacket. On their beaches California women pioneered bathing suit seminudity and then nudity, and elsewhere they introduced the nation to street slacks, illuminated shrubbery, split-level living, and the custom of women smoking in public. In a word, they were imaginative; in another, casual. The coffee, unsurprisingly, was instant.
Typically, kaffeeklatsch conversation was about their children. They had become the beaming creators of a population explosion which was wholly unexpected. The government had unwittingly encouraged mushrooming births. “Instead of dating many girls until college and profession were achieved,” Betty Friedan has noted, the veteran “could marry on the GI bill.” Demographers hadn’t expected the new couples to lie in bed and just neck, but they had thought they would exercise some restraint, like their older brothers and sisters in the 1930s. Parental moods had changed, however. “The veterans and their wives grabbed for the good things as if there were no tomorrow,” Caroline Bird wrote. “They wanted everything at once—house, car, washing machine, children…. They had babies without worrying about how much it would cost to straighten their teeth or send them to college.” It was easy to do, and lots of fun; if the figures Dr. Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University published in the third year after the war are set beside census data of the late 1940s, a few simple calculations reveal that America’s 55,311,617 married men were reaching 136,666,060 sexual climaxes a week, or one emission every .0048 seconds. During those years a wife was being impregnated once every seven seconds, and the U.S. Bureau of the Census was blushing.
For the bureau this was a debacle. Every pre-Pearl Harbor population estimate went out the window. The war years had not been barren. “Goodbye babies” were being born throughout it, with the annual birth rate just below three million. But in 1946, the year after the troop transports began unloading, a half-million more infants were born than the year before. And that wasn’t the end, or anything like it. The next year’s crop passed 1946’s record-breaker by over 400,000. By the mid-Sixties there would be between 20 and 30 million more Americans than long-range planners had counted on, with the greatest expansion in the teen-age population: the student generation which was destined to make so much news. Even in the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964, before the bulk of the war babies reached their majority, fewer than one voter in four had been a Depression adult. It was then, in Johnson’s second term, that certain generational differences began to emerge. Thus the conceptions of the Truman years would begin to exert a conspicuous influence upon society just as the parents were settling into middle age, and alter it in ways which would not always arouse their enthusiasm.
It was in these years that Dr. Spock’s manual of baby care became the greatest best seller since best seller lists began in 1895. Spock devoted a section to what he called “per
missiveness.” He wrote: “It’s basic human nature to tend to bring up your children about as you were brought up.” Nevertheless, they should bear in mind that “Doctors who used to conscientiously warn young parents against spoiling are now encouraging them to meet their baby’s needs, not only for food, but for comforting and loving.” The Age of Spock had begun.
At the outset it was in many ways a marvelous age. One of Bill Mauldin’s cartoons in Back Home, his sequel to Up Front, shows a father clutching groceries and wheeling a stroller while a uniformed sergeant heckles: “How’s it feel to be a free man, Willie?” Veterans without number thought it felt great. Women’s magazines began to note a phenomenon: the new fathers were volunteering to mix the baby’s formula, take the 2 A.M. feeding, and even cope with the diaper service. (Disposable diapers wouldn’t be available for another fifteen years.) As new gadgets and conveniences came on the market, parental chores became easier. (There were no electric knives, but electric knife sharpeners took the butchery out of carving; no central vacuuming systems, but vacuum cleaners became lighter and more efficient.) And if a couple wanted to dine out and take in a movie, older girls in the neighborhood were glad to sit for a price. (A quarter an hour was considered generous.) Emerging households, in fine, had been freed of their worst drudgery and most backbreaking tasks. The only difficulty was finding a home.
The postwar housing shortage was a direct consequence of the baby boom and the rapid Wanna-Go-Home demobilization. With the Army discharging nearly a million men a month by December 1945, and the Navy another quarter-million, there was almost no place to put them. America needed at least five million homes, and it needed them now. Clearly it wasn’t going to get them from the housing industry. Once wartime controls were removed, labor and materials went into industrial construction; between V-J Day and Christmas ground had been broken for only 37,000 houses. President Truman asked Congress for price ceilings on housing and authority to channel half the country’s building materials into low-cost ($10,000 or less) houses. The powerful housing lobby blocked him. The Senate did approve turning 75,000 temporary wartime buildings over to veterans and their families; government dormitories were remodeled for another 11,000 married GIs, and with winter blowing colder every day, 14,000 families were crowded into empty Army barracks. It was a dent, no more. Over a million families were doubling up. In arctic Minneapolis a husband, wife, and their little war baby spent seven nights in their car. In Atlanta two thousand people answered an ad for one apartment. Atlanta’s distressed city fathers bought a hundred trailers for veterans’ families. Trailer camps were springing up around every community of any size, especially those with campuses. The University of Missouri conducted a house-to-house canvass, reserving every foot of available space for children of Missouri parents, and then wrote out-of-state applicants that despite their qualifications, there was no room. North Dakota veterans converted grain bins into housing, and Benny Goodman and his band played for a Cleveland benefit at which citizens pledged rooms for rent. There wasn’t anywhere near enough of this, though. Landlords were famous for their cold shoulders. Mauldin was bitter—his wrath continued to be a guide to the temper of his generation—and he expressed his anger in a savage drawing showing a GI and his wife and daughter confronting a fat, arrogant landlady. A sign by the door reads: “ROOMS/No Children or Dogs.” The landlady is saying, “You soldiers just don’t seem to understand our problems.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 64
