THE NATION: Liquor & Lipstick

They had been married ten years. Big, slow-moving Albert and his neat, pretty wife Josie-Lee, seldom escaped the dawn-to-dark drudgery of farm life. They made little money. But few U.S. couples were happier. They had 52 acres ot land near Memphis, a white cottage, a little herd of dairy cattle. They had four children—a baby girl and three little boys. Both had been raised on the land, both were from plain, churchgoing Methodist families and neither had ever expected life to be different.

Then, when Albert was 40 and Josie-Lee 32, the U.S. went to war. They packed up and went to Memphis, Albert to work in a tire factory, Josie-Lee to a job in an aircraft plant. In two years they saved $3,000. But they lived in a squalid water front boarding house, saw little of each other or their children.

There were strains and irritations in their new life. Albert, who had never touched liquor, began coming home drunk. Then he quit going to church, spent half their savings on a car. Then he took up with an 18-year-old girl war-worker. Josie-Lee went to the tire plant, where she fought her rival with fists and fingernails. She won, but Albert, who had watched, simply walked away with the weeping loser.

Terrified, Josie-Lee went to the other woman again, to plead for her husband. Said the girl: “He’s anybody’s prey. If I get him, I’ll keep him.” As stonily, Albert said: “I’ve worked all my life. It’s time I was enjoying myself.” He asked Josie-Lee to divorce him. At last she agreed. Last week she was back on the farm with the children. Albert had married the girl, lost his war job, headed somewhere away from Tennessee.

Young and Middle-Aged. With variations major and minor, the same bathetic, woeful, touching story was being enacted last week by thousands of other U.S. husbands & wives. Like Albert and Josie-Lee, many were over 30, many had children, most had been happy before the war. But they had not withstood loneliness or temptation or big money, or the contagious recklessness of the times.

Despite a Supreme Court decision (TiME, June 4) which made quick divorce suspect in other states, Reno was booming — its hotels were jammed, workmen were building a $106,000 addition to the Washoe County Courthouse, and the divorce business was almost triple the mark of booming 1940. But Reno, and divorce mills like Miami and Hot Springs, Ark., no longer had a corner on the quick-divorce market. People were buying divorces every where almost as matter-of-factly as they had bought moonshine in the ’20s. The U.S. divorce rate had virtually doubled since Pearl Harbor.

For Those with Children. In Chicago, Judge Edwin A. Robson had installed a nursery just off his court. As parents stood before the bench last week (few Chicago bailiffs wasted time asking them to take the witness stand), their children looked at comic books or played with blocks just down the hall. Children were still the real victims. Thousands of them would learn to accept the impermanence of their parents’ marriages as natural and matter-of-fact. Instead of having two parents they would now have one — or three, or four; they would learn to be visitors in one or both of their two “homes.” Brothers & sisters would be divided. And many a child would lack actual care, suffer indifference or antagonism.

Across the country, the rush made divorces easier to get than ever. Judges guessed, but could not prove, that thousands of divorce seekers perjured themselves. Decrees were asked and granted for scores of trifling reasons. Testimony, even about adultery and physical cruelty, had assumed a kind of ceremonial sameness:

“He struck you?” “Yes.” “With his fist?” “Yes.” “Did it leave marks and cause you suffering?” “Yes.” “Divorce granted. . . .”

Woman’s Work. With few exceptions, it was the wife who went to court. Many did so at the urging of their husbands, and every lawyer had grown used to seeing men waiting outside courtroom doors for the good news. But thousands of women got divorced simply to get another man.

The mounting divorce rate stemmed from many roots, but judges and divorce lawyers who listened cynically to the sing-song of testimony argued that there were only two immediate causes. Said Louisville Circuit Judge Gilbert Burnett: “It’s always liquor or lipstick.”

War Bride’s Day. With troops coming home, the war romances were beginning to break up, too. Many had bloomed in the tense atmosphere of ten-day leaves, between girls who had a crush on uniforms and careless youths hungry for any woman. Many a bobby-sox bride had married a soldier to get his allotment check, or his insurance.

There were other causes: in Chicago Mrs. Mae Casey was divorced from a soldier who had taken a second wife in New York, written: “Honey, she got me all hot and bothered.” Many a soldier was coming home to find his wife pregnant, or the mother of another man’s child.

There could be little doubt that U.S. courts would still be crowded in 1946.