The Power & the Grief

The news was too magnificent. The British held in Libya, the Russians held, and now the U.S. had held, by smashing the Japs at Midway. And there was more to it than just holding: the British were beginning carefully and thoroughly to do their job of destroying Germany from the air.

All over the U.S. the optimism which the Administration had first inspired, and bad then hastily quenched, bubbled back again. The reason was simple; there simply was no important bad news, except submarine sinkings on the East Coast—which, although very serious indeed, were something the public had got used to.

Hope & Merriment. Throughout the land the belief was strong now that the war was not only being won but would end soon. In Texas, naturally, the biggest-sized rumors sprang up: that Washington believed the war would be over in six months; that auto dealers had been told to hold on to their dead business for a few more months, because the war would be over then; that the real reason Washington had stopped expanding war plants was that the U.S. did not need any more to whip the Axis.

Meanwhile to New York’s Belmont race track went the alltime greatest crowds. the carriage trade, lush with furs and brilliant with jewels; fashion models, dressed carefully to provoke envy in the thousands who came in merely their best clothes (see p. 63). It was all very much like the race meet at Auteuil, in the suburbs of Paris, in the spring of 1940, when Parisian couturiers worried about the proper cut and color for gas-mask containers. Shut Out whipped Alsab in the famed Belmont Stakes, and Vice Admiral Adolphus Andrews, Commandant of the entire Eastern Sea Frontier, came graciously to the microphone to make a neat little speech, in which he promised that the U.S. Fleet in the Pacific would win as Shut Out had just done. The thousands gave him a rolling cheer; a railbird shouted ‘Atta boy, Admiral!”

Death & Poverty. But the fact was that the U.S. was engaged in no phony war. At that moment out on the Pacific the Jap and U.S. Fleets were smashing at each other in a death lock; squadrons of the finest young American men were taking off carrier decks and off land bases, many never to come back.

And in Washington responsible men knew that civilians too would soon have to face a new unpleasant aspect of war. When it comes, it is true that no one will starve. Practically no one will be unemployed. The great majority of people will find far more money in their pay envelopes than they ever found before. But for all practical purposes there will be a major depression. For the comforts of life will go glimmering, and most necessities will be as hard or perhaps harder to get than in 1932.

Having been the richest people on earth, the citizens of the U.S. have long had more goods about their homes and shops and warehouses than any other people. But less & less civilian goods are being manufactured. Soon there will not even be normal replacements (see p. 73).

This time will come in a matter of months, not years, for many kinds of goods wear out in a few months. So far the U.S. public’s war sacrifice has consisted of living on its economic fat. The next sacrifice will be to live without fat—to fight a war and a new kind of depression at the same time— as Britain and Germany and China and Japan have been doing for years.

The well-to-do will feel the pinch relatively hardest, because the money in their pockets will be drained off. Labor is making money, but it will soon be unable to convert it into the goods that money usually buys. Inflation will reduce its value and some of it will just be made useless by rationing—there will be nothing for money to buy.

If price control and rationing work, the standard of living a family enjoys will not depend on the amount of income it has, but on the number of ration cards it holds. For some of the very poor there may be more of the necessities of life than usual. But, for the nation as a whole, the standard of living, which in the first six months of war has hardly dropped, will take a nose dive.

And one of the big questions is whether rationing will work. There may be relatively few rich men who will have money to spend, but there will be millions of workers in war industry who have it, and to keep millions from spending money on what they want is not easy. Already Leon Henderson is calling for 90,000 enforcers, but he will have to have many thousands more.

Prohibition had 4,500 enforcers in its peak year—who could not enforce—and Prohibition attempted to suppress the traffic in only one kind of goods. The enforcement of prices and rationing will, as some economists say, be as big a job as Prohibition times the Sears Roebuck catalogue.

But even if the U.S. public, never long on law observance, begins buying goods at high prices in black markets, the basic condition will not be altered: most of the goods that the public wants will not exist. If rationing does not force the public to do without, high prices will.

The fortunes of war are fickle. If by next autumn the worst should befall—if Russia or China or India or North Africa or several of them should go down—and meanwhile the illusion of war prosperity has vanished, then the U.S. will be well out of its dream-walking, war-made-easy attitude. Then the people will be at war as the other peoples of the world are now.