World War Two - Home Front
Having heard from assorted armchair generals, radio oracles and ink-stained bums that the heart of the American home front was not in the fight, journalist Quentin Reynolds bought some train tickets to scour the country and see if it was true.
It wasn't.
Click here to read about the rationing of makeup. "There is no other country at war with such an enormous gulf in sacrifice between fighting men and civilians. There is no other country where the men at the front have given up everything, while the people at home have given up practically nothing. And the soldiers know it...'A few bombs would do this country a lot of good.' I heard that in San Francisco from a curly-headed sailor who had been sunk in the Pacific, and I heard it again in Washington from a corporal who had left his leg on Hill 609. Both added, rather anxiously, that, of course, they wouldn't want anyone to get hurt." A 1945 Yank Magazine article concerning American teen culture on the W.W. II home front in which the journalist/anthropologist paid particular attention to the teen-age slang of the day. "Some of today's teenagers ---pleasantly not many --- talk the strange new language of "sling swing." In this bright lexicon of the good citizens of tomorrow, a girl with sex appeal is an "able Grable" or a "ready Hedy." A pretty girl is "whistle bait." A boy whose mug and muscles appeal to the girls is a "mellow man," a "hunk of heart break" or a "glad lad."
To read about one of the fashion legacies of W.W. II, click here...
Throughout a good deal of the Great Depression (1929 - 1940), FDR liked to think he was cozying-up to the voters when he insulted the great captains of industry with mean names like "selfish" and "stubborn". All that ended when the war started, and the President had to make common cause with these men in order gain their cooperation in meeting the military needs of the nation. This article concerns the importance of the industrial might of Detroit. For those blessed to live in a society with a free-market economy, we are pleased to pursue our whims daily - and eight times out of ten, they are made manifest before too long. Yet this was not the case for those living on the W.W. II home front. This article is about the black market that must have been a temptation for everyone back then. The reader will get a true sense of the tyranny Americans had to suffer when our economy was engaged in total war; it was written by one of the autocrats charged with enforcing the rationing laws. Even before the Home Front kicked into high-gear, the men who had been picked up in the 1940 draft were causing real problems in every area where a military training camp could be found. Knowing that the enlistments were soon to grow and these problems would be getting worse, the brass hats joined arms with the town elders to curb the drinking and whoremongering. The cure for these difficulties came in the form of the USO, which would be eatablished before the year was out.
A similar article can be read here.
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