World War Two - Home Front
Additional home front articles can be read here.  During the final year of the First World War, the Influenza Pandemic absolutely ravaged the American home front - it made a return visit to the W.W. II home front during the winter of 1943 - 44, but not to the same degree.
Click here to read about the 1918 - 1920 outbreak of influenza in the United States.
This article appeared six months before the 77th Congress passed a price control law as a wartime measure in an attempt to stave off inflation. The column pertains to the early planning of a wartime economy as the nation prepared to devote itself to total war. You'll remember that the Supreme Court found FDR's price control schemes (the NRA) to be unconstitutional during the Thirties. Regardless of their efforts, inflation still kicked-in after the war, up until the Republican Congress cut taxes. Appearing in 1944, this article listed numerous reports relayed to the FBI by amateur spy-hunters of all the imagined foreign agents who they stumbled upon daily. Some of the accounts ended up being true and lead to actual confessions, but most were just plain silly - either way, the G-men had to investigate each account. 1940s feminism bares no resemblance to the take-no-prisoners feminism of today. This is made clear in the attached article by Amaran Scheinfeld (1900 - 1979), a writer, whose book Women and Men (1944), as stated by the New York Times, "foreshadowed many issues of the feminist movement". The primary difference between the two lay in the fact that seventy-five years ago it was believed that it was nature that had established many of the rolls played by the (two) genders. Chicago, Illinois saw enormous changes take place during the war years, most notably the overnight construction of over 260 defense plants and the opening of its subway system (six miles in length, at that time). Half a million war workers arrived to toil in her new factories while it is said that each city block in Chicago dispatched, on average, at least seven of her sons and daughters for the armed services.
"Nerves are taught with war tension. Hard work adds to the strain and increases the tempo. People walk faster in the streets. Stampedes for surface cars, and the new subway are more chaotic than ever... Five thousand block flagpoles have been erected by block committees of the Office of Civilian Defense. Listed in some manner near each are the names of all the GIs from the block. Some of the installations are elaborate and have bulletin boards that are kept up to date with personal news from camps and war theaters."
Appearing in various magazines and newspapers on the 1945 home front were articles and interviews with assorted "experts" who predicted that the demobilized military men would be a burden on society. They cautioned families to be ready for these crushed and broken men, who had seen so much violence and had inflicted the same upon others, would be maladjusted and likely to drift into crime. In response to this blarney stepped Frances Langford (1913 – 2005), the American singer. She wrote in the attached article that she had come to know thousands of soldiers, sailors airmen and Marines during the course of her tours with the USO and that the nation could only benefit from their return. |
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