The 1940s: Lifestyles and Social Trends: Overview

THE 1940s: LIFESTYLES AND SOCIAL TRENDS: OVERVIEW

The Great Depression and World War II

The Great Depression and World War II cast long shadows over American life in the 1940s. During the 1930s President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal created a sense of economic optimism and eased the suffering of many, but it did not eradicate poverty or solve the economic crisis. In 1941 as many as 40 percent of all American families lived below poverty level. Nearly eight million workers earned less than the legal minimum wage. Another eight million Americans were unemployed, and the median income was only $2,000 per year. While the economic picture improved during the 1940s, the sense of crisis created by the Depression permanently altered lifestyles and attitudes. The so-called depression mentality of fear and economic caution marked an entire generation, even as the economy boomed after World War II.

America at War

World War II presented a new series of demands and dislocations that further reconfigured personal life. Most immediately, the armed forces conscripted ten million men, including fathers, after 1943. The war effort demanded stepped-up production at home to equip the military and maintain civilian needs. The Gross National Product and manufacturing output doubled in the war, as American industry limited or suspended production of consumer goods to devote its efforts to making weapons and war materiel. No civilian automobiles and trucks were manufactured from 1942 until after the war. Other steel, rubber, or electrical consumer goods were scarce or unavailable. Government entered people's daily lives, raising taxes, rationing scarce commodities, controlling prices, and allocating labor for military and civilian production, even restricting where individuals lived or worked.

Wartime Prosperity

Most Americans tolerated government restrictions as temporary necessities, and stepped-up industrial production improved the material lives of many people. The labor force expanded from 56,180,000 in 1940 to 65,290,000 in 1945. Average yearly earnings rose from 1754 in 1940 to $1,289 in 1944. While more than half of all Americans lived in poverty during the Depression, by the end of the war just over one-third were poor. Another third earned wages that gave them significant disposable income for the first time.

The Postwar

Years. When the war came to an end in 1945, many Americans wondered if the higher standard of living brought about by a wartime economy could be sustained in peacetime. Having experienced the Depression, they feared yet another crisis once millions of soldiers reentered the civilian workplace in an economy no longer stimulated by massive wartime production. Yet in spite of major dislocations caused by the reconversion to peacetime business and manufacturing, no new crisis occurred. Several factors cushioned the economy after the war. Demobilization occurred slowly, and military expenditures remained high. During the war Americans had saved billions of dollars, which they spent on new homes and newly available cars and appliances once the war ended. Wartime profits gave businesses money to invest in plants and equipment for civilian production. The United States was the only major industrial nation to emerge unscathed from World War II, and American loans to war-torn European nations gave these countries funds to purchase American-made goods. The Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 gave veterans one year of unemployment compensation, financial assistance for job training and education, and low-interest loans to buy homes, farms, and businesses. This aid to veterans and their families, known as the GI Bill of Rights, helped nearly one-quarter of the population and further stimulated the economy.

Inflation

While many Americans benefited from the immediate prosperity of the postwar years, complete economic recovery proved elusive. By the end of the decade inflation became the new economic woe. With one-third of the population still below the poverty line in 1949, it was unclear if the United States had developed an economy capable of providing an adequate livelihood to all its citizens.

Containment and the Cold War

The late 1940s marked the beginning of the Cold War. Fear of communism manifested itself in the Red-baiting that began in 1946 and in a policy of containment directed at the Soviet Union. Postwar politics generated serious concerns about global security. Once the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world entered the nuclear age. The United States and the Soviet Union stared at one another with fear and hostility. The Cold War began to chill the nation, creating profound insecurity about the future. As Dean Acheson said in 1947, "the nation must be on permanent alert."

Containment and Conformity

Political containment translated into expectations of strict behavioral conformity. During the war years Americans saved and delayed gratification. This postponement created pent-up desires to spend and create, and many feared that this stored energy might not be channeled properly. Security and behavioral conformity came to be valued above personal risk and experimentation. Parents were urged to rear their children properly, lest they be vulnerable to Communist subversion.

Ethnicity and Race in the 1940s

The war years encouraged the assimilation of white ethnics from European backgrounds into American society. Americans' revulsion at the Nazi ideology of racial purity led them to reject assertions of Anglo-Saxon supremacy in the United States. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 encouraged aliens to become American citizens, and between 1943 and 1944 nearly one million people—mostly from Italian and Eastern European backgrounds—were naturalized. Wartime propaganda patriotically stressed that though we are from different backgrounds, "We Are All American." Yet the 1940s version of pluralism emphasized the blending of ethnic differences into the "melting pot" of American society. The distinctive ethnic identities of these new citizens were not valued, and nonwhites were not welcomed into the melting pot.

Wartime Discrimination against Mexican Americans

When Mexican Americans managed to get jobs in the defense industry, they were given the most-menial and lowest-paid positions. White Americans' deep animosity toward them became apparent in the "Zoot Suit" Riots of June 1943. Named for a distinctive style of suit that was popular among young Mexican Americans and African Americans, these riots erupted in Los Angeles after white soldiers heard false reports that a Mexican American youth had beaten a sailor.

Internment of Japanese Americans

The U.S. government's treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a shameful example of institutionalized racism. After Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, first and second-generation Japanese Americans living on the West Coast were judged to be threats to national security. In February 1942, 120,000 West Coast residents of Japanese origin were ordered to leave their homes, jobs, and property and were taken to inland internment camps, where they were held for the duration of the war. Few of those interned represented any actual security threat. Two-thirds of them were American citizens by birth.

Discrimination against African Americans

While they continued to suffer from segregation and discrimination, African Americans managed to make modest gains during the military crisis. In 1941 they succeeded in pressuring President Roosevelt to ban racial discrimination in defense production. Although his executive order was difficult to enforce, the number of African American skilled workers more than doubled during the war, and their presence in semiskilled jobs increased by an even larger measure. While the 1939 average income of a non-white male worker was only 41 percent of a white man's, by 1950 the percentage had increased to 61. The war also accelerated the migration of African Americans from the rural South to northern and western cities, a movement that improved their economic prospects and their political strength. These improvements in the status of African Americans set the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Women in the Workplace

The successive crises of the Depression and the war created a greater egalitarianism in Americans' concepts of gender roles. The economic hard times of the Depression and the demands of wartime production pushed women into the workforce. The Depression forced many wives and mothers to find ways to supplement their reduced family incomes, but government pronouncements and policies reinforced the ideology of the traditional family. The inability to provide for his family eroded an unemployed man's sense of masculinity, and married women who worked outside the home were often perceived as taking jobs away from men. As a result women faced job discrimination. This situation changed dramatically with the employment opportunities presented by World War II.

Workingwomen in Wartime

Two years after the United States entered the war, the unemployment rate had dropped from 14 percent to zero. Men were not the only ones to don military uniforms. Some women joined the WACS, the WAVES, or the SPARS—the women's branches of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Coast Guard. Wartime industrial mobilization required the labor of those men and women not in the military. Suddenly the government and the media affirmed the importance of workingwomen and welcomed them to the workforce, particularly to jobs in the defense industry.

Postwar Reversion to Tradition

The success of women in the wartime workforce briefly challenged traditional gender roles. Women's economic gains in the wartime boom raised their expectations for sustained equality of opportunity after the war, but the shift in attitude toward the workingwoman was only temporary. After 1945, as returning veterans reclaimed jobs women had held in wartime, the image of the full-time wife and mother was reintroduced as "modern" and necessary to meet the new psychological stresses of life in the age of atomic insecurity.

The Family

The economic hardships of the Depression created strain in marriages and family life and caused a decline in marriage and birthrates. Those who did marry in the 1930s postponed childbearing or had fewer children. The war accelerated the process of family formation. The marriage rate went up between 1940 and 1946, as many couples rushed into matrimony, often just before the husband's departure to the war overseas. During the same period the birthrate rose as well, from 19.4 to 24.1 births per thousand women. Absent husbands and fathers, wartime rations, and working mothers characterized family life in the early 1940s.

The Baby Boom

Marriage rates continued to soar after the war, and there was a sharp rise in the birthrate that has become known as the Baby Boom. The Baby Boom generation reshaped the American family and American culture for decades to come. American society celebrated domesticity after the war. The average family had a ranch or split-level house, a car, and 2.5 children. The ideal of the good life was represented by a full-time wife and mother who had shiny new appliances in her kitchen, and a husband and father who was the sole breadwinner.

The Birth of Suburbia

This idealized good life was set in one of the new suburban communities that suddenly sprawled across the American landscape after World War II. Postwar prosperity and government subsidies made home ownership accessible to large numbers of middle-class Americans for the first time. Pent-up consumer demand resulted in a huge postwar buying spree as young families spent their wartime savings to furnish their new homes, clothe their babies, and put cars in their new garages. In each of the four years following the war Americans moved into more than a million new houses and bought 21.4 million cars, 20 million refrigerators, and 5.5 million stoves.

MEET THE FOLKS

On 1 September 1947 Time magazine offered a portrait of the American public compiled by the famous Gallup polling company. The average U.S. man, it reported, was 5 feet 9 inches tall and weighed 158 pounds. The average woman was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 132 pounds. Women believed that three children constituted the ideal family and wanted no babies until the second year of marriage. Most of the quarrels between "Mr. and Mrs. America" were prompted by money, jealousy, and children—in that order. Seven out of ten U.S. adults believed in spanking their offspring. Less than a third of U.S. families said grace at meals. Seven out often preferred dogs to cats, and no one wanted his or her son to go into politics.

Source:

"Manners and Morals," Time, 50 (1 September 1947): 14-15.

The Cold War and Suburbia

Fear of atomic war also contributed to the rise of suburbia. Atomic scientists advised the depopulation of urban centers to avoid a concentration of industries and homes in potential target areas. New roads provided quick escape routes from cities to the suburbs. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained in 1956, "the road net must permit quick evacuation of target areas" in the event of a nuclear attack.