Wartime Sacrifice -- Yeah, they used to do that.

World War II consumer pledge

Back  in 2001after 9-11, President George W. Bush was asked what Americans could do to support the effort.

"Go shopping," was his answer, and went on to discuss how the health of the American economy was critical, how we couldn't let terrorists keep us from living our normal lives, and so on.

I suspect he also wanted folks to shop so the economic activity would both make folks happy and provide taxes to pay for the war. Raising taxes, asking actual sacrifice, seems to be anathema to politicians these days, no matter what.

This had an unfortunate side-effect: Americans have not had to sacrifice for this war. A vast majority view it as nothing more than noise,  like peanut butter commercials.

O, yes, families of the 5,000-plus killed have sacrificed a bunch. And the families of the soldiers, airmen, Marines and seamen who've served in the wars have. Friends, relatives, too. But even adding all that up, I would wager fewer than 10 percent of Americans have been directly touched.

WWII booklet to rally public
support for the war effort

The standard-issue American with no direct family involvement - folks like me - has had it easy. My taxes haven't gone up, my ability to buy toys has not gone down. The supply of the food, clothing and modern gadgets so critical to my American Way of Life has never been interrupted or restricted in the least.

Does it have to be this way?

I have no idea.

How you can help win!

My father, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, was a bit dismissive of the rationing and other limitations put on folks during that scuffle. Some of the restrictions were mostly to make people aware, he said, not because of some dire shortage.  Was he right?

I know they rationed gasoline, not because gasoline was short (the US was a major producer then, too) but because driving wore out tires and rubber WAS short. Drives for scrap metal were an essential part of the war effort -- I saw one news article warning that the nation's supply of scrap was down to two weeks -- because scrap was a lot more easily converted into tanks and guns than iron ore was.

The nation's economy was different back then. World War II was war on a national scale. The entire resources of the country had to be shifted to war production from the very small pre-war state to enormous wartime state. That shift in national resources was bound to create shortages, changes, and disruptions.

Fighting the war at home

These days we already have a massive wartime infrastructure. The US spends more on the military than any ten other nations on the planet, combined. We're used to it. It's what we do, war or no war.

It's hard to see how they could change things.

That makes possible war without general immediate sacrifice. We'd all be better off if we weren't spending all that money on defense, but shifting a substantial portion of it back to peacetime production would, again, cause massive disruptions, job changes and so on. Look what just the demise of the Space Shuttle has done to Box Elder County.

How did they get the nation to go along with the changes the first time? What sort of national campaign would they have to run to make a similar shift today palatable?

These exhibits here are a hint. They made it a matter of patriotism, of national pride. The logic of living a thrifty life anyway is good, but showing how it can help win the war is even better.

In our collection here at Union Station we've got this nifty little booklet from a local natural gas company that talks about the "consumer pledge" and gives hints on how to conserve precious resources for the war effort: Don't toss leftovers, save fats for bomb production, learn to cook tougher cuts of meat, learn to get the most nutrition from your food.

There's a big section on maintaining your refrigerator and other home appliances and tools. It takes 600 refrigerators to make one tank, we are told, so make that fridge last!

Compare that to today where I was told, in all seriousness by the nice folks at Sears, that no matter what I did, I could count on my brand new fridge dying in 10 years because that's just how they're made
these days.

We also have a little 4-page recipe booklet published in 1941 by Family Circle with lots of information, and recipes, for sending goodies to our boys in the military training camps. This was in August of 1941, before Pearl Harbor, but a lot of folks forget that the US was already ramping up its war footing in 1941. Pearl Harbor was a surprise attack, but war was no surprise.

They were the ways, big and small, that folks at home supported the war, and they did. Bond drives
paid a third of the cost of the war. People scoured fields for milkweed to make life-vests for pilots. People sorted and fiddled with ration coupons and shortages and regulations because that was what it would take.

What would it take to rally the population today, to get it to buy war bonds and pay higher taxes, to endure shortages and husband resources?

More important, does any politician believe in a particular war they want to fight so much that they're even willing to try?