A Memorial Day Reflection on the Second World War. Changes: The impact of World War Two.
Rifleman in training, April 1942.
I'm a member of an email list serve that discusses the Second World War. It's populated by academics and writers. Often the threads are pretty active around this time of year because of the holiday that, this year, falls on this date.
Normally I won't quote from there here, and I'm not going to do so directly now, as its a private list. But a member just posted the news that the new Tom Hanks movie Greyhound is going to be released on Apple TV, which I lack.
I was really looking forward to the film.
Anyhow, that lead to a thread discussing things that are changing due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, and then I posted an item, after I commented on that, noting I should link it back to World War Two, as I was off topic.
An interesting thread developed, which I posing on here, editing some of it so as to keep folks anonymous.
Cornell freshmen, 1919.
It started with one noting the demise of the college beanie, attributing that to returning servicemen being older and not wanting to put up with that sort of foolishness.
I replied to that noting:
Indeed, I've looked through old university newspapers and the beanies were a big deal. I've wondered what killed them off.
On university, I've heard it claimed and I think it correct that not only did the GI bill bring a lot of people into universities after the war that never would have gone to university otherwise, that had a major impact on the demographics of student bodies. Demographics that were poorly represented in universities started to be fairly well represented in them for the first time. For example, the number of Catholics attending university jumped quite a bit.
As that happened the diversity of student bodies in universities of all types increased and that changed their nature. Some Ivy League universities, for example, still had chapel requirements as late as the 1960s, reflecting a fairly uniform Protestant student body. That started to go away by that time as a result of the change in the student makeup following WWII.
I have in fact posted on this odd, old, now gone custom a couple of times here. Here's the threads for that:
I have in fact posted on this odd, old, now gone custom a couple of times here. Here's the threads for that:
Freshman Caps? The Wyoming Student, November 2, 1917.
Blog Mirror: Beanies, Brooms and Bother: UW Freshmen Get the Initiation Treatment (and Lex Anteinternet: Freshman Caps? The Wyoming Student, November 2, 1917.)
I'd forgotten that this odd custom lasted this long, and another participant noted that his university was still wearing them as late as 1970.
Apparently beanies are still a thing at the South Dakota School of Mines, but they're optional.
This would suggest that this is another one of those odd things that we tend to associate with World War Two that isn't, although there are more significant ones to come.
Soldier reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn of the Armed Services Edition.
One that I only recently learned of, from one of my children, is the spread of the popularity of paperback books due to the war, which was brought up by one of the replies which noted the Armed Forces Expeditions of various novels. Another participant expanded on that and noted a scene of a soldier reading just such a book is included in Sam Fuller's movie, The Big Red One, with the thinly disguised Fuller character commenting on a new recruit reading his book. Fuller actually had written some novels prior to the war.
That scene is one of the better ones from The Big Red One, in my opinion. That movie turns out to be one of the several World War Two movies referenced here which I find that I haven't reviewed yet, and I need to.
One of the comments had to do with a variety of ways the US was in a different position coming out of the war compared to when it went in it, noting that we came out of the war having 16,000,000 veterans and a fairly unified, disciplined, society, which translated into their being able to go on to higher education and train for careers. After thinking about this, I added:
Another thing that it seems to have done that's sort of related to this is that it relocated quite a few people permanently.
California seems to have received a big influx of workers due to the war and a lot of them stayed there after the war, as an example. As another odd example, I've read that returning Navajo servicemen tended to return to communities near where they had entered the service, but off reservation rather than on, as the economic opportunities were better.
In local agriculture, a big change occurred in that the start of World War Two came in an era in which ranches here still employed a lot of cowboys with a lot of them being career, usually single, cowboys. They didn't return to those occupations after the war. At the same time, the war normalized the production of the 4x4 truck and that meant that they weren't actually needed for a lot of the winter time jobs they'd formally been necessary for.
Like a lot of things here, I've touched on these topics before. I think the comment about the 16,000,000 disciplined veterans, mostly men, going into civilian life is correct, but we shouldn't forget that some of those men had lives that were significantly negatively impacted by what they experienced. People don't like to touch on it, but alcoholism was very common in the World War Two generation and at least part, but not all, of that was due to the war.
The impact of the 4x4 truck has been covered here before in this extensive thread, among others:
A Revolution In Rural Transportation
A somewhat related topic came up which addressed Residential Building Codes, something I'd frankly never thought of. The commenter noted that the Farmers Home Administration's guides for housing contracts were issued as a result of the war in 1942. I had no idea. They noted the guides are still with us.
Regarding this item, I noted:
Sort of along these lines, there was an expansion of employer provided employee benefits during World War Two in the U.S.
Wages were frozen at some point to keep labor shortages from spurring inflation, so companies took up competing with benefits, like health insurance. It can be argued that the employer provided health insurance system in the US was a byproduct of World War Two. I guess a person's view on that may depend on what they think of that system, but it did work for a fair amount of time following the war.
Other benefits along these lines, like retirement benefits, etc., also received a boost.
This doesn't mean that they didn't exist at all before the war, but they were greatly expanded during the war and became the norm for a long period of time, and are still with us in an evolved form today.
Another was the expansion of the calculating machine, which no doubt did occur, but which is something I never would have thought of. It's modern descendant, the electronic calculator, is everywhere. For that matter, the modern home computer in some ways is a descendant of the calculating machine.*
An addition to this from a university history resulted in this, regarding changes in higher education, which were massive. I've noted some of those here before, particularly the expansion of the student body to include demographics, such as Catholics, which previously rarely went to university. As noted here earlier, Catholic students were basically barred from Ivy League universities as they had protestant chapel requirements. Indeed, that didn't change until the 1960s for some.
He also noted the inclusion of refugee academics, which is something that would not have occured to me.
The massive expansion of education due to the GI Bill was a huge economic boon to the US in the late 40s, 50s, and the 60s, but like many things, there's a downside to it. Breaking the doors to university wide open helped the first two or three generations of new university students, but they were also stepping into a university system that well predated World War Two in its focus. As student bodies swelled, standards started to lower, something that was already notable by the 1970s As that occured simply having an degree went from an advantage to a necessity for many occupations, reaching the nature of an absolute for some. Entire occupations that never required a degree of any kind ultimately required a college degree and, quite frankly, for no real reason. Universities themselves became addicted to public funding, something that they first started to really receive during World War Two, and it oddly has operated in recent years to drive up the cost of education. And as universities offered more and more degree programs that conveyed upon their recipients no real advantage, a sort of radicalization of some elements of university faculty, which was something that had already started as far back as the 1920s, accelerated and became institutionalized.
One poster noted that much expanded airline travel resulted from the war, and that certainly is the case.
Just prior to the war airliners were beginning to take on a recognizable form, with the DC-3 being a recognizable commercial aircraft that went on to do yeoman's service during the war as the C-47.
After the war, however, things really changed. Four engined wartime aircraft made four engined commercial aircraft inevitable. By the 60s they were yielding to jets and modern air travel was around the corner. It really took airline deregulation, however, which came in during the 1980s, to make air travel cheap.
A need for an Interstate Highway System, by which is meant a good one, was also noted.
This is one of those things where I'd disagree. It's often stated that Eisenhower was really impressed with the German Autobahn, which was really a massive German public works project during the pre war Nazi years there, and he may have really been. But I think it was the ongoing evolution of the automobile that made the Interstate Highway System come in. It was billed a defense program but that was, quite frankly, a funding charade.
What that does bring up, however, is the massive expansion of government that started with the Great Depression and which kept on keeping on during World War Two and which never went away thereafter. It wasn't until the Reagan administration of the 1980s that contraction of any kind started, and its never contracted to its pre 1932 level. Prior to the Great Depression the nation would never have undertaken a highway construction project on a national level, and not until World War Two would the country thought of trying to pass it off as a defense measure.
That act, of course, lead to the demise of passenger rail in US, so its another thing that had a mixed result.
Women in industry came up, as it usually does.
I've become pretty convinced that the women in the workplace story is, frankly, heavily mythologized. I've written on that here before in this thread:
Women in the Workplace: It was Maytag that took Rosie the Riveter out of the domestic arena, not World War Two
I replied here, with the following:
Women in the workplace is a really complicated and I think poorly understood topic however.
I've looked at it before for other reasons over the course of the 20th Century and the increase in women working overall as a rising percentage is almost imperceptible in terms of its post WWII make up. Rather, women in the workforce started to climb starting around 1900 and continually climbed almost year by year up into some point in, I think the 1980s or 1990s, when it actually slightly declined. There were big jumps during World War One and World War Two, with the jump in WWI rivaling WWII, and then after both wars the wartime jump declined and the rise went back to the prewar curve.
Having said that, following World War Two the type of work women were doing changed a lot, but that's also true following World War One. Prior to World War One a massive number of working women were employed as domestic servants. That was still true all the way through the mid-50s, but women started to enter offices prior to WWI and then they did in large numbers during WWII. So the type, and pay, of women working really changed and part of that was due to WWII. Women in middle class occupations were greatly impacted by that.
The other big change, and I'd argue it was more significant than the impact of either war, however, was the introduction of domestic machinery, and that correlates really well with the rise in employed women. Domestic machinery, such as washing machines, vacuums, modern stoves, etc., are a 20th Century deal and they really started to start reaching their modern form in the 1920s. Prior to that domestic labor was so overwhelming that people basically couldn't "live on their own". How many of us, for example, have lived in a boarding house, like so many men did prior to World War Two? Men had to do that as there was no instant anything, and they simply couldn't live on their own, work and still wash their clothes and cook their meals routinely. A lot of men never left home until they married.
Indeed, that explains why a common aspiration for women was to marry and have their own homes. They were already engaged in heavy domestic labor as it was for the families they grew up in. Daily shopping, long slow cooking, washing clothes more primitively, etc., etc., was a huge chore that a lot of them looked up as something they'd rather do for households of their own as opposed to their parents.
Anyhow, once good domestic machinery came in the hours and hours of work that women had to do at home greatly declined and their labor became surplus to the household. A lot of that would have occurred in the 1930s as domestic machinery continued to develop in that period, but the Great Depression kept it from being spread more widely, much like a lot of farms kept using horse implements in the same period. After the war, however, ramped up domestic production rapidly changed that. You can see that in late WWII advertisements in which all sorts of companies engaged in war production are promising to make washing machines, stoves, etc.
All of this is stuff we don't think of much on Memorial Day, nor perhaps should we that much. Memorial Day is a day to remember war dead. But sometimes we should remember the lives of the living as well, and, in terms of demise, the demise of things, practices and norms that came before a war.
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*May 25, 1970, mark the first orders, fwiw, of the stand alone desk top computer. Primitive by today's standards, as anemic, they were also extremely expensive.
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