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Rational Thinking


Subdeacon Joe

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i have been reminded of the war efforts on more than one occasion recently , gas , sugar , so many things , as well as the scrap metal drives , my forst house was a 1930s vintage home , the one car garage was well built but had the records of the tire use scribed on the wall , the coal chute door was stuffed with war era newspapers , my folks spoke of the hardships but unless you live them its hard to fully comprehend - much like trying to explain the "draft" to anyone that didnt live thru it , 

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Two things about that list caught my attention.

 

Women still used muffs? I thought they went out of style when flappers came in.

 

And what the heck is hard haberdashery?

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My folks said the rationing wasn't too bad, especially in light of the Depression which immediately preceded the war. People now had jobs and money.

 

A little-remarked fact is that the War produced full employment at good wages, but there was little to spend money on, because of the need to restrict consumer goods. The result was forced savings: people bought War Bonds.

 

At the end of the war, the bonds were paid in full with interest. There was huge pent-up consumer demand, and with the bonds, folks had the cash to spend. As a result, industry was able to immediately switch to peacetime production on a big scale from war production, without the economic downturn that had usually followed wars in the past.

 

Add that to the GI Bill, and the result was a generation of ever-increasing prosperity.

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i agree with your analysis - what a great time to be young and back from the war , prosperous times to be sure , we are missing that prosperity after every war since korea tho , and yes that GI bill did educate a great deal of our population that were deprived of their youth , im the beneficiary of that in that my folks would never have been able to pay for my fathers education before or after the war except for that , i feel a lot of that is lost now , im interested in hearing others thoughts .........

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The GI bill propelled millions of men into the professions and management, and high-end skilled work, who never otherwise would have done so. Its contribution to the prosperity of those times has been written about a lot. But still, that bore fruit several years after the war's end.

 

If you look at advertisements in early 1945, you will see interesting things. I happened to, because several years ago I got interested in traditional hiking and climbing gear. In the course of that, I saw adverts by Coleman and other manufacturers advertising their civilian gear, several months before the end of the war. The ads basically all said: here are the products that we are ready to sell as soon as peace comes. These ads were paralleled in all sectors.

 

The manufacturers knew the war was won, knew the huge pent-up consumer demand that was coming. And they knew the consumers would have the wherewithal, because of the enormous forced savings represented by the war bonds. This is a less well-known tale.

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12 hours ago, Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619 said:

The manufacturers knew the war was won, knew the huge pent-up consumer demand that was coming. And they knew the consumers would have the wherewithal, because of the enormous forced savings represented by the war bonds. This is a less well-known tale.

 

Supposedly, at least according to my mom, a Wearever salesman in Oceanside CA set sales records in '46 & '47 that held for many years by hitting all the off base housing near Camp Pendleton.  All the housewives wanted new and decent cookware, having either turned in much of it in the metal drives or left it behind when they moved to California.  We were still using it in the late '70s when I left home.

 

 

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