The past isn’t always a foreign country; sometimes it’s more like a fun-house mirror, reflecting the present in ways both recognizable and strange. Consider the United States in December, 1942, a year into a terrible war: different and yet not so different from the United States in March, 2021. They had blackouts, sugar and gas rationing, and war work. We’ve had lockdowns, yeast and toilet-paper shortages, and Zoom meetings. They had anxiety, grief, sacrifice, boredom, and a strong sense of unity and national purpose. We have . . . some of those things.
Readings from the wartime press, in December, 1942, as America took stock on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor:
“As a Nation and a people we have been going through changes, some of them hard to take. . . . We have learned to be a little sad and a little lonesome, without being sickly about it. . . . There are things we love that we’re going to have [again] if the breaks are not too bad against us.” —Carl Sandburg, in the Chicago Times.
“Our war opened with a disaster which is still hard to excuse. . . . At home our immense industrial machine was being geared, by heroic effort, to its task; but political calculations and timidities, the President’s ineptness in the creation of effective administrative machinery, the demands of pressure groups incapable of seeing the greatness of the crisis beyond their own narrow interests, delayed the work. All this will cost us many lives and much sacrifice.”—New York Herald Tribune.
“Many workers are feeling ‘essential’ for the first time. . . . Others are fatalistic and apathetic.” —Times Magazine.
“Back of us is a year of heartbreak and a multitude of new experiences we always felt can’t happen here. . . . We used to grimace at pictures of long queues outside English markets, but we chuckle out the other side of our mouths now. The butter and egg and citrus scavengers hang now like a pall over the corner grocer waiting for a shipment.” —Los Angeles Times.
“Household ammonia is just one more of those things which were consistently sniffed at and scorned until the exigencies of war transformed them into luxuries.” —The Times.
“Gone is the Hollywood we used to know, / The strumpet strutting in the night club’s glow. / Premieres and searchlights in the sky / Are memories of nights gone by . . . / No more you read the tales of midnight brawls . . . / And swing-shift gals perform in overalls.” —Variety.
“Professional baseball . . . now seems reasonably assured of going through next year with its second successive wartime campaign. It will be a streamlined meal that will be served to the nation’s fandom, with many of its festive trimmings clipped.” —The Times.
“I have a run in my stocking. Not a fresh, impromptu snag, but a wide, shameless bull run up the whole fatted calf. Am I embarrassed? Self-conscious? Not at all. Nonchalance is the word for me, since I can blame my genteel shabbiness on the ever reliable war. . . . So what if I take advantage of an unfortunate state of affairs, and wear air-conditioned hosiery? . . . War is a wonderful alibi.” —Margaret Fishback, in Woman’s Day.
“After Pearl Harbor, like most other family men, I started fighting the war on the home front. I bought War Bonds, became a blood donor, joined the air-raid wardens. . . . But then, as the months dragged by, something happened to me, something that might be called patriotic dry rot. Slowly I began to lose my drive as a home-front fighter. Slowly I began to indulge myself beyond all reason in expensive food and other luxuries and a desperate sort of merriment. . . . The war began to seem remote.” —Herbert Clyde Lewis, in the Herald Tribune.
“Hoarding has been good for a hundred laughs. Personally, I’m hoarding bobby pins. (Steel shortage, you know.) . . . There’s my friend who rushed out the day after Pearl Harbor to buy a rip saw. He’s used it once. It’s rusty. But he wanted to be sure to have a rip saw.” —Sigrid Arne, A.P.
“So much for a year of war. If the war continues another year—and it would be rash to expect less—one cannot doubt that our determination and our unity will be even more conclusively demonstrated.” —The Times.
One further reflection: in late 1942, the A.P. reported a total of 8,192 American deaths during the country’s first year at war. The true number was surely higher, and by the war’s end more than four hundred thousand American lives had been lost. During the first year of the pandemic, about half a million Americans are said to have died from Covid-19. That number is surely higher, too. ♦
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