This was the third of the four lectures that I'll be attending this month in honour of Black History Month. This lecture was being held at the African American Military History Museum downtown, which is located in the former African American WWII USO. My sister didn't have work, so she could attend this one with me. I sort of knew about rationing, but the lecture was really informative. There was also rationed sweets sampling, which the recipes came from a 1943 rationing cookbook! I've already written a blog post about the rationed sweets, complete with recipes, over at my cookery blog here, if you are interested. We were late to this lecture. Last time, for the Double Victory lecture, we arrived twenty minutes early and they started the lecture ten minutes late. This time, we arrived at six on the dot and it felt like it had already been going for twenty minutes, so I'm not sure what I missed, if anything. I also did not take notes and this was four days ago, so lets see how well I can remember. For Double Victory, it wasn't until after I'd posted it and sometime in the middle of the night half waking up from sleeping that I remembered that I hadn't even mentioned anything about what Double Victory actually meant... and I had notes for that one, and it was written in there! Oh-ho, too funny. So, Dr. Haley gave a weird lecture. Stating more than once that he should remember to look at his notes, while moving back behind the podium to rummage through them. Also that his grad student, a girl, was writing her dissertation on this very subject and she should have been the one to give the lecture. He didn't say she knew more about the subject than him, but it was sort of implied. So, that was weird, but beyond that he did give a good presentation, and I felt that he knew what he was talking about, and it was kind of funny in a cute way how he didn't want to stop talking at the end. History nerd, I totally get it. Now onto the lecture bit. A type of rationing was implemented during The Great War. It was merely a try to do your part by not eating as much of certain things so that the soldiers would have more. It wasn't enforced and not that many people participated really. Then with WWII, there was enforced rationing.
There was only one poster circulated during the war stating that rationing was in effect so that the soldiers could have more. Even though this is the popular theory among the people of the time, it just wasn't really true. Sure, they wanted to ration certain things like canned food because the tin really was needed to make things for the war, and they did really want the soldiers to have coffee and meat, etc. However, it wasn't always guaranteed that the soldiers would always end up with these things because of shipments going awry, blockades, being trapped behind enemy lines, ect. So, it was never the first and foremost reason for rationing. Even though the bigger line is stating that you're doing with less so they'll have more, it's the smaller bit at the bottom that was the truth. America didn't know who long it would be in this war. There was plenty of food now, but for how long? Also the fact that they wanted to stop inflation and keep prices low (price control), and to keep the wealthier people from buying everything up, so that people who were less wealthy would end up going without. So, this is why there was rationing. You'd get a book for every member in your family and it worked on the honour system. The point tickets you were to receive directly correlated to what you told the OPA (Office of Price Administration) of your stores at home. So, if you already had 5 pounds of sugar at home you would receive less in that first initial month than the person who only had 1 pound. The first thing to be rationed was sugar. Your tickets would be given to you at the beginning of every month, stating how much sugar you were allotted during that month. However, it was broken down into thirds. If you were 9 bags of sugar for a month, you had three tickets for three pounds of sugar in the first part of the month, then you could get three more pounds in the middle of the month, and then three more at the end; so never all 9 bags at the beginning of the month. The next thing rationed was coffee. Coffee was being rationed, not merely for the soldiers but because of where America was obtaining its coffee supplies in Brazil and the Caribbean. The shipping lines were under threat from Nazi U-boats and as a result, shipments were sporadic. Dr. Haley didn't give a specific reason as to why sugar was rationed as he did with coffee, so I am unsure. Though some states have sugar cane fields, even during this time period, most of it was imported from probably the Caribbean, as well as other places, so I'm sure shipping lanes and U-boats were also the issue with sugar. Now, coffee and sugar were of a base rationing where you were allotted a certain amount, depending upon your family, every month. The next items rationed, however, were done with the price point system, which was rather complicated. Dairy, canned foods, and meats. The points fluctuated on these as demand rose or fell. So, if America thought there was a shortage on canned spinach, the price point would go up on that, where as if they had a lot of canned corn, the price on those would be set low. The price point system heavily depended upon women. Local groups of housewives would be selected to form a committee within their community to run tabs on food products basically. They'd gather information from other women as to what foods were being consumed in their homes, and they themselves would tabulate what they were consuming, and then send these figures to the OPA. This is how they knew what foods were being chosen over others, so as to know what points to set foods at, in order to ensure that everyone was able to get items and certain ones wouldn't run out too quickly. Sadly, during this time period, though people cared about all the people, the black population weren't allowed to form committees within their communities, but were allowed to include their numbers to the white ladies of their local area, who would then report it to the OPA. So, one example he included were Chitlins. This needed no explaining because everyone in the audience knew what they were. They are the small intestines of pigs (sometimes cows or other animals) that are boiled down and are eaten. Generally only black people and the French (as in the French people in France, not French descendants in America) eat this. The same is true now as it was then. The OPA, comprised of white men, knew what these were and also did not eat them as most white people do not then or today. They set the price point for one chitlin rather high. It wasn't ridiculously high, but say one can of green beans was four points (a low price point for a canned good), then so were chitlins. Only, those white men didn't know how one prepares chitlins and you need a lot of them, because they boil down, so you need a gallon buckets worth to make one dish of it basically. So, no one was going to be able to afford to get the necessary quantity and the OPA would essentially be stuck with rotting chitlins. So, without the committees, those women wouldn't have learned from the black women in their communities that you need a lot of them to boil down, so the price point wasn't going to work. This is why the local women of the communities were so important with the rationing. It's just a shame that the black women couldn't form their own committees and report directly to the OPA. It's also a shame that all of the publications featured only white people. Which the black women brought up to the white female committees, who then reported that to the OPA as well. The OPA is stated as not wanted to alienate the black communities, but they also didn't change their publications to show black people as well. Rationing also focused more heavily on the children than on soldiers. Again, America did not know how long it would be in the war, and as with any war the point is to win. If it were to drag out, they'd need soldiers and where do soldiers come from? Younger generations. So, families with small children were allotted more milk than families without, and in posters and pamphlets that were printed up at the time, it was always emphasized that women and small children get the milk before anyone, but that if anyone needed to go without, to always make sure the small children got all of the milk. It's not that America didn't want children to survive simply as human beings and offspring of families. They certainly didn't want children to end up dying because of food rationing, though this probably wouldn't have been the case, considering they did slightly over ration compared to what we know now (as we know when the war ended), but impounding this information into the publics consciousness was vital for if and when supplies were diminishing. But they were not shy in their official reports of wanting to keep the children alive so they could tap them as soldiers when and if the time came. They didn't blare it out on their posters, but it was a reason. It was not a bad concept, the idea of rationing, though it did work very oddly indeed. Britain had already tested the limits of food rationing before we implemented it in 1942. They knew the bare minimum a family could survive on for a month. We used that knowledge with our own rationing program. I don't know the numbers, but say that Britain found it was 75% scale back. The US only scaled back about 40%. So, Americans were in no way starving in the slightest or dealing with hard times food-wise. Most households after the war reported that the food they ate was pretty much the same as before the war, with 5% smaller portions over all. Basically, rationing, as far as food and recipes went, was only a minor inconvenience. But it was good for the fact that it kept inflation in check. Because any war will cause quite a bit of inflation. American households would have been worse off without the rationing system, as at least this way they were allotted certain items, where as with inflation they probably wouldn't have even been able to afford most of the items like meats and sugar. And even though Victory Gardens and home canning were posterized during this time, it wasn't a huge amount of people that were actually involved in either, as opposed to what we hear today. About 40% of the population had Victory Gardens, which is a lot, but is not in the 90th percentile like one would believe. And most of that 40% lived in urban areas. Home canning too was, in itself, a bit of a sticky wicket. Sure one could have food grown from their Victory garden and preserve it too, so that the price point tickets could go towards something else. However, it takes a lot of tin to make a pressure cooker, which is something the military wanted to reserve for weapons manufacturing. There was also tins for some of the glass lids for the canning jars. Even if you had glass lids, the attachment ring was tin. You also needed a lot of sugar to preserve certain foods. And if you told your local committee that you were canning, you were allotted more sugar. So, it does seem kind of like a weird a no win situation and a bit illogical. Also certain businesses were somewhat exempt from rationing. Restaurants and bakeries for example. They were allotted huge numbers of rationed goods compared to families, so it's no wonder that the number of people eating out at restaurants tripled during the war years. 20 million people in the US were eating at restaurants before the war versus the 60 million that were eating there during the war years. There were two reasons. One, more people were in the workforce than before. People had extra jobs, or new jobs, and also people were volunteering. More people were away from their homes than at them and so did not have the time to cook for themselves. Another reason that is part of this one is that the war created a lot of jobs which created money. People had money to spend. More money than price point tickets. Two, is that you could go to the restaurant and have that high price point steak (which you might not have except once a month, or once every three months) with the heavily rationed cup of joe with sugar in it for what? $2.50? You didn't have to use price point tickets or your reserve to order food here and most people had the extra funds now. Bakeries were also allotted great quantities of sugar. So, why not go and purchase a cake from the bakery for a small price than using up all your rationed reserves to cobble one together? It does seem like rationing was a ridiculous idea, however without it and without price control, that steak and coffee meal at the restaurant would have been a lot higher than the (and I'm guessing at a price) $2.50. People probably wouldn't be able to have spent the money they were earning on eating out at restaurants, but price control (a direct result of rationing) provided that opportunity so that prices were the same before the war. It ensured that you could still purchase non rationed items at the same price as you did before the war, otherwise you might as well forget that chocolate you were wanting to purchase at it would be close to $1 instead of the 5 - 10 cents or whatever it was. Which he didn't explain why chocolate wasn't rationed and it seems like it would be; America importing it from South America and all. Perhaps the way it traveled was the same way as coffee? Or else America is just stupid? I don't know. But it was an interesting lecture with a lot of information that I did not know. Everything I heard was not from first hand accounts (like my grandparents) but from people my parents' age who were born after the war. Things like "everyone had a Victory Garden" "everyone canned" "Food was rationed so extremely that they were hard times." I've no doubt that things were different and it wasn't all unicorns and roses. And while my maternal grandmother didn't talk about it, she had lived through two World Wars and if coffee went on sale, she did buy like five cans and would mutter, "Coffee.... I have to get this..." But I also have to take into account that my grandmother was slightly crazy. I loved her, but she was certifiable. She'd also lived through two wars, one when she was a child. There's no telling what her mother, who was always crazy, might have said about "what if we're left without." That kind of fear trickles down and can scar a kid. I don't know if she heard things like this, but she might have. However, I did interview her for a school project on what her life was like during The Great Depression and basically because her father worked at the newspaper and newspapers were vital, he never lost his job and her life really didn't change. They had a home and a car and she could go to the picture show whenever she wanted and could still attend university, though in her second year some people never came back because their families had lost too much and couldn't afford the tuition. So, I'm thinking that if her life was pretty dang grand during The Great Depression, then it probably wasn't that bad during The Great War. I can not use my limited knowledge on one grandmother to encase an entire scenario. My paternal grandparents didn't buy coffee in bulk when it was on sale or mutter "Coffee... I have to get this..." But there's also different factors here as well. Both of these grandparents grew up poor, in rural communities in the south. They weren't born until after The Great War. My grandfather was also a soldier during WWII, whereas my maternal grandparents were from small towns in the north, rural and po-dunk today, but not at the turn of the 20th century. He served in The Great War, so wasn't serving in WWII, but by that time they were living in the south. My paternal grandmother canned, I think because that's what poor southerners did, not because it was some new fangled thing during the war. She'd already grown up growing her own food and preserving it, and was taught that this is what she would do when she had a family, which was not the case with my maternal grandmother. So, unless you actually heard it from an adult who lived during the time, I'd take those "family stories" with a grain of salt and actually learn about rationing in WWII. But the main point here is that rationing did happen and it was confusing for a reason, and a nice reason at that. They did the price point system on those last three food groups; dairy, canned vegetables and fruit, and meats, because it was important to them that the American public still had freedom of choice. That's right. They could have made it easy, but hardly even considered it and instead tried to work out a program where people could obtain what they wanted and not what the government said they should have. They could have just said, you get this many cans of spinach and this many cans of peas and you get cottage cheese and ground turkey. They could have had everything already boxed up and ready to be picked up by families at the beginning of the month. They didn't because what if someone doesn't like spinach, or someone doesn't like turkey? So, the system was confusing so that it ensured every person would have the same (so not some people having more than others) and that they could get whatever they wanted and liked and weren't stuck with items they didn't want. I agree with Dr. Haley that it was a really nice gesture. They could have gone the easy route, but they really cared about what the American people wanted. And he did bring up the boxes that our current president wants to give out to people and while it might seem nice, I have to agree that it's not who America is, not who she was, or who she wants to be. American people like the right to choose. The freedom to do what they want, buy what they want, not to be told what to do. Everyone praises WWII "those were real men", "what a war", "victory, glory,..." "the greatest generation"; and yet in the midsts of a war, a real war, the American government went out of its way to ensure that everyone got an equal share of what they wanted and not what they were told to have.
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AuthorA girl from South Mississippi who finds herself in exploration. Archives
November 2019
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