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TechnoratiHome-Front Ecology: What Our Grandparents Can Teach Us About Saving The World
Does this generation of Americans have the "right stuff" to meet the epic challenges of sustaining life on a rapidly warming planet? Sure, the mainstream media are full of talk about carbon credits, hybrid cars, and smart urbanism--but even so, our environmental footprints are actually growing larger, not smaller.
The typical new U.S. home, for instance, is 40 percent larger than that of 25 years ago, even though the average household has fewer people. In that same period, dinosaur-like SUVs (now 50 percent of all private vehicles) have taken over the freeways, while the amount of retail space per capita (an indirect but reliable measure of consumption) has quadrupled.
Too many of us, in other words, talk green but lead supersized lifestyles--giving fodder to the conservative cynics who write columns about Al Gore's electricity bills. Our culture appears hopelessly addicted to fossil fuels, shopping sprees, suburban sprawl, and beef-centered diets. Would Americans ever voluntarily give up their SUVs, McMansions, McDonald's, and lawns?
The surprisingly hopeful answer lies in living memory. In the 1940s, Americans simultaneously battled fascism overseas and waste at home. My parents, their neighbors, and millions of others left cars at home to ride bikes to work, tore up their front yards to plant cabbage, recycled toothpaste tubes and cooking grease, volunteered at daycare centers and USOs, shared their houses and dinners with strangers, and conscientiously attempted to reduce unnecessary consumption and waste. The World War II home front was the most important and broadly participatory green experiment in U.S. history. Lessing Rosenwald, the chief of the Bureau of Industrial Conservation, called on Americans "to change from an economy of waste--and this country has been notorious for waste--to an economy of conservation." A majority of civilians, some reluctantly but many others enthusiastically, answered the call.
The most famous symbol of this wartime conservation ethos was the victory garden. Originally promoted by the Wilson administration to combat the food shortages of World War I, household and communal kitchen gardens had been revived by the early New Deal as a subsistence strategy for the unemployed. After Pearl Harbor, a groundswell of popular enthusiasm swept aside the skepticism of some Department of Agriculture officials and made the victory garden the centerpiece of the national "Food Fights for Freedom" campaign.
By 1943, beans and carrots were growing on the former White House lawn, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and nearly 20 million other victory gardeners were producing 30 to 40 percent of the nation's vegetables--freeing the nation's farmers, in turn, to help feed Britain and Russia. In The Garden Is Political, a 1942 volume of popular verse, poet John Malcolm Brinnin acclaimed these "acres of internationalism" taking root in U.S. cities. Although suburban and rural gardens were larger and usually more productive, some of the most dedicated gardeners were inner-city children. With the participation of the Boy Scouts, trade unions, and settlement houses, thousands of ugly, trash-strewn vacant lots in major industrial cities were turned into neighborhood gardens that gave tenement kids the pride of being self-sufficient urban farmers. In Chicago, 400,000 schoolchildren enlisted in the "Clean Up for Victory" campaign, which salvaged scrap for industry and cleared lots for gardens.
Victory gardening transcended the need to supplement the wartime food supply and grew into a spontaneous vision of urban greenness (even if that concept didn't yet exist) and self-reliance. In Los Angeles, flowers ("a builder of citizen morale") were included in the "Clean-Paint-Plant" program to transform the city's vacant spaces, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden taught the principles of "garden culture" to local schoolteachers and thousands of their enthusiastic students.
The war also temporarily dethroned the automobile as the icon of the American standard of living. Detroit assembly lines were retooled to build Sherman tanks and B-24 Liberators. Gasoline was rationed and, following the Japanese conquest of Malaya, so was rubber. (The U.S. Office of the Rubber Director was charged with getting used tires to factories, where they became parts for tanks and trucks.) When shortages and congestion brought streetcar and bus systems across the country near the breaking point, it became critical to induce workers to share rides or adopt alternative means of transportation. While overcrowded defense hubs like Detroit, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., never achieved the national goal of 3.5 riders per car, they did double their average occupancy through extensive networks of neighborhood, factory, and office carpools. Car sharing was reinforced by gas-ration incentives, stiff fines for solo recreational driving, and stark slogans: "When you ride ALONE," warned one poster, "you ride with Hitler!"
Even hitchhiking became an officially sanctioned form of ride sharing. Drivers were encouraged to pick up war workers stranded at bus stops and soldiers heading home for furloughs. In Colorado, the Republican Party vowed to save rubber by having all of its candidates in the 1944 elections hitchhike to campaign rallies. In Hollywood, a starlet in revealing tennis shorts won editorial praise for helping a stranded serviceman catch a ride home. Emily Post, America's mandarin of manners, frowned on such roadside seductions and emphasized a modest etiquette for snagging a ride: It was "bad form to jerk the thumb when hitchhiking"; instead, a woman should "display her defense identification tag." She also warned that "these 'rides' are not social gatherings and conversation is not necessary," although many baby boomers are undoubtedly the result of wartime ride sharing.
One of the major films of 1942 was Orson Welles's The Magnificent Ambersons, a pessimistic chronicle of how modern corporate capitalism and the automobile had destroyed the easygoing horse-and-buggy world of the late 19th century. Yet aspects of that world, including even the horses and buggies, were reborn under the auspices of wartime austerity. To the delight of children as well as elderly people who still mourned the passing of the urban horse, grocers and delivery companies circumvented the rubber shortage by hooking up Old Nellie to a wagon. Suburbanites in Connecticut and Long Island began to "break their saddle horses to harness," the New York Times reported in May 1942, adding that "harness makers are doing a brisk little trade and horse-drawn carriages are coming out of hiding."
More important, that national obsession of the 1890s, the bicycle, made a huge comeback, partly inspired by the highly publicized example of wartime Britain, where bikes transported more than a quarter of the population to work. Less than two months after Pearl Harbor, a new secret weapon, the "victory bike"--made of nonessential metals, with tires from reclaimed rubber--was revealed on front pages and in newsreels. Hundreds of thousands of war workers, meanwhile, confiscated their kids' bikes for their commute to the plant or office, and scores of cities and towns sponsored bike parades and "bike days" to advertise the patriotic advantages of Schwinn over Chevrolet. With recreational driving curtailed by rationing, families toured and vacationed by bike. In June 1942, park officials reported that "never has bicycling been so popular in Yosemite Valley as it is this season." Public health officials praised the dual contributions of victory gardening and bike riding to enhanced civilian vigor and well-being, even predicting that it might reduce the already ominously increasing cancer rate.
Ideas as well as commodities were recycled in the war years. Much of the idealism of the early New Deal reemerged in wartime housing, fair employment, and childcare programs, as well as in the postwar economic conversion from military to civilian production. One particularly interesting example was the "rational consumption" movement sponsored by the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD), which encouraged "buying only for need" and set up consumer information centers that gave advice on family nutrition, food conservation, and appliance repair. The OCD consumer committees challenged the sacred values of mass consumption--the rapid turnover of styles, the tyranny of fashion and advertising, built-in obsolescence, and so on--while promoting a new concept of the housewife as an "economy soldier" who ran her household with the same frugal efficiency that Henry Kaiser ran his shipyards.
Yet with millions of women wielding rivet guns and welding torches, traditional concepts of gender roles were increasingly contested. In April 1942, for example, the New York Times visited a trailer village near a Connecticut defense plant, expecting to find young wives yearning for the postwar future of suburban homes and model kitchens that the 1939 New York World's Fair had prophesied. Instead, they found female war workers who liked their industrial jobs and were content to live in simple quarters that demanded little or no housework.
One point of convergence between this incipient "war feminism" and the conservation imperative was the fashion upheaval of 1942. Desperate to conserve wool, rayon, silk, and cotton, the War Production Board (WPB) believed that the same techniques that were revolutionizing the production of bombers and Liberty ships--the simplification of design and the standardization of components--could be usefully applied to garment manufacture. In an unusual role for a department store heir, H. Stanley Marcus (of the Neiman Marcus dynasty) became the WPB's chief commissar for rational fashions. As such, he emphasized conservation and durability--priorities that coincided with the egalitarian-feminist values long advocated by the radical fashion designer Elizabeth Hawes, whose 1943 book, Why Women Cry, was a bold manifesto on behalf of the millions of "wenches with wrenches."
The goal was a "slim, abbreviated silhouette," whose higher hemlines, girdleless form, and stabilized variation in styles would free fabric and looms to make more uniforms, tents, and parachutes. As shorter skirts, along with overalls and pants, became the WPB-approved norm, Life magazine photographers delighted the troops overseas with images of true patriotic zeal: starlets cutting off the bottoms of their nightgowns or showing off the shorter pajamas that were helping to win the war. Those nightgown trimmings, along with the wool cuffs from men's pants (ordered sheared by the WPB in May 1942), were eagerly recycled into blankets and other military fabrics in the 500-odd sewing workshops across the country that had been organized in response to an appeal from the Bureau of Industrial Conservation.
Conservation also warred with luxury lifestyles. Although defense production was adding billions to the net worth of America's plutocrats, it became harder for them to spend it in the usual conspicuous ways. In order to force builders to meet the acute demand for affordable housing for war workers, the WPB banned construction of homes costing more than $500 (the median value of the average home was then about $3,000). Simultaneously, thousands of servants fled Park Avenue and Beverly Hills to take higher-paying jobs in defense factories, while many of those who remained joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations' new United Domestic Workers Union. Some millionaires retreated to their clubs to grouse about Franklin D. Roosevelt's latest outrages, but others accepted the servant shortage and moved into smaller (although still luxurious) apartments while allowing their mansions to become temporary war housing. In a typical story, the Chicago Tribune in July 1942 described the adventures of seven young Navy petty officers and their wives who were sharing an old robber baron's mansion. (Today we would call it "cohousing.")
The total mobilization of the time was dubbed the "People's War," and while it had no lack of conservative critics, there was remarkable consistency in the observation of journalists and visitors (as well as in later memoirs) that the combination of a world crisis, full employment, and mild austerity seemed to be a tonic for the American character. New York Times columnist Samuel Williamson, for example, monitored the impacts of rationing and restricted auto use on families in commuter suburbs that lacked "the self-sufficiency of the open country" and the "complete integration of the large city." After noting initial popular dismay and confusion, Williamson was heartened to see suburbanites riding bikes, mending clothes, planting gardens, and spending more time in cooperative endeavors with their neighbors. Without cars, people moved at a slower pace but seemed to accomplish more. Like Welles in The Magnificent Ambersons, Williamson pointed out that American life had been revolutionized in a single generation and many good things seemingly lost forever; the war and the emphasis on conservation were now resurrecting some of the old values. "One of these," he wrote, "may be the rediscovery of the home--not as a dormitory, but as a place where people live. Friendships will count for more."
An alternative future lurked in Williamson's hopeful comment, but it was swept away by the backlash against the social and economic reforms of the New Deal and the postwar euphoria of abundance. Few of the core values or innovative programs of the People's War survived either the cold war or the cultural homogeneity of suburbanization. Yet, even a few short generations later, we can find surprising inspirations and essential survival skills in that brief age of victory gardens and happy hitchhikers.
Mike Davis is the author, most recently, of Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. He is working on a new book on the geopolitics of climate change.
19 Comments so far
Show AllGather wild edibles, grow our own, brew your own, buy used, trade & barter. Buy less!
Why buy spinich when you can pick all the lamb's quarters you want all summer long! You can eat the leaves right off the plant, no bad taste, great for salad.
Growing food locally is a matter of national security!
This is all a repeat of 72-73 gas shortage when we then realized crude oil won't last forever. Now we are learning the same delimma over again!
"When you ride alone, you ride with CHENEY!"
*splurp* I think i just s**t my pants.
The cookbooks of former times are rather instructive, too.
Back in former times, it was usual to save odds and ends of vegetable parings: potato peelings, broccoli stems, tough outer leaves of cabbage, leek tops, the cooking liquids from vegetables and the soaking liquid from beans.
What you did with this stuff was throw it into the stock pot (along with parsley and a bay leaf), where it became a vegetable broth--and the basis for the day's soup.
As a vegetarian, this is a tip I've thoroughly enjoyed. It sure beats paying more than a dollar for a dinky can of inferior quality vegetable broth. It's healthy, too: The portions of vegetables that we discard are often the most nutritious parts. I save them in the freezer until I have a good quantity.
Once the stock is made, the odds and ends of vegetable parings are strained out. Then you use this broth instead of water as the basis of your soup--adding onions, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and other ingredients. The stock makes for a far heartier, more delicious soup.
Then you throw the cooked vegetable parings that you used to make the broth on the compost pile.
Also, why not use wild greens to create your vegetable stock? I haven't seen this suggestion in any of the old cookbooks, but I've tried it myself. Wild greens are often far more nutritious than garden produce. My favorites for use in making soup stock are stinging nettle and lamb's quarters. Stinging nettle is so rich in minerals that herbalists suggest taking the tea as a mineral supplement. Lamb's quarters is a wild member of the spinach family that is very rich in vitamins. Wild onions, too, would be a good addition to a stock pot.
The combination of stinging nettle and lamb's quarters makes an excellent vegetable broth--especially with a bay leaf and some parsley thrown in.
Broths like this make an excellent base for miso soup--just add a bit of miso paste. Or, if you want something heartier, you can add tofu cubes, some shredded cabbage, and a few finely sliced scallions.
Former generations made a lot more use of wild greens.
Personally, I think there is no better tea in the world than one made from red clover blossoms. In my area, the meadows and roadsides are brimming with red clover, which makes a sweetly fragrant and highly nutritious and beneficial tea. Especially good with honey and a pinch of cardamom.
Food prices seem to be increasing exponentially. I share D. Decker's enthusiasm for gardening, and I really feel that it's a skill that we all should learn--if we don't want to grow hungry in the days to come.
I agree with NMBill, too: I remember life in the 50s--without so many modern conveniences. What is odd is, though people worked hard, life was actually more leisured and less rushed. Life was more meaningful; work was more meaningful.
My Father's grandparents were "Green" because of the Great Depression not WWII.
They always had rabbits, chickens, and grew most of their vegetables. What they didn't grow, my Grandmother would dig out of the big retail stores' Dempsey Dumpsters.
(I remember when my cousins accompanied our granma out shopping. She went to directly to the dumpsters and fished out several perfectly good blocks of ice cream using her nail-ended stick . Later that night, when she served dessert, my cousins gave each other an uncomfortable look and politely declined.)
In their garage, my grandparents always had shelves and shelves of stored canned goods that grandma picked up from the bargain bins. Mealtime could be an adventure...some of the cans lost their labels.
Last, my Grandparents saved, spent frugally, and stockpiled basic goods because they never could believe that the post-war prosperity would last forever.
Perhaps they were right!
In fact, when a major economic form goes into crisis mode and eventually collapses, those groups least attached to it are usually better positioned to survive and many times prosper.
So, if and when the present form of urban-based world capitalism grinds down, who is to say that many Third World peasants won't suddenly find that they are the lucky ones.
Roger, I believe that if you or anyone else find the stories of people pulling together and sacrificing to get us through the depression of the thirties and the war of the forties, you need to reconsider your attitude.I watched my parents and their friends all work together in a situation you could probably not imagine. There was gas rationing, sugar rationing, no TV, no cell phones, no I-Pods, no microwaves, and on and on.
However, they seemed to be happier than many folks today in spite of
the lack of a comfortable lifestyle as we have today. Divorce was only something the rich did and we kids had a great time just amusing ourselves without much help as adults were busy trying to survive. The people in this country are driving themselves nuts trying to keep up with everyone else unnessarily. Oh, we had no computers either so we learned to read and write, read books, and play games. We did not have to worry about drugs,getting into a status college, credit cards, and all that wonderful stuff. Sacrificing is not as terrible as many think and we may have to do it again in the near future.
We don't have to go as far back as the 1940s to find saner, less wasteful attitudes and behaviors common among Americans. The giant, 12 mpg and less SUVs and other ridiculously large trucks that are now seen as eternally typical of the US didn't become common here until the mid-90s, after a barrage of advertising telling Americans that this is what they wanted. Never mind that during the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s, small, efficient, very thrifty cars and trucks were the choice vehicles for most Americans. I know young Americans don't believe this, but most American vehicles during the 80s got better gas mileage and made more efficient use of space than those today. And small trucks were enormously popular at that time. Furthermore, hatchbacks were offered in almost all lines, so people weren't forced to turn to less efficient trucks if they wanted utility.
What I think happened during the 90s, though I don't think it's been researched, is that US automakers, turned anti-environmental by 12 years of Reaganism, undertook a strategy of forcing people into larger, gas-guzzling vehicles by stressing only status in their advertising, connecting status with size as they had for full-size cars prior to the mid-70s. They simultaneously reduced and in many cases eliminated hatchbacks from their lines, though hatchbacks had been a popular mainstay of US lines since the early 70s. I recall in the mid-90s starting to hear jokes on TV and in popular songs associating hatchbacks with cheapness. I think this was all part of an enormous marketing strategy to force consumers in a certain direction. (Yes, I know Americans deride the idea of mass, long-range planning as "conspiracy," but that sort of thing is part of corporate behavior.)
Before massive, military-looking vehicles and their attendant aggressive drivers became common in the 90s, you also saw more bicycles around, and they weren't just limited to a few "progressive," "eco-conscious" cities like Austin or Seattle. It was once not as scary to ride bicycles around many urban areas; car drivers were more at eye level to bike riders, for one thing, instead of a few feet above them as they are with today's monster trucks.
What's really disturbing about today's US public attitudes is that people seem to think it's always been this way, and it hasn't. There's no awareness of even recent cultural history anymore (this is partly because the most wasteful, least conserving attitudes are referred to as "conservative"). In the 1970s, environmental awareness was so pervasive in US society that even my very right-wing, very Republican, upper-middle, Texas parents headed recycling drives, drove small fuel-efficient cars, and car-pooled - both before and after the OPEC energy crisis (environmental awareness and the push for safer, more efficient vehicles preceded the oil crisis by several years).
Reagan is responsible for making the country so anti-environmental, an unthinkable stance before the 80s and one which needs to be reversed today. It can be done, because it has not always been this way and Americans as recently as the 1970s and 80s were not so greedy and mindless.
My grandparents went through the depression, as a Scots/Irish-German family in an Italian neighborhood in the NE. Bartering got everybody through and I loved listening to the lessons they learned from this life, by listening to their stories.
*Eat everything on your plate.
*Don't run out and buy something if you can fix what you have.
*Everybody had gardens and traded goods and services.
*The community came together and made sure no one was left out.
*Things were in short supply and they had to find alternatives and use innovation.
*Never call it quits.
Just living life this way builds character. It also made my Grandmother phobic about another depression leading her to shop for only what she needed.
I remember their friend's farm north of Hialeah, FL; it was about 1962, just north of the "Big Bend" in the Palmetto Expressway (12th av. / Ludlam Rd.). Beautiful BIG oak trees with moss hanging down and thousands of fireflys.
Ray and Flo Homes was their name. Ray showed me how he was making compost out of horse manure. They were pretty self-sufficient and their food came from their land. Flo, cooked meals I will never forget and Ray forged in my head the magic of food from the earth. After dinner, we kids would chase fireflys. Never wore shoes back then!
This is what I miss. Anybody familiar with that area of the country couldn't imagine today what things looked like back then, what a good life that was!
Great article,moot point. Americans no longer have the ability to sacrifice. Bill Mahar asked recently asked" If we could solve the global warming crisis by getting rid of the remote control and changing the channel by getting off the couch and changing the channel by hand, would Americans sacrifice the remote?" Sadly, I think we know the answer is NO.
By the way, when FDR signed the hemp ban back in the 1930s, he gave Corporate America the power of HOSTILE TAKEOVER !
Did this author ever take the time to include in this article the fact that the HEMP BAN 70 years ago had everything to do with forcing America to rely on fossil fuels? Hemp replaces petroleum all the way and hemp charcoal is a perfect substitute for coal. Our grandparents lived during the time when hemp was BANNED in America !
This spring I denounced my green suburban lawn, and put in manageable raised bed gardens in its place. What a treat! With minimal effort, on a .4 acre lot in the burbs, I am growing AMAZING amounts of food, thus avoiding not only trips to the grocery store to buy produce, but also growing (and thoroughly enjoying) fresh-from-the-garden ORGANIC produce. I have corn, beans, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, turnips, peppers (hot and not-hot), melons, okra, potatoes, and tomatoes, plus assorted favorite herbs. AND there's still room for the dog to run and play, and room for a washline so that I can hang out the wash instead of resorting to using a clothes dryer. It's a start. I know there's much more I can do, but the point is, it can be done! All it takes is a bit of effort, and a commitment to doing something about lessening one's impact upon the planet. Well, I guess it also involves not living in a community where a home owners' association would not allow such deviation from the "norm." There are few treats to compare with fresh food plucked from your own garden. Give it a try if you can. Let's all start our own Victory Gardens!
An 81-year-old friend taught me this creed from her youth:
Use it up,
Wear it out.
Make it do,
or do without.
Good article!! As a kid during WWII, recycling feels like a perfectly natural thing to do. And veg. gardening--my mother planted FIVE tomato plants one summer and we about drowned making canned tomatoes and catsup and chili sauce (we didn't know about salsa).
Saving cooking grease and turning it in for extra meat ration points--or shoe points--saving tin cans and newspapers for the Boy Scouts--
It is admittedly easier to cut down on driving if you either don't have a car or put it up on blocks. And it takes a while to get used to planning, asking for rides, offering rides, and hitchhiking--but I went without a car for six years (insurance went up too high) and it was interesting. And you can get a lot of groceries in a backpack.
It's not a question of "Will the American people do it?", it's the little question of "What can I do today?" AND PUBLICIZING YOUR OWN EFFORTS. The big media won't. But try your faith congregation. Ask your kids' teachers or the PTA. And your grandparents!!
...and they somehow did all this without air conditioning. A few electric fans sufficed.
Thanks to Mike Davis and respondents for showing concretely how history matters, and that it's not all bad. It's hard to remember sometimes.
I live in Austin, Texas. Unfortunately it is not as weird as it claims to be or people think - developers have pretty much taken it over, paved it over, skyscrapered it over and made it close to unaffordable for most folks.
But we still have some of the best swimming holes on the planet: Barton Springs, Deep Eddy and Big Stacy, among others.
They were built and/or improved by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s and have become municipal treasures ever since, jealously defended by both citizens and government.
Now if we can get a handle on this damned Global Warming thang, maybe we can get some respite from the seemingly endless storms and chill..........ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
My grandparents were right wing, racist catholic homophobic alcoholics who lived off dead animals and white bread. I have nothing to learn from them.
But ultimately, I don't really admire the "sacrifices" in this article. I'm sure all of those people believed in murder so much that they were willing to pitch in to have millions of people die, and save up public funds to build the atom bomb that may someday kill us all. The green left hardly existed at all back then, I'm glad today a certain class of us has more conciousness. The question, ultimately, is whether people are willing to change their lives not to promote death, but peace, kindness, and human health. Which is very different from the 1940's.
http://www.dreamingearth.net
Having been a child during WWII. I learned early to do without and to grow my own vegetables. I hang clothes outside when weather permits, and surprisingly, there are times in the winter when you can in Oregon. I still live by the creed that Ruby B's elderly friend subscribes to. I seldom have to buy clothing, because what I have is still usable and looks good. I do not have to be "In Style" anymore. I also use fluorescent bulbs throughout my house and for my porch lights. When driving on errands, I make multiple stops on what I call "The great circle tour" in town. I have cut my gasoline usage to $20.00 per month max,driving an old Buick 4 door sedan. I also take the bus if I don't have to get something like groceries. You meet lots of interesting people on the bus.
My New England Yankee grandmother always used up stuff. Full bed sheets when they wore out became twin bed sheets, then ironing board covers then dust rags. Nothing but nothing was wasted. We weren't poor, and maybe one of the reasons was that nothing went to waste.