Wartime Almanac
ILLICK, JOSEPH E.
Wartime Almanac Don't You Know There's a War On? The American Home Front, 1941-1945 By Richard R. Lingeman Putnam. 400 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Associate Professor of History, San...
...Today's best practitioners of social history use the methods and theories of these other disciplines to give new meaning to familiar facts or to draw upon hitherto unused sources...
...But the lay reader will no doubt be frustrated to find that in over 350 pages of text there is no summing up more daring than this: "The war, then, upset the social topography as it did the physical landscape...
...When present problems seem insoluble, the past is particularly attractive...
...Maybe there were no Japanese extras around Hollywood...
...Don't You Know There's a War On?, at first glance, appears to be another of the genre...
...Bookstores are currently jammed with volumes of fond recollections...
...Little attempt is made at integrating these separate subjects...
...Some lives were virtually untouched by World War II, while others were totally changed...
...war simply exaggerated them and made them more visible...
...it is more accurate than either of its so-called predecessors and also duller...
...But in view of the advances that have been made in the writing of social history, Don't You Know There's a War On...
...These divergent judgments underscore the difficulty inherent in generalizing about a society so large and diverse as that of the United States...
...It represented a chasm separating not only two periods of time but two distinct cultural worlds...
...Richard R. Lingeman, a member of the New York Times Book Review staff, applies the Times' venerated journalistic formula to history: The details are full, the generalizations limited and the conclusions properly qualified...
...In fact, battles in that part of the world seemed curiously one-dimensional...
...people met new places, new situations, new jobs, new living conditions, new ways of life, new temptations, new opportunities...
...is not an artfully structured work...
...is a period piece, an exercise in nostalgia perhaps not intended by author or publisher...
...The lack of generalization is apt to be judged a virtue rather than a vice...
...In winter the girls at school, and even some of the nimble-fingered boys, knitted squares for an afghan, while spring brought newspaper, tin-can and cooking-fat drives...
...are classified in topical chapters on civilian defense, mobility of population, wartime industrial production, labor conditions, government regulation and rationing, popular entertainment, social conflict (the Detroit race riot, the relocation of the Japanese and other such events are euphemistically labeled "War Nerves"), and national politics at the end of the War...
...Yet even this rather restrained and tentative conclusion poses a problem...
...To take a simple example, an historian who has studied the field of child development may inquire into the consequences of altered child-rearing practices due to the absence of a father (and, perhaps, the infrequent presence of a working mother) during World War II...
...is not truly popular or nostalgic...
...In the autumn we collected milkweed which, we were assured, would fill life jackets...
...Thus Pearl Harbor left an indelible impression for reasons that had nothing to do with the Empire of the Rising Sun...
...Lingeman's book bears closest resemblance to an almanac...
...His uncharacteristic anger and the racial slur were both bewildering...
...The publishers, exhibiting their usual restraint, claim that it "is destined to take its place beside Only Yesterday and The Aspirin Age as a classic of significant popular history...
...But Don't You Know There's a War On...
...For this historian, contemporaneous observations on adolescent behavior may yield new or more comprehensible conclusions, youth magazines may become valuable repositories of evidence, and the impact of the War on American society may thus be understood in broader dimensions...
...My brothers, cousins and I lay out on the lawn, identifying passing aircraft through long summer days...
...Gradually the War and its hatreds made themselves felt, but in that rural white community the Japanese remained an abstract threat, even after two older cousins and some close friends were sent to the South Pacific...
...Nor is it at all similar to the assemblage of mood pieces on the '20s and '30s comprising The Aspirin Age...
...The War" still has only one meaning for many of us and, horrible as it was, we nostalgically nurse our memories of it--perhaps now more than ever before...
...More salutary if less exciting was our victory garden, tended by a patriotic uncle who kept us well-supplied with radishes for the duration...
...From this perspective Don't You Know There's a War On...
...By describing the home front in detail and dealing with the dilemma of interpretation by avoiding it, Lingeman is on safe if rather pedestrian ground...
...A conscientious reader of the book will be overcome not with the weight of nostalgia but rather with battle fatigue brought on by the barrage of information about the War...
...But the aristocratic attitude toward the past was more easily debunked than discarded...
...Unlike Only Yesterday, in which the Big Red Scare of 1919 sets the stage for a decade of fantasy and frivolity climaxed by the Crash (punishment for the flight from reality...
...Schlesinger himself was of that early generation of historians who came to the profession out of America's middle rather than upper class, who believed in democracy rather than patrician rule...
...Reviewed by Joseph E. Mick Associate Professor of History, San Francisco State College As a boy barely seven I watched while my uncle, a newspaper editor whose good-natured bantering always centered on us children, sat hunched and distracted before the radio and uttered words never heard before (or again) in the family: "Those dirty yellow rats...
...In contrast John Aldridge, attempting in his In the Country of the Young to account for the state of American society in the '60s, has interpreted the War years from the vantage point of the postwar period...
...A satisfactory technique for describing the existence of the common people has only slowly emerged, informed by disciplines that traditionally lay outside the field of history: sociology, psychology and anthropology...
...Our frequent impersonations of Hitler--hair over forehead, comb under the nose, right arm outstretched, accompanied by a raucous rendition of "Right in Der Fuhrer??s Face"--were only a jocular cover for more secret fantasies: the life of an undercover agent or member of the resistance in Paris or Belgrade or, best of all, Berlin, assassinating the leader himself...
...My father taught aerial navigation at a nearby college, though he had never been in an airplane and steadfastly refused to fly until 1959...
...His conclusion is quite different from Lingeman's: ". . . the war had broken our connection with the past in a peculiarly final way...
...even such films as Guadalcanal Diary, if I recall correctly, focused almost entirely on our fighting men...
...demography and statistics...
...Perhaps because of my family's German ancestry, so common in eastern Pennsylvania, the Nazis were far more real...
...will prove more useful to future social historians for the raw material it provides than the conclusions it draws...
...The facts and figures, along with illustrative examples ("One such model community was Kent, Connecticut...
...Of course we all marched proudly in the V-J parade, led by the local Chevy dealer astride his dapple-gray "Jim...
...It was a war for all seasons, and we participated fully, at one time staging "This Is the Army" on top of the grand piano in the living room for gathered relatives...
...Not very healthy dreams for an adolescent, but certainly encouraged by both radio and the movies...
...Lingeman is viewing wartime developments in terms of their precedents, judging the early '40s by the '30s...
...Inevitably, these men thought that history must do more than summarize past politics, describe institutions and depict the personalities of prominent leaders, that it must embrace commonplace lives and events as well...
...This sort of approach was adequate some 40 years ago, when Arthur M. Schlesinger's American Life Series announced the respectability of social history...
...There were social ills aplenty, but for all their novelty, they were perhaps the familiar ones...
...The social structure which had once ordered, contained, and given meaning to our lives--the structures of community, school, parents, relatives, and friends--had all been left behind on the other side of the chasm...
Vol. 54 • February 1971 • No. 3
