Shaking Off Innocence and Insularity
GIOVANNI, GEORGE SIR
Shaking Off Innocence and Insularity America 1941: A Nation at the Crossroads By Ross Gregory Free Press. 400 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by George Sirgiovanni Assistant professor of history,...
...While many like to believe that "traditional values" were more widely respected in the America of 1941 than they are today, the evidence is hardly conelusive...
...With war news dominating the radio, newsreels, the print media, and even movie plots, few Americans in 1941 could ignore events overseas...
...Along the way he pauses occasionally for a close look at special points of interest: a massive wargames maneuver in Louisiana (in which General George S. Patton cheated), a miner's drab but ever-dangerous life, a snake-worshiping rite in Tennessee...
...The "conk" burned terribly, of course, but the process temporarily straightened kinky hair, making it look more like a white man's...
...A concoction of Vaseline, two eggs, two medium-sized white potatoes, and a can of Red Devil lye was applied to the head, and combed in...
...Nostalgia for the '40s is inevitable as the War generation retires and reflects upon the extraordinary times of its youth...
...One has to wonder, could today's yuppies have done as well...
...Gregory lingers on the farm— where, after all, a substantial if declining portion of the population continued to live...
...Indeed, America 1941 is a well-researched, well-written overview of the "time in between" America's emergence from the Great Depression and entry into the War...
...Sports heroes share the chapter with a wealth of information about 1941's Broadway plays, radio shows, films, popular music, literature, and other entertainments...
...The "American Century" dawned in 1941, and came of age with victory in 1945...
...This dress...
...Gregory quotes a national poll in late 1940 that asked Americans how often they attended church...
...America 1941: A Nation at the Crossroads is Ross Gregory's first-rate contribution to the current harvest...
...If no one knew on December 7 that America had been launched "into a new role in world affairs that would last perhaps as long as the nation," everyone suspected that things never would be the same again—and they were right...
...Yet, the United States emerged from the ordeal a freer, more confident and better land than in 1941...
...News of the sneak attack (or "surprise" attack, as many now seem to prefer) generated great public exuberance and deep private sadness...
...No need for us women to get so hysterical we forget that the woman's job consists of being charming for the stronger sex...
...Usually the only view one gets of prewar rural America is the brief backward glance of thousands of worn-out farmers heading for the cities...
...Gregory's book makes it clear that the gap between social standards and social behavior was greater then, but this simply suggests that the '40s generation was more hypocritical than those that followed...
...If the Kinsey Report, the best available account of prewar sexual habits in America, is at all accurate, many middle-aged parents in the 1960s who denounced the "new" sexual "revolution" did so with crossed fingers...
...After leadmg America 1941 and other objective accounts, only the truly myopic could deny that vast strides have been made in this country on matters involving race and gender...
...In 1941 it was common for blacks—including the young Malcolm X—to "lay on a conk, " a frightening act of disfigurement...
...Few expected the "gentler sex" to go to such painful lengths to please their men...
...Reviewed by George Sirgiovanni Assistant professor of history, Rutgers University We are in the midst of a bumper crop of popular and scholarly books about the World War II era...
...Although specialists may not discover much new material in their areas of expertise, Gregory's canvas is broad and many interesting details can be found in every part of his survey...
...is a bit misleading...
...Nevertheless, before Pearl Harbor most Americans—excluding perhaps the Army inductees brought in under the country's first peacetime draft in 1940-41—regarded Europe and Asia as places "over there...
...The title belies the scope of this study...
...In Gregory's account, common folk crowd out the famous names on most pages...
...Historians are drawn to the period because it now seems clear that World War II wrought changes in this country as profound as those produced by the Civil War...
...The title Gregory chose for one of his chapters—"Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis, Joe Palooka...
...Draft-avoidance was not a phenomenon peculiar to the Vietnam War: There were a half-million more marriages than usual in 1941, and the birthrate figures for July of that year —nine months after Congress passed the conscription bill—soared...
...Appropriately, the reader never forgets that in the case of thousands of the ordinary Joes, 1941 would be the last year f or enjoying life's simple pleasures...
...All were sharply affected by the troubled international scene, which was tugging a reluctant America inexorably to the crossroads where prewar divisiveness and self-doubt would give way to a decade marked by "unity and boisterousness" for military victory and globalism...
...The evolution was not a gentle process: Misjudgments were made, principles were compromised, injustices were inflicted, and human lives were not given to the cause so much as they were taken for it...
...Ill-prepared for war, the American people shook free of their innocence and insularity and assumed the mantle of world leadership forced upon them by events...
...Rosie the Riveter, keep your priorities straight...
...history focus upon Franklin D. Roosevelt's gradual movements toward intervention, in the face of jittery public opinion and the determined opposition of America First, the isolationist pressure group...
...It is much more ambitious than a dayby-day chronicling of headline events during a critical year—"the year we held our breath...
...Nor were Americans necessarily more patriotic in 1941...
...Gregory, a professor of history at Western Michigan University, examines Americans on the job, on the move, at worship, and at play...
...Of the earlier generation of Americans, one suspects that Ross Gregory has it about right: "Maybe they were special people after all...
...Most discussions of this short yet important interlude in U.S...
...As always, popular culture served a useful purpose, providing outlets for people in need of escaping temporarily from the intensifying crises about them...
...and 63 per cent of the respondents said no...
...does much for your figure, 24 hours around the clock...
...Particularly strong is the chapter on life in the countryside...
...Consider, however, the following from the Women' s Page of a Los Angeles newspaper, soon after War had been declared: "We've found this little number we call the 'blackout dress,' because it is completely black except for the alluringly feminine jeweled pink buttons fastening down the front...
...Any book about 1941 has a readymade climax that is no less poignant because it is known to all...
...Desperate, old-world poverty still prevailed in many rural areas, but the tractor, automobiles, radio, and the movies slowly were bringing even these back country regions into the larger community of modern America...
...Politics and diplomacy are not excluded, but the author devotes proportionally more space to social, economic and cultural trends...
...For awhile yet, people's concerns centered on matters closer to home...
...The most frequent response was "never," followed by 52 times a year, or weekly...
...The same poll asked, "Did you go to church last Sunday...
Vol. 72 • February 1989 • No. 3
