![]() ![]() government’s Office of Price Administration (OPA) had encouraged the public to save up their money (ideally by buying war bonds) for a brighter future. ![]() factories that had proven so essential to the war effort quickly mobilized for peacetime, rising to meet the needs of consumers who had been encouraged to save up their money in preparation for just such a post-war boom.īy the summer of 1945, Americans had been living under wartime rationing policies for more than three years, including limits on such common goods as rubber, sugar, gasoline, fuel oil, coffee, meat, butter, milk and soap. Most returning veterans had no trouble finding jobs, according to Herman. View of the assembly line and workers at the Studebaker automobile manufacturing plant in South Bend, Indiana, 1946.īut history proved the pessimists wrong. A report released in mid-1945 by Senator James Mead of New York took this opinion, arguing that if the war in the Pacific ended quickly, “the United States would find itself largely unprepared to overcome unemployment on a large scale.” After All That War Rationing, Americans Were Ready to Spend Some economists even predicted a new crisis of mass unemployment and inflation, arguing that private businesses couldn’t possibly generate the massive amounts of capital necessary to run the pumped-up wartime factories during peacetime. businesses at the time were still “geared around producing tanks and planes, not clapboard houses and refrigerators.” As Arthur Herman wrote in his book Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in World War II, U.S. Powerful military and business leaders pushed back, and plans for widespread reconversion were postponed.īut with the war wrapping up, and millions of men and women in uniform scheduled to return home, the nation’s military-focused economy wasn’t necessarily prepared to welcome them back. In 1944, Donald Nelson of the War Production Board (WFB) proposed a plan that would reconvert idle factories to civilian production. business, military and government officials began debating the question of the country’s reconversion from military to civilian production. A new assembly line at Detroit Tank Arsenal operated by Chrysler which turned out 28-ton tanks by mass-production methods.Įven before the war ended, U.S. ![]()
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