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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 May 2012
World War II, some scholars have argued, interrupted Americans’ “love affair” with the automobile. According to this school of thought, gasoline rationing temporarily curtailed car driving and suspended car culture before both surged in the postwar era. This essay argues that World War II strengthened, rather than interrupted, Americans’ attachment to the automobile and solidified driving as a fundamental part of American culture. Ration boards distinguished between “essential” and “nonessential” driving and justified gasoline rationing as the only method to preserve civilian driving when supplies of gasoline were low. Thus at the same time as government and private industry were encouraging Americans to limit their driving, they were sending a strong message that Americans needed to drive and that foregoing driving whenever one wanted was a true, if temporary, hardship. Advertisements and government propaganda conflated car ownership with citizenship and portrayed driving as integral to the American way of life. But this mode of citizenship was not available to all: posters, pamphlets, and advertisements portrayed the American driver almost exclusively as white and most often as male. Such depictions implied that the mobility and independence that driving afforded were the sole domain of white American men.
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2 These posters are reproduced online on the George C. Marshall Library website, http://library.marshallfoundation.org/posters/library/index_posters.php, and the National Archives Powers of Persuasion exhibit website, www.archives.gov/exhibits/powers_of_persuasion/use_it_up/images_html/ride_with_hitler.html, accessed 18 Sept. 2011.
3 Seiler, Cotton, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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5 Seiler, Cotton, “So that We as a Race Might Have Something to Travel By,” American Quarterly, 58, 4 (2006)Google Scholar.
6 Thomas J. Sugrue, “Driving While Black: The Car and Race Relations in Modern America,” Automobile in American Life and Society, www.autolife.umd.umich.edu/Race/R_Casestudy/R_Casestudy1.htm; Paul Gilroy, “Driving While Black,” in Daniel Miller, ed. Car Cultures (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Lipsitz, George, “‘Swing Low, Sweet Cadillac’: White Supremacy, Antiblack Racism, and the New Historicism,” American Literary History, 7, 4 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 See Sarah Frohardt-Lane, “Race, Public Transit, and Automobility in World War II Detroit,” PhD dissertation, University of Illinois, 2011.
8 Scharff, Virginia, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Walsh, Margaret, “Gendering Mobility: Women, Work and Automobility in the United States,” The Historian, 93, 3 (2008)Google Scholar; Clarke, Deborah, Driving Women: Fiction and Automobile Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
9 Walsh, 376.
10 See Flink, James J., The Automobile Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990)Google Scholar; idem, The Car Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975); Foster, A Nation on Wheels; Lewis, David L. and Goldstein, Laurence, eds., The Automobile in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983)Google Scholar. One exception is Heitman, John, The Automobile in American Life (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2009)Google Scholar, which devotes a chapter to World War II.
11 See, for example, Yergin, The Prize, 391; Casdorph, Paul, Let the Good Times Roll: Life at Home in America during World War II (New York: Paragon House, 1989), 14Google Scholar; Foster, 32–33.
12 Steinberg, Ted, Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 213Google Scholar.
13 See for example Winkler, Allan M., The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Weinberg, Sydney, “What to Tell America: The Writers’ Quarrel in the Office of War Information,” Journal of American History, 55, 1 (June 1968): 73–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bird, William L., Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Horten, Gerd, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda during World War II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Koppes, Clayton R. and Black, Gregory D., Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York: Free Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
14 Winkler, 8–9, 20.
15 Ibid., 31. Before the OWI, Roosevelt had established the Office of Government Reports (September 1939), the Division of Information within the Office of Emergency Management (March 1941), and the Office of Facts and Figures (October 1941).
16 Winkler, 35; and Weinberg.
17 See Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Vintage Books, 2004)Google Scholar; Bentley, Amy, Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar; Honey, Maureen, “The ‘Womanpower’ Campaign: Advertising and Recruitment Propaganda during World War II,” Frontiers, 6, 1 (1981), 50–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Meg Jacobs, “How about Some Meat? The Office of Price Administration, Consumption Politics, and State Building from the Bottom Up, 1941–1946,” Journal of American History, 84, 3 (Dec. 1997), 910–41; Mark H. Leff, “Home-Front Mobilization in World War II: American Political Images of Civic Responsibility,” in Roger E. Kanet, ed., Regional Conflicts and Conflict Resolution (Urbana: Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security, 1995): 277–97; idem, “The Politics of Sacrifice on the American Home Front in World War II,” Journal of American History, 77, 4 (1991); McGovern, Charles, Sold American (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sparrow, James T., “‘Buying Our Boys Back’: The Mass Foundations of Fiscal Citizenship in World War II, Journal of Policy History, 20, 2 (April 2008), 263–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Dannagal Goldthwaite, “Sacrifice, Consumption, and the American Way of Life,” Communication Review, 8 (2005), 27–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 Young, “Sacrifice and Consumption in WWII,” 47.
19 Baruch, Bernard M., ed., Report of the Rubber Survey Committee, Washington, DC, 1942, 34Google Scholar.
20 Ibid., 34.
21 On the General Motors buyout of streetcars across the United States in order to replace them with General Motors-produced buses, see Bradford Snell, “American Ground Transport,” in Jerome H. Skolnick and Elliott Currie (eds.), Crisis in American Institutions (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1985); Klein, Jim and Olson, Martha, Taken for a Ride (Hohokus, NJ: New Day Films, 1996)Google Scholar; Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Black, Edwin, Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Kay, Jane Holtz, Asphalt Nation (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1997)Google Scholar; Doyle, Jack, Taken for a Ride: Detroit's Big Three and the Politics of Pollution (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000)Google Scholar; Kloby, Jerry, Inequality, Power, and Development: The Task of Political Sociology (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997)Google Scholar.
22 Cohen, 65.
23 Flamm, Bradley, “Putting the Brakes on ‘Non-essential’ Travel: 1940s Wartime Mobility, Prosperity, and the U.S. Office of Defense,” Journal of Transport History, 27, 1 (March 2006), 79CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 While nationwide gasoline rationing was implemented because of the rubber shortage, on the East Coast gasoline rationing began in March 1942 because of German submarines’ success in sinking oil tankers off the Atlantic coast, causing temporary gasoline shortages to the region. “Nonessential” driving, informally known as pleasure driving, was also temporarily banned on the East Coast because of the gasoline shortage.
25 Rae, John, The American Automobile: A Brief History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 149Google Scholar.
26 Galbraith, John Kenneth, A Life in Our Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 157Google Scholar.
27 Ibid., 157–58.
28 Flamm.
29 “Information Campaign for the Car Sharing Program,” File “Government Campaign Materials: Car Sharing–Mileage–Tires–Transportation,” Record Group 208, Entry 141, Box 751, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
30 Ellipsis in original. Office of Price Administration, Department of Information, “The Facts about the Need for Car Pooling,” p. 3, File “Gas Rationing and Car Sharing, Office of War Information,” Record Group 208, Entry 69, Box 221, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
31 OWI Press Release, File “Gasoline Situation Box 1042,” Entry 198 RG 208 OWI NC–148; 13 Sept. 1944.
32 Chevrolet Motor Division, General Motors Corporation, “Chevrolet Car Conservation Plan,” 7 Feb. 1942, Collier's, 39, Reel 10, D'Arcy Collection, University of Illinois Communications Library.
33 Chevrolet Motor Division, General Motors Corporation, “Your Chevrolet Dealer,” 29 May 1943, Saturday Evening Post, 33, Reel 10, D'Arcy Collection, University of Illinois Communications Library.
34 Office of War Information, Bureau of Special Services, Surveys Division, Special Memorandum No. 102: Car Owners Look at the Tire Situation, 28 Jan. 1944.
35 Office of War Information Domestic Radio Bureau Fact Sheet No. 256, “New Car-Pooling Regulations,” 24 July 1944, File “Gas Rationing and Car Sharing, Office of War Information,” Record Group 208, Entry 69, Box 221, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
36 Ibid.
37 “The Facts about the Need for Car Pooling,” p. 2, File “Gas Rationing and Car Sharing,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 69, Box 221, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
38 Malcolm Lund to William H. Wells, 9 Sept. 1943, File “Gas Rationing and Car Sharing,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 69, Box 221, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
39 US Office of Defense Transportation, Civilian War Transport: A Record of the Control of Domestic Traffic Operations, 1941–1946 (Washington, DC, 1948), 297.
40 Office of War Information, “U. S. Government Transportation Campaigns – to Save Rubber, and to Conserve America's Truck, Bus, Railroad, and Local Transit Facilities,” March 1943, File “Government Campaign Materials: Car Sharing–Mileage–Tires–Transportation,” Record Group 208, Entry 141, Box 751, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
41 “Information Campaign for the Car Sharing Program,” File “Government Campaign Materials: Car Sharing–Mileage–Tires–Transportation,” Record Group 208, Entry 141, Box 751, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD, underlining in original.
42 Ibid. Underlining in original.
43 File “Gasoline Program and Conservation,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 66, OWI Records of Deputy Director Maurice Hanson, Nov. 1943–Oct. 1945, Box 1, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
44 “Go 'Way Ghost!”, File “Gasoline Program and Conservation,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 66, OWI Records of Deputy Director Maurice Hanson, Nov. 1943–Oct. 1945, Box 1, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
45 “He doesn't get around much anymore!”, File “Gasoline Program and Conservation,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 66, OWI Records of Deputy Director Maurice Hanson, Nov. 1943–Oct. 1945, Box 1, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
46 United Motors Service, “Housewife with an ‘A’ card,” 20 Feb. 1943, Saturday Evening Post, 40, Reel 10, D'Arcy Collection, University of Illinois Communications Library.
47 “Delightful New Way to Reduce Hips,” File “Gasoline Rationing,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 40, Box 144, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
48 File “Programs 9-1, Gas and Rubber 1942–44,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 1, Records of the Office of the Director, 1942–45, Box 6, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
49 “Look, Lady – No Sneakin’ Sub Can Keep Us from Deliverin’ the Gas!”, File “Gasoline Rationing,” Office of War Information, Record Group 208, Entry 40, Box 144, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
50 Walsh, “Gendering Mobility,” 384.
51 Before the campaign, only 48% of Americans in these areas thought gasoline rationing necessary. Office of War Information, Surveys Division, Memorandum No. 42, “Public Opinion after Two Weeks of Nationwide Gasoline Rationing,” 5 Jan. 1943.
52 In September 1943, when asked what problem they would like to discuss with their Congressmen, “gasoline rationing” was mentioned more frequently than any other problem except for “high cost of living.” By contrast, no other rationing concerns were in the top ten listed. Gallup Poll, “Important Problems,” 3 Sept. 1943.
53 Memorandum No. 42, “Public Opinion After Two Weeks of Nationwide Gasoline Rationing.”
54 Ibid., 4.
55 Ibid., 9.
56 Steve F. Reznik to W. M. Jeffers, Office of Price Administration, 7 Nov. 1942, File “Detroit, MI, Office of Defense Transportation,” Record Group 219, Series 109, Box 115, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
57 Joseph Eastman, director of Office of Defense Transportation, to Steve F. Reznik, 20 Nov. 1942, File “Detroit, MI, Office of Defense Transportation,” Record Group 219, Series 109, Box 115, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.
58 Quoted in Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 70.
59 See Leff, “The Politics of Sacrifice.”
60 United Motors Service, “Fill her up … MY EYE,” Saturday Evening Post, 27 Oct. 1945, 44, Reel 10, D'Arcy Collection, University of Illinois Communications Library.
61 United Motors Service, “What's to Stop Us?”, Saturday Evening Post, 22 Dec. 1945, 42, Reel 10, D'Arcy Collection, University of Illinois Communications Library.