ALL QUIET ON THE HOME FRONT

How US wartime prosperity explains

Washington WITH RONALD Reagan's insistence on putting posies on the graves of storm troopers it may look like springtime for Hitler in Washington, but it's not. No, Mr Reagan, born in 1911, a fully-formed, 30-year-old adult in 1941 when America entered the war, is not a closet anti-semite going public on the strength of his landslide election but a child of his times and his country.

That country went to war against Ger- many 40 years ago with some reluctance and no vast enthusiasm. To be sure there were Americans, millions of them, who wanted to fight to save the West, who were militant anti-fascists, but there were many other millions, possibly even a majority, who were not too terribly concerned one way or the other. If the Nazis hadn't declared war on the United States im- mediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franklin Roosevelt might not have had the political base to enter the European conflict.

In any event, when Ronald Reagan switched over from being in the cavalry reserve to active duty in the army making training films in Culver City, California (an enclave of Los Angeles), more of Amer- ica's anger was directed at Tokyo than at Berlin. As for what was happening to the Jews in Europe, that story was not well known here and when it was known it was not always fully accepted. After news of Treblinka had become available, a family friend of Franklin Roosevelt's approached him on the topic of the German massacres. For answer he was told: 'I don't want you to talk about Jews to me. Now or ever. I haven't time to listen to any Jewish wailing.'

The mortal seriousness of what would be called the Holocaust never seems to have got through to FDR. Plans and proposals for rescuing Jews seldom got an attentive hearing at the higher levels of government. The President himself toyed with outlandish-sounding schemes to settle Jew- ish refugees in weirdly unlikely places such as New Guinea instead of allowing im- migration into the United States.

The Jewish problem', as it was frequent- ly called then, had been put in the hands of I under-secretary of state Breckinridge

Long, a Roosevelt campaign worker and political contributor. Whether or not he should be called an anti-semite, his diaries reveal a man with no sympathy for the persecuted. To him 'the communists, ex- treme radicals, Jewish professional agita- tors, refugee enthusiasts' are all made of the same material. He writes that Mein Kampf was 'eloquent in opposition to Jewry and to Jews as exponents of com- munism and chaos'. Not only did Long make it as difficult as possible for Jewish refugees to get into the country, at one point he ordered American diplomats in Switzerland, the principal source of news on what was happening inside Naziland, not to transmit reports of the mass killings.

Of course the news got out, but it did not have the sanction of official verification. You could believe it and be concerned, or not. Some people were extremely con- cerned, holding mass meetings to protest at the government's lethargy, but at the same time men like Joseph Kennedy, John F.'s father, met the heads of the major Holly- wood studios, where he had much influ- ence, to counsel them not to make a fuss about the murdering. It was important in his estimation and that of others like him that the war should not be turned into a 'Jewish crusade'.

It wasn't. In 1942 30 per cent of the want ads for employment placed in the New York Times and the Herald Tribune ex- pressed a preference for Protestant and Catholic applicants. Restrictive covenants prohibiting Jews from buying real estate in the more hotsy-totsy suburbs were still being enforced by the law courts.

In such an ambiance it was possible both to know and to believe that the Holocaust occurred, but still think of it as a far-off event. If American animus against Ger- many during the second world war was not as great as it had been in 1917 or as it was in Europe, the failure to drive home the Holocaust may have been one of the reasons. Perhaps, as a result, today some people say that the Holocaust didn't hap- pen, or it wasn't six million Jews, or there were as many non-Jews murdered, as if that made it all right. Newly revealed documents here show that as early as 1945 some American military officials were

fudging the political dossiers of German engineers they wanted to get into this country. When Ronald Reagan, 40 years later, finds it hard to sympathise with what he undoubtedly regards as morbid harping on the past, he is not separated from a large stream of American sentiment.

American magazines printed during the second world war reveal a stream of commercial propaganda which may also have blunted the sharpness of wartime ideological commitment. The Celotex Cor- poration, manufacturers of building mate- rials, struck the theme reiterated by many other companies in one of its ads: 'As America drives under war's incentives the products of our future greatness are being shaped. New wonders are coming from the men of science and industry . . . housing will undergo tremendous change. Out of undreamed-of progress . . . will emerge your "miracle house" of tomorrow.'

America was fighting Hitler and Tojo but it was also involved in the business of wading forward into something wonderful called 'the postwar world'. 'Weren't you bragging just a little, Yamamoto?' the mass circulation Saturday Evening Post asked the admiral. 'Your people are giving their lives in useless sacrifice. Ours are fighting for a glorious future of mass employment, mass production and mass distribution and ownership.' Sure, you hate the enemy for being the bad guys and doing bad things, but war also is the unpleasant but necessary process you go through to enjoy prosperity.

The saturnine essayist Philip Wylie caught this facet of the civilian spirit in his bestseller of the time, A Generation of Vipers. 'Our war aims,' he wrote, 'remain nebulous, we are told, because nobody has yet hit upon a plan for the postwar world which satisfies the majority of the people in this all-consuming problem of goods. . . to many, it hardly seems worthwhile fighting to live until they can be assured that their percolators will live, along with their cars, synthetic roofing, and disposable diapers.'

Few Amercians have seen war at first hand, and Ronald Reagan is not among them. They have found war rather more a plus than a minus. With a population of over 130 million, the United States had the lowest proportion of deaths among the major combatants. For the dead and the maimed the war may have left something to be desired, but most Americans didn't know anyone killed in the war.

The value of goods and services in the civilian economy was greater in 1944, at the height of the war effort, than it had been four years previously. Everybody made more money. Average income in New York City jumped from a pre-war $2,765 to $4,044; in Los Angeles the surge upward was from $2,031 to $3,469. In 1942 the American railroad industry showed a profit for the first time in 15 years.

Between 1939 and 1944 the number of supermarkets in the country more than tripled. On 7 December 1944, the third anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Macy's de- partment store in New York had the largest selling day in its history. After years of being on the dole people had jobs and money again; if not everything their hearts desired was in the stores, much was and they bought it. A jeweller in Philadelphia was quoted as saying: 'People are crazy. They don't care what they buy. They purchase things just for the sake of spend- ing.' Perhaps patriotism and wartime con- sumerism were perfectly fused in the Formfit brassiere ad which declared: 'For the support [italics are Formfit's] you need in these hectic days of added responsi- bility.'

Not everybody got into the stores to sit at the lunch counter, however. A black soldier serving in the aseptically segre- gated army (even white and black blood plasma were kept separated) remembered walking into a lunch counter with soldier buddies in Salina, Kansas and being told: —You know we don't serve coloured here." We ignored him, and just stood inside the door, staring at what we had come to see — the German prisoners of war who were having lunch at the counter . . . it was no jive talk. The people of Salina would serve these enemy soldiers and turn away black American GIs . . . if we were Untermenschen in Nazi Germany, they would break our bones. As "col- oured" men in Salina, they only break our hearts.'

Plus fa change and all that jazz.