For this was a lean America, where a weekly hot bath was a luxury

From Small Wars, Faraway Places by Michael Burleigh. Page 47. The rapid adjustment to peacetime after WWII.

How the US dealt with the world was inevitably subordinated to more immediate problems. The Americans had experienced nothing of the domestic civilian death and destruction experienced by Asian and European belligerents and so failed to grasp how deeply the war had disordered the world. While the rest of the world was laid waste, US GNP rose from $886 million in 1939 to $135 billion in 1945. Nonetheless, on Victory in Japan Day there were over twelve million personnel in the US armed forces, including seven million overseas. The first task was to get them home as their families adopted the slogan ‘No boats, no votes’. Repatriated at the rate of 15,000 per day, GIs teemed into an economy undergoing painful civilian reconversion. For example, Boeing laid off 21,200 of the 29,000 men in two aircraft plants on one day, while 6,000 naval ships were mothballed at the stroke of a pen. Within a single week, $15 billion worth of arms contracts were cancelled.

Among workers and their representatives there was fear that wartime economic expansion was only a hiatus before the return to Depression-era conditions. As prices and rents were freed, rationing was phased out and forty-eight-hour weeks with overtime ceased, union leaders contrasted their members’ newly modest incomes with the colossal profits corporations had made in wartime. A rash of ugly strikes swept the US, involving automobile and steel workers, coal miners and meat packers. Regardless of whether they were homebound veterans or civilians who had followed wartime work to remote locations, everyone wanted a place of their own, but there was a chronic shortage of new housing. This was only partly solved by loans to GIs or the application of Fordist assembly-line methods to basic suburban housing. The reality was many families doubling up, with people also camped out in cars, barns, cellars and streetcars.

Although Americans had forced savings in bonds and cash amounting to $140 billion in 1945 as a result of the wartime dearth of consumer goods, there was still remarkably little to spend their money on. For this was a lean America, where a weekly hot bath was a luxury, almost impossible for us to imagine from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. It was not concerned with whether the Russians wanted a small piece of Turkey, or which permutation of crooks and villains came to power in Athens. It did not want US armed forces permanently stationed 3,000 miles away to defend former enemy lands against a former ally. At the same time most Americans passionately believed in the universal value of the United Nations. In a poll held in late 1947, as many as 82 per cent believed that it was ‘very important that the UN succeed’, while 56 per cent wanted it converted into ‘a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States’.