The burgeoning interest in 1940s American culture has recently borne the TV series Homefront, which focuses on the postwar scene in a small Ohio city; last year’s “Art of the Forties” show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; and Loyola University’s recent conference on “The War in American Culture.” Fiftieth-anniversary commemorations of World War II are probably only part of the explanation. The rest may be due to nostalgia for that era’s sense of unity, national purpose, and industrial expansion with jobs for everyone–all so notably lacking in the 90s.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
What immediately leaps out is the large role that Chicago played in the national war economy, and the ramifications this had for the city and its citizens. The $1.3 million spent in factory construction during the war was the biggest investment in this city’s history within a like time span; the result was a period when, in the words of the show’s catalog, “more jobs were held by more Chicagoans in more new factories that paid more money than at any other time in the twentieth century.” The unemployment rate dropped to 1 percent by 1944 and the number of derelicts on Madison Street fell by over half as over 1,400 area companies became involved in war production, most reconverting for the purpose. For instance, the Chicago Roller Skate Company turned out nose sections of bombers while the big jukebox manufacturer Rock-ola began making M-1 carbines. Other plants were newly built, mostly in outlying areas (thus sparking some of the first suburban industrialization). McCook became the site of a huge ALCOA rolling mill that produced aluminum “skins” for bombers, and the lumbering C-54 cargo plane was made in a plant situated on what is now the military area of O’Hare airport.
This section is called “The Production War”–one of four parts of the exhibit. Others focus on the household, the neighborhood, and Chicago’s role as a crossroads and “liberty town.” Household artifacts are amply displayed–ration stamps, V-mail forms, war toys for kids, novelties for grownups (a Hitler pincushion, for example) and exhortations to conserve. (“Vicky Victory, your Hair Aid warden, says Save Steel, use your victory hair pin kit again and again,” reads the cover of a hairpin package. “Take it to the beauty salon every time you go.”)
“My father always said, ‘Consider this a part of your war effort’–that we were moved, that this is part of your expression of loyalty,” says one Japanese American man in a taped interview. “I didn’t question it then. Maybe he was trying to protect us.” On the same video a woman recalls, “When I came here, people would always ask me where I was from, naturally thinking that I was either going to say I was from China or whatever, and when I’d say I was from Portland, Oregon, they’d invariably ask me, ‘Why would you want to live in Chicago?’–since Portland is such a beautiful place–and do you know, I could not tell them why. I couldn’t tell them I had been evacuated, I’d been put in a camp, and I’d been forced to leave Portland. I shouldn’t have been ashamed. But I was.”
