Taking war talk in stride is nothing new for Americans

December 28, 2002

If Americans seem to be taking the possibility of war with Iraq in stride, it's not new; polls taken during World War II found many people who felt the same way even during that vastly greater disruption.

American Enterprise magazine recently reprinted results from a number of polls taken during the war years. The most remarkable answer, I thought, was that 64 percent of people told Gallup pollsters in 1945, that they, themselves, had not had to make any real sacrifice for the war.

And a similar number of soldiers back from the front agreed that "most people in this country do not take the war seriously enough."

Sixteen million American soldiers went to war, most of them men, and more than 400,000 died. Millions of women went to work to replace them. Even in families where no one was in the armed forces, the effects of the war were profound. My father, who was 35 at the time of Pearl Harbor, expected to be drafted. He closed his law practice, which to tell the truth had never done all that well, and took a job temporarily with the Nassau County Courts on Long Island. In fact, he was always just a little too old to be called up, and he retired from the court system more than 30 years later.

Food and other necessary goods were stringently rationed. I was born in December 1939, and I think I remember rationing, which ended for most foods on Nov. 23, 1945. I know the books of ration stamps were still in the top drawer of the dining-room sideboard long afterward.

"When Gallup asked in 1945 which rationed items people found it hardest to cut down on, people mentioned meat, coffee, gasoline, sugar, butter, canned goods, shoes, fuel oil, tires and cheese," the magazine says.

More than half of households planned to have a "victory garden." A third of people in 1942 were doing or had signed up to do civil-defense work, and two-thirds said in 1941 they would be willing to donate an hour a day for "training for the home-guard, nursing, first-aid work, ambulance driving" or other defense-related activities.

How to reconcile these answers? I think many people looked at the greater sacrifices demanded of others, and declined to regard their own lesser privations in the same light.

In a 1941 poll for Fortune magazine, the Roper organization asked men, "If we were actually in the war, would you spend one day a week in training for homeland defense?" and 89 percent said they would do so willingly. But there was far more resistance to the idea of service in the armed forces; only 53 percent said they would willingly be drafted for possible service abroad, and another 25 percent said they would do so unwillingly. Nineteen percent said they would fight the draft, though by the time we were actually in the war opposition was much less common.

Women were much less supportive of the draft than men, with 32 percent saying they would fight against having their husbands drafted, and 22 percent saying the same about their sons.

Of course some of the poll questions sound merely quirky today. In order to save rubber, 87 percent told Gallup, they would favor a law setting the speed limit at 35 miles an hour. And to save film, 71 percent agreed, the government should forbid double-feature movies for the duration of the war.

But people also accepted the necessity for massive government intervention into private lives. Eighty percent supported raising the number of hours worked in a week before workers were eligible for overtime pay to 50. In a time of war, people agreed the government should have the right to tell factory owners and businessmen what products they can make and what prices they can charge (78 percent); to tell workers what jobs they are to work at, what they will be paid, and how many hours they work (67 percent); to tell each citizen what to do as his part in the war effort and require him or her to do it (61 percent).

We have, perhaps, become more cynical about the ability of governments to do those things successfully. But even if we were not it would be impossible to garner public support for such measures in any military situation the United States could conceivably face, and no inclination on the part of the American government to try to impose them.

I share many of today's concerns about the possible erosion of civil liberties in the struggle against terrorism, in part because the technology of surveillance is qualitatively different than anything available during World War II. Still, I find it comforting to be reminded of how things were not all that long ago.