The temper of the Forties was resiliance.
Memory is a first resource for capturing the aura of a decade, every decade defined by its specific theme and concern, as the Depression was in the Thirties, which began in the crash of 1929 and ended abruptly in 1940 hen the United States became the Arsenal of Democracy and everything was paid for on government credit and that made the Depression disappear. The Forties as a decade was marked by the Second World War and its recovery afterwards and the looming Cold War and ended in 1950 with the Invasion of South Korea. Here are three ways to take the temper of the Forties: personal memory, the movies of the time, and the cultural structure implanted in the period to accomplish particular goals but also provide meaning for the decade.
For some reason or other, I was particularly struck at a young age by political and otherwise public matters. I remember the day FDR died, which is when I was four. We were visiting relatives and heard it on the radio and my parents were very distressed even though they were not particularly political. My father just insisted to me later on that all rich people were crooks, getting their ill gotten gains, even George Washington. I have other early memories during and after the war ended. (I still think of the Second World War as “the War” whatever were the wars that came afterwards.) I remember blackouts. My parents put in a night light near my bed because it was so dark when the drapes and curtains were drawn. Men complained about how little gas was allocated through their ration categories but my father always seemed to get enough gas to travel between the Bronx and his father’s house in the Catskills. The three of us were able to take a trip to Akron, Ohio so the family could work in a bakery owned by the rich uncle who had brought the two sisters to America, the women working at the front selling baked goods while the men in the back made the baked goods, the kids just getting out of the way because the multiple families were so busy. Maybe Uncle Louis had gotten a lot of flour on the black market. The store was always filled with customers. Back in the Bronx, there was plenty of meat available in the local kosher meat market, and women would bring their ration stamps to be given to the butcher along with the cash. People were not hungry and rationing quickly ended after the war ended even though rationing in Great Britain didn’t end until the Fifties.
I remember the sunny day of V-J Day, the day when the war over Japan ended. We were in Woodridge and everyone was jubilant, no one thinking the A-bombs a mistake. That evening my mother took me with her down to the village that centered around a plaza near where the train station was that took trains from New Jersey through and beyond the Catskills. There was a gigantic bonfire and the young women danced a hora encircling the bonfire. I was four years old.
I remember “the boys” as everyone called them, coming home after the war ended in 1945. My mother was one of those who rented a room to have a celebration for the veterans having made it through, some of them becoming doctors and lawyers through use of the G. I. Bill of Rights, no longer satisfied, like Dana Andrews in “The Best Years of Our Lives”, to go back to being a soda jerk. Some of the veterans had a long time adjusting. Some would still wear khaki shirts or pants for months, maybe saying the clothes were personable but even me, at five, thinking it odd that they would not change to civilian clothes as soon as possible. Some got their discharge payments for months until they ran out and had to get work. And within a few years, we were looking inside the windows of bars so as to see the now available television sets and soon enough, visiting neighbors who had sets were putting up chairs in their living rooms so people could visit for an evening and see what it was. I never could figure out whether tv owners were being gracious or just showing off and probably it was both.
What is remarkable about the post war world is that it quickly recovered. There are economic reasons. Europe and Japan had been destroyed and it took a generation for the industrial plants there to reconstitute, as well they did, because they were well developed nations, people, and organizations. There was no competition to the bi three automakers and to American steel. But also the United States was vigorous and inventive in developing new things and expanding its horizons and so the end of the war was not an end of energy but a transformation of the United States into the future. Veterans went to college and into the middle class. The potato fields of Long Island became suburbia. New York City’s borough of Queens filled up with population as did Westchester. By 1950, working class people had televisions and summer vacations. Prosperity and upward mobility were the themes and there was preparation for the transformation of African Americans from being a caste to an ethnic group, accomplished in principle and law in the Fifties and Sixties and projected even by the events in the Forties, such as when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and Truman managed the integration of the armed forces. America was not going back to the nation before the war but was extending into the future, legislation agile to deal with hurdles rather than frozen, as it is today, in indecision, the executive branch back then responding to save Europe with the Marshall Plan and Marshall himself reluctantly coming to the conclusion that there were not going to be fruitful negotiations with booth Soviet and Chinese Communists. There was, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. put it, “a vital center” that was active however hounded by the obscurists and retrograde right and the left that hankered for a Communist utopia already discredited.
Here is a second way to appreciate the temper of the times in the Forties. There were movies made and shown in theaters during World War II that glorified group cooperation. There was “North Star” that showed brave Soviets resisting the Nazi interlopers, but that was pro-Soviet rather than pro-collectivistic. There was a musical, “As Thousands Cheer”, where the young Kathryn Grayson explained to Gene Kelly that an army was like an orchestra in that it needed leadership and coordination, but most of it was about how lush and pleasant Southern California life was, whatever was happening in the War. And the main tribute to the hard demands of leadership appeared after the War, in 1950, in “Twelve O’Clock High”.
What is remarkable about the stellar war movies is that they are about loners: people engaged in the War because of their own personal fight with or observant of the War. Lillian Helmann’s “Watch on the Rhine” was opened as a movie in 1943, the depths of the war where the end was not yet near, and showed an anti Fascist family arriving in the United States to live with the well to do family of his wife and finds he has to kill a Nazi official who knows too much about him, and the family decides to hide the crime as part of the war effort rather than let authorities sort it out, this much a Staliniost notion that the ends justify the means. It is war, after all. And the most memorable of the wartime dramas was “Casablanca”, also of 1943, where Paul Henreid seems to be an itinerant troublemaker who finds himself and his girlfriend in Casablanca fomenting resistance and bound to continue to Lisbon to continue his anti-Fascist activities.
People are also seen as singular observers and participants, separated by their calling alongside of or engaged in the War. Saroyan’s “The Human Animal” shows a boy bicycle rider bringing telegrams that their loved ones had died and reflecting on the human condition. “The Eve of St. Marks”, first a play by the well known playwright Maxwell Anderson, showed the irony that the behest and brightest in the war,. Those destined to be the next leaders who could set the world on a new course, were always the most likely to die because they were brave and dedicated, a prophecy realized in that one Kennedy died in the war and his next in line almost did so, while Nixon had honorably served as a logistic officer far behind the front. The War, whether in “Guadalcanal Diary” or “They Were Expendable”, or “Twenty Seconds Over Tokyo”, just ate up valuable people.
“The Enchanted Cottage” is a movie that was made in 1945 and so was at the end of the War and so trying in fantasy to deal with the horrors of a war. It dealt with a different issue, which was how to deal with those impaired by battle, and was an early one of the movies that were part of this important subgenre of war movies. The movie brought to mind these thoughts about how a population is given an avenue for finding meaning in all that horror through a fantastic concoction of its ravages despite the fact that the homefront had been economically prosperous and the nation’s parts culturally wedded at least for the Duration..
Certain matters of the movie, mind you, have to be put aside. Dorothy McGuire plays somebody so plain that no man at a USO type dance will approach her. She is destined for spinsterhood. That is not very plausible given the actress’s voice and cheekbones and eyes. No one would pass by Dorothy McGuire even if she is backlit and hunches over and has allowed her hair to go straggly. And the young Robert Young is not so disfigured as to present a shock to anyone who sees him, much less his fiancé from before the War. Men much more severely wounded are trotted out at the Memorial Day ceremonies at the Mall in Washington D.C. The Young character has simply lost the use of one arm and has some scar tissue around his eyes, but the movie prepares you to see him as badly disfigured just as it prepares you to see McGuire as ugly, and so the audience can accept that they are disfigured enough to make you imagine they are really disgusting, just as the audience is prepared to see the characters transformed in one another’s eyes into being the beautiful people the actors are.
The major impediment to the adjustment of disfigured people to the world, according to the movie, is that people feel sorry for them even if they do not reject them outright. The fiancé was ready to do her duty and be brave for her intended spouse. His parents wanted to get him a nurse and promised to visit. Pity runs thick and he will have none of it and the thing that distinguishes the ugly girl is that she does not have to overcome loathing his looks.
There is a bit of a Jane Austen turn here. The screenwriter remembered the scene where Darcy proposes to Elizabeth Bennett the first time. Darcy is very condescending and acts as if he is doing her a favor, having been overcome by his passions. It is only much later that Darcy returns to the issue, remembering that proposal with embarrassment, and this time asks to be reconsidered by her as an equal. The screenwriter of “The Enchanted Cottage” collapses that into a single short scene. The boy asks the girl to marry him because he needs someone and she rejects him because a girl wants to think that the boy who proposes loves her. A few lines later she accepts because he has apologized for having muffed the approach. That is a way of saying that words may contain barbs but they do not contain truths, while Jane Austen’s lines always do portray both the truth of the situation and the truth of the characters.
The major theme of “The Enchanted Cottage" is that people are transformed by their love for one another or by their good character into being socially acceptable people. They will brave the looks of others, the final image of the movie suggests, because in one another’s eyes they are well worth being looked at. That is very different from saying that blind people just accept their fate or that the mothers of Down’s Syndrome children get over being stared at because from the inside this is now a normal life. But it is a way to imagine and so let an audience live with the ways some soldiers have been disfigured by war. It all just goes away; there is a process of healing and so a way to be at peace with oneself.
“The Enchanted Cottage” provides other ways of imagining a satisfying ending of a story of war injuries so that there is an explanation for or at least a reason to become resigned to the suffering of war. One of these is to turn the story into a saga, an extension of the story of the First World War, which had already occupied the imagination for a generation of Americans, movie goers and non-movie goers both. The new younger generation had to relive the experience of its father’s generation. In “The Enchanted Cottage”, the protagonist’s father had been killed in the First World War and his step father had served in it, and the housekeeper of the cottage had lost a young husband to the war and had never adjusted to it, could never go beyond her memories. A pianist who had been blinded in the war shows how well an adjustment to disability can be made and serves as a confidante to the Robert Young character. And so the suffering of this generation is just an inheritance, as if one knew that a certain portion of the young would die and be crippled by an inherited disease and the best thing that could be done is to go on with life as best one can, knowing what fate held in store for some. There is no claim, this time, that the Second World War is the war that will end all wars. The scythe comes through a generation before and takes its toll again soon. That is not to forecast endless wars, only that this generation is “fortunate” enough to have survivors from the last one to tell them how to manage their lives.
That is the story telling strategy favored by many of the movies made during the Second World War. It is there in “Random Harvest” where a World War I veteran is an amnesiac who does not remember the woman he loved when he wandered out of a mental ward and so hires her as a secretary only to become aware of her again as the woman he loved when the sirens of World War II blare through the night. Then there is “The White Cliffs of Dover”, where Irene Dunne is a World War I American who has become the widow of her British husband and decides to settle in England in her father in law’s house, only to have to be brave enough to see her only son, born after his father was killed, sent off to die at Dieppe. All very melodramatic tear-jerkers, they convey poignancy, inevitability, deep maternal love, and all the other sorrows of civilian life shattered by loss rather than by air raids.
The moral of “The Enchanted Garden”, when people are assessing the ravages of the War, is that people can restore themselves, remain confident of the future, despite those ravages, even disfigurement, what seems the worst of war wounds, even death, by self reflection and emotional growth, even if, in this case, in a fantasy. The practical results in “The Best Years of Our Lives'', a much better movie, also faces relocations for civilian readjustment, whether to a war cripple, or to a bad hasty marriage where the hero finds work as salvaging old bombers, and a banker restores his life with his wife and thinks about the post war economy, not having realized that the G I Bill would find answers for many and not just get a loan so as to go back to farming. Each of the three characters and their women had to be resilient and thoughtful in grasping the future. Not so in the last large production of Goebbels’ dream factory which is a costume drama set during the time of the Napoleonic Wars: “Kohlberg”, from 1945.The moral message is that people should seize the day because tomorrow these soldiers will die, a very bleak prospect, but nothing more hopeful to commend because, after all, the Germans were losing and the Americans were winning and, except for the casualties, the American nation was not just intact but prosperous..
And there is also the much underappreciated Orson Welles vehicle, “Tomorrow is Forever”, from slightly after the war, 1946, that tells of a man crippled by the war who returns as a refugee chemist from Nazi Germany and there comes a time when he comforts his now remarried wife that her child, also his child, now grown to manhood, is also to be emotionally set free to go to war. Movie actors are always playing tricks on the audience by superimposing their persons on a role and vice versa. A limp and a beard do not do much to disguise Welles’ charm and his distinctive voice, and the audience knows he is Orson Welles, no mistaking that, though the Greer Garson character in the movie pretends only to suspect that he is her lost husband.
That is not very pusible and only becomes so if you leave sexual consummation out of it. The Seventeenth Century Frenchman Martin Guerre, at least according to the film version of his life, was known to his wife as a man who was not the absent husband returned to her but an imposter. It took one night together to tell her that. But the English and the American movies of the Thirties and Forties did not do that aspect of life very well, with the sole exception, as best I remember, of Scarlett O’Hara stretching with satisfaction the morning after having been reunited with Rhett.
To turn wars into fodder for poignancy and romance is certainly to indulge a desire to flee from the horrors of war, not to see it straight. But, then again, the same deflection occurs even with “true” histories of the sort provided by Rick Atkinson. Readers can look forward to reading about the disposition of the forces that will fight in the next battle, and what goes wrong and right on the attack and the defense. There are always surprises and there are always endings that let a reader turn the page to the next battle. After all, the boom of the guns is only in one’s head as one sits in an armchair. These people have not really been awakened from the dead; only their time and the memory of them has been reignited, and so one is safe to contemplate their fate and let one’s own emotions guide how safe it is to identify a little more with what is going on in the text.
Some writers and screenwriters take that dispensation of the reader or audience to play with their fictive experience even a bit further so as to make war understandable even if still not very palatable. They liberate the imagination to come up with magical or preposterous solutions so that people can become reconciled to their losses, as if doing so restores the world to being a just and place. That happens in Powell and Pressburger’s “A Matter of Life and Death”, also of 1946, where a wounded British pilot has to argue in a heavenly court for his life on the grounds that he was taken before his time. If he wins the trial, he will come out of a coma. In this loopy and not very well organized narrative, the pilot gets an American Revolution era judge because his girlfriend is an American and there is still hostility between the Brits and the Americans, which was something of a joke about the past because there was indeed friction between British and American soldiers. The premise is that the next world can interfere with this world in a very post-theological way so that lovers can be restored to one another. What a way to deal with a war.
“The Enchanted Cottage” shares that dispensation. The Great War widow plays something of a witch and the piano player says, deadpan, that he can see what sighted people cannot, as if he was out of Sophocles, the screenwriters up on their ancients as well as the moderns. The protagonists talk to one another candidly when they are within the confines of their enchanted cottage and so can become lovely to one another. Love is another name for the magic that can render anything different.
The year 1946, mind you, was also the year of “The Best Years of Our Lives”, a very commercial Hollywood hit that was grippingly realistic in its portrayals of a war bride in it for the consignment checks, a bomber pilot reduced to his old job as a soda jerk, a banker hemmed in from providing loans to worthy veterans and, most of all, Howard Russell playing himself, a man who had hooks to replace the arms he had lost in battle. One of the many touching moments is when Russell, the character rather than the actor, reveals to his girl friend just how helpless he is. When she helps him take off his hooks every evening, he tells her he will be helpless until the next morning when she will help him “re-man” himself. James Agee thought badly of the movie because it made men into babies and that this was not the way to portray romance. But the idea that the movie got across was that the private lives and not just the public lives of this couple would be affected by his disability. They would have to be a bit creative in their love life. The same point is made again just a few years later in "The Men” (1950) where Teresa Wright is frightened at having to deal on her wedding night with a paraplegic Marlon Brando who will experience random tremors in his shriveled legs. That is how quickly the movies learned to adopt a new more practical tone to dealing with the disabilities and disfigurements of war, but that was not the case only a year before “The Best Years of Our Lives” when “The Enchanted Cottage”, which was made when the War was still going on, had to find some way out of the carnage, however fey and platitude filled that might be.
Here is another way to access the spirit of a decade, remembering that here is a signal event or set of events which define each decade, just as the Thirties were the decade of Depression, and 2015-25 was the decade of Trump and the Forties were the decade of world war and recovery. Look at the social and cultural structures which allowed people to process and comprehend the decade or even the period. We can understand the half century between 1960 and 2020, for example, as the era of political primaries preceding presidential elections that suddenly erupted in the Kennedy nomination, defeating the expected challenger, Lyndon Johnson and ending, equally abruptly, when all the contgenders dropped out in 2020 so as to clear the field for Biden after his win in South Carolina, and where the nominees of each party this year of 2024 are settled by March. The period came and went but while it lasted people thought the primary system a necessary part of democracy which allowed people to think of primaries as fair in that they were the preliminary bouts that brought forward the best two contestants, akin to arriving at the American and National League champions to contest the World Series.
That structure was the popular War Bond Drives. There had been Liberty Bonds in World War I and they were revived as War Bonds in World War II and a great deal of energy and celebrity was involved in these campaigns. The idea was that civilians could engage in buying a financial instrument where money was sent to the government so as to buy bombs and bullets and ships and planes so as to sustain the War effort. But as Robert Merton, in his excellent book of 1943 “Mass Persuasion”, explains, this program was something of a ruse in that the munitions were paid for by government accumulation of debt rather than a pay out of coffers policy. Expense was not the issue though Harry Truman became famous for examining waste and corruption and other agencies required compliance with wartime economic rules. FDR was said to say “Let Sydney do it” which meant the labor leader was tasked to make sure there was labor peace for the duration of the war. The real purpose, Merton explains, was for people to give their money away to the government rather than to engage in personal purchasing power because such private expenditures would lead to inflation, which was a bad thing, though inflation would become a good thing after the War because it ate up the enormous government debt because the delineated debt was paid off with al less valuable currency.
There is a different way to interpret the consequences of war bonds and Merton’s description of a Kate Smith radiothon to raise war bonds explains why. Kate Smith was the hostess of the radiothon. She was a motherly and overweight singer well known for patriotic songs said in a clear and strong voice. She appeared for five minutes an hour to interrupt other broadcasts. Merton reports that Smith would relate how she trudged up to the broadcast booth for her broadcast and did not mind it because it was part of the war effort. Kate Smith was evidencing that she was at least a little bit participating in the war effort. That was important because, protected by two oceans, the United States was not a warfront. It was important to believe, as Roosevelt did, that all; Americans should remain enthusiastic about the war and efforts were made to do so. Children engaged in junk and paper drives to supply this material to the war effort. Children filled books of stamps of very low denomination so that they could be exchanged for a small war bond. Roosevelt, in fact, insisted that the North African landings take place before the end of 1942 to insure Americans were bloodiked and not allowed to forget or dismiss the war. So the importance of the radiothon was to engage the American population in the War by suffering a very little bit for the war effort, by contributing money or walking up stairs to a broadcast studio. A popular comedy musical where a number of stars are set in Rio, of all places, “The Gang’s All Here”, had a girl say the ridiculous thing that girls on the homefront also suffered through, of course, they were not at risk as were their brothers and boyfriends, who might get killed or maimed. They suffered because they worried and did their war jobs, cautious, as the current song said, “Don’t Go Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me”, a warning lest a soldier away got a “Dear John'' letter that she had found a different love.The appearance of shared sacrifice united the nation even if food and jobs were ample though housing was in short supply.
The Fifties and afterwards, now called “telethons” because of the change in technology, had mass appeals for contributions, but these were directed at charities for aiding the victims of and curing diseases rather than a national or political cause. Dennis James, a commentator on wrestling, led a telethon for cerebral palsy and the most stirring event was the many decades long Jerry Lewis Telethon concerning muscular dystrophy. Lewis came on the air at nine pm before Labor Day and with brief exceptions lasted until three pm on Labor Day, covering young people hours, a variety of celebrities and singers and his ever more dated tap dancing and singing, ending every year with his exhaustion in rendering a closing of “You’ll Never Walk Alone”. Pure schmaltz, true to his borscht belt tradition. Unfortunately, for Lewis, unlike the March of Dimes which had no telethon but had the memory of FDR, and did contribute to the cure of polio, muscular dystrophy proved so deeply into the nature of cell biology that forty years could not accomplish a cure though Lewis on some years said a cure was just around the corner. Instead, his very well audited charity provided services and support for victims, something not to be said of the religious leaders like the Bakkers at the PTL Club which also solicited donations from their followers. There was something religious or at least magical about the Lewis Telethon. Maybe if you made a contribution to show goodwill, maybe one of your own would be spared that scourge. Not so during the War drives. No loved one would be spared, only more attacks against the enemy. For all the sentimentality of Big Band music, World War II was driven by its instrumentalities: to ally with Stalin, forget the fate of the Jews, and drop the A-Bombs. The Bravest Generation was clear sighted in its objectives.