Americans Asked to Sacrifice
"The U.S. had promised a lot—and performed miserably," said Time in reporting this week on the American response to the famine in Europe and Asia. The country was 12,000,000 bushels of wheat short of its commitment to world relief.
While Americans could not get everything they wanted when they wanted to get it in April 1946, they were constantly reminded that millions in Europe and Asia were starving and homeless. Time reported that "in Italy, children with spidery legs and leathery skin stalked the streets, struck down by malnutrition. Greece, Yugoslavia and Poland were down to a two-weeks' supply of bread grains. In Germany, hungry burghers rooted through refuse." It was a major embarrassment for the Allies and a perceived threat to democracy in Europe (and to European colonialism in Asia) that many people in the liberated nations of the world had less to eat than they had during the war under Japanese or German occupation. It was particularly embarrassing to the US that Canada, Australia and even England, which had suffered direct German attack, were meeting their relief quotas but our country, now indisputably the richest, most powerful nation in the world, was falling behind.
Our allies were meeting their quotas in large part because rationing was still in effect in their countries. While the US government was using its war powers to requisition meat and oils for the relief effort, as well as to feed the men and women still in uniform, they were buying grains in the market rather than through requisition. Some relief officials, journalists and even businessmen dared to suggest that rationing had been lifted prematurely and needed to be re-imposed until worldwide food production had returned to normal. With their constituents already up in arms about the meat situation, American politicians thought this would be political suicide. So instead, Americans were asked to cut back voluntarily. Eat more potatoes and less bread said patriotic home economists and food journalists. “Give up your pastries, ladies,” former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who now headed the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, thundered.
Time excoriated America this week for its poor response to world suffering, spreading the blame widely. The administration had bungled the food problem here and abroad. The press, caught up in the joy of victory and war's end, had failed to report adequately on the seriousness of the world situation. Americans had refused to take their obligation seriously and were indifferent. "They fought in black markets and haggled with grocers for luxuries; they made few sacrifices themselves so that necessities could be sent abroad."
In April the White House publicity machine put out word that the Trumans were setting an example by eating only dark bread and only at breakfast. One day a week they were totally wheat free. The Department of Agriculture launched a promotional campaign, “Share a Meal and Save a Life.” Its emblem was an empty bowl. The program urged consumers to save and share wheat and fat products, buy and serve the foods that were most plentiful that week never waste food and maintain last year's Victory Garden. But the voluntary efforts to conserve wheat were not working, in large part, according to Fortune, because, thanks to the vagaries of price control, it had become economical to feed wheat to livestock. Although polls showed most Americans approved of the relief effort and supported the call for voluntary cutbacks, statistics indicated they actually were consuming more wheat than they had the year before.
The Journal-American reported this week that April was the time for planting peas, lettuce, onions, potatoes, radishes, spinach, Swiss chard, parsnips, parsley, beets, early cabbage, carrots, kohlrabi and turnips in your Victory Garden. Americans told pollsters that they planned to plant Victory Gardens again this year but many did not.