On 8 December 1941, one day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan seized control of rubber plantations in the Pacific, cutting off 97 percent of the US's rubber supply.Footnote 1 Thus as the United States entered World War II the country faced a severe rubber shortage. This scarcity, as well as shortages of gasoline and spare parts at various points of the war, created a significant transportation dilemma for the US home front. The federal government's response was two-pronged: it regulated Americans’ use of limited resources – rationing rubber and gasoline and lowering speed limits, for example – and it undertook a widespread propaganda campaign to encourage compliance with these regulations.
At first glance, propaganda that implored Americans to alter their driving habits during World War II appears to undercut the importance of driving to Americans’ daily lives. For example, one poster demanded, “Have you REALLY tried to save gas by getting into a car club?”, above a drawing of a wounded soldier with furrowed brow and blood streaming from underneath his helmet. Another, atop a picture of an oil tanker “torpedoed off the Atlantic Coast,” demanded rhetorically, “Should brave men die so you can drive?” And most famously, a 1942 poster urging drivers to “join a car-sharing club today” proclaimed, “When you ride alone, you ride with Hitler.”Footnote 2 In these and other government messages, excessive or improper driving was tantamount to treason and conservation of scarce materials became patriotic.
But government propaganda and corporate advertisements encouraging drivers to change their habits also established the notion that Americans could make key contributions to the war through proper driving, not by giving up driving. As this article argues, rather than dampening Americans’ affection for the automobile, wartime propaganda reinforced the notion that automobiles were essential to the war effort and portrayed driving as integral to the American way of life. In this way, the war helped establish driving both as patriotic and as constituent of citizenship. Yet this citizenship was not available to all; posters, pamphlets, and magazine and newspaper advertisements portrayed the American driver almost exclusively as white and most often as male. Such depictions implied that the mobility and independence that driving afforded were the sole domain of white American men.
This article first situates itself in current scholarship and outlines the rubber scarcity that prompted rubber and gasoline rationing. It explores how government propaganda and advertising on the subject of wartime transportation measures portrayed driving as essential to Americans, while simultaneously denigrating alternative modes of transportation, including public transit and walking. The proper role of women in the transportation crisis became the subject of much discussion in advertisements and government press releases, demonstrating continued uneasiness about female drivers. Finally, despite being inundated with messages to comply with wartime transportation guidelines and regulations, many Americans chose not to comply. How residents in Detroit, Michigan resisted the imposition of gasoline rationing and asserted their need to drive in spite of the war is the subject of the last section.
STUDIES OF THE AUTOMOBILE AND OF WARTIME PROPAGANDA
One measure of the new directions in scholarship on automobiles is the growth of “automobility studies.” In this field, Cotton Seiler's recent work has used the term “automobility” to capture the “multiple, heterogeneous, intersecting components” of the automobile's impact.Footnote 3 John Urry has employed “automobility” to encompass the vast “system” of material objects, culture, consumption, mobility, and environmental aspects that comprise the automobile's dominance.Footnote 4 By using the term “automobility” in this work, I draw on Seiler's and Urry's multiple layers to include material, sociocultural, and environmental elements of the car.
Increasingly, automobility studies have taken into consideration racialized and gendered divisions in Americans’ relationships with cars and driving. Cotten Seiler's insightful essay “So that We as a Race Might Have Something to Travel By” looks at African American drivers in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 5 As Seiler shows, cars offered opportunity for blacks to experience the freedom of mobility, but black drivers were particularly susceptible to discrimination. Thomas Sugrue, Paul Gilroy, and George Lipsitz each explore whites’ prejudice against black drivers and the threat black drivers’ autonomy posed in the white imagination.Footnote 6 As this article illustrates, World War II propaganda contributed to an image of driving as an exclusively white domain, at the same time that it emphasized the mobility and freedom that driving offered. Wartime events furthered the racialization of driving as white and public transit as black, creating an increasing divide in status and desirability of public and private forms of transportation.Footnote 7
Virginia Scharff, Margaret Walsh, and Deborah Clarke, among others, have studied female drivers and changing cultural norms with regard to women's driving.Footnote 8 Although many histories of the car have focussed on male drivers, these authors demonstrate that women drove cars from their first inception in the United States, and advertising drew upon female beauty to promote particular models of cars for male and female drivers. Walsh argues that cars were integral to women's labor in the twentieth century, and ultimately women's widespread use of the automobile has made it “a sex neutral vehicle.”Footnote 9 This work complicates the relation of women to driving and automobiles by examining the multiple and contradictory messages about female drivers that government propaganda and car advertisements conveyed during World War II. While advertisements increasingly featured solo female drivers near the end of the war, female drivers were particularly targeted in appeals to restrict driving in order to save rubber and gasoline, and were overrepresented in commentary on the benefits of foregoing automobile driving as part of the war effort.
Despite the growth of automobility studies, the war years have not figured prominently in histories of the automobile. In fact the majority of such works focus on the widespread proliferation of automobile ownership in the 1920s and on the development of infrastructure to support increased automobility beginning in the 1950s. To the extent that World War II enters into these histories, it is a momentary stagnation or interruption in the story of an increasingly motorized society.Footnote 10 World War II, in this line of reasoning, interrupted Americans’ “love affair” with the automobile; gasoline rationing temporarily curtailed car driving and suspended car culture before both surged in the postwar era.Footnote 11 As Ted Steinberg has written, World War II “put a dent in American auto culture” and created “a moment of ecological and social possibility” in which Americans might have turned away from increasing reliance on automobile-based transportation.Footnote 12
By contrast, wartime propaganda and advertising have received extensive scholarly attention.Footnote 13 During World War II, the Office of War Information (OWI) was responsible for coordinating much of the US's propaganda. At first, President Franklin Roosevelt was reticent to create an agency that would have much control over information about the war – in light of criticism of the heavy-handed work of George Creel in the Committee on Public Information during World War I – and eager to contrast American efforts with those of Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels.Footnote 14 After three incarnations of a propaganda office floundered in part for want of a clear mandate, Roosevelt created the OWI in June 1942 under the direction of journalist Elmer Davis.Footnote 15
The OWI was tasked with disseminating information about the war and drumming up support for home-front campaigns such as those that urged conservation of materials. Attempting to shape Americans’ behaviors and simultaneously convey “just the facts” of the war proved contradictory, and divided OWI's staff, as Allan Winkler and Sydney Weinberg have shown.Footnote 16 In terms of transportation, the OWI sought to convince Americans that the answer to the transportation shortage was to reduce all “unnecessary” travel and maximize use of private automobiles and public transit systems for all “essential” trips. Its strategies for obtaining compliance centered on convincing American drivers that they must make their cars last for the entirety of the war because their cars were necessary to victory, and because there would be no new cars and few spare parts.
A rich body of scholarship has shown how corporate advertising during World War II encouraged the public to see consumption as integral to winning the war and central to Americans’ self-definition. Advertisers built demand for future goods to be available after the war, and encouraged Americans to think of it as a sacrifice to go without these products. It became patriotic to deny consumption during the war, at the same time as Americans’ identities as consumers solidified.Footnote 17 As Donnagal Goldthwaite Young has argued, “sacrifice and consumption” went hand in hand in wartime advertisements. And in the transportation industries in particular, “by articulating a vision of abundance that would be experienced by all once their engines, rubber, steel, fan belts, and bolts won the war, corporations succeeded in defining a postwar American way of life in terms of material goods.”Footnote 18 Thus, by suggesting that the war was being fought to secure an idealized, abundant society built on free enterprise, advertisements conflated a potential outcome with the war's purpose. The automobile industry was no exception, and automobile companies flooded newspapers and magazines with advertisements that kept their names in front of the public and associated their products with the war effort. Automobiles were not for sale to the general public during the war, but, as we shall see, car companies, service stations, and parts manufacturers found ample opportunity to promote their businesses in relation to the war. At the same time, the OWI's campaigns stressed the importance of the private automobile to wartime transportation and the successful completion of the war.
RUBBER AND THE WARTIME TRANSPORTATION CRISIS
From tires on tanks and airplanes to gas masks, rubber was essential to combat operations during World War II. At the same time, rubber was a key component of the smooth operation of American civilian life. In particular, during peacetime it took approximately 250,000 tons of crude rubber to keep the country's 27,000,000 private cars running for a year.Footnote 19 But as estimates in the fall of 1942 revealed, even if no rubber were set aside to replace tires on private cars, the United States would have an overall deficit of 211,000 tons of crude rubber by the beginning of 1944 due to military needs for rubber.Footnote 20 Public transit systems that used buses also were dependent on rubber to operate, and at the dawn of World War II many mass transit systems had recently converted their streetcar lines to bus lines.Footnote 21 Thus from the beginning of the US's military involvement in World War II, scarcity of rubber was a significant military problem with widespread consequences for civilian transportation as well.
To address the rubber shortage, the Office of Price Administration (OPA) began rationing rubber in January 1942, making rubber the first commodity to be rationed.Footnote 22 When it became clear that rubber rationing had failed to reduce rubber consumption sufficiently, the the Office of Defense Transportation (ODT) imposed a speed limit of thirty five miles per hour for the duration of the war.Footnote 23 In December the OPA implemented nationwide gasoline rationing to curtail wear of rubber tires more effectively by making it more difficult for drivers to use their vehicles.Footnote 24 Gasoline rationing spawned widespread opposition and disbelief in its necessity, prompting the OWI to undertake a massive campaign to convince Americans of the gravity of the transportation problem and the need to comply with wartime regulations.
SELLING AUTOMOBILITY WITHOUT SELLING CARS
Although popular histories of World War II routinely laud automobile companies for patriotically halting civilian production and converting to war production, car manufacturers actually delayed conversion in order to sell more cars. Some plants began to make aviation equipment in mid-1940, in expectation that the United States might enter the war, but it was not until February 1942 that civilian automobile production ceased.Footnote 25 According to economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who was an assistant to OPA director Leon Henderson, heads of the major automobile manufacturers were unwilling to discontinue car production completely despite strong pressure from the government following the US's entry into the war in December 1941. It took a secret “deal,” proffered by Henderson, to halt auto manufacturing and force full conversion to the war effort. Henderson agreed to allow continued car production into early 1942 and promised not to claim that the car companies were being uncooperative.Footnote 26
When it became clear that Henderson's public explanation would not be convincing, OPA staff sat in on multiple sessions in which he practiced making it sound believable. In time for a press conference announcing the cessation of civilian car production, Henderson found language to make his case convincing, and cover up the fact that he had bowed to the auto executives’ wishes. According to Galbraith, Henderson
was both imaginative and eloquent. Staff cars were needed for the military; passenger cars were needed for defense workers; the components would otherwise be piled up in the factories during the duration. The weeks until the order went into effect would be used to plan the production of tanks and military vehicles and ensure that Detroit would truly be an arsenal of democracy.Footnote 27
Galbraith's account suggested that top executives at Ford and General Motors were able to ensure that the automobile industry secured a reputation for full cooperation and sacrifice as part of the war effort, while actually consuming limited supplies in order to turn greater profits until they were forced to stop. Despite an extreme rubber shortage for military and civilian needs, the federal government acquiesced to automobile manufacturers’ desire simultaneously to continue using scarce resources for their own benefit and to appear patriotic and sacrificing for the war effort. This was a harbinger of what was to come, and of the extent to which notions of citizenship and patriotism would infuse the rhetoric of automobility during the war.
The OWI was instrumental in portraying the automobile as fundamentally important to the war effort. With entry into the war it was clear that there were insufficient tires, spare parts, and gasoline to support the country's overreliance on individual automobiles as the primary means of transit. But the same material shortages limited the possibility of greatly expanding public transit systems to absorb much former automobile traffic. To address the wartime “transportation crisis,” the ODT focussed on preserving the function of Americans’ private automobiles, maximizing use of the existing public transportation systems, and reducing overall travel needs.Footnote 28
As the propaganda wing for the federal government, the OWI created information campaigns to support these transportation directives. With a limited supply of tires available through rationing, and no new civilian automobiles for consumers from February 1942 until after the war ended, government officials were very concerned that drivers would wear out their tires and lose functionality of their automobiles. As a result, the OWI sought to convince the public that it was imperative to keep their cars functional by changing their driving habits. In making their case for the need to change driving habits to keep cars operational, several of the OWI's information campaigns underscored the importance of cars to the war effort and even cast driving as patriotic, despite the resource shortages.
OWI press releases, radio shorts, and posters fundamentally promoted the automobile as an essential part of the war effort, and spoke to the American public primarily as a nation of drivers. As a March 1943 press release put it, “The privately owned automobile is no longer the exclusive concern of its owner. The car owner has in fact become the custodian of a vital unit in America's wartime transportation system.”Footnote 29 This portrayal elevated the importance of automobiles: no longer was a car solely the concern of its owner and of use only as a mode of transportation, it was now “vital” to America. Emphasizing the importance of maintaining one's automobile to “America's wartime transportation system” portrayed automobiles as a weapon in the fight, and drivers as contributing to the war's successful execution.
Similarly, the OWI's guidelines for radio broadcasts suggested that local stations emphasize that the country was counting on Americans to keep their cars working. As one memo on carpooling stressed, “All car operators have in their possession a valuable unit in their nation's transportation plan … an automobile.”Footnote 30 In this way, the rhetoric surrounding driving offered car owners an opportunity to assist their country by keeping their cars in operation. Indeed, in September 1944 the OWI proclaimed,
All conservation measures – mileage rationing, group riding, tire conservation, automobile maintenance – have been directed toward one single objective: assurance that the private automobile will, according to ODT, “continue to perform its indispensable function as an integral unit of the nation's transportation facilities.”Footnote 31
Such language emphasized the automobile as central to American mobility, and that all attempts to control Americans’ driving habits during the war were for the larger goal of preserving automobiles as the primary form of transportation.
Private companies involved in the making and service of automobiles expanded upon government propaganda that linked proper car maintenance with helping win World War II. Car dealers, filler (gas) and service stations, tire manufacturers, oil companies and other large and small endeavors advertised their products as helping Americans defeat the Axis. Just before halting car production, companies such as Chevrolet tapped into the rhetoric of conservation and advertised the dealer's expertise in helping drivers “conserve” their cars. An ad published in Collier's in early February 1942 sought to channel drivers’ concern about maintaining their tires into business for the company's service stations.Footnote 32 It touted twelve “conservation services” that Chevrolet dealers offered, while describing “Chevrolet owners” as “patriotic” and “forward-looking.” The ad encouraged “all motorists” to have their cars serviced because “a mobile nation is a strong nation.” In this line of thought, the driving public contributed to America's strength and to the successful execution of the war.
Advertisements spread name recognition for Chevrolet and other brands of car-related products, depicted these companies’ (white male) workers as heroic, and created an image that connected service at particular businesses with patriotic duty. For example, a Chevrolet ad in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1943 proclaimed,
Your Chevrolet Dealer serves for victory, day after day, in many, many ways. Conserves the lives of the vital cars and trucks which are serving industry – serving agriculture – serving all America. Preserves the greatest motorized transportation system which is helping America to win the war. See him for service today.Footnote 33
By describing “vital cars” and “the greatest motorized transportation system” as contributing to the war effort, the advertisement underscored automobiles’ importance and desirability, even at a time when new cars could not be purchased.
Results of a survey conducted by the OWI in December 1943 demonstrated that many drivers had been exposed to messages about the need to preserve one's automobile and take care of its individual parts to ensure it ran properly. Survey researchers asked participants if they were familiar with the government's “tire conservation campaign,” and if so what the campaign asked drivers to do. When thinking of tire conservation and actions they were encouraged to take, more drivers recalled the importance of having their tires inspected and inflated than recalled the need for reducing driving or driving more slowly.Footnote 34 Thus keeping one's car fully functional seemed to have stuck in drivers’ minds more than limiting or altering one's driving in any fundamental way.
Because rubber for civilian use was very scarce and many workers drove to their jobs, the government stressed car drivers’ opportunities to aid the war effort by reducing their tire use. In heavily promoting representations of drivers who had their tires checked regularly as patriotic, this tire conservation propaganda conflated driving and American citizenship. Suggesting it was Americans’ responsibility to take proper care of their tires, these messages portrayed a nation comprising drivers and ignored the millions of Americans who did not own a car.
AUTOMOBILES AS PREFERABLE TO ALTERNATIVE MEANS OF TRANSPORTATION
Government appeals for workers to form carpools targeted only drivers. The carpooling arrangement that the OPA backed most vigorously was “car sharing,” in which four or five drivers took turns driving the others to work in their car, with each person responsible for driving approximately one week per month. Radio announcements and posters asked drivers to do their part by joining a car-sharing club with other motorists, and noted that there was no need to pick up non-drivers. As an OWI memo in the summer of 1944 assured drivers,
Car pooling does not mean “thumbing” a ride – or the casual picking up of people waiting for buses or street cars. The kind that counts is the organized car pool whose members rotate the use of cars, ride together, leave some cars at home that would otherwise be burning up gasoline, wearing out precious rubber and parts.Footnote 35
In this situation, owning a car, and subsequently regulating one's use of it, was key to helping the war effort. Only those who already drove cars could be patriotic by joining a carpool; those who did not drive could not contribute by riding with another person, even though doing so might free up much-needed space on public transit vehicles.
Government propaganda promoting car-sharing programs encouraged Americans to identify driving with freedom and to see car-sharing as the best way to preserve this freedom during the war. A press release in July 1944 explained, “The driver who drives alone just because he likes his freedom probably doesn't realize that by saving his car, gasoline, and rubber he can help insure a lot more freedom for himself later on.”Footnote 36 Such an appeal framed carpooling as a key measure to ensure drivers could continue to use their cars when they needed them during the war, and would not lose this freedom of mobility at a later date. The pitch for carpooling was premised on the idea that it was a temporary and tolerable inconvenience in return for continued use of one's automobile.
Portrayals of carpooling that explained that “neighbors” should arrange carpools implicitly reassured the driving public – represented as all white – that they had total control over who entered their cars. They discounted the prospect of taking strangers “waiting for buses or street cars” and offered instead an image of coworkers and neighbors joining together to cut down on their use of rubber.Footnote 37 For whites, taking neighbors and coworkers more likely brought to mind visions of sharing one's car with other whites than did the vision of picking up intending passengers at a bus stop.
Casting public transportation in a more negative light than carpooling was one method that government agencies used to promote car-sharing programs. Describing a film he hoped would be produced to encourage car sharing, the OPA's Malcolm Lund explained,
The selling job should be entirely positive. It should be pointed out that car-sharing actually works no hardship on anyone, that it is infinitely more desirable than waiting indefinitely while crowded buses pass you up, or fortunately finding a square foot or two on which to stand in a crowded bus.Footnote 38
Thus even in addressing the inadequacies of individual automobile use, and promoting restricted driving, the government disparaged public transit as unpleasant and crowded. Adding to the riders’ actual experiences, this public characterization of streetcars and buses as undesirable reinforced the importance of cars and driving to the American way of life and undercut acceptance of alternative modes of transit.
But government propaganda went even further in depicting the good citizen as a driver and undermining public transit. With public vehicles carrying on average 53 percent more passengers during the war than in 1941, and limited equipment to accommodate the surge in ridership, the OWI sought to dissuade drivers from taking public transit.Footnote 39 Given the vast number of automobiles in the country compared to the number of public transit carriers, the OWI explained in a 1943 press release, “the man who climbs aboard a public conveyance, when he is able to use his own car for essential transportation, is rendering a disservice to his country.”Footnote 40 In this depiction it was unpatriotic for car owners to take the bus. As an undated pamphlet to promote car sharing laid out, it was the car owner's “duty to use his car in a Car Sharing Club and stay off the street cars and buses. Our public transportation facilities cannot carry the entire load.”Footnote 41 In fact, “the individual car owner, who makes his automobile and tires last longer by sharing his car with his neighbors is serving his country's best interest by the very fact that he does not become a street car or bus rider.”Footnote 42
Government communications about driving asserted that cars were necessary to victory and deplored the possibility of losing the use of a car. This is seen particularly in the joint ODT and War Advertising Council print advertisements on the theme of “Take Care of Your Car.”Footnote 43 Prefacing a series of these ads, ODT director J. Monroe Johnson explained the premise to heads of private companies, such as service stations, whose sponsorship he solicited. Johnson wrote that these ads
have been prepared on a common sense, practical basis around the question, “Will they [American drivers] ride … or will they walk?” It is of first importance to this nation as well as to every individual and every automotive service dealer in this country that the answer be, “THEY WILL RIDE!”
The memo emphasized the basic premise that driving was the primary mode of transport for Americans, even despite resource shortages that reduced the availability of rubber and gasoline. The question “Will they ride … or will they walk?” is a rhetorical one, meant to underscore the importance of maintaining one's car at all costs in order to avoid having to walk.
Ads within the portfolio the ODT sent out spoke directly to drivers and urged them, “unless you'd rather walk than ride, continue to treat that car with loving care.” Walking was the unpleasant consequence of inadequate attention to one's car, hitting home the importance of keeping the car properly serviced in order to avoid having to walk. As one ad pronounced, “WARNING TO ALL CAR OWNERS: Take care of your car and all its parts OR YOU'LL WALK. Sounds drastic, doesn't it?” In another, a man learns that if he does not care for his car he will have to walk: “Walk! Did you say walk? To work … every day. That's several miles. I can't walk that far.” Upon this realization, he vows to take better care of his vehicle to avoid walking. “Car, you're going to get some of the best service you've ever had. And believe me, you'll get it regular from now on.”Footnote 44
Some ads went a step further to depict the negative effects on a man who was forced to walk. One, with the caption “He doesn't get around much anymore!” featured a picture of a man soaking his legs in a bucket of hot water. The text below the caption read,
He's got a headache, too! For he's the man who said, “New cars are just around the corner!” Today he's walking instead of riding because he let his “old” car die on its wheels … stopped giving it the proper care to help it carry on.Footnote 45
Having to walk, as depicted in the ad, was such a difficult change from driving that the hardship of walking instead of driving could make a man immobile.
A government–industry meeting about ODT's “car conservation campaign” in the spring of 1945 emphasized the importance of cars to the war effort and threatened those who failed to regularly service their cars with having to walk instead. As the meeting's secretary clearly noted,
The primary purpose of this campaign is to bring home to the general car owning public the vital need to keep every privately owned automobile in operating condition right on through to final victory – and on beyond that to the day when new cars can again be purchased … It is in the last analysis a question of “Look after your car – and all the parts of it – or you'll walk!”
By upholding driving as the preferred method of transportation, to be preserved through careful attention to the needs of one's car, other forms of transportation appeared less desirable.
TARGETING FEMALE DRIVERS
Women were specifically targeted in gasoline conservation propaganda as those most likely to violate driving restrictions and therefore as those who should reduce their driving. At times, women were expected to embrace walking, while at other points advertisements assured women that they were not expected to give up “essential” driving. United Motors Service's 20 February 1943 advertisement, “Housewife with an ‘A’ card,” made clear that “housewives” were entitled to drive for certain functions. Next to a picture of a white woman behind the wheel, the ad declared, “Better than anyone else, you know the meaning of ‘indispensable’ driving.” The ad provided its own definition of “indispensable driving: “It's what gets the children to school, takes you marketing, and accomplishes those essential ‘odd errands’ that can't be predicted or avoided.”Footnote 46 The ad's language drew on the federal government's categorization of “essential” and “nonessential” driving but offered an expansive view of “essential” that included trips of convenience to run “odd errands,” activities that OWI propaganda explicitly told women to avoid doing unless with a group of riders. By identifying driving as “essential” and “indispensable,” this particular ad recognized white women's entitlement to driving while it portrayed driving as critical for the perpetuation of daily family life.
Not all ads supported the notion that women's driving was essential. In fact, a disproportionate number of ads that encouraged drivers to reduce their driving were aimed at women. Propaganda that lauded the benefits of walking for women contrasted sharply with depictions of men in pain from having to walk because they had failed to take care of their cars, as described above. While ads in the series “Take Care of Your Car … Or You'll Walk!” portrayed men who had to walk as suffering, other ads and newspaper stories suggested that female drivers in particular could benefit from walking instead of driving. Crafters of this message touted walking as a boon for women's beauty and health, in addition to helping relieve the crisis in transportation. One newspaper ad suggested a silver lining of limited automobile use with the headline “DELIGHTFUL NEW WAY TO REDUCE HIPS!” The text recommended that women should bicycle and walk whenever possible, and that doing so would increase their femininity. “You'll soon be a finer figure of a woman if you'll just help make gas rationing work!”, the ad promised.Footnote 47
Such propaganda reflected broader anxieties about women's roles and the appropriateness of female drivers. The toughest ads seeking Americans’ compliance with gas rationing singled out female drivers for criticism. Meant to be the words of a Nazi sailor, one cheered,
ATTA GIRL! WASTE YOUR GAS! … Don't pay any attention to that gas rationing stuff. Nuts to the war! Be a gas chiseller. Grab all the gas you can. What's your name, fraulein? We'll put you down for a Nazi medal!Footnote 48
Another, from the voice of an American on an oil tanker at sea, chastised a female driver for wasting gasoline to attend a “fancy pink tea.” After a graphic description of the ways one might die on a tanker, the seaman exclaimed, “listen, lady, we ain't riskin’ our hides just so's people can drive to pink teas. Just remember, every drop of that stuff in your gas tank is blood!”Footnote 49 In this and other appeals to obey gasoline rationing, women were depicted as especially frivolous in their use of gasoline and the consequences as particularly dire. Propaganda thus simultaneously recognized women's driving, if not car ownership, as a growing trend, but put women's access to automobiles as subordinate to men's.
Suggesting that gas rationing offered a chance for women to benefit from walking, but implying that noncompliance with rationing would force men to walk, reinforced men's claims to driving. It also sent mixed messages about women's relation to automobiles and driving. Margaret Walsh has argued that World War II created the opportunity for more American women to drive when they took on “war work” outside the home and served in the military.Footnote 50 This opportunity, however, was circumscribed by media messages implying that women had less of a right to use automobiles when limited resources called for changes in driving habits.
OPPOSITION TO GASOLINE RATIONING
Despite the OWI inundating the public with messages about the severity of the transportation problem, and attempting to convince Americans of the need for gasoline rationing, many Americans opposed gas rationing in late fall of 1942. After an intensive publicity campaign in November 1942, one in three Americans newly subject to gasoline rationing still did not think that rationing was necessary.Footnote 51 A minority expressed opposition to some rationing throughout the war, but the announcement of nationwide gasoline rationing engendered a particularly bold negative reaction.Footnote 52 Officials were “besieged with protests.”Footnote 53 Organized resistance to gasoline rationing was strongest in Detroit and Indianapolis in the weeks preceding its 1 December implementation; government reports referred to these cities as “trouble spots” and “centers of opposition.”Footnote 54
In Detroit, the automobile capital, opponents to gas rationing framed their protest in terms of the dire consequences for their mobility if rationing were implemented. According to an OWI public opinion report based on surveys conducted just prior and subsequent to the nationwide gasoline rationing, those opposed in Detroit felt that limiting the amount they could drive would exacerbate the city's “transportation problems.”Footnote 55 One Detroit public transit rider wrote to Washington to explain his concern. After detailing a recent fatal bus accident blamed on the driver's limited visibility due to overcrowding, Steve Reznik described his difficulty in getting to work on time when he had to wait for a streetcar with room to stop for him. He worried that with gas rationing more Detroiters would crowd the city's public vehicles and cause even further delays. Wrote Reznik,
If gas rationing takes effect in Detroit God help those who will have to depend on the Detroit Street Railway System. It's the worst transportation system in the world. Ask those who ride it. They ride it not because they want to but because they have to. They don't own an automobile.Footnote 56
What is particularly striking about Reznik's letter is the fact that as a person without a car he was concerned enough about the proposal of gasoline rationing to write to the OPA in Washington, DC voicing his opposition to it. His experience with public transportation had led him to believe that any policies that might increase ridership would be disastrous.
Reznik's letter was forwarded to the ODT, whose director at the time, Joseph Eastman, replied two weeks later. Eastman informed Reznik that the most important thing was to use cars effectively, but that non-car owners could also help out. “The one immediate help which almost every individual can give is to cooperate in the more intensive use of the personal automobile.” Acknowledging that Reznik did not own a car, Eastman advised,
Even if you do not own a motor car which you could share with other car owners in rotation, you may find a fellow-employee or a neighbor whose terminal-to-terminal trips morning and evening in his machine come at times that would be reasonably convenient for you.Footnote 57
Eastman's emphasis on “more intensive use of the automobile” implied that greater employment of the car was what the country needed; the private auto was a key weapon in the war. His reply to Reznik suggested that the opportunity for non-car owners to be patriotic lay in attaining access to a car and a driver willing to take them. Implicitly, walking, taking public transport, and otherwise avoiding using rubber and gasoline in private cars were not patriotic. In the realm of transportation, non-car owners’ ability to connect with a car owner determined their contribution to the war effort.
Resistance to gasoline rationing in Detroit demonstrated that many drivers were opposed to direct limitations on their ability to drive as they pleased, even when the restriction was framed as a temporary measure. More significantly, as Reznik's letter shows, even those who did not own cars could oppose gasoline rationing. Both those with cars and those without saw restrictions on driving in Detroit as a serious threat to their well-being. In the view of those who opposed rationing, any limits on automobile use that forced more riders onto overcrowded buses and streetcars were a bad idea.
CONCLUSION
John Kenneth Galbraith famously commented about World War II, “never in the history of human conflict has there been so much talk of sacrifice and so little sacrifice.”Footnote 58 Indeed the war did not bring extreme hardship to Americans on the home front, as compared to those in other warring nations. But during the war and in popular parlance since, many Americans have embraced the idea that they made significant sacrifices, and did so gladly.Footnote 59 As I have shown here, American drivers were asked to make relatively minor changes to their driving habits during the war, and many refused to do even this little. But the rhetoric of driving and sacrifice during the war had enduring effects in the postwar era and created the perfect opportunity for car-related businesses to promote unlimited driving as the ultimate reward after years of sacrifice.
An October 1945 advertisement for United Motors Service articulated the underlying message of longing for the total freedom to drive at war's end that had underpinned its ads throughout the war. It described a driver who had “been waiting, dreaming of the time when gas rationing would be over and he could head for the open road on a well-earned vacation trip.” The ad played on its enduring wartime theme of the need for routine car maintenance to keep it in good condition, but substituted the end goal of “enjoy[ing] many miles of safe, satisfying ‘pleasure’ driving as your reward” for such service instead of the wartime message that car maintenance was integral to the war effort.Footnote 60
Unlimited use of the car as a “reward” for proper automobile upkeep during the war promoted driving as an activity even more than as a form of transportation. Often it was also linked to the joys of being an American, and the ability to enjoy these pleasures after years of wartime restrictions. As an ad in late December 1945 put it, “It's time to take your reward: you took the trouble, spent the money, to keep your car in good shape during the war years when it couldn't be replaced. You've earned the right to take those trips … drive where you please.”Footnote 61 Those with cars were all too ready to do so.
