From The Writer’s Almanac…
Though Harry Truman had announced the Japanese surrender the day before, it was on this day in 1945 that the Allies officially declared V-J Day, beginning one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in American history.
American factories had become more and more efficient throughout the war, and once it was over, they were able to focus on consumer goods. In the year after World War II ended, Detroit produced 2.1 million cars, a 2500% increase from the year before. Factories also began to produce all the appliances that had been invented but that no one had been able to afford before the war: washing machines, dishwashers, refrigerators, and televisions.
Hundreds of thousands of happy couples had romantic reunions after the end of World War II, and nine months after V-J day, in May, 1946, 233,452 babies were born in the United States. It was the largest number of babies that had ever been born in a single month in American history. By the end of 1946, 3.4 million babies had been born, the largest generation of Americans ever born at that point.
More than anything else, these new American families wanted houses. The country became so crowded that more than a half million families were living in Quonset huts. Many newly married couples had to move in with their families. The government provided a mortgage program for returning soldiers, and developers began to build houses by the tens of thousands.
The most famous housing developments were those built by the Levitts of Long Island, New York, who build more than 140,000 houses. The average house in Levittown cost about eight thousand dollars, with a mortgage payment of sixty-five dollars a month. When people first moved into the new neighborhoods, there were no streets or streelights, and the lawns had yet to grow grass. But every new house included a stove, a refrigerator, and a washing machine.
The period of economic growth that followed World War II would last for thirty years, and the prosperity was more widespread in the post-war years than during any other economic boom since. For many Americans it was the greatest period in our country’s history. Whenever politicians talk about the way things used to be, they’re almost always referring to the period after World War II.
As a baby-boomer child, born during one of the greatest periods of economic growth our country has ever known, I grew up generally taking many things for granted, like the washing machine, stove, refrigerator, television… even my little Levittown house in the Philadelphia suburbs.
It’s sometimes difficult to appreciate everything that I had then, and even now, when I’ve never really been without. The passing of time, and the challenges of parenthood, now provide the wisdom and insight into how fortunate I was to have been born in one of the most prosperous and peaceful periods in American history.
As a 42 year old middle-class American living 60 years after the end of World War II, through the blessings received from God’s goodness, I never knew the hardships of the Great Depression like my parents and grandparents before them, and perhaps there is a certain amount of luck in that I was not born, say, to a Vietnamese or Biafran family, but I sometimes wonder about Thorstein Veblen’s concept of conspicuous consumption…