Taste of War: World War II and the Battle for Food (73 page)

In Germany, Britain and the Soviet Union every effort was made to maintain industrial productivity by channelling food to workers by means of extra rations, special canteens or bigger bread rations. In the United States a programme for improving industrial workers’ nutrition was set up by the Nutrition Division of the Office of Defense Health and Welfare Services.
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However, Paul McNutt and his team found themselves unable to exert any real influence on government policy. Roosevelt’s refusal to appoint one person to co-ordinate food policy meant that the division’s attempts to improve the food provided for workers became bogged down in a mass of bureaucratic negotiations. In order to push their policies through they had to argue their case within the multiplicity of ministries and departments governing food production, distribution and sale. The nutritionists were given no executive powers over industry and had to content themselves with giving industrial plants advice on how to set up and run canteens and what sort of food to serve, without being able to require them to adopt these measures.
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In the United States the feeding of workers was left largely to the discretion of private employers.

In the huge and hastily constructed war plants this tended to result in the inadequate provision of eating facilities. At Ford’s Willow Run plant, where bombers were made in an enormous hall, there was one cafeteria for more than 10,000 people. Most of the workers could not get there and back in their half-an-hour lunch break. Luncheon wagons provided food but the workers complained that the sandwiches were often made with inferior luncheon meat, the coffee was like dishwater
and the lukewarm food was slopped unappetizingly on to paper plates.
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Chauncey Del French, who worked at the Kaiser shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, recalled that ‘two of the greatest causes of dissatisfaction among workers were the high prices and the minute portions of meals served at Hudson House [dormitory] and the shipyard cafeteria’.
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The prices were listed as having been approved by the Office of Price Administration, ‘but OPA took no interest in the size of the portions’ and the men felt cheated. ‘A welder who worked with our crew voiced the thought of the hundreds who quit on that account alone: “Whenever I eat a meal that costs me $2.35 and I’m still hungry, I know I’ve been gypped. I can do war work at home, and that’s where I’m going.”’
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Given that it cost $225 to recruit and train each worker, it would have been cheaper to force the contractor to improve the meals but, even though the yard’s counsellors were aware of the problem, nothing was done.

The United States government had no incentive to irritate employers by forcing changes in the provision of food for workers or by interfering in the profit-making activities of catering contractors. The food provision at some of the larger war plants might have been sub-standard, but on the whole workers could afford to feed themselves well. American workers were in no danger of going hungry; on the contrary, they were extremely well nourished. The Nutrition Division was assigned the task of assessing the nutritional quality of factory cafeteria lunches. A survey of an Illinois canteen classed 71 per cent of the meals as poor, but this was because they were judged against the Food and Nutrition Board’s recommended daily allowances and thus the assessors applied absurdly high standards. The meals were classed as poor if they were missing two out of a list of foodstuffs which included an 8-ounce glass of milk or some other dairy food; a cup of green or yellow vegetables; meat, cheese, fish or eggs; two slices of wholegrain bread; butter or fortified margarine; fruit juice; or citrus fruits.
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The list in itself was an indication of the generous quantities of fresh and nutritious food American wartime workers were accustomed to eating. A Soviet worker, existing on watery soups, would have been grateful for a meal made up of just one of the items on the list, while British workers would have been delighted by the meat or a fresh egg.

Even when there was compelling evidence of a need for state intervention, as in the soaring industrial accident rate, the government remained reluctant to intervene. In the first year of the war it was more dangerous to work in an American factory than it was to be a soldier. By June 1942 more workers had died in industrial accidents than had been killed in action.
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Inexperienced ‘green’ workers, new to their jobs, working unfamiliar machines and overcome by fatigue, all contributed to the problem. Most of the injurious or fatal mistakes were made on the graveyard shifts when the workers were tired and physically low. This should have provided ammunition for the Nutrition Board to insist that night workers should be served fortifying warm meals, which were proven to help workers remain alert.
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The federal government did step in and organize a safety campaign, followed by the setting-up of a committee on health and safety in 1943. But here again the government limited itself to offering advice and did not empower the committee to enforce regulations.
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Meanwhile the Coca-Cola company used the war to infiltrate the workplace. The company was the only soft drinks manufacturer exempt from sugar rationing because it was the main supplier of sodas for military bases. The company produced a pamphlet for the government entitled
The
Importance of the Rest-Pause in Maximum War Effort
. It outlined at great length the argument that workers were more efficient if they were given regular breaks. It was only at the end, once the case had been made, that it was suggested that Coca-Cola should be the rest-break drink.
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The utility of Coca-Cola as a drink for improving productivity was somewhat dubious. As the Germans discovered, a hot meal rather than a drink was of far more benefit to tired workers.
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Nevertheless, Coca-Cola appears to have succeeded in its campaign. Peggy Terry, who worked in a shell factory in Viola, Kentucky, complained that ‘Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper were allowed in every building, but not a drop of water. You could only get a drink of water if you went to the cafeteria, which was about two city blocks away. Of course you couldn’t leave your machine long enough to go get a drink. I drank Coke and Dr. Pepper and I hated ’em … We had to buy it, of course.’
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If the nutritional gap between the classes began to close during the war, a deep racial divide continued to mark American society. Black
Americans were actively excluded from the economic boom sparked by the growth of the war industries. Many war plants refused to employ blacks and by the end of the war only 8 per cent of all jobs in the war industries were held by blacks. Many of these were southerners who had left the poverty of a rural life, and women who had escaped the drudgery of domestic service.
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This was an improvement on their share of only 3 per cent of war industry jobs in 1942, but they were nevertheless under-represented and frequently employed in the most dangerous jobs – handling ammunition, gunpowder or poisonous chemicals.
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Many war plants would only employ blacks in menial positions as porters, janitors and cleaners.
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Those black men willing to sacrifice their lives for America found the armed forces also unwilling to admit them, and when they were enlisted they tended to be assigned to menial positions, as cooks or in service battalions. In the army and in many southern states segregation was still in force. Blacks were required to use separate washrooms in factories, they were denied access to parks and pool halls and expected to ride in the back of buses and streetcars, well away from the white passengers.
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One campaigner pointed out that the United States government made itself sound pretty foolish when it declared itself ‘to be against park benches marked JUDE in Berlin, but to be
for
park benches marked COLORED in Tallahassee, Florida. It was grim, not foolish, to have a young black man in uniform get an orientation in the morning on wiping out Nazi bigotry and that same evening be told he could buy a soft drink only in the “colored” post exchange.’
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One of the major sources of disruption to the war effort was racial unrest. In 1943 there were 242 racial confrontations in forty-seven cities and the worst disruption was concentrated in war-production centres such as Mobile, Detroit and Philadelphia, where white protests against the employment or promotion of blacks led to wildcat strikes, the paralysis of transport systems and riots in which blacks were killed.
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In the one month of March 1943 the US Labor Department concluded that 101,955 work days had been lost as a result of racial bigotry.
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Throughout the black community there was great bitterness that while America claimed to be fighting to defend democracy abroad the government did not apply democratic principles to its treatment of blacks at home.

Blacks were doubly disadvantaged in that their difficulties in finding employment in the war industries excluded them from the benefits of rising wartime wages, while at the same time they were less protected from wartime inflation. In the black areas of America’s cities astronomical rents were charged for broken-down and overcrowded housing and the local stores charged outrageously high prices for foodstuffs of inferior quality. In theory, price controls should have held this problem in check but the Office of Price Administration had few volunteers checking up on the prices storekeepers charged in the black areas of the cities, and on average blacks paid more than whites for their food.
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In August 1942 a survey conducted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People found that the black population of New York was paying 6 per cent more for their food than other inhabitants of the city. Although the Association asked OPA to address the problem in the black neighbourhoods, nothing was done.
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The bitterness culminated in the August of 1943 when a ‘commodity riot’ broke out in Harlem and the white-owned stores which overcharged the community were looted and destroyed. After the Harlem riot, action was at last taken in New York, and within a week the OPA had set up an office in the area and appointed black administrators to oversee food-pricing in the area.
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But throughout the war Roosevelt and his administration remained reluctant to address the real grievances of the black community and it was not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s that the United States government finally accepted the need to protect the basic democratic rights of all its citizens.

There were those within the administration who were eager to use the war to improve the system of poor relief set up during the Depression. The report of the Conference on National Nutrition for Defense (1941) argued for the continued use of the food stamp plan and school lunches, both of which had been introduced in the 1930s, in order to ‘bring nourishing, adequate meals to those who could not otherwise afford them’.
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However, the New Deal food relief programmes had been seen by both their chief administrator, Harry Hopkins, and the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry Wallace, primarily as ways of off-loading agricultural surpluses and maintaining farm incomes, rather than as the means of improving the nutritional quality of the diet of the poor.
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Thus, although by 1942 the school lunch programme was
benefiting 5 million children (about one-quarter of the total school population) it had also improved farm incomes to the tune of at least $16 million and the school kitchens had been inundated with farm surpluses of eggs, grapefruit, onions, apples, apricots and almonds. The food donations were so unbalanced that the schools often had to buy in extra foods in order to make balanced meals and the children became so sick of many of the donated foods that they refused to eat them.
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By 1943 the enormous wartime demand for food had solved the problem of food surpluses and most of the New Deal relief programmes were phased out. Federal funding was withdrawn from the food points and relief schemes, and states which wished to continue participating were required to find the funding themselves. As a result the poorest states, with the largest populations in the greatest need, withdrew from the relief schemes.
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This meant that a stubborn residue of the impoverished, who had not been pulled out of poverty by the wartime boom, lost their access to food aid. This was particularly the case in the farming belt, which stretched from the mid-Atlantic coast to the south and west through Virginia and West Virginia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas to Louisiana. Poor land, outdated machinery and a lack of capital to invest in new technologies meant that farms in these areas were left untouched by the wave of wartime prosperity which washed over America’s farming community.
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In these areas living standards actually fell as there was an exodus of doctors, dentists and teachers who went to the army and the more prosperous towns, leaving hungry and malnourished women and children with virtually no health care and a sub-standard education.
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