Reading 1945’s Signs of Peace in Life Magazine By Bob Greene
http://www.wsj.com/articles/reading-1945s-signs-of-peace-in-life-magazine-1440628226
The reality of shared sacrifice is striking, seen even in the ads for Life Savers and Ray-O-Vac.
‘Tell me it’s really happening. I can’t look away from your eyes, John. If I did, you might disappear, the way you do in dreams. Let me just sit here and remember how your hand feels on my arm . . . I can touch the stripes on your sleeve. I can hear the clock tick. I can see my reflection in your eyes.”
Those words, from an advertisement for International Sterling tableware in Life magazine soon after World War II ended 70 summers ago, were accompanied by a photo of a wife greeting her returning serviceman husband.
The ad was hardly an anomaly. To leaf through wartime, and then immediate postwar, volumes of Life—which, in those years, was as close to a weekly American scrapbook as this country had—is to be struck by how thoroughly the fact of war permeated the nation’s thinking. And by how much the reality of shared sacrifice and participation—of every family being affected—seems to have faded during more recent conflicts.
“We’re sorry if there aren’t enough Life Savers to go around,” the candy manufacturer proclaimed earlier in that summer of 1945, before the Japanese surrender. “But Servicemen come first—we know you’d want it that way!” Apologies by corporations were common in the pages of Life, in the months before peace arrived. “Plenty of pineapple, but—sorry—not for you,” the Dole fruit company informed civilians. “Again this year the Armed Forces require about two thirds of all the pack of the Dole Pineapple and Dole Pineapple Juice.” The Jockey underwear company asked for understanding: “Jockeys are scarce in the stores—the bulk of Jockey production capacity has been used for the armed forces.”
The editorial content of Life in the summer of ’45 was heavy on war coverage—in July, combat hero Audie Murphy graced the cover—but somehow the advertisements, when seen from the vantage point of today’s America, tell just as vivid a story. Gaines dog food encouraged civilians to boost the morale of soldiers overseas by writing frequent letters, and did so in the guise of a fanciful note from a cocker spaniel: “Dear Master . . . Oh master, you MUSTN’T be lonely. We’re going to write you often . . . every day we can.” Ads for radio shows, such as “People Are Funny” on NBC, carried notations: “Fridays, 9:30 p.m., EWT.” Eastern War Time—the War Time designation was official, for all the clocks here at home.
And then came late August, and the assurance of victory and peace, accompanied in short order by a subtle change in those pages of advertisements. “The secret radar bombsight built by Philco,” the electronics manufacturer told readers, featured technology that “will bring you the newest developments in the enjoyment of radio and recorded music.” The Ray-O-Vac battery corporation—its ad depicted a smiling uniformed usher in a movie-theater balcony—was pleased to declare that supplies were “back again—Now you can fill your flashlights with dependable Ray-O-Vac leakproofs, war-proved and improved.” Oldsmobile vowed that “as a result of combat use on Army tanks,” the Hydra-Matic Drive transmission had been fine-tuned to make peacetime rides on U.S. highways a smooth pleasure.
It was as if all those companies, as the promise of peace dawned, didn’t even consider eliminating wartime references. How could they? The war had been a unified and unifying national endeavor, for those who fought and those who waited. “What does the button say, Daddy?” a young boy asks his father, home from combat and wearing an honorable-discharge button on his business-suit lapel. The ad’s sponsor, Camel cigarettes, answered the question: “It says a service well done for our country . . . for freedom and humanity the whole world over. It says that America, every American, is proud of the wearer . . . be it your dad, or any one of the 13,000,000 men and women who, like him, served in the armed forces.”
As peace became a dream realized in late summer, the U.S. Rubber Company placed an ad with the headline: “They’ll be kids in Keds again!” No longer needing to devote so much production capacity to soldiers’ shoes and boots, the company could make the famous Keds footwear available once more for children. The illustration was of a father and son going fishing together.
A sweet marketing concept? Sure, but it was something deeper, and more real, than that. Earlier in the summer of ’45, when the war was still on, Life ran an article about Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. A weary Ike was quoted as telling a group of combat correspondents: “I take it that you are just as anxious as I am to win this war and get it done so we can all go fishing.”
Mr. Greene’s books include “Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War” ( William Morrow, 2001).
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