Chapter 12 Days with Harry-2

The advertising industry will enter a golden age.A Navy veteran's best-selling novel based on true events (Frederick Wakeman's The Advertiser, 1946) made Madison Avenue a household name.However, the popular magazines that originally developed the advertising industry were unable to compete in various publicity industries and were defeated miserably.In wartime, magazine publishers are as busy as car factory foremen.Each magazine gained an average of 250,000 subscribers in the period from Pearl Harbor to victory.Before the war, they sold no more than a few thousand copies abroad; now that the United States is recognized as the leader of the West, hundreds of thousands of Europeans read these magazines.Within two years, their advertising revenue increased by $100 million.But even during this heyday, there were some ominous signs.John Fisher reports in Harper's magazine: According to advertiser surveys, literate Americans are increasingly turning to magazines for a particular audience, such as Yachting, Holiday, The New Yorker, etc.As for ordinary readers, they can't hold back their hearts.They are no longer content with distractions, but demand something fascinating, captivating, and absorbing.Once the public discovered television, the once-best-selling magazines on newsstands, the good times were numbered.

In the first few years of the Truman administration, television was a hotly talked about topic, but it was just a topic, it didn't do much else, and it was certainly not a money-making business.The early popular Dumont TVs were too small, expensive, few in number, and had nothing to look at.But the huge potential of television can be seen from the two live sports broadcasts.One was the Louis vs. Conn boxing match on June 19, 1946, and the other was the 1947 World League Baseball match.People who watch TV at home can see it better than paying $50 for a front-seat ticket to a boxing match or a ticket to the grandstand at Yankee Stadium.But advertisers are still hesitant, thinking that the number of households with television sets is still too small, and it is not worth spending a lot of money on advertising, because by January 1, 1948, there were only 172,000 television sets in the country, and there were no TV broadcasting stations. More than 20.So the radio broadcasting industry can still be complacent.Not so with Hollywood.The giants of the film industry had to turn to the advertising giants of Madison Avenue, and the sales directors of these companies immediately advertised on billboards, subways and trolleybuses across the country: "Why don't you go to a movie tonight? ’ and assure everyone: ‘The movie is better than ever!Moreover, news has spread that an average of 250,000 households are buying TVs every month, so this propaganda is even more unworkable.But that doesn't seem to matter.After the war, the advertisers and the propagandists of various companies were brothers and sisters. They were skilled in gold, and their magic was boundless. Beer and cigarettes packed in double cellophane are selling well.Whether these people speak at a Manhattan banquet, in a Detroit new car showroom, or among oilmen and congressional lobbyists, the whole room will be silenced.These people are good at shaping images and are known for their keen observation. Of course, all ears should be listened to.As you know, the technology of opinion polling and the manipulation of propaganda tools is still in the experimental stage, just like Newton just saw the apple fall to the ground, Fleming just discovered the penicillin mold in the laboratory, just a little more time, a little more time.They are infinitely promising.Some imaginative minds, drawing lessons from Upton Sinclair's failed 1934 run for governor of California, imagined that someday these technologies, when ready, could be used in a presidential campaign.

Exactly what role these advertising industries played in promoting postwar prosperity is uncertain.However, during the war period, the influence was significantly expanded, and it was not limited to the market.All kinds of advertisements and magazine articles have shaped people's inner psychology, or repeatedly advocated that people should be like this or that.Again and again they told soldiers that they were fighting for their favorite pie.And the girls next door, or the young newlyweds who stayed in those trailer houses at the port of departure, wondered how much Joey had changed and what he should be like now.Of course she had some letters from him, but the letters were obviously checked, and most soldiers avoided talking about really important issues.So she had to look for some newspaper articles from newsstands and corner stores, and these authors were very enthusiastic, introducing to her the situation of her relative who was far away and whose return date was near.

They told her that the soldiers had a "readjustment" problem, and she'd better be prepared. "Women's Home Journal" asked: "Is your husband seeing the woman he imagined when he came home?" Psychoanalysts, sociologists and writers have analyzed in detail, saying that this Joey is impossible It's the same as before. Home Economics exhorts patience. "After two or three weeks, he will stop talking non-stop, and the burden of the past should be over. If he keeps talking and talking, and he is still emotional, then you'd better see a psychoanalyst. Look." As for Home Beauty magazine, the solution is simple and clear.It featured a picture of a living room, designed for a shell-shocked general, and boasted that "the family is the most important demobilization center, for all soldiers." Booklet to teach members of the Army Women's Service Corps and the Navy Women's Volunteer Emergency Service Corps how to cope with mental depression in rapidly changing circumstances.They advised the parents to refurbish her bedroom to make them feel unexpectedly new, and said that "the female soldiers adjusted mentally when they put on the new pleated shirts."Some irresponsible newspapers are talking about the danger of deranged demobilized soldiers wandering around.One headline went so far as to say: "Crazy Demo Soldier Going Around."

This nonsense was passed on to foreign troops by Bill Mauldin and some other writers and painters.They were offended to hear these embellished reports or outright fabricated lies. In 1944, it was widely rumored that Mrs. Roosevelt suggested setting up a shelter in Panama, where returning troops would be quarantined there for a period of time to learn how to live in a civilized society, and then let them go home. Wear a prominent armband to let the orderly women know that the person in front of them may be a rapist.Soldiers at the front said indignantly that they were not such people at all.It is not true to say that all they want is to vent their sexual desires.

But in fact they are. At the end of the Battle of Alamein, it is said that a reporter from Reuters asked a British soldier in the Eighth Army: "After the war is over, what is the first thing you do?" "Fuck my wife," the soldier replied without thinking. "What about the second?" "Throw away those damn hobnail boots." That's pretty much the case with any army.And it has always been the case for soldiers to return home after demobilization.Once the semi-nude photos of Betty Grable were ripped from the wall and they lifted women's skirts in bedrooms or in parks, there was no talk of "refitting" anymore. "The so-called demobilized soldier problem," said William O'Neill, "has never been a problem. There are all sorts of surprises in the post-war years, but perhaps the most unexpected is the ease with which such a large number of men can be arranged." Outside."

In the 1940s, American Love had three distinctive features.The first is that marriages are quicker during wartime; the second is that divorces are more frequent after the fighting has subsided; and the third is that nurseries are overcrowded.Before Hiroshima was destroyed by the atomic bomb, surprise marriages were popular.All kinds of propaganda encourage them to do so.In a famous movie called "The Clock," Robert Walker meets a girl at Penn Station who, though of different origins and family circumstances, have nothing in common except physical attraction. After only 24 hours of acquaintance, the two stood in front of the church altar and became a couple.Some military bases are near cities, where there are many young girls, so they build some chapels to encourage people to get married.Newspapers also played up celebrity marriages, including Artie Shaw and Eva Gardner; Oona O'Neill and Charlie Chaplin; Judy Garland after her divorce from David Ross , also married Vincent Minnelli; Gloria Vanderbilt, 21, and Leopold Anthony Stokowski, 58; and Roy Rogers and Dale E. Vince, who made 24 western cowboy films without a single kissing scene, also announced his marriage.Then, the soldiers return from the front, and the romance begins to unravel.There are many reasons, and there is a movie called "The Best Years of Our Lives" that portrays one of the main reasons.It was the story of a middle-class character returning from the war.Dana Andrew plays a teenage pilot who gets married on the spur of the moment just before departure.The bride was a shallow blond, and after he set off, she imagined him the way he always was: silver Air Force collar pins, aviator cap pulled low over the brow, and so on.But after he was discharged from the army, he couldn't wait to take off his military uniform and put on civilian clothes.And as soon as she saw him like that, she made up her mind to take the train to Reno at once. In 1946, the city approved 11,000 divorces.Until now, this is still the highest record.

In those days, Los Angeles, like any other city, had thousands of coffee sessions.The young wives of ex-servicemen who participated in these talks were very interested in these topics, some of which were intriguing divorce cases, citing lack of affection between the parties.These ladies are very well behaved people.Except for those who had been chronically malnourished during the Great Depression, those difficult years left little trace on their appearance. (But if they open their mouths and smile, the situation may be different. In their youth, orthodontics and orthodontic appliances are also more expensive. Some people have dentures by the age of 30.) According to the Museum of American History in New York City According to a survey of 15,000 women in 1945, the legs of young American women at that time were longer than those of their grandmothers in 1890, their hips were slightly fatter, and their waists were slightly thicker.But compared to the image of Aphrodite, the god of love in Cyrene, the buttocks are slightly smaller and less enchanting.By the time of their wedding, their average height was five feet three and a half inches (slightly taller if born in California), with a bust of 33.9 inches, a waist of 26.4 inches, and a hip of 37.4 inches.By the time they're good enough to attend those morning coffee sessions in Los Angeles, they're young mothers, fattening in certain parts.But they were still slender and slender, and European journalists at the time admired them, saying that they laughed at everything, sometimes at themselves and their friends--she would say: "We are really like a bunch of people here." Cows." Or, "Like a coop of hens." They had brown hair and blue eyes.Her parents' generation used to say "dear" to express intimacy, and now it has been replaced by "baby".Among them, except those who were college graduates or members of the "League of Women Voters", they were completely indifferent to national affairs.They belong to the "Silent Generation" and are proud of it.She and her husband rarely read newspapers.She has only one expectation for him, that is to have a stable career.He himself had spent his childhood in the Great Depression, so the request was no more than that.In short, the requirement for life is to have security.

Except for open-air courtyards and small subtropical gardens, such young women abound all over the country.There are so many young women in California because it is growing faster than any other state, especially attractive to demobilized soldiers preparing to make their homes, and has become the birthplace of the postwar American way of life.In these years, the number of supermarkets has tripled, and it is about to pass the 20,000 mark, but the instigator, the Crystal Palace Market in San Francisco, opened its doors as early as 1922.Before Pearl Harbor, California had pioneered drive-in theaters, drive-ins, auto banks, and drive-in churches, as well as machines designed to wash and wax cars without requiring drivers to get out of them.After the war broke out, backyard pig kilns and kidney-shaped swimming pools developed in private houses.California engineers were the first to design the eight-lane superhighway, the quincunx interchange and the toll collector.It was a Californian who was the first to wear a short-sleeved open-necked shirt to a formal dinner, and they were the ones to wear the iron-blue tuxedo.On California beaches, women lead the way in half-naked and later fully nude bathing suits, while women take to the streets in trousers, decorate trees with lights, build split-level houses, women smoke in public and more , all spread from California to the country.In one word, they are creative; in another, they are informal.As for the coffee, it goes without saying that it is instant.

The topic of coffee talks is often about children.The unexpected increase in population is caused by this group of smiling people.The government also played an inadvertent facilitative role. "It used to be just hanging out with a few girlfriends before graduating from college and achieving a successful career," Betty Frieden said. Now demobilized soldiers "rely on the GI Bill of Rights and get married right away." Of course, demographics People don't think: the newlyweds are lying in bed, just kissing and hugging.But they thought they would hold back on fertility, as their elders did in the 1930s.But for those who are now parents, the mood is obviously different. "These demobilized military couples always want to get what they want right away, as if if they can't get it today, they will never have it again." Caroline Byrd said: "What kind of house, car, washing machine, child...he Want to have everything right now. . . . They have kids and they don’t think about how much it will cost them to get their teeth fixed and send them to college.” Having kids is easy and it’s fun.If we compare the figures published by Dr. Alfred Kinsey of Indiana University in 1944 with the census figures in the late 1940s and perform simple calculations, we find that 55% of American men are married There were 311617 people, and the number of times of sexual intercourse per week was as high as 136666060, or in other words, there was one ejaculation every 4.8/1000th of a second in the whole country.In those days, a woman in the U.S. became pregnant every seven seconds, making the Census Bureau blush!

For this bureau, this is simply to demolish it.All pre-World War II population estimates are completely useless.The war years did not stop giving birth, and in those years there were always "wartime babies" being born.There are as many as 3 million births per year.By 1946, the year transport ships began bringing troops home, there were another half million more births than the previous year.This is not the highest record, not even close to the highest record.The following year added another 400,000 from the already record-breaking figure in 1946.By the mid-1960s, those who made long-term plans found that there were 20 to 30 million more people in the United States, and the largest population increase was the teenage generation, and this generation of students was destined to have a lot of things in their lives.Even in 1964, when Johnson and Goldwater ran for president, wartime babies were underage and Depression-era adults were less than a quarter of the electorate.So some of the antagonism between the old generation and the new generation only started to emerge during Johnson's second term.Because certain views and concepts during the Truman period will have a significant impact on society when parents enter middle age.And they are not necessarily very interested in these changes. It was during these years that Dr. Spock's Parenting Handbook became the best-selling book since the 1895 bestseller list.There's a section of Spock's book devoted to what he calls "letting go.""It is human nature for parents to bring up their children the way they were brought up," he wrote. But they should remember that "the doctors who used to tell parents not to pamper their children now advise them Not only to take care of the children's diet, but also to consider their emotional needs." The "Spock era" began. In many ways, the beginning of this era was wonderful.Bill Mauldin published the comic "Return" after his serial comic "On the Front Line". One of them is a picture of a father who is holding vegetables while pushing a child in a small car. A sergeant in uniform asked him, "Willie, how's life as a free man?" The demobilized soldier thought it was great.Some women's magazines began to discover a new phenomenon: these new fathers volunteered to mix milk powder, take care of breastfeeding at two o'clock in the middle of the night, and even wash diapers by themselves (throw away diapers after use, it will take 15 years).However, as new household electrical equipment comes on the market one after another, these houseworks are easier to handle (there is no electric knife for cutting meat, but there is an electric grinder for sharpening knives, so cutting meat will not be laborious; the vacuum cleaner installed on the wall is still there. Not present, but the vacuum cleaner is already lighter and easier to use).If the young couple were going to a restaurant for dinner or a movie, the neighbor's older girl would be happy to come over and babysit for a little money (twenty-five cents an hour is considered generous).In short, these new families were neither tedious nor labor-intensive.The only problem is that housing is hard to find. The housing shortage that emerged after the war was a direct result of the rapid demobilization brought about by the high number of babies born and the "We're Going Home" movement. In December 1945, the army demobilized nearly 1 million people a month, and the navy had another 250,000 people. There were so many demobilized soldiers that it was simply impossible to accommodate them.The United States must have a minimum of 5 million houses, and it must be resolved immediately.Obviously it is impossible to ask the construction industry to solve it.As soon as wartime control was lifted, labor and materials were immediately used for industrial construction.Only 37,000 houses broke ground between the victory over Japan and Christmas.President Truman asked Congress to pass a decree stipulating the maximum price of houses and authorizing him to use half of the country's construction funds to build low-cost houses (10,000 yuan or less than 10,000 yuan each).The construction industry sent powerful lobbyists to Congress to prevent the bill from passing.But the Senate agreed to transfer 75,000 temporary wartime buildings to demobilized soldiers.The government also remodeled and rebuilt some group dormitories, housing 11,000 newlywed soldiers. When the winter wind became increasingly severe, another 14,000 households were squeezed into the vacated army barracks.But that's just a drop in the bucket.There are more than one million households living together with others.In bitterly cold Minneapolis, a couple spent seven nights in a car with their wartime baby.An apartment in Atlanta was advertised for rent by as many as 2,000 people.Disturbed by this, the city's leading figures paid for 100 mobile home trailers for demobilized soldiers.These trailers can be seen densely clustered in large and small cities, especially on campus.The University of Missouri conducted a door-to-door survey on the campus, leaving all the places that can be vacated for Missouri students, and went to other states to tell the students who applied for admission: Although they have the admission requirements, there is no house to accommodate them .In North Dakota, ex-servicemen converted granaries into homes.Benny Goodman's band was volunteering for the city of Cleveland, asking listeners to rent out their rooms.Even so, the house is not enough.The landlords were said to be indifferent, and Mauldin was most indignant at this—his resentment continued to be an indicator of the mood of his generation.He vented his feelings in a cartoon of a demobilized military couple with a daughter arguing with a fat, aggressive landlady.A sign at the door said, "There are rooms for rent, children and dogs are not accepted." The landlady said, "It seems that you soldiers just don't understand our difficulties." When the housing shortage was at its worst, any homeless ex-military couple had a lot to live through.The most conspicuous of their spokesmen is Senator Glenn Taylor, a shepherd boy singer.He was elected to the Senate by the people of Idaho by playing the banjo well.Standing in front of the stone steps on Capitol Hill with his wife and children, he sang weepingly: Oh, let me have a home near the halls of Congress, Let the kids play in the yard! One or two rooms, even if they are older, Alas, we can never find a place to call home! The United States urgently needs a 10-year plan to build a living area of ​​1.5 million households every year. Before this, it seemed that it had to rely on tents for the time being.Although the building industry lobbies powerfully in Congress and can thwart the passage of grand government plans, they build houses brick by brick, too expensive and too slow for them to do it alone.There has to be a solution.By early 1949, someone was creating a solution to this problem by prefabricating components in factories.There are production miracles in wartime, and they are production miracles in peacetime.The Henry J. Kaiser of the construction industry is the newly created Leavitt & Sons.William Leavitt bought a 1,500-acre potato field in Nassau County, Long Island.In terms of its impact on post-war life, this event is as important as the seven-inch television created by Dumont and the first electronic computer created by Howard Aiken at Harvard University.The concept of what we call suburbs today, in retrospect, started from this piece of land.Some people look down on this first Leavitttown.But they couldn't understand how grateful and satisfied the people who moved in at that time were.Leavitt doesn't need to post announcements, and he doesn't spend money on advertising. People go around and tell, and that's enough. On March 7, 1949, when his unglamorous business department opened for business on a cold and windy morning, more than a thousand couples lined up there.Some have been waiting four days and nights for coffee and fritters for dinner.As soon as the doors of the sales department opened, it was like the land rush in Oklahoma in 1889.Those who are now called "young couples" are crowded with each other, trying to be the first batch to buy a house with four rooms at a price of 6990 yuan.If you include handling fees, greening and kitchen appliances, it is less than 10,000 yuan. Leavitt builds houses, like Kaiser shipbuilding, with the assembly line.The first batch consisted of 17,500 houses at once, and each house was of the same style.At the sound of an order, row after row of bulldozers move forward, and when the red flag is waved, they turn.Those who followed were responsible for laying the concrete floor, followed by electricians who erected street lampposts, and workers who came to hang street signs.Then, divide each house into lots.Fleets of cars rolled on the solidified concrete road.The prefabricated wall panels were removed at 8 a.m., the toilet bowl at 9:30 a.m., the sink and tub at 10 a.m., the plasterboard at 10:30 a.m. and the floor at 11 a.m.That's the flow of work.There wasn't a hand saw in the whole town, and the woodworkers at Leavitt's company used only electric tools.They sprayed the walls with paint guns, and the so-called "color design" of the first batch of houses was just two different shades of color.According to his calculations, a swimming pool for two thousand households would occupy the same area as a tennis court.So he ordered the construction of eight swimming pools and the cancellation of all tennis courts.Everything can only be the same.Monday was designated Laundry Day, and 17,500 backyards were lined with laundry.But under no circumstances should clothes be hung to dry on a Sunday.No family can make wooden fences.The lawn should be trimmed regularly.All this is clearly written in the contract.Even the new mechanical tools that have just hit the market seem to fit in with Leavitt's plan.The distance between each tree is 28 feet (two and a half trees in front of each house), and the error can be measured in inches.The stones of the sidewalk are slightly curved, but the angle is also uniform.If those households want to make some special features, they can only think about the interior decoration and the tone of the doorbell (although there were ringing or ringing bells at that time, the doorbells were still used).Architects and sociologists are very disgusted.In their view, such an entrepreneur is a dictator.But people who bought a Leavitt-style house didn't care about that.The demobilized soldiers who are used to the strict military life, and the wives who lived in the prefab houses or trailers made of corrugated iron still remember them vividly. For them, a house built according to uniform specifications is also a warm home. Bill Levitt was at once a mythical figure, a Paul Bunyan who made people live, despite the accusations of furious aesthetes.His imitators popped up all over the country, and he crossed the Pennsylvania line with his men to start work on an eight-square-mile stretch of land on the Delaware River that had always grown spinach.The town designed by his designers has 1100 streets, contains schools, churches, baseball fields, city halls, factory railroad spurs, parking lots, doctors' and dentists' offices, cisterns, downtown areas, trains Stations, newspaper offices, garden clubs, in short, everything a city with a density of 70,000 people needs, making it the tenth largest city in Pennsylvania.Levitt called the Second Levitt Town "the most well-planned town in America."When he talked about it, his voice was hoarse. "Of course it's exciting to be able to use a product to fill a need that no one else can solve," he said, "but I'm not just building and selling houses. Frankly, I also want to gain some reputation, which It’s human nature. I want to build a town that I can be proud of.” After a pause, he added, “Of course, you have to be bold and think big.” Oddly enough, his own house looked so different from Levittown's.It was a lovely farm in Bucks County, with thick stone walls, hand-cut rafters, thick beams, spacious rooms, and a deep forest in the distance, uninhabited.He thought this kind of house was good, but quickly said: "Most Americans, especially women, would not like it." He said to the visitors: "You want people to buy a house that they don't want, but a house that they don't want. There is no reason for a house whose price is beyond their ability.” He pointed to the decorative lines of the house and the places where dirt and dust are easy to accumulate, and said: “Think about it, if the current housewife wants to live in a house like this Take care of cleaning and sanitation, and put your wife in such a village, do you think it’s okay? People always like to have someone to accompany them.” His tone seemed to say that they should stay the same.Admittedly, they don't have much choice.