The Consumer's Wartime Duty, 1942 

We consumers have a big job to do in this war. We can and must help our fighting men by making possible all-out production of war supplies. We can and must keep our civilian population strong and fit, our economy efficient, our nation democratic. Everything that we do is part of this job. For every purchase we make is a claim on our nation's resources. Every article we use is part of the nation's precious supplies. Each worker and machine that is working to make things for us is one less worker and one less machine producing guns, planes, uniforms, ships, and food for our fighting men and our allies. At the same time, every home is a unit of national strength. Economic efficiency depends on our day-by-day dealings in the market place. Democracy lives or dies in our home towns. A strong consumer front thus means that we must release all possible resources to work for our fighting men, and that we must make the best possible use of the limited supplies which our armies can spare for civilian living. It means an all-out attack on inflation, with war bonds, taxes, and effective price control. It means wise buying by consumers and careful conservation of all our possessions. It means the utmost efficiency in producing and distributing civilian goods. For the better use we can make of materials, manpower, machines and farms that are producing for us, the more we can free for military production, and the stronger we can keep ourselves and our families to meet the strains of war. 

No one of us consumers can escape his wartime duty. We must be at our battle stations twenty-four hours a day-lest we leave the furnace burning too high while we sleep.... .  We need to understand what is required of us, too, because we must reverse attitudes and habits to which we have been accustomed in the past. Our rich land of "plenty" has become a land of "scarcities." We have had too little money to buy the goods we were able to produce; now we have too much. We have been a wasteful people; overnight we must become savers. We have struggled to "keep up with the Joneses"; now both we and the Joneses must "keep down." . . . From now on, virtually everything is going to be "scarce." Although stores are still full of goods that were produced in 1940 and 1941 when more things were made for civilians than in any previous two years, many shelves will be bare as soon as present stocks are gone. It is not only a matter of the refrigerators, automobiles, electric toasters and other products whose production was stopped or cut to the bone in the spring of 1942. Shoes and blankets for our soldiers, food for our fighting forces and our allies demand a large part of our national ability to produce. We can no longer deal with shortages one by one. Every new shortage creates ten or a hundred others and thus sends ripples through the whole economy. For substitutes in turn become short. The delicate balance of peacetime uses is violently upset.....


SOURCE: Abridgement of pp. 1-3, 5 from The Consumer Goes to War: A Guide to Victory on the Home Front by Caroline Ware (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1942).