Late Spring

The average U.S. citizen had assumed that his world would soon get back to normal after the war. He could hardly escape the fact of the atomic bomb, but he thought he could forget it for a while. The national debt was big, but it wouldn't explode; and the Russians, though annoying, would be busy rebuilding Minsk. He ordered an automobile, ate a steak, and waited irascibly for Better Conditions. But last week, as spring grudgingly began to warm the continent, he had reached a reluctant conclusion: things were probably as normal as they were ever going to get and he was still living in the same old world.

Very few seemed shocked, or even particularly surprised, by the President's plea for aid to Greece and Turkey (see The Presidency). But the national mood was one of resignation and apathy rather than enthusiasm. Muttered a Chicago commuter: "More sand down the rat hole." Said an ex-soldier, now a student at the University of Oklahoma: "Well, I told my wife to dust off my uniform."

U.S. citizens had plenty of other problems--no less annoying because they were smaller than those of Greeks, Frenchmen, Englishmen and Chinese--and they were busy wrestling with those closest to their pocketbooks.

The H. C. of L. Many found the advent of spring, 1947, an ironical occasion. Some of the nation's fondest dreams had come true. Strikes had dwindled. Production was up. Shelves were loaded with things which a few months ago would have drawn milling crowds, no matter what their prices--roasts, steaks, white shirts, nylons, alarm clocks, men's suits. Canned beer was back and so were fishing tackle, shotgun shells and golf balls. But prices stayed stubbornly high or got higher. Everywhere, the biggest single continuing topic of conversation was the high cost of living--people talked endlessly of how much more they had enjoyed on much less before the war.

After the free-spending war years, millions were suddenly finding a kind of savage satisfaction in refusing to buy. Despite the most honeyed words of Vogue and other fashion magazines, women in all U.S. cities were betraying no sudden fascination for the new clothes with longer skirts. Expensive Scotch and bonded bourbon sat untouched in liquor stores--the U.S. had gotten used to cheaper blends. Detroit used car lots were jammed with new automobiles for resale at fabulous prices, but almost nobody was having any.

Stew Meat. Once more, housewives were staring their butchers down, taking home stew meat instead of standing rib roasts. There was a sudden demand for buttons--for home sewing. The Sears,

Roebuck and Co. catalogue, printed on a poorer-than-usual quality of paper, was being eagerly scanned by thousands who not so long ago had trooped to department-store perfume counters in their tin hats.

In many other ways, the U.S. was settling down. If World War II was to be followed by something approximating the jazz age, it was not yet in sight. Nightclub business was off everywhere--from Manhattan's Stork to Hollywood's Mocambo. The great migrations and frenzied travel stirred up by war were almost at an end. There were fewer marriages and fewer divorces in the first months of 1947 than there had been in 1946.

Vanished Targets. But if the nation was pinching pennies and getting set in its ways, it was doing so against its will--and was finding little pleasure in the process.

The crime rate was at a ten-year peak. There was little talk of the housing shortage, but the silence was a sullen one--there still weren't enough houses. The young veteran of World War II was not the kind of political influence he thought he might be--he had vanished back into the civilian population, too busy making a living to do much else.

In 1947, the U.S. citizen could not even blame his troubles on somebody else. The rich, scoundrelly munitions kings, the international bankers and the suave plotters of the British Empire, who had been such handy targets for abuse after World War I, had all but vanished. The U.S. was now the mightiest power in the world--across the seas there lay only Russia and the rubble of the once-great nations of the past. Now the U.S. could only scan the inscrutable face of circumstance, find the answers to her own dilemmas, or fail. It gave many an American a lonely feeling.

In Indianapolis, a TIME correspondent stood next to a stranger in the Saratoga Tavern. Afterwards he wrote:

"We talked about the weather and he said: 'Yes, spring is here, all right, but there's something wrong.' I asked him what and he said, 'I don't know, just something.' "

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