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Home Front Headache: Rationing

© Earl Rickard

"All RED and BLUE stamps in War Ration Book 4 are Worth 10 POINTS EACH. RED and BLUE TOKENS are WORTH 1 POINT EACH. RED and BLUE TOKENS are used to make CHANGE for RED and BLUE stamps only when purchase is made. IMPORTANT! POINT VALUES of BROWN and GREEN STAMPS are NOT changed." This government announcement was the language of the Home Front consumer during World War II. Mastering the language of rationing and living under its draconian rules became a necessary evil on the the road to victory.

During the Great Depression Americans had "done without" because thay had little money. When war broke out in Europe, in the fall of 1939, England and France placed orders for war materials with American firms, thus ending the decade long depression. Throughout 1940-41 the American economy rose dramatically and continued straight up following the nation's entrance into the war. With unemployment dropping to miniscule levals, everyone had money and a pent-up desire to spend it. But the demands of total war forced the American consumer to put long delayed pleasures on hold for the duration of the war. Priority for all commodities from food to gasoline went to the United States armed forces; civilians would have to take the hindmost and divide it as equitably as possible. This meant rationing.

To administer a nationwide ration program the government created an agency hated only slightly less than Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini: The Office of Price Administration (OPA). The only commodity produced by OPA besides hatred was stamps -- three billion ration stamps every month.

In the case of food rationing, each family in a community received a quota of ration stamps doled out by their local ration board. Meat was purchased with the book of red stamps, while canned goods required books of blue, green, and brown stamps. To illustrate: Every month each consumer received 48 blue stamps, also called points. When a person used their last blue stamp for the month, no matter how much money they were willing to pay for a canned item in the blue stamp category, they could not legally purchase the item without the required blue ration stamp. On the other side of the equation, grocers had to reconcile stocks sold with the amount of stamps collected.

Points, printed on cans next to the price, fluctuated from month to month depending upon an item's availability. In The Home Front: U.S.A., Ronald H. Bailey reported that applesauce went from 10 points in March, 1943 to 25 points a year later, while grapefuit juice dropped to 4 points from 23 during the same year.

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