Sorry No Gas (October/November 1979 | Volume: 30, Issue: 6)

Sorry No Gas

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Authors: Stephen W. Sears

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October/November 1979 | Volume 30, Issue 6

According to the members of the blueribbon committee, the situation was desperate. Their report, released to the Washington press corps, had been blunt, unsparing, and apocalyptic. “We find the existing situation to be so dangerous,” it warned, “that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both a military and civilian collapse.” The committee proposed to counter the dire threat by the imposition of nationwide gasoline rationing.

Such a report may be easily imagined in one of the future-crisis scenarios currently making the rounds in the White House or the Department of Energy. In fact, however, it was issued on September 10,1942, with the United States nine months into World War II, and it triggered the nation’s first—and, thus far, only—encounter with the full-fledged rationing of gasoline. How the American people coped with so traumatic an experience may be instructive.

To be sure, the lessons of history need to be used with caution. The situation in the early 1940’s was very different from what we are told may confront us in the early 1980’s. We were then at war, united against a common enemy. We were then not hostage to foreign sources for petroleum. Indeed, in 1942, for much of the country at least, there was not even a gasoline shortage. Yet if the origins of wartime gas rationing have little in common with one of these alarming future scenarios, the actual rationing experiences of 1942 to 1945 may offer certain lessons worth a second look.

The blue-ribbon committee that issued its outspoken report in September, 1942, had been assigned the task of bringing order out of confusion. It was a distinguished panel, including educator James B. Conant, president of Harvard, and physicist Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; at its head was Bernard Baruch, Wall Street wizard, director of industrial mobilization during World War I, and confidant of Presidents. Franklin Roosevelt had turned to him almost in desperation. “Because you’re ‘an ever present help in time of trouble,’” the President pleaded in a handwritten note, “will you ‘do it again’?” The time of trouble in this instance was what the press called the “rubber mess.”

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, rubber instantly became the most critical strategic material for making war. Nine-tenths of the nation’s rubber came from the Far East, and it was painfully evident that nothing would now stop Japan from cutting off that source. Stockpiles on hand, enough for about a year of peacetime demand, were grossly inadequate for the growing war machine. Synthetic rubber eventually would provide the answer, but the American synthetic-rubber industry was in its infancy. Just four days after Pearl Harbor a freeze was put on the sale of new passenger-car tires, and on December 27 tire rationing was authorized, to go into effect early in January, 1942. Sales of new cars also were halted, leaving America’s motorists to contemplate an uncertain driving future with their present