But, it gave me some insight into how the war got us out of the Depression!
The war didn't get us out of the Depression.
You probably learned that in school. However, John Pugsley who actually lived through it says "not so--the standard of living didn't rise it FELL".
Items that were abundantly available during the Great Depression--chocolate and silk hosery--disappeared during the war. Sugar, milk, bacon, butter, gasoline, and many other items were rationed during the war years.
Housing built during WW2 consisted of "cracker-box" rat traps. My neighborhood is full of it. You can see how the standards of living plunged by comparing housing of the different eras. Houses built in the late 19th century until WW1 broke out are luxuriant. During both war eras they become more modest, WW2 being the noticeable plunge in quality. A lot of WW2 housing turned into slums and numerous neighborhoods in my city were blighted then.
There is a lady down the street and around the corner from me who has been growing cucurbits ever since she and her dad had a WW2 victory garden. I encourage backyard production as much as possible. But it's not particularly efficient.
What about employment? Didn't employment levels rise? Not at all--replacing attrition when draftees were mobilized or killed in battle does not constitute increasing employment. :(
Roosevelt's pre-war record is just as catastrophic--there's a reason the Great Depression happened in the first place. Contrary to widespread misperception, unemployment rates did not fall under his reign but actually rose. Hit 25%. Also contrary to misperception, consumer prices rose after 1933. We went from Depression to a form of stagflation, with the "stagnation" part being dominant.
What did happen was that people blocked out the reality of the situation. Hollywood's propaganda machine peaked around 1939 and coasted until the 1950s when it went into decline. It's had several rises and falls since then. Eduard Bernays and his new "science" of "PR" (originally, openly referred to as "PRopaganda", then euphemized to "Public Relations") were thriving, along with the other new science of "Public Opinion" (PR's evil twin; that's where you not only test to see if the PR is working, you feed back into the PR machine--for example, you release deceptive opinion poll results in order to--influence opinion!).
People were made to believe that Roosevelt "cared" about people and was "doing something" about the situation (causing it, actually). We were "sovietized", and have never really recovered all of our lost freedoms.
It's somewhat the same way that many people nowadays can speak of the "economic recovery" when in fact the economy continues breaking down at an accelerating pace. Flooding certain specific markets with "liquidity" does not make family-supporting jobs magically appear, nor does having a gigantic glut of houses sitting empty improve our standard of living.
Getting back to history, it was circa 1948--after the war--that standards of living started rising. That was also the start of a major bull market.
