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• 121 • 8. Midsummer Dreams Americans were ready to celebrate July 4. The first anniversary of the nation’s independence since the end of World War II was filled with the usual flags, fireworks, band concerts, parades, and picnics but also with extra joy and meaning for families reunited with loved ones home from service in a war to preserve that independence, yet tempered by the sadness of those whose loved ones did not return. Americans had been released from the anxieties and obligations of war, and with a new prosperity, they were busy trying to recover the lives they had known before Pearl Harbor. The huge increase in the numbers attending major league baseball games was but one dimension of the return to prewar life. Movie theaters were also setting all-time records at the box office as audiences crowded in to see The Best Years of Our Lives and It’s a Wonderful Life or, most popular of all, Walt Disney’s Song of the South. Broadway sparkled again with a revival of Show Boat, while Americans sang along with old favorites, Bing Crosby and the Ink Spots, and new ones, Frank Sinatra and Perry Como. The hit tune “Zipa -Dee-Doo-Dah” seemed to capture the carefree attitude and optimism of Americans in the summer of 1946. If the reconversion of ordinary Americans to the peacetime world had been rapid and relatively smooth, that of the nation had not. President Harry Truman had faced one major problem after another: restoring private control over the economy, returning millions of troops to the United States and to civilian life, the threat of communism and a cold war in Europe, the atom bomb, and the endless labor strife at home with one industry after another hit by strikes. As June ended, no question occupied Washington so much as that of deregulation. Truman had vetoed a congressional extension of the Office of Price Administration that would have sharply reduced the • 122 • MIDSUMMER DREAMS agency’s authority. Controversy over whether to continue the fight to renew the OPA or let it die and permit prices to seek their own levels raged not only between the president and Congress but also within the White House itself. Free-market conservatives won, and the OPA expired, igniting a rise in prices on consumer goods greater than any during the war. A much more limited OPA was restored later in July, but in the interim, there were protests across the country aimed especially at increases in the price of food. In Boston, housewives organized to picket markets, and the New England Office of the Americans Veterans Committee called for a second Boston Tea Party in which “bales representing inflated and black market goods will be dumped into Boston harbor by ‘Indians’ as bales of tea were thrown into the harbor in 1773.”1 A shortage of food, especially meat, had been a concern since spring. Confronted with widespread hunger and the prospect of starvation in war-ravaged Europe, Truman diverted American farm products from markets at home to those abroad. Fears grew that Russia would capitalize on food shortages , and the general postwar chaos on the continent, to expand its influence, putting the president in the odd position of dismantling one army while recruiting aggressively to build another to defend the West against possible Soviet aggression. Shipping food to Europe diminished that available in the United States. In early June, after touring city shops, Mayor James Michael Curley of Boston declared, “Not a loaf of bread was to be found anywhere in the city,” and he warned of possible riots and bloodshed. Bakeries had shut down for lack of flour, and long lines of housewives formed early every morning at markets in the city to purchase the one loaf they were permitted. Black market and under-the-counter sales boomed, and huge traffic jams formed in the narrow and crooked streets of Boston as people from outside the city came looking for bread.2 A seven-year-old from Somerville, Charles “Red” Robinson, enjoyed a moment of celebrity for walking seven miles to find a loaf of bread. Even baseball felt the shortage where as one wag put it, “The hot dog lost its long association with the bun.” In Fenway Park, wieners were sold with a pickle in the middle and mustard on top. They were not even selling that at Griffith Stadium in Washington, where the Senators were unable to obtain any hot dogs whatsoever...

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