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• 40 • 3. The Boys Come Marching Home The nation was ready for its first postwar baseball season. Spring training had been a big hit with fans who poured into Florida in unprecedented numbers. The president of the American Express Company declared 1946 “Victory Vacation Year,” and Americans by the thousands left the snow and ice of the northern winter for the warmth of the Sunshine State. The widely heralded return of the prewar galaxy of major league stars drew fans from the East and Midwest to see for themselves how their favorite clubs were shaping up for the first postwar pennant chase. The outpouring of fans continued as teams attracted large audiences for games as they barnstormed north to open the season, none more so than the New York Yankees. The Bronx Bombers drew 23,000 for a pair of weekend games in New Orleans, more than 20,000 for several weekday encounters in Texas, and then set an all-time attendance record in Atlanta when 21,674 turned out for a Sunday afternoon game. “That baseball’s recovery from the war is complete,” the Sporting News editorialized, “was demonstrated during the spring training season, with its refurbished clubs, amazing turnouts, record enthusiasm and fresh eagerness among the players.”1 Spring training may have been a vacation for fans, but it had become work for the players. No longer was it a lazy time of routine conditioning with matter-of-fact games played before sleepy assemblies of Floridians by “bored, jaded, careless” big leaguers, as the Sporting News portrayed previous springs.2 The physical reconversion of players to meet the athletic demands of baseball, like that of the nation to a peacetime economy, took center stage in training camps. As players were rounding into shape in early April, the Office of War Mobilization reported much the same for the nation, announcing that the economy was “over the hump” in the production of • 41 • THE BOYS COME MARCHING HOME goods and services for the civilian market. More and more major items like radios, phonographs, refrigerators, washing machines, and automobiles were available, as were more personal ones like jewelry and toiletries. Sales taxes brought new revenue to state and local governments for education and other programs, while full employment at higher wages during the war increased the income tax revenue coming to the federal government. It was the dawn of a new affluence for Americans, but the return to peacetime production had not brought peace to relations between labor and management, nor had it restrained a rapid inflation in prices. There seemed no end to strikes and the threat of strikes. In mid-March, two of the longest were ended as settlements were reached in a 113-day walkout at General Motors and a 57-day work stoppage at General Electric; 175,000 auto workers and 100,000 electrical workers returned to their jobs, all of them getting an 18½-cent increase in their hourly pay. But no sooner did peace come to these industries than 400,000 coal miners rejected a similar offer and threatened to stop production of the nation’s primary source of energy. Meanwhile, controversy raged within both the White House and Congress about continuing wage and price controls. Many had been removed shortly after V-J Day at the behest of those wanting a quick return to a private economy, but other controls remained for which the Office of Price Administration had responsibility. The authorization for the OPA was set to expire in July, and heated debates swirled through Congress, the White House, and the press about its extension. The pace of demobilization had picked up through the winter and spring months, returning not only players to major league teams but also millions of servicemen to their families. It eased one political problem but produced another by leaving a depleted military in Europe at a time when Russia was asserting its influence. The Soviet-Western alliance had been a wartime marriage of convenience always troubled by suspicion, skepticism, mistrust, and even resentment. In meetings of the Big Three of the Western nations—Britain’s Winston Churchill, Russia’s Joseph Stalin, and the United States’ Franklin Roosevelt—the Soviets had pledged to give the nations of Eastern Europe a role in choosing their own governments. Instead, Moscow established regimes that would bend more or less to its dictates. The Russian bear was the dominant military power on the continent, and an exhausted Europe lay at its feet. In...

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