Promoting a Culture of Driving: Rationing, Car Sharing, and Propaganda in World War II

Abstract

World War II, some scholars have argued, interrupted Americans’ “love affair” with the automobile. According to this school of thought, gasoline rationing temporarily curtailed car driving and suspended car culture before both surged in the postwar era. This essay argues that World War II strengthened, rather than interrupted, Americans’ attachment to the automobile and solidified driving as a fundamental part of American culture. Ration boards distinguished between “essential” and “nonessential” driving and justified gasoline rationing as the only method to preserve civilian driving when supplies of gasoline were low. Thus at the same time as government and private industry were encouraging Americans to limit their driving, they were sending a strong message that Americans needed to drive and that foregoing driving whenever one wanted was a true, if temporary, hardship. Advertisements and government propaganda conflated car ownership with citizenship and portrayed driving as integral to the American way of life. But this mode of citizenship was not available to all: posters, pamphlets, and advertisements portrayed the American driver almost exclusively as white and most often as male. Such depictions implied that the mobility and independence that driving afforded were the sole domain of white American men.