A nation's socio-psychological climate: change, determinants and value shift

Journal of Instructional Psychology, June, 2002 by William C. Daly

The writer would list below a few of the determinants of the change in ethos in 1942. These events, of course, impacted on the public through multiple sense stimuli, i.e. newspapers, radio, magazines, speeches and more particular on-site experiences which make themselves clear in what follows.

* The attack on Pearl Habor killing almost 3000 and destroying military and other kinds of property. It took nine days for pictures of this debacle to appear on Pathe News in the local movie houses.

* Japanese submarines firing at oil wells in the Santa Barbara area in California (Leighton, A. 1945).

* Blackouts on East and West Coasts, the former because the enemy was near at hand (German U-boats off the coast) and the latter because of public anticipation of Japanese troop landings. There was a need otherwise to remove lights that could attract and guide enemy forces should they appear. Before blackouts on the East coast U-boat captains were looking through periscopes at silhouettes of U.S. freighters and oil tankers at certain points (Miami, New York, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Boston) by way of bright city lights glowing for miles. In and around the Gulf of Mexico, eighty American ships were sunk in May of 1942. Very soon the blackouts eliminated much of this at night but daytime sinkings continued until England sent twenty some frigates (Churchill, W. 1950) totally armed to escort American Freighters to and from Naval shipyards and major cities on the East Coast and West Coast, from Trinidad to a point well past Boston (Time and Life 1989).

* An Executive Order (Roosevelt, F. 1942), authorized the establishment of military zones in this country from which any person, citizen or alien could be evacuated and excluded. Because of geography, commerce, population concentrations and expected Japanese troop landings the military general at the time decided it was imperative to move people inland. Furthermore, there were people, American and otherwise, who were in the process of leaving the coastal areas and taking refuge inland in order to escape any outcomes of a troop landing.

* One Air Force Reconnaissance plane, only, overhead during the night looking for suspicious lights along the beaches so an alert could be sounded.

* "Kids" from down the street suddenly in uniform.

* No civilian cars for four years, only military vehicles of all kinds.

* Landings on Long Island and Florida from German submarines of saboteurs who planned to blow up transportation lines carrying vital material to factories building aircraft, ships and over-land military vehicles. The four who landed on Long Island were tried and three executed by firing squad in Washington, D.C.

* Quartering troops in all Atlantic City Hotels along the boardwalk commandeered by the military.

Values:

People tend to do more of one thing and less of another because of danger around them and a greater sense of self-preservation (gain life) and a lesser sense of materialism (gain things). These are sociological trends that just seem to happen during times of anguish, struggle and disapprobation. Some overlap and semantics are not always clear in the following, as is characteristic often in the social sciences, but they are based on a period of national transition.