Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

"THE PECULIAR PEACE"
THE NEW
WORLD OF
SCIENCE (1946—51)
The war ended with a monstrous 'bang. In "the peculiar peace" that fol-
lowed, the word "fallout" equally described a metaphorical truth and a new
phenomenon loosed on the world. In a decade compounded of inflation,
strikes, shortages, Russian intransigence and aggression, and the new pres-
ence of the atomic bomb, the Nation was to be ruled by uneasy fears.1
By the end of 1946, as price controls went off, living costs were an
estimated 39 percent above those of December 1941, and strike after strike
hobbled production and pushed prices still higher. Trolley and subway
fares went up 2 cents and then a nickel. The 10-cent Sunday paper became
15 cents, 'then 20. A public with massive war savings fretted over shortages
of food, furniture, nylons, electric irons, and clothing. Even razor blades
and alarm clocks were hard to find, a new car meant signing up on a
multiple of long waiting lists, and housing was either not to 'be had or the
new ones promptly started falling apart. In the summer of 1946 came the
meat "famine" as producers refused to send their cattle to market. The
black market, a way of life in Europe, came to America.
"Had enough?" the Republicans asked the country, and in 1946 it
elected the first Republican Congress since the days of Herbert Hoover.
But the worst of the adjustment was already past. Raw materials were
again becoming plentiful, the reconversion of industry neared completion,
and production 'began approaching prewar levels.
New sources of tension arose in the United Nations, born in the
last year of the war, where Russia, using the veto to shield her expansion
in Europe, goaded the assembly, staged stormy walkouts, and sabotaged
issue after issue raised, including the most critical of all, international con-
trol of atomic energy. Communism's growing threat in Eastern as well as
Western Europe slowly impelled America to assume responsibility for re-
storing their war-wrecked economies.
1
The material of the introductory pages of this section is largely drawn from Eric F.
Goldman, The Crucial Decade: America, 1945—1955 (New York: Knopf, 1956).
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CHAPTER VIII