2016 wasn't exactly the most stellar year but 1916 was worse
December 31, 2016 7:43 AM   Subscribe

The History of the Great War is a podcast [iTunes link]that goes "week by week through the War to End All Wars". It started in the summer of 2014 and has mostly kept to a weekly schedule since.
posted by Kattullus (8 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Forgot to mention that the podcast is made by Wesley Livesay.
posted by Kattullus at 7:46 AM on December 31, 2016


I'm about 8 episodes in; he moves briskly and died a pretty good job of juggling the events happening all over the place in 1914. Once more, I'm aghast at the blythe disregard for consequence shown by the diplomats before the war. As I've said before, it wasn't that the lights were going out all over Europe; it's that careless and short-sighted power jockies were kicking them over out of spite and then being shocked when the drapes caught fire.

Anyway, it's a significant commitment, but it's pretty solid so far.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:17 AM on December 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


reminding us that things were way worse one hundred years ago
posted by philip-random at 9:32 AM on December 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


Fascinating post - thanks Katullus!

Coincidentally, last week I was googling something or other related to early 20th Century agriculture and ended up down the rabbit hole reading the now-online editions of the California Grocers Advocate from the WWI years. It was fascinating to see how the war was reflected, month by month, in something so anodyne, yet so close to the heart of everyday life, as grocery news.

I was struck, for example, by reports of the food rationing scheme that became quite intrusive as the war continued. Stores were prohibited from advertising sugar and wheat, so as not to encourage demand. People were given certain allowances of sugar for canning preserves, and inspectors went into their homes to see if they had used it. They were fined for sugar hoarding if they had not used it all. A baker was fined for having several bags of sugar hoarded in his basement. A new type of bread, made with predominately rice flour, was touted as a patriotic alternative to wheat bread.

There were other wartime schemes reflected in those pages, too. The "work or fight" regulations at the time meant that inspectors would troll the cafe houses, barbershops, theatres, parks and anywhere else men might be. When they found one, they would demand his draft registration card and whether he was employed in a needed profession. If he were not, his information was taken down and submitted to the draft board. In one telling editorial (remember, this is a publication by a grocer's lobby), the paper urges that the men who go door-to-door selling tea and other comestibles (and thus taking business away from grocers) be urgently included in these draftees!

It is amazing to think of how you could be fined for having a few bags of sugar in your house, or that you might be enjoying a movie and thence be rousted into the army, whereupon shortly you'd be dying in a gas-filled trench.

And that's not even getting into the advances in technology and medicine that make our lives so much easier. Yes, I'll gladly take 2016 over 1916, as bad as this past year has been.
posted by darkstar at 10:34 AM on December 31, 2016 [7 favorites]


I was vaguely aware of sugar rationing - was it merely a calorie/war-materiel thing or was it to cut down on booze manufacture?
posted by porpoise at 3:05 PM on December 31, 2016


If it approaches Dan Carlin's nearly 30 hours on the topic I'll be very impressed.

Ww1 is unbelievably fascinating and relevant
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 3:13 PM on December 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


porpoise, a big part of it was to make sure the war effort got the materiel it needed, but I think just as significant a reason was to make sure everyone back home got their share, too.

There were extraordinary food shortages due in large part to the shift of labor away from agricultural production to the military. So there just wasn't enough sugar, bread, meat and dairy products to satisfy everyone's demand. To make sure that less affluent people had access to these staples, they were rationed and the prices were fixed. Had they not done so, vendors would have raised prices to reflect the scarcity and only wealthy people could have afforded the food.

People hoarded food for two main reasons: they were afraid of even leaner times to come and wanted a cache of food so they wouldn't starve, or they hoped to sell it to wealthy (and unscrupulous) buyers for a hefty markup on the black market. In either case, hoarding takes food out of legitimate distribution reserves and amplifies the scarcity problem, so the government had to act to tamp down on it.

It's fascinating that in both WWI and WWII we had broad acceptance of what today would be considered an extraordinarily intrusive government intervention in food distribution. It calls to mind modern Prepper hoarding. I wonder how those folks might react if the government were to legislate that their stockpile should be inspected and confiscated if they have more than their ration. I suspect armed insurrection would be the result!
posted by darkstar at 5:58 AM on January 1, 2017 [2 favorites]


Ah, thank you darkstar, that makes a lot of sense; refined sugar is very shelf stable. And, well, sugar.

Interesting point about preppers - there is currently overproduction of food, and wartime levels of efficiency could be implemented; not sure if the US would be in the position where (palatable) calories were a materiel limitation. Depending on how the lines are split, (good/decent/acceptable) coffee might be the future sugar equivalent.

I know that WWII food caches have been found post-2000; unpalatable but edible. I wonder what proportion of extant US "prepper" caches are no longer usable?
posted by porpoise at 8:04 PM on January 1, 2017 [1 favorite]


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