Carrot cake became popular after a recipe was published in “The Foxfire Book” a collection of folkways from the Appalachian mountains.
It would be a few years before people discovered that carrot cake was created by a home economist during the Second World War, when sugar was rationed, and people were looking for substitutes.
Rationing (In those days pronounced Ray shon ing) was part of daily life for Americans after Pearl Harbor. Sugar was rationed, as was meat, gasoline, tires, clothes, alchohol. Stockings were hard to come by since silk and nylon were used to make parachutes. Women made do by putting makeup on their legs.
Chances are you’ve heard stories about wartime rationing from your parents and grandparents, and seen references in old movies.
During the war, people did without, including my grandparents, who were staunch Republicans and despised Franklin Roosevelt.
Quite a few Americans detested “That Man In The White House” and his wife.
My grandmother worked hard to keep FDR from having a third term.
Two years later she would be eating her oatmeal without sugar and walking to the train station, when she wanted to go downtown.
Because she wasn’t doing without for Mr. Roosevelt, or the Democrats. She was doing without to help her country.
My mother’s parents had not taken Prohibition seriously. They were not the kind of people to let a constitutional amendment come between them and their cocktails. Grandaddy had a bootlegger leave whiskey, fresh from Canada by way of Lake Erie, where the bootleggers fished the bottles out of the water, in his garage. (Except for one night, when the bootlegger made a mistake, and left the whiskey next door, at the minister’s house.)
But this was different. They, like most Americans, knew they had to pull together to defeat fascism. If that meant doing without their cocktails, and their Sunday roast beef, for the war effort, they would do without.
There were people who tried to get around the government policies. Nobody liked them. They were the bad guys in the movies. The papers blamed them for juvenile delinquency.
Before Pearl Harbor, there was a strong anti war movement in the United States. They called themselves America Firsters, and they were of the opinion that there was no reason Americans should involve themselves in the problems of other countries.
A group of them were having a meeting, here in Pittsburgh, in the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, ironically. A lot of them thought the guy who came in and announced that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor was a prankster.
They were wrong.
That was the beginning of the end for the American First movement.
Like everyone else, they would pull together.
Then there was the Transylvania University football team.
The school does exist, in Lexington Kentucky. It was founded in 1787. A large number of distinguished Kentuckians are Transy graduates, among them Henry Clay, and Terry Isaacs, who was the first woman mayor of Lexington, KY.
Their basketball team is called the Pioneers, because vampires suck. The football team, as alumnae will tell you, has been undefeated since 1941.
Because that was the last time they played.
After Pearl Harbor, the team enlisted.
They would have been, most of them, the sons of wealthy families in Kentucky and Tennessee. Their fathers, most of them, would have been “Dixiecrats”, who opposed the New Deal, and made ugly jokes about Eleanor Roosevelt going into coal mines to talk to the miners.
But they knew they weren’t going to fight for Roosevelt, or the New Deal, or the Democratic party. They were going to fight for their country. They were going to fight for freedom. Politics didn’t matter.
(Anyway, folks in Kentucky know football is just a game. As opposed to basketball, which is a religion.)
When covid hit, last year, some of us made sacrifices. We stayed in. When we did go out, we wore masks. We missed holidays, parties, church services, club meetings, going out to lunch.
We had lonesome Easters and Passover seders. We had solitary Memorial Days and Fourth of Julys. We had small Thanksgiving dinners, and did Christmas over Zoom.
We were the small time heroes. True heirs to our ancestors who sacrificed to win the war and defeat fascism.
Then there are the others.
The ones who wouldn’t wear masks, because they knew they didn’t need them. The ones who said the covid virus was a hoax. The pastors who insisted on holding services. The governor who turned spring break into a super spreader event.
The TV preachers who denounced efforts to slow the spread of the virus.
The politicians who turned the pandemic into another us versus them issue.
They were, of course, lead by the most incompetent president our nation has ever had. But there were plenty of others, willing to put their profits ahead of their fellow Americans. Happy to see a few people die, people who didn’t matter, really, for the sake of business as usual.
The ones who refused to be vaccinated.
The restaurant owner who will only serve unvaccinated customers.
Worst of all, they wrap their despicable ideas in the flag, and the cause of freedom.
They are the heirs to I don’t know who. To the few who decided they preferred their comforts to their country, and dined on steak, while their neighbors made do with spam.
Once upon a time, Americans, Republicans and Democrats, sacrificed for freedom.
We can’t seem to manage that now.
One more reason why I kind of detest the Republican party.