Old and interesting #8: Gallup opinion polls and World War II tire rationing
Introduction
Each year, Americans are asked to name the man and the woman they most admire. As documented in David M. Oshinsky’s book Polio: An American Story, the most admired woman in 1951 was Elizabeth Kenny, a nurse who rose to prominence due to her role in the fight against polio. The disease was very salient in people’s minds at the time. Today, we are much more worried about other diseases like cancer, and Sister Kenny’s name is virtually unknown.
In every era, people revisit the same big (and not-so-big) questions. These include things like what to do about poverty, how to deal with diseases and death, or why morals seem to be in constant decline. Lighter topics, like celebrity gossip and rating the attractiveness of people from different parts of a territory, are also common pastimes. Even though the general questions are always the same, they manifest themselves differently across different eras. To stick to the example of diseases, people in every historical and current society want to avoid getting sick. But depending on the specific context, this universal desire may have been equated with avoiding the plague, polio, or cancer.
To understand a general question better, we need to study specific instances of it. For example, it wouldn’t be very credible to make grand pronouncements about how people experience war in general without analyzing their experience during specific wars.
In this post, I pick a specific war (World War II), a specific aspect of it (rationing in the US), and a specific product (tires). I don’t think tire rationing in the US during World War II is inherently more interesting or relevant than alternative topics like the impact of the Golden Horde’s conquests on certain Central Asian peoples’ cultural evolution or the impact of the relative scarcity of Soviet men after World War II on marriage norms. All these topics are interesting and relevant insofar as they teach us something about human behavior that transcends the local context.
Naturally, it’s easier to find information about tire rationing 80 years ago than about Central Asian peoples 800 years ago. One useful source about tire rationing is the Gallup opinion polls. Founded by George Gallup in 1935, these polls allow us to peek into people’s lives as they experienced World War II.
Unsurprisingly, some of the poll questions concerned the military situation. They ranged from predictions about outcomes (e.g., When will the war be over?) to moral and practical questions (e.g., What should happen to German and Japanese leaders?; Who should be drafted into the army or various support roles?). Beyond military topics, economic issues like rationing were a recurrent theme. It’s typically civilians who respond to these polls, and shortages of all kinds are never far from the minds of the population.
I use Gallup opinion polls to track what the public thought about tire rationing and related topics. I then link the public’s perception to objective measures about tire consumption and production (taken from this 1947 paper). I include figures about rubber consumption and production in the main text. The individual Gallup polls I mention throughout the text can be found in a PDF at the end of this post.
Tire rationing
When the US entered World War II in December 1941, most of its available rubber was used to produce tires and tubes. A couple of weeks later, tire rationing was already in place. In a January 1942 poll, virtually all car owners (99%) were aware of the tire rationing program and most considered it necessary (81%). Additionally, many of them (44%) correctly predicted that tire rationing would be in place until the end of the war.
Supply issues
It’s not surprising that tire rationing didn’t become an issue earlier. After all, the US was not at war. What I found surprising, however, is the speed with which tire rationing was established. Part of it was surely that policymakers expected demand for rubber to rise as the US’s involvement in the war increased. But more importantly, the rubber supply decreased significantly in early 1942, as shown in Table 1 below.
Almost all the imported rubber came from the “Far East”, roughly corresponding to today’s Malaysia and Indonesia. Japan finished occupying these territories by the first half of 1942, which led to the drastic reduction of US imports from the region. US policymakers probably knew when they entered the war that they would lose access to these imports very quickly. Rationing tires early gave them a bit more time to try to figure out where to source rubber from.
Decrease in civilian consumption
Rationing is one possible answer to product scarcity. The idea behind rationing is to limit the quantity of a good that a person can purchase. Rubber, the raw material for tires, had both military and civilian uses. For obvious reasons, military uses were prioritized, so the reduction in consumption needed to come at the expense of civilian uses. Figure 1 shows that civilian consumption decreased substantially in 1942, probably in great part due to rationing.
Alternative sources of rubber
Instead of limiting the consumption of rubber, its supply could have been increased. In other words, rubber could have been imported from places other than the Far East. Attempts to do this largely failed. Table 1 shows that rubber imports from Latin America and Africa somewhat increased by the end of the war, but the increase was nowhere near enough to offset the loss of imports from the Far East. Since increasing natural rubber imports was not an option, policymakers could have turned their attention to close substitutes like synthetic rubber. They pursued this avenue, but despite the substantial effort that went into this project, producing large enough amounts of synthetic rubber wasn’t yet realistic in 1942.
Rubber drive
If sourcing new rubber takes time, repurposing old rubber could theoretically be done much more quickly. This is the idea behind nationwide rubber drives, whereby people turn in their old or excess rubber products to the government. In the US, such a rubber drive took place between June 15 and July 10, 1942, resulting in roughly 400,000 long tons (PDF) of scrap rubber.
People were paid one penny for each pound of rubber. According to the critics of the initiative, the quality of this scrap rubber wasn’t very high. But despite its limited usefulness in increasing the rubber supply, the rubber drive may have had other benefits. For instance, it may have increased morale by making people believe that they had a way to contribute to the war effort or by showing the unity of the country.
I’m no expert on the average quality of scrap rubber in typical rubber drives, but the incentive structure seems conducive to low quality. After all, people were paid based on the rubber’s weight, not its quality. So, people may have kept their functional tires for personal use and turned in their heavily contaminated or otherwise unrecyclable tires to the government.
A few days after the rubber drive ended, people were asked if they would sell some of their tires to the government for a fair price. 73% said they would. One concern with this type of question is that people may disagree about what constitutes a fair price.
Imagine that the government, after seeing these poll results, decides to go ahead with the purchasing scheme and sets a price it considers fair. It may find that far fewer people want to sell their tires at the supposedly fair price than the poll numbers originally suggested. Some people may consider the government’s price unfair.
Gasoline rationing
People won’t need new tires if their existing ones don’t wear out quickly. Tires wear out quickly when they are used a lot. The solution? Use them less. The US government probably didn’t trust its citizens to follow this simple advice. If it had, it wouldn’t have introduced gasoline rationing to save tires. The idea behind gasoline rationing was simple: you need both gasoline and tires for your car. If you don’t have gasoline, you cannot use your car, so you cannot wear out your tires either. In July 1942, only 49% considered a nationwide rationing scheme to be necessary. Half a year later, the proportion of supporters jumped to 73%.
National speed limit
Another way to slow down the deterioration of your tires is by literally slowing down. When people reduce their speed to 35 mph on all roads, their tires wear out more slowly. This measure has obvious costs, such as increased travel time. Despite these costs, the measure was supported by 87% of people (and 89% of car drivers) in a September 1942 poll. I found this level of support surprising, considering that the speed limits had been much higher before.
I wonder if people didn’t drive much anyway due to the war, making the costs of the intervention smaller, or if the costs of the lower speed limit were just less tangible. (The speed limit, called Victory Speed Limit, was eventually introduced. As a side note, the word “victory” made an appearance in other places as well. For example, small vegetable gardens were rechristened as “Victory Gardens”.)
Edging towards the end
Fast forward one year, tires and tubes were still high on people’s wish lists. In fact, they were the most desired non-food items. Later in the war, however, questions about tires didn’t resurface. To speculate why, let’s revisit the 1947 paper containing information about rubber production and consumption.
As we can see in Table 2, natural rubber consumption was much lower towards the end of the war. It’s not that rubber was not needed. Instead, synthetic rubber became available in much greater quantities than before. The collaboration of businesses, universities, and the government managed to pull off the feat of producing industrial amounts of synthetic rubber within a few years (Table 3).
This remarkable achievement made tire rationing quickly obsolete. People then moved on with their lives. Like polio and Sister Kenny, tire rationing was a high priority for some time, only to be displaced by newer and more pressing issues.
Conclusion
Even though the story of tire rationing in the US during World War II feels quite niche, some of its lessons are applicable much more broadly. Let me conclude by mentioning just three of these lessons.
The first lesson involves potential policy responses to a sudden decrease in a product’s supply. To deal with the shortage, the US government tried measures like rationing and persuading people to drive less. It also tried supply-side measures like finding alternative sources of natural rubber, recycling used rubber, and creating synthetic rubber. Each new rationing scheme comes with its peculiarities, but the set of policy responses tends to be very similar across the board.
The second lesson is that a crisis can quickly change public opinion. On the one hand, this is great because it allows people to act swiftly when needed. On the other hand, updating one’s views quickly can lead to overreactions. Historically, overreactions have frequently led to calls for restrictions on civil liberties that would have been unthinkable in ordinary times.
The third lesson is that topics enter and exit public discourse quickly. When rationing was first implemented during the war, many people probably had a hard time imagining how their new life would be. They then got used to this new life. Conversely, when rationing ended, they may have had a hard time imagining life without it. Rationing surely left an imprint on an entire generation’s way of thinking. That said, it’s remarkable how quickly people can adapt to both good and bad situations and move on with their lives.