THE NATION: Democratic Vistas

Out on the Montana range, rattlesnakes were unusually plentiful, and the old men predicted a long warm fall and a short easy winter.

In Chatsworth, Ill. First Lieut. Billie Wittier, an Army nurse, made Page One of the weekly Plaindealer when she got back home: "She has seen much front-line active duty in the European sector, including Italy and Germany. She was able to see the Alps in all their beauty and says Switzerland, especially, is beautiful."

In Manhattan, a nobly decorated veteran of the Pacific was passed along by a junior executive, who was unfavorably impressed by his willingness to take "anything," to a junior executive who told him, kindly, "You know, I don't think this is exactly the job for you." Upon hearing this, the young hero burst into tears.

Happy days, more or less, were here again. Despite prodigious achievements at home & abroad, the nation had not been essentially changed by war. Now, returning to peace rather than struggling through to it nine-tenths dead, the U.S. was more like itself than ever—in a world which would never again be remotely the same.

The Broad Highway. Butter pats were served again at Schrafft's and Henrici's; cases against cigaret blackmarketers were dropped. Along the highways, in whatever cars they had, people were blowing out tires and bumping into each other again; the city traffic tie-ups were something awful. Other moral equivalents to war were the fall's football games—which drew record crowds—and a shooting season so trigger-happy that Colorado's game department recommended manslaughter laws for hunters.

Army deaths were totaled 216,966, the Navy's 55,896; the National Safety Council announced that on the home front, since Pearl Harbor, 355,000 had been killed through accident, and 36,000,000 injured. The great songs of season were Till the End of Time, I'll Buy That Dream, On the Atchison, Topeka & the Santa Fe. Best-selling novels were The Black Rose and Forever Amber. A big movie hit was Love Letters, a romance about amnesia. A psychologist claimed that Superman provided a beneficent Aristotelian catharsis ; a Jesuit saw in him a fascist archetype. Young girls tried to look like Bacall with a dash of Hepburn. Their elders went in for cosmetics with manic names like Fatal Apple and Havoc. They also favored detachable daintiness features and phantom crotches. In ads as expressive as dreams, fathers forfeited their children's love because of denture breath, and women exclaimed: "Don't expect me to marry you with a mouthful of cavities!"

A Navy doctor, soon to come home, wrote warning his wife rather sadly that he had gotten bald and heavy. She wrote back gently: "You will find that three years has done quite a bit to me, too." A partially paralyzed ex-defense worker gave his six-year-old daughter a doll, his nine-year-old son a pack of cards, told them to shut their eyes because more was coming, and shot them through their heads.

The war was over. The postwar world was born. Everywhere the returning traveler saw signs of change, signs of no change at all, signs of change but too fast, signs of change but not fast enough: signs by the millions.