Gasoline rationing in the United States

On 1 December 1942 gasoline rationing, in force on the East Coast since the spring, was extended to the whole of the United States. Every car owner had to have a coupon book and a sticker on the windscreen, and had to hand over a coupon for every gallon of fuel bought at the filling station. A speed limit of 35 miles per hour (about 56 km/h) was imposed. A country that then produced more than half of the world’s crude oil introduced gasoline rationing even though there was no shortage of fuel in Texas, California or Oklahoma. What was in short supply was something else: rubber.

Rubber, not oil

Japanese conquests in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies cut the United States off from about 90 per cent of its supplies of natural rubber. Before the war synthetic rubber had been made only in negligible quantities. As early as 11 December 1941 the Office of Price Administration (OPA) halted the sale of new tyres, and from January 1942 they were allocated by local boards. At the beginning of 1942 the production of civilian cars came to an end, so there were no new cars either. Yet a tyre wore down with every mile driven, and America’s nearly 30 million passenger cars were the main means of getting to work, including to the munitions factories.

In the spring and summer of 1942 the rubber dispute became a political issue. The government, the armed forces and the oil and chemical industries argued over what synthetic rubber should be made from (oil, or alcohol from grain, as senators from the farm states demanded), and Congress passed a bill for an alcohol-based rubber programme, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt vetoed. A national scrap-rubber drive in June, collecting old tyres, inner tubes and rubber articles, yielded less than expected. In August Roosevelt appointed a committee of three: the financier Bernard Baruch, the president of Harvard University, James Conant, and the president of MIT, Karl Compton.

The committee’s report, published on 10 September 1942, was alarming. “We find the existing situation to be so dangerous that unless corrective measures are taken immediately this country will face both a military and a civilian collapse,” its authors wrote. By their calculations, stocks of crude rubber (about 578,000 tons) and the modest imports expected would not cover the country’s needs until early 1944 – more than 200,000 tons would have to come from synthetic production, which did not yet exist. They recommended a rapid expansion of synthetic rubber plants (more than 400,000 tons in 1943), the appointment of a single rubber administrator, and, for motorists, nationwide gasoline rationing, so that the average car would cover no more than 5,000 miles a year (roughly a quarter less than before), a speed limit of 35 miles per hour and compulsory periodic tyre inspections.

Roosevelt accepted these recommendations. In September the president of the Union Pacific Railroad, William Jeffers, became rubber administrator, and he explained to Americans: “This is not a gasoline rationing programme, but a rubber conservation programme. The aim is not to take cars off the road, but to keep them on it.”

The East Coast first

Gasoline coupons were no novelty in December 1942. On 15 May 1942 they had been introduced provisionally in 17 East Coast states (together with the District of Columbia), and in July they were replaced by permanent coupon books. There the reason was different from that in the rest of the country. Gasoline and oil were carried to the east mainly by tankers from the Gulf of Mexico, and from January 1942 these were being sunk in large numbers by German U-boats operating just off the American coast as part of the Battle of the Atlantic. There were too few pipelines, and the railways could not keep up. In the east fuel really was short, so the coupons protected both gasoline and tyres. From the autumn heating oil was rationed there as well.

Extending the system to the whole country took an enormous amount of work. The second half of November had been mentioned at first, but printing and distributing millions of books took longer, and in the end rationing covered every state from 1 December. Drivers were registered in schools, and the coupons were issued by some 5,500 local War Price and Rationing Boards, staffed mostly by volunteers.

A, B and C stickers

The system was based on lettered categories, shown on a sticker in the corner of the windscreen. The most common was the “A” sticker, to which anyone who drove for private purposes – shopping, church or visiting – was entitled. It gave a few gallons a week: at first four, later three in the east (a gallon is about 3.8 litres). Those who drove to work, especially in war industry, and took other workers with them could get a supplementary “B” allowance. “C” stickers went to those whose driving was essential to the war effort or to public health: doctors, nurses, clergy, postmen, railway workers. Lorries received “T” allowances, and emergency vehicles and some machines “E”. An “X” sticker meant an unlimited allowance.

To receive coupons, drivers had to declare the serial numbers of their tyres. Anyone with more than five tyres per car had to sell the surplus to the government. Holders of “A” stickers had their tyres inspected periodically, and the 35 mph limit, dubbed the “Victory Speed”, was meant to extend the life of tyres. Motor racing, including the Indianapolis 500, was suspended for the rest of the war.

Complaints, Congress and the black market

Americans accepted rationing with a mixture of a sense of duty and irritation. The loudest protests came from the Midwest and the West, where distances were great, public transport was poor and gasoline was plentiful. Senators and congressmen from these states argued that rationing fuel where there was no shortage of it was absurd, and demanded that the rules be postponed or relaxed. The government answered with the argument from the Baruch report: every mile driven meant rubber used up. The affair of the “X” stickers in the spring of 1942 had become notorious: after rationing was introduced in the east, it emerged that some two hundred members of Congress had applied for an unlimited allowance, and the press tore them to shreds. Motorists joked that OPA stood for “Only a Puny A-card”.

The Office of Price Administration was the most hated agency in the country. Its head, the economist Leon Henderson, resigned in December 1942, officially on grounds of health but in reality under pressure from Congress, which after the November elections was more conservative and hostile to price controls; he was succeeded in January 1943 by the former senator Prentiss Brown. A black market soon appeared: coupons were stolen from board offices, forged and sold under the counter at filling stations. According to figures cited by historians, in the first eighteen months coupons for hundreds of millions of gallons were stolen in break-ins at board offices, and by 1944 forgeries worth more than a million gallons a week were in circulation. In the east, where fuel was still short, pleasure driving was banned from January 1943.

Significance

Gasoline rationing was the most tangible effect, for ordinary Americans, of a war in the Pacific thousands of kilometres from their homes. The restriction worked: the average annual mileage of a car fell from almost 10,000 miles in 1941 to just over 6,000 in 1943, and people shared cars, walked, and switched to bicycles and to crowded trams and trains. The tyres lasted until the synthetic rubber programme, built up in line with the Baruch committee’s recommendations, began in 1943 and 1944 to produce hundreds of thousands of tons of rubber a year – more than pre-war imports of the natural material.

Unlike Britain, where in the spring of 1942 the government announced the rationing of coal, gas and electricity and was abolishing the basic petrol ration for private motorists, the United States did not experience real scarcity. Gasoline rationing was nevertheless part of the same economic mobilisation that Roosevelt had announced in his State of the Union address in January 1942: civilian consumption was to give way to war production. Gasoline rationing lasted until the end of the war and was lifted on 15 August 1945, the day after Japan’s surrender was announced.