Shoe rationing in the United States

On Sunday 7 February 1943, at 3 p.m. Eastern Time, the Office of Price Administration (OPA) announced that from Tuesday 9 February leather footwear would be rationed in the United States. From then on every American – man, woman and child – could buy only three pairs of leather shoes a year. For the first pair the customer had to hand over stamp No. 17 from War Ration Book One, issued in the spring of 1942 for sugar. The stamp was valid until 15 June 1943. Stamps could be exchanged among members of the same household, so that parents could give theirs to children whose feet grew faster than the ration allowed.

The decision was announced on a Sunday and without warning, to avoid panic buying. Even so, reports came in from cities where shops were open on Sundays of crowds besieging the shoe departments. In many towns shopkeepers refused to sell shoes “for stock” to customers who telephoned, and assured the press that the ration would be sufficient. According to the industry’s figures at the time, the average American had previously bought about 3.7 pairs of shoes a year, so three pairs a year did not yet amount to a painful sacrifice.

Leather and rubber for the war

The reason for rationing was a shortage of leather, above all of the thick leather used for soles. The US Army, expanding rapidly to many millions of men, needed boots and leggings, and a soldier in the field wore out footwear much faster than a civilian. Leather also went into belts, holsters, harnesses, gloves and flying jackets. Then there was rubber. Japan’s conquests in South-East Asia had cut America off from almost all its imports of natural rubber, and rubber soles and heels were among the commonest everyday uses of the material. Rubber work boots and galoshes had already been rationed in the autumn of 1942: to buy a new pair, one had to convince the local board that it was needed for work and hand in the old pair.

The announcement came at a difficult moment for the OPA. For months the office had been under attack from Congress and business over price ceilings and the growing number of rationed goods. Its first head, Leon Henderson, seen as the symbol of state control over the economy, had left in December 1942, and in January 1943 he was succeeded by the former senator from Michigan, Prentiss M. Brown. It fell to him to announce the new restrictions. Footwear remained the only item of dress for which Americans were issued coupons: unlike in Britain or Germany, clothing was not rationed in the United States, and savings in fabric were enforced through regulations on cuts and styles.

Three pairs a year

The stamp had to be torn out of the book in the presence of the salesperson; an exception was made for mail orders, which were very important in rural America. Anyone who needed more shoes could apply to one of several thousand local ration boards, most of them staffed by volunteers. Extra pairs were granted above all to people whose work wore out their shoes, such as postmen, as well as to pregnant women and people who needed orthopaedic footwear. The application was lengthy: one had to list every pair one owned and explain why another was essential. Extra shoes could also be obtained if one’s existing pairs had been burned, destroyed in a flood or stolen.

Rationing did not cover used footwear, seconds, or shoes made of materials that were not in short supply: fabric, plastics, cardboard, small amounts of reclaimed rubber, even old fire hoses. These unrationed “play shoes” quickly became fashionable, and demand for them was so great that manufacturers could not keep up. At the same time the authorities restricted the range of leather footwear. Shoes could be made in only a few colours – black, white and two shades of brown, including “Army russet” – two-tone shoes, high tops and thick heels were banned, and men’s sandals, golf shoes and running shoes disappeared from the market. Cobblers grew in importance: repairing old shoes became the main way of coping with rationing, and from 1943 the authorities allowed repair shops to buy up old stock and odd shoes for parts.

A growing rationing system

Shoe rationing was another link in a system that Americans had been building since the first weeks of the war. In January 1942 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Emergency Price Control Act, which gave the OPA the power to set maximum prices and introduce rationing, and in April he presented Congress with an anti-inflation programme in which the rationing of scarce goods was one of the main points. Sales of new tyres had been halted even earlier, and at the beginning of 1942 production of civilian cars ended. Sugar was rationed from May 1942, coffee from the end of November, and from 1 December petrol throughout the country.

February 1943 brought a further and much bigger step. Alongside the introduction of shoe rationing, a second ration book was being distributed, with points for processed foods. From 1 March tinned and frozen foods, dried fruit and juices could be bought only with “blue points”, and from the end of March meat, fats, butter and cheese required “red points”. This rationing system, run by some 5,500 local boards, came by the end of the war to reach, in one form or another, almost every American household.

Significance

Shoe rationing was no tragedy for Americans, and it can hardly be compared with the privation of occupied Europe, of Britain, where clothing and footwear had been rationed since June 1941, or of the Third Reich, where clothing cards had been in force since the autumn of 1939. For the inhabitants of the world’s richest country, however, it was a tangible sign that the war was reaching deep into everyday life. The leather from every pair left unbought went to the factories making military boots and equipment, which in 1943 were equipping the army for the fighting in North Africa, Italy and the Pacific.

Rather than growing, the ration eventually shrank. According to American accounts, in the spring of 1944, as leather stocks fell further, it was cut to two pairs a year. Shoe rationing was lifted only on 30 October 1945, more than two months after Japan’s surrender and later than most other rationing – together with sugar, it was one of the last wartime restrictions in the United States.