New Austerity Incites a Bitterness the Postwar Generation Did Without
By ALAN COWELL
NYT
LONDON — Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.
“Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple ‘utility furniture’ until 1952, food until 1954,” he wrote in a memoir, concluding that austerity in “that bare-bones age” was “not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic.”
It was not just in Britain.
A continent was reeling, its cities and industries ruined. As Soviet Communism threatened to encroach and the cold war loomed, Western Europe awaited the salvation of America’s Marshall Plan. Cars were few and small, vacations modest, belts tight.
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — Before he died of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 2010, the historian Tony Judt recalled childhood days just after World War II in a debilitated Britain that was slowly ceding its empire and its pre-eminence.
“Clothes were rationed until 1949, cheap and simple ‘utility furniture’ until 1952, food until 1954,” he wrote in a memoir, concluding that austerity in “that bare-bones age” was “not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic.”
It was not just in Britain.
A continent was reeling, its cities and industries ruined. As Soviet Communism threatened to encroach and the cold war loomed, Western Europe awaited the salvation of America’s Marshall Plan. Cars were few and small, vacations modest, belts tight.
(More here.)
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