Greetings From the War
by Rachel Dworkin, archivist
Right after college I worked in a greeting card store. We liked to claim that we had cards for every occasion, but we really didn’t. Not only didn’t we have cards for married couples with the same birthday (I know, I checked), we didn’t have cards tailored for servicemen and women either. If you want cards like that, you have to buy them on-line from specialty manufacturers.
That was not the case during World War II. Shortly after America’s entry into the war in December 1941, the War Department issued a directive aimed at cutting America’s civilian use of paper by 25%. In response, the greeting card industry, lead by George Burkhardt of Burkhardt-Warner, formed the Greeting Card Association. The Association lobbied hard that greeting cards should be exempted on the grounds that they helped to boost soldiers’ morale. They created programs designed to shill war bonds and stamps, and gave free greeting cards to wounded soldiers so they could contact their families.
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| Card sent to Herbert Hall upon joining the army in 1942. |
The end result was that America during World War II was awash with patriotic greeting cards.
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| Christmas, 1942 |
Card companies tailored their birthday, holiday, and other assorted greetings to servicemen and women. While today less than .5% of Americans serve in the military, nearly 12% of the population served in World War II including over 13,000,000 men and 358,074 women. Pretty much everyone had a friend or relative in uniform to write to. Some cards were fairly generic (to a serviceman/woman) while others were targeted towards members of each branch of service. There were 11 different branches of service including Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, WAAC, WAVES, WASP, SPARS, Women’s Marine Corp, Army Nursing Corp, and Navy Nursing Corp.
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| Christmas Card sent to Seaman Francis Palmer, 1944 |
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| Birthday card sent to Captain Helen Booth of the WAACs, ca. 1943 |