White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf

by Aaron Bobrow-Strain

What appeared only as short-term wartime expedience would set the stage for the 1950s and 1960s golden age of Wonder bread.

In 1940, with U.S entry into Europe’s war appearing ever more inevitable, Congress authorized the country’s first peacetime draft. As men across the country lined up outside neighborhood draft boards, however, it was quickly evident that the country had a problem. After a decade of lean economic times, men aged twenty-one to thirty-five were dangerously unfit to fight.

In Chicago’s tough Eleventh Ward—cradle of the city’s Democratic machine, home to the stockyards and hard-working Lithuanian, Polish, Italian, German, and Irish men—draft boards found seven out of ten conscripts physically unfit to serve.

Nationwide, General Lewis B. Hershey reported gravely in 1941, draft board doctors and dentists had rejected five hundred thousand out of the first million men screened.7