America Rationed Sugar Until 1947 — How Would You Have Fed Your Family?

In July 1944, Bertha Boeing of Seattle filled out a federal form asking her ration board for 60 pounds of sugar to put up fruit, 20 for each of three people, with a stamp numbered 37 pasted beside every name. That was how American families got sugar for five years. The first ration book ran to 123 million copies, babies included, and the stamp in it bought half a pound a person a week. By May 1945 the household ration was down to 15 pounds a year, about four or five teaspoons a day. When a ten-year-old girl in Los Angeles offered to give back her sugar book, the man running the program wrote back: "There is enough sugar for all of us if it is all shared properly." In this video, we open the records American kitchens and ration boards left behind: the school registration of May 4–7, 1942, when teachers counted the sugar in every pantry, the German submarines that sank the sugar ships Leslie and Margaret in April 1942, the canning certificates and Ann Mason's three questions in New Hanover County, the Department of Agriculture's radio script of June 12, 1942, the stamps cancelled overnight in December 1944 and Chester Bowles's "We were wrong," the April 1945 Senate testimony that Americans would get less sugar than the British, the Dallas coupon check that exposed a quarter of a million pounds of sugar bought for moonshine, the North Platte canteen letter of July 23, 1946, President Truman's reluctant signature of March 31, 1947, and the day in June 1947 when sugar finally came off the stamps. This is the story of how American families fed themselves on a sugar ration that outlasted the war by almost two years, and why the coupons ended before the shortage did. 💬 If your family remembers the sugar book, tell us in the comments: did anyone ever buy sugar without a stamp, or turn it down when a grocer offered? Sources include Victory, the official bulletin of the Office for Emergency Management (1942); the OPA quarterly reports (1942, 1947); the Truman Library's Public Papers; the Museum of Flight archives; the Library of Congress; the USDA Economic Research Service; the National Park Service; and newspapers of 1942–1947. Dates differ in the record: the Department of Agriculture gives June 12, 1947 as the end of household sugar rationing, while many accounts give June 11, the day it was announced. #AmericanHistory #SugarRationing #WW2 #HomeFront #Rationing #RationBook #1940s #WorldWarII #HomeCanning #VictoryGarden #Truman #BlackMarket #HistoryDocumentary #Documentary #OldAmerica