Old YaleThe ad man who sold the warChester Bowles '24S pulled Americans together in a time of crisis. Judith Ann Schiff is chief research archivist at the Yale University Library. As we commemorate the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II, a look back at the war years provides an opportunity to learn and appreciate how Americans in the past met the challenges of an extended national emergency. A Yale alumnus, Chester Bowles ’24S, has been credited with sustaining enthusiastic public support of the war effort; John Kenneth Galbraith called him “the best civilian administrator of World War II.” Known throughout a long career of service as a liberal New Deal Democrat, Bowles helped President Franklin D. Roosevelt convert the United States into “the arsenal of democracy.” Bowles’s talent for public persuasion may have had its roots in his career in advertising. In 1929 he and William Benton ’21 formed the Benton and Bowles advertising agency, which quickly became one of the most successful in New York. Bowles exploited the new medium of radio with several innovations: the soap opera, cue cards for audience applause and laughter, sound effects, and jingles. After leaving the agency in 1941, he accepted a request by the governor of Connecticut, where he had a home, to serve as rationing administrator. Appointed state director of price administration in 1942, Bowles issued rules to prevent hoarding and selling of food and fuel rations. Americans received a set of monthly ration books, each containing a certain number of stamps for coveted staples like sugar and gasoline. But cheating was relatively easy, until—as noted in a July 1942 Yale Daily News article—Bowles required every buyer to detach the right number of stamps and hand them to the seller for every purchase. Henceforth there would be “no opportunity for bootlegging as torn out coupons must be presented to the distributor to obtain a fresh supply. Elis must be careful not to detach coupons from their books.” In 1943, Roosevelt selected Bowles to direct the federal Office of Price Administration. As a Washington Post article would explain after his death in 1986, Bowles’s job was “an enormously important, if thankless and unglamorous, one. Basically, he was in charge of price and wage controls for a country at war. He administered a bureaucracy of some 70,000 employees and convinced Capitol Hill and the nation of the need for controls and the importance of fighting inflation.” Bowles utilized his ad-man skills to show that anyone who “met a payroll was running an economic operation for President Roosevelt.”
As governor, Bowles worked to increase spending for housing, education, and medical care. Outspoken against racial discrimination in the North as well as the South, he was the first governor to establish a State Commission on Civil Rights. After successfully championing a law to desegregate the Connecticut National Guard, he named the first woman and the first African American to the state’s military staff. In 1950, he lost his bid for a second term to Republican John Davis Lodge, but in 1958 he was elected to represent Connecticut for one term in Congress. In 1968, Yale made Bowles an Honorary Doctor of Laws.
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