After the War: Quonset Huts and Their Integration Into Daily American Life
In a Coca-Cola advertisement from 1943, a group of soldiers are depicted enjoying an impromptu baseball game at a remote Alaskan military encampment. Several are shown cheerfully hoisting Cokes, rendered instantly legible by its iconically ribbed, green g
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Their Integration Into Daily American Life Tom Vanderbilt
In a Coca-Cola advertisement from 1943, a group of soldiers are depicted enjoying an impromptu baseball game at a remote Alaskan military encampment. Several are shown cheerfully hoisting Cokes, rendered instantly legible by its iconically ribbed, green glass bottle. “From Atlanta to the Seven Seas,” declares the ad text, “Coca-Cola has become the high sign between kindly minded strangers, the symbol of a friendlier way of living.” Coke, the ad implied, was home in a bottle. “The pause that refreshes works as well in the Yukon as it does in Youngstown.” In the background of the ad, on the edge of the glacial baseball diamond, lay another American icon, one that was also being spread through the incidental globalization of World War II. Along with Coke, chewing gum, the Jeep, the Kilroy was Here logo, and any number of other field-deployed accoutrements of the U.S. military campaign, it, too, had become a kind of symbol for American ingenuity, can-do pluck, and ubiquitous cultural influence. There, in the ad, low-slung on the horizon, lies an instantly recognizable, arch-like and half-barreled, form: the Quonset hut. While the Quonset hut could claim any number of literal or metaphoric predecessors, ranging from the cylindrical “longhouses” of the local Narragansett tribe (in whose language, coincidentally, Quonset itself means “long place”1) to the British Army’s Nissen hut, it was, in effect, a historical hybrid, melding the traditional housing forms typically adopted by nomadic peoples
with the latest advances in materials and prefabrication technologies. Its lines were clean, its facade unadorned, but it spoke less about modernism than wartime contingency (which is not to say the two are unrelated), or what has been described as the “spirit of functional consequence [that] gripped every facet of wartime construction, from the steady stream of more than one hundred thousand Quonset huts made and shipped overseas to the network of coastal defenses that guarded our shores against the possibility of enemy attack.”2 With the Quonset, housing was a weapon. An September 1946 advertisement for Kimberly-Clark (makers of Kimsul, an insulation used in Quonsets) shows a “recently declassified” photo of a vast collection of sleek Quonsets; the accompanying text states: “A massive Naval installation on New Guinea gives a better idea of the Quonset’s contribution to the winning of the war.” It was a kind of heroic icon—“A new
Coca-Cola advertisement, 1943
Stran-Steel advertises the new “Jeep,” Pencil Points, 1943
Jeep in the military field,” as a Stran-Steel (a division of the Great Lakes Steel Corporation) ad put it, part of the same massive industrial complex that was churning out bombers and munitions.3 Its appearance on some Pacific Atoll represented not just an advance of troops, but a virtual outpost of America, a
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Tom Vanderbilt
home away from home, a Coca-Cola of the landscape. In an age prior to McDonald’s or the corporate Holiday Inn, the Quonse
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