So horrid was the terror of World War I trench warfare that more than a few of the Frenchmen serving in those forward positions (and others who were simply overcome with life in the military) began to post personal ads in French newspapers, volunteering to marry widows and divorcees with large families in order to be absolved of all military duty.
Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about courage.
Appearing in The American Legion Monthly some nineteen years after the end of the war was this nifty article written by a German veteran. The article explains quite simply how his forward listening post operated in the German trenches North of Verdun during the early Autumn on 1918.
With the Korean War in full-swing, Major General Edward E. MacMorland (U.S.A.) recalled his experiences some forty years earlier when he was a field grade officer fighting the nascent Soviet Army on their own turf:
It was a tough and surprisingly well-equipped enemy that our soldiers faced in this region…
On page one of this three page guide, you will find some essential notes and illustrations from the editors of Vanity Fair regarding the good taste of 1918 (as well as the simply awful).
To be sure, the book review of Das Kapital by Karl Marx that appeared in The New York Times in 1887 was very different from the review that same paper would give that book today. For this reviewer, Marx was one of the advocates of chaos, and a militant political economist:
If he is anything, Karl Marx is a man in a towering rage. His paragraphs are replete with kicks and cuffs. He wants to slap your face if you are a bourgeois; to smash your skull if you are a capitalist.
Click here to read an article by Leon Trotsky.
The columnist whose opinions are attached bitterly pointed out that the first year of FDR’s administration had marginalized the Congress – and further opined that Roosevelt’s rhetoric clearly implied his arrogant conviction that his administration alone was the only alternative to out right revolution, and should therefore to be seen as a mandate of the people. The article lists the numerous failings of FDR’s New Deal.
CLICK HERE to read more criticism from FDR’s loyal opposition…
When W.W. II began and the factories reopened, the reality of having money and full-time employment made so many people giddy with excitement it proved to be too much for them – click here to read about that…
During the closing months of the tempestuous Sixties, American baseball legend Jackie Robinson (1919 – 1972) wrote about his fears in regards to the racist hatreds that existed within the hearts of a handful of the most vociferous Black radicals.
The Brain Trust has devised a number of schemes for getting money away from the fellows who accumulated it during the Golden Age of Coolidge, and some of those schemes are working. Any man who hoarded gold has now been relieved of it, any man who piled up a bank deposit sees it reduced by 40% in value.
I have gathered my tools and my charts… I shall roll up my sleeves – make America over!
This was the motto to which the young folk began their work, nearly a thousand of them, which may be grouped for study purposes under the generic title, ‘Junior Brain Trusters’. They were, for the most part, young men from the colleges and universities of the larger eastern cities…. Many of them came as protégés of the Senior Brain Trusters themselves, brought from the classrooms by [Guy] Tugwell, [Raymond Charles] Moley, [Felix] Frankfurter – Professor Frankfurter being especially successful in drafting students and recent graduates from the Harvard Law School.
