Interesting figures revealed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1920 served to relieve much of the race-conscious anxiety among some of the members of the Anglo-Saxon majority. KEY WORDS: Xenophobia, U.S. Census Bureau, Figures of the U.S. Census Bureau, Yellow Peril, Asian American, Asian American History, Asian American Studies.
The German slide-rule jockeys of World War I burned the midnight oil well into the early hours coming up with this weird steel mask for their sharp-shooters…
Click here to learn more about W.W. I snipers.
One of the first profiles of Hollywood beauty and former child star Natalie Wood (1938 – 1981).
The journalist went into some detail explaining how she was discovered at the age of six by the director Irving Pichel (1891 – 1954) and how it all steadily snowballed into eighteen years of semi-steady work that provided her with a invaluable Hollywood education (and subsequently creating a thoroughly out-of-control teenager).
At sixteen, Natalie co-starred with the late James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, and the resulting Dean hysteria swept her forward with him… She cannot bear to be alone. She is full of reasonless fears. Of airplanes. Of snakes. Of swimming in the ocean.
The article appeared on the newsstands while she was shooting All The Fine Young Cannibals.
He led no charge, won no thrilling victory. But men honor his memory because, in the midst of slaughter, he dared death to bring solace to his wounded foes… He was Sergeant Richard Kirkland of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers.
We honor him on this page because he was one of the few men in war who simply refused to submit himself entirely to the savage spirit of war and surrender all sense decency.
On a cold Virginia day in 1862, Kirkland and his Carolinians were locked in a bitter struggle with Federal infantry. It was not a good day for the men in blue, and many of their wounded lay on the ground crying out for help. During the few lulls in the firing Kirkland decided he could take their cries no more and ventured out onto the killing ground bringing water and blankets:
The Union men were thunderstruck when a Confederate soldier, laden with canteens, suddenly climbed into view. Their surprise was probably what saved Dick, for in a few seconds he had sprinted to the nearest wounded man, given him water, covered him with an overcoat, and gone on to the next… Dick was the talk of both armies that day.
Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.
Mr. Junius B Wood, correspondent of the CHICAGO DAILY NEWS with the A.E.F. recently spent a week in the sector held by the American Army Northwest of Toul. He lived the life of a Doughboy, slept a little and saw a lot. He spent his days in and near the front line and some of his nights in No Man’s Land. Here is the second and concluding installment of his story, depicting life at the front as it actually is…
This article listed the skills required to survive as a sniper in W.W. I France:
One extremely important rule was that he should swab the muzzle of his rifle after every shot, to make sure that no moisture had collected there. One tiny drop of water would, upon the rifle’s discharge, send up a puff of steam that would reveal him to his carefully watching enemies.
To see a diagram of the American W.W. I sniper rifle, click here.
When you stop to think of patriotic poetry, Gertrude Stein
As a response to the drastic increase in French and British tank production, German industry manufactured a powerful (if cumbersome) anti-tank rifle in early 1918. The weapon fired a 13mm armor-piercing bullet but it’s heavy recoil made the weapon difficult to operate. The Abris Museum in Albert, France has one of these currently on display.
The attached cartoon depicted one of the unintended consequences of German aggression during the First World War: the creation of what was known as the servant problem. It should be understood that the difficulty in question caused no particular hardship for those who were supposed to be the servants; they were simply delighted to vacate the collective domiciles of Mr. & Mrs. Got-Rocks in order to pull down a living wage in a nice, cozy smoke-spewing armament factory some place – leaving their former employers to fix their own meals and diaper junior.
Click here to read about the New York fashions of 1916.
Assorted black and white illustrations depicting an variety of French artillery pieces from the years 1916 and 1917; among them is a railway gun, Obusier de 520
Click here to learn about the timing fuses designed for W.W. I shrapnel shells.
Will Any of These Pictures be Turned to the Wall? asked the editors of VANITY FAIR shortly after the outbreak of the W.W. I. On the attached pages are photographic portraits of the potentates representing the assorted combatant nations; French President Raymond Poincare was the only elected official to be included among the royals. Pictured are Austria’s Emperor Franz Joseph, Britain’s King George V, Germany’s Willhem II, Victor Emmanuel II of Italy, Peter of Serbia and Albert, King of the Belgians.
Attached is a small piece that explains how the draft of 1917 was conducted. Illustrated with three charts, this article provides the number of males in the U.S. at that time (54,000,000), how many had registered under the Selective Service Act (26,000,000), the percentage of the whole number who had never registered and how the onslaught of the influenza epidemic had effected the W.W. I draft.
In the fall of 1917 the first half million came rapidly. During the winter the accessions were relatively few, and those that did come in were largely used as replacements and for special services.
Two articles from 1917 heaped praise upon the laureled cranium of the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs (1877 – 1962). Having written diligently for the readers of the DAILY MAIL and DAILY CHRONICLE, who were also anticipating his book THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME (1917), Gibbs was admitted to the VANITY FAIR Hall of Fame (for whatever that was worth at the time):
He has been able to bring the wide, modern, romantic outlook to bear in his survey and analysis of fighting and the conditions of fighting…He is a war-correspondent of a ‘new dispensation’, giving ‘not a realistic or a melodramatic vision of war, but a naturalistic vision’.
At the close of hostilities in 1918, Philip Gibbs was filled with disgust concerning his cooperation with the censors and would begin writing NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (1920), in which he angrily names the bunglers in command and admits that he wrote lies all through the war.
This article written by Edwin A. Goewey and illustrated by C. Leroy Baldridge (1889 – 1977) reported on how America’s granite youth was chiseled into fighting trim at the Long Island training camps at Upton and Mineola. Reference is made to the contributions made by Father Francis Duffy and Major-General J. Franklin Bell.
Click here to read about the AEF officer training at Plattsburg, New York.
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
Additional data regarding the 1917 Draft and how the first one million inductees measured-up physically:
The first adequate physical survey in half a century was made possible when the Selective Service system brought before medical examiners some ten million men. Of the 2,510,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one 730,000 (29 percent) were rejected on physical grounds.
We found it interesting to learn two facts from this article; the first being that the highest number of acceptable draftees were from the countryside and the second involved the malady of flat feet -which effected one out of every five American men at that time.
One year after the First World War reached it’s bloody conclusion, Admiral German Grand Admiral Alfred Von Tirpitz (1849 – 1930) was in a frenzy writing his wartime memoir in order that it arrive at the printing presses before his critics could do the same. One of his most devoted detractor was a naval advocate named Captain Persius who had been riding Tirpitz as early as 1914 for failing to fully grasp the benefits of the U-boat. In 1919 Captain Persius took it upon himself to widely distribute a pamphlet titled, How Tirpitz Ruined the German Fleet, which was reviewed in this article.
Tirpitz never realized the power of the submarine… Tirpitz was building Dreadnoughts when he should have been concentrating on submarines, and what is worse was building them with less displacement than the British, less strongly armed and of lower speed.
In 1920 the representatives from the victorious nations who convened at Versailles demanded that Kaiser Wilhelm, Admiral Tirpitz and an assortment of other big shots be handed over for trial – click here to read about it.
By enlarge, this article is a mildly technical piece that compares the German sniper scopes used during W.W. I to those of the British; happily, the amusing part of this essay is contained in the opening paragraph in which a British Tommy returning from the front, is quoted as exclaiming:
German snipers are better shots than the English because their rifles have telescopic sights that are illuminated at night.
A hand tinted colour photograph depicting a French biplane in pursuit of a German Taube.
