The War Labor Board has decreed ‘equal pay for equal work’ for women in war industry… George W. Taylor, WLB vice-chairman, wrote the decision and said that any other condition than that of pay equality was ‘not conducive to maximum production’.
At Stalingrad the imitative appears to be slowly shifting into the hands of the Russians…The Russian attack was reported to be growing in vigor and German counterthrusts were repulsed with heavy losses.
The WASP program, for as such the Women Airforces Service Pilots became known, was begun in August, 1943. In addition to providing women fliers who could take over certain jobs and thereby release their brothers for front-line duty, the program was designed to see if women could serve as military pilots and, if so, to serve as a nucleus of an organization that could be rapidly expanded…The women who took part in the pilot program proved of great value to their country, flying almost every type of airplane used by the AAF, from the Thunderbolt fighter, to the C-54 transport, they flew enough miles to reach around the world 2,500 times at the Equator.
The WASPs were fortunate enough to have pioneering aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran (1906 – 1980) to serve at their helm.
Click here to read about the WAC truck drivers of the Second World War.
Attached is an article by James A. Farley (1888 – 1976), who in 1933 was appointed by F.D.R. to serve as both the Postmaster General as well as the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. During the Thirties, Farley was also FDR’s go-to-guy in all matters involving politics on Capitol Hill, and he wrote the attached article two years after Roosevelt’s death in order to explain how the Court-packing scheme was received in Congress and how his relationship with FDR soon soured.
Boss, I asked him, why didn’t you advise the senators in advance that you were sending them the Court bill?
Jim, I just couldn’t, he answered earnestly. I didn’t want to have it get to the press prematurely…
The first successful attempt in world history to limit armaments was marked for the scrap-heap on December 31, 1936, when Hirosi Saito, the slim and smiling Japanese Ambassador to the United States, bowed himself into the State Department building in Washington last Saturday and handed to Secretary Cordell Hull a document that the world has expecting for many months – Japan’s formal denunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty.
Click here to read about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.
This is a peculiar article about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull (1871 – 1955); the man who penned the piece was so obsessed with Hull’s hillbilly upbringing that he didn’t get around to writing about the man himself until page six.
This column praises those brainiacs of Madison Ave who obsess over single syllable words (and sounds) in an effort to propel their client’s product to the tip-top of the profit-pantheon.
The right name can zoom a product into a commercial success. The wrong one can wreck its sales and waste the advertising dollars spent promoting it… If one day you hear of a product called ‘Heck’ or ‘Gosh’, don’t be surprised. Slang is more popular than the king’s English in product naming. Again, it’s because you use it more naturally. Newest proof of this came after the phrase ‘poof – there goes perspiration’ (a TV commercial for Stopette spray deodorant) made ‘poof’ a new American slang word.
Here is a pretty middle-of-the-road type of article that explains the creation of British Palestine, the Jewish migration and the Arab unrest:
Writing in his History of Zionism, Nahum Sokalow looked in to the future: ‘The Jews have grown tired of their roll as the homeless Chosen People and would prefer to be a self-supporting small nation with a quiet spot of earth for themselves…’. The spot for which the Jews had yearned proved to be about as quiet as a live volcano.
…And last week the Office of Indian Affairs, reporting results of a sampling of 26 out of 80 Indian jurisdictions, revealed that out of 7,407 Selective Service registrants, 547 had already volunteered against 37 actually drafted – a ratio of 15 volunteers for each draftee.
With the arrival of the Great Depression came an increase in American suicides. When this article appeared on the newsstands the Depression was just three and a half years old – with many more years yet to come. As the Americans saw 1932 come to a close, the records showed that 3,088 more acts of self-immolation had taken place than had been recorded the year before.
Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…
When a 22-year-old expectant father wrote to President Roosevelt complaining that he’d been unemployed for four months, FDR wasted little time in contacting one of his alphabet agencies and seeing to it that the gent was offered a defense job.
The outbreak of the war in Korea sent stocks tumbling in all important world markets. In N.Y., three months of profits were wiped out. At week’s end some stocks rose, but jittery brokers kept an eye on the war news and – an ear turned toward Washington, where announcements of increased U.S. participation in the fighting touched off further waves of selling>
Before the era of the World Wide Web, intelligence agencies had to rely on their own flunkies to gather all meteorological information they could find about a particular weather system; this explains why so many Axis spies were found with weather data among their possessions.
Shortly after the Soviet Union successfully tested their first atomic bomb, the brass hats who work in the Pentagon saw fit to take the first step in preparing to fight an atomic war: they gave the order to create a subterranean headquarters to house a military command and control center for the U.S. and her allies.
The finished chamber, according to local observers, will be 3,100 feet long, contain four suites for the top brass (the Joint Chiefs of Staff, among others), and provide operational quarters for some 1,200 technicians in peacetime, or 5,000 if atomic bombing threatens the Washington command.
Commonly known as Site R, it is located not terribly far from the presidential retreat, Camp David, and in the subsequent years since this article first appeared, the complex has grown considerably larger than when it was first envisioned. Today, Site R maintains more than thirty-eight military communications systems and it has been said that it was one of undisclosed locations that hosted Vice President Dick Cheney (b. 1941) shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
A related article can be read here…
Attached is a printable page from an R.O.T.C. primer concerning American Military History outlined the events of 1948 that created the need for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.).
This pact, called the North Atlantic Treaty, united Great Britain, the United States, and ten western European nations in a common security system. Approved by the Senate in April 1949, the treaty provided for mutual assistance, including the use of armed force in the event of a Soviet attack upon one or more of the signatory powers.
This well-illustrated article appeared in a middle class American magazine in 1959 and it reported on the rising international sentiments that signaled to the dominate Western powers that the old diplomacy of the wealthier white nations had to change. It will help to explain why the United States re-fashioned their immigration laws in 1965.
In the attached editorial, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1898 – 1980) weighs in on how the United States could forge stronger Cold War alliances in Asia and the Middle East:
We have thought that we could stop the spread of communism by guns and by dollars. We have spent billions upon billions and yet the Red tide of communism seems to spread… We should show Asia how her revolution can follow the pattern of 1776. What will win in Asia are not guns and dollars but but ideas of freedom and justice. To win in Asia, America must identify herself with those ideas.
To understand some of the diplomatic challenges Douglas was referring to, click here
Over the last thirty years the United States, as well as Central and South America, has been invaded repeatedly by ununiformed soldiers of the Soviet Government – agents of the International Communist Conspiracy. Our government has been furnished repeatedly with conclusive evidence of this invasion and yet has done nothing to exclude and deport the invaders… To make matters worse, ‘Liberal’ administrations since the time of Franklin Roosevelt have urged that what few immigration restrictions we have to prevent their entrance be removed… Roosevelt was not interested in the fact that many of those entering were Communists; after all, he told me that some of his best friends were Communists.
