To read this 100-year-old article is to understand that the inhumane conditions of today’s alien detention centers on the Southwest border are a part of a larger continuum in American history. This article addressed the atrocious conditions and brutality that was the norm on Ellis Island in the Twenties.
But it is not the stupidity of the literacy test alone that is to be condemned. It is its inhumanity.
The Christian concept of death is contained in this article by the ancient Greek author Athanasius (296 – 373).
All those who believe in Christ tread death underfoot as nothing and prefer to die rather than to deny their faith in Christ, knowing full well that when they die, they do not perish, but live indeed, and become incorruptible through the the resurrection. Death has become like a tyrant who has become completely conquered by the legitimate monarch and bound hand and foot so that the passers-by jeer at him.
The editors of Pathfinder Magazine were rightfully scandalized to report that the Mississippi State Senate voted in favor of purchasing two sets of civics books for the school children of their state:
[The] idea behind this, said the Senate Education Committee, was to eliminate instructions for voting from the books to be distributed to Negro pupils.
This article lays out the many responsibilities and challenges that made up the day of a U.S. Border Patrol officer stationed along the Rio Grande in 1940:
In one month these rookies must try to absorb French and Spanish, immigration law, criminal law, naturalization, citizenship and expatriation law, fingerprinting, criminal investigation, first aid, firearms and the laws of the open country through which refugees are tracked down in the desert and forest.
In this 1920 American Legion Weekly article the mojo of the Red Scare (1917 to 1920) is fully intact and beautifully encapsulated by W.L. Whittlesey who condemned the U.S. Government for ever having allowed large numbers of socialist immigrants to enter the country and spread their discontent throughout the fruited plane. On the other hand, the writer was grateful that the government was finally tending to the matter of deporting them in large numbers and doing so with every means available.
A report on the August, 1925 KKK march in Washington, D.C.:
The parade itself marshaled ‘from 50,000 to 60,000 white-robed men and women’ as the correspondent of the The New York Times estimates, and H.L. Mencken tells us in the New York Sun:
The Klan put it all over its enemies. The parade was grander and gaudier, by far than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour. When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill – a full mile of Klansmen…
Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.
Published one month before her disappearance, this is one of the last interviews Amelia Earhart was to give.
Theodore Roosevelt had loomed large in Washington for a long time – so when it was learned that his nephew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat!), was chosen to work in Woodrow Wilson’s Department of the Navy he was an instant curiosity.
Click here to read a 1913 article about another young man on the move: Winston Churchill.
During the Civil War many young boys enlisted. In fact, three out of every ten men on the Union side were under 21, and not until 1864 did Congress pass a law forbidding the enlistment of of anyone under 16. But Johnny Clem, who joined up at ten, had them all beaten.
– Indeed he did. In fact, at the age of 12, Johnny Clem was a hero.
For many it will come as no surprise that the Confederate States of America entered it’s twilight with the same hubris and cupidity that gave it life. This 1912 article solved a mystery: what had become of the gold and silver from the vaults of the CSA when it finally became clear to all that the rebellion was over.
Click here to read a memoir of the Union victory parade in 1865 Washington.
In 1938, Fulton Oursler (1893 – 1952), editor of Liberty, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in order to ask Benito Mussolini why he invaded Ethiopia and to get his thoughts as to whether there would be peace in Europe. We can’t say that Il Duce gave very thorough answers to those questions, but Oursler did find out what was eating Mussolini:
Why is it that the people of the United States are so against Fascism? What is the matter with them? Why is the whole press so bitter against Fascism? Can you answer me that?
Late last week 30 prominent Ethiopians were tried as ringleaders in the attempted assassination [of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani]. They were to serve as public examples of Italy’s determination to rule over her new African domain. All other natives found in possession of arms were shot by Fascist firing squads, more than 1,000 terrified men being mowed down in a bloody Mussolini-ordered revenge.
An Italian partisan fighter described to an American correspondent exactly how Benito Mussolini met his end.
Any of us born after 1945 have seen this before: the United Nations condemns a dreadful dictator and sends him a mean email and the dictator deletes it (Sadam Hussein was condemned 17 times by the U.N.) – but this was the first time it happened in the Twenties. The League of Nations condemned Mussolini for the Ethiopia invasion, and Mussolini couldn’t have cared less.
Recently former Viceroy Graziani cabled Mussolini that ‘my surveys demonstrate that tranquility is absolute. The native population is with Italy.’ But a writer in the Tribuna of Rome admitted that ‘nobody must delude himself with the idea that the former Shoan-Galla ruling caste have resigned themselves to the loss of their privileges and have welcomed our Italian Empire.’
Italy’s financial and human resources are being heavily drained, not only by a vast [Roman] road-building program in the conquered kingdom, but particularly by the efforts of 200,000 men who compose the fascist expeditionary force to pacify a warlike population of 9,000,000 natives in a territory larger than France and Italy combined.
A report on the start of the Italian adventures in Ethiopia:
The dispute arose over alleged trespasses by Ethiopians on Italian possessions in Eritria and Italian Somaliland, in East Africa.
A solemn declaration of Abyssinia’s peaceful intentions toward Italy was read in broken but emphatic Italian to representatives of the foreign press in Rome by the nervous and impassioned Negradsa Yesus, Abyssinian Charge d’ Affaires. In fervent tones he asserted that Abyssinia’s intentions were so peaceful ‘that if Italy remained without a single soldier and without a single gun in her colonies, Abyssinia would not touch a single stone.’
Mussolini explained why he invaded Ethiopia in this article…
A column about Mussolini’s Minister of Colonies, Emilio De Bono (1866 – 1944) and his popular book, La Preparazione E Le Prime Operazioni:
Last week, with the appearance of a third printing, following a sold-out second edition (both of which were marked for publication in 1937), Italians at home and abroad noted certain deletions, including the passage which intimated that Mussolini had been on the point of abandoning his campaign in the face of British armed intervention.
