Like many Americans in the Twenties, the journalist who penned the attached article was totally irked by the concept of an American territory – bound for statehood – having a majority Asian population. He wrote at a time when the nation was deeply concerned about assimilating America’s immigrants and his indignation can clearly be sensed.
Well, Monsieur, did I ever tell you about the time I was a Doughboy in the Great war?
This is the story of Marie Marvingt (1875 – 1963), an amazing French woman who did indeed serve in the forward trenches disguised as a man during the Summer of 1917.
From time to time, it was the practice of the German military to separate American Jewish soldiers from their fellows and transfer them to concentration camps. The corpse of one of these men was found at the Nazi concentration camp in Ohrdruf, Germany.
Click here to read about the malnourishment and starvation of Allied prisoners of war…
Newton Wilson, a modest, quiet, somewhat academic man who never leaps before he looks through, in and around a situation, became the 20th Century innovator of precise recipes; a sort of Fanny Farmer of flying.
Click here to read about the earliest airline stewardesses…
PM (1940 – 1948) was a left-leaning, New York-based evening paper that enjoyed some notoriety across the fruited plane on account of its founding editor, Ralph Ingersoll (1900 – 1985), who liked to believe that his steady mission was to create A tabloid for literates:
Contributors included Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), I. F. Stone, Ad Reinhardt, J.T. Winterich, Leane Zug‐Smith, Louis Kronenberger and Ben Hecht; the photographs of Margaret Bourke‐White and Arthur Felig (aka Weegee) appeared regularly. Occasional contributors included Erskine Caldwell, Myril Axlerod, McGeorge Bundy, Saul K. Padover, Heywood Broun, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Lyons, Earl Conrad; Ben Stolberg, Malcolm Cowley.
Preferring to rely more on subscribers than advertisers, PM only lasted eight years.
A 1945 Yank Magazine article concerning American teen culture on the W.W. II home front in which the journalist/anthropologist paid particular attention to the teen-age slang of the day.
Some of today’s teenagers —pleasantly not many — talk the strange new language of sling swing. In this bright lexicon of the good citizens of tomorrow, a girl with sex appeal is an able Grable or a ready Hedy. A pretty girl is whistle bait. A boy whose mug and muscles appeal to the girls is a mellow man, a hunk of heart break or a glad lad.
To read about one of the fashion legacies of W.W. II, click here…
Click here to learn how the Beatniks spoke.
Click here if you would like to read a glossary of WAC slang terms.
•Suggested Reading• Flappers 2 Rappers: American Youth Slang
Greta Garbo (1905 – 1990) was well known for keeping to herself and preferring to act on movie sets free of executives, pals and all sorts of other hangers-on and she was very famous for refusing to grant members of the press corps interviews. With that in mind, it is a wonder that Katherine Albert of PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE was able to piece enough together for this 1930 article:
She has no place in the life of Hollywood. She has never adapted herself to it.
Garbo will continue to remain an enigma…
Click here to read about early cosmetic surgery in Hollywood.
A brief 1940 profile of the man President Roosevelt preferred over 33 other generals of higher grade: General George C. Marshall (1880 – 1959):
His most spectacular military feat occurred during the [First] World War, when, as operations chief of the First Army, he moved 500,000 men and 2,700 pieces of artillery from one battlefield to another without a hitch and without letting the enemy get wind of what he was doing.
This article was written long before the crumbling Euro and the economic collapse of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Venezuela, East Germany and the USSR – it is an 1894 editorial that outlines why socialism cannot not work:
He insists that all previous Social evolutions have meant an improvement in production and an increase in income, but the peculiarity of the Socialistic programme is that “it is to be not a money-making, but a money-spending evolution,” in which “everybody is to live a great deal better than he has been in the habit of living, and to have far more fun.
This 1946 article argued that Socialism is simply un-American…
Generations before satellite photography, and long before the T.V. cameras were placed on the moon, an American astronomer named V.M. Slipher (1875 – 1969) figured out the predominate color of our planet when seen from afar. Read on…
One of the first American magazine articles heralding the November 4, 1922 discovery of the ancient tomb of King Tutankhamen (1341 BC – 1323 BC) by the British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874 – 1939); who was in this article, erroneously sited as an American:
What is thought may prove the greatest archeological discovery of all time has recently been made in Egypt, in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor. Two chambers of a tomb have been found filled with the funeral paraphernalia of the Egyptian King Tutankhamen, and hopes are entertained that the third chamber, yet unopened, may contain the royal mummy itself.
The Spanish Influenza (February 1918 – April 1920) struck hard in the U.S. Army camps. Every fourth man came down with the flu, every twenty-fourth man caught pneumonia, every sixth man died.
By the time the virus ran its course in the United States 675,000 Americans would succumb (although this article estimated the loss at 500,000).
Admiral Pete Mitscher was one of the primary architects of American naval aviation during the 20th Century.In this column, one of the officers who served under him during the admiral’s command of carrier Task Force 58 recalls why he came to admire the man as deeply as he did.
One of Admiral Pete Mitscher’s officers recalls the man with tremendous admiration:
They used to think a carrier was a hit-and-run fighter, but Pete changed that. He said, ‘Hit’em and stay. Hit’em again tomorrow. And he did.’
The War Shipping Administration is never at a loss for an answer when asked what’s been authorized, what’s in the works, what’s been shipped and where everything is at the moment? Nevertheless, the Transportation Inventory Department is a tidy place, with no visible signs of agitation. The TID has never lost so much as a bolt. Once it took twenty-two weeks to find a couple of airplane engines which had got themselves lost.
Not only did Germany limit the size of her fleet, but she failed to push technical developments. For example, she was behind the Allies in developing radar, and her torpedoes were mechanically deficient. She was ahead of the Allies in perfecting magnetic mines, but these proved to be a short-lived advantage… The priority for naval construction was so low that when the war began in September, 1939, the naval strength allowed in the treaty of 1935 had not been reached.
Thus, in the opinion of Admiral Doenitz, Germany, for the second time within 25 years, lost her bid for world supremacy because of her weakness at sea.
Click here to read about an American destroyer on D-Day.
The baby flat-top Liscome Bay was sunk by a torpedo from an enemy submarine on the day before Thanksgiving of 1943. The Liscome Bay was on her first battle assignment, covering the occupation of Makin in the Gilbert [islands]…The torpedo struck a half an hour before dawn and it was still dark when Liscome Bay sank.
The ship went under in less than twenty-four minutes; up to that time it was the U.S. Navy’s second largest loss since the sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor. Only 260 men survived.
The attached is an uncredited article from the later days of 1943 concerning the continuing struggle for supremacy of the North Atlantic:
It was plain to see that due to the Allied tactics which drove the U-boats from the seas last summer, sinking 90 subs in 90 days, something new had to be added… the newer [German] subs have larger conning towers, painted white this time instead of black – packing at least two new guns, and shooting it out in the open instead of from ambush… Brazil has recently reported 11 sinkings in the South Atlantic.
During World War II, the officers and men of the U.S. Navy’s submarine Tang had a proud boast. Their submarine, they crowed, rarely wasted a torpedo. In less than a year of combat, the Tang mowed down Japanese transports, freighters and tankers with deadly accuracy. But it was her fifth patrol from September 27 to October 24, 1944, that gives a unique place in the annals of submarine warfare.
You see, the Tang was sunk by her own torpedo.
