Nine months after the American intervention into the Korean War, the Congress saw reason to expand the draft pool to an even wider degree:
Eighteen-year-olds were a little closer to the draft this week, and America was a step closer to a system of permanent universal military training…
Christmas in khaki became the new theme song of thousands of the nation’s young men last week when the Army handed Selective Service a new quota… the Army wants 70,000 in November.
John Thompson of The Chicago Tribune saw more of the World War II than most other correspondents. He had witnessed to the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of Paris and the horrors of the Buchenwald death camp. Throughout his life, Thompson held the distinction of being the last surviving war correspondent to land on Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings; by war’s end he had been awarded the Purple Heart, nine battle stars and was the first correspondent to receive the Medal of Freedom. This column was written in 1943 and pertains to some of his experiences in North Africa and Sicily.
Richard Tregaskis (1916 – 1973) covered the invasion of Guadalcanal and the first seven weeks of Marine fighting on that island, the earliest stages of the Tokyo air raid, covered the Battle of Midway, wrote a best-selling book
(Guadalcanal Diary) and accompanied the forces that invaded the Russell Islands.
It wasn’t long after he arrived in the Mediterrian that stories began appearing in American papers under the Tregaskis byline, and he is still ‘somewhere’ on the European fighting front covering the big battles which make news.
This 1944 article by the U.S. Commissioner of Education, John W. Studebaker (1887 – 1989), reported on the impact that W.W. II was having on the American educational system. Studebaker pointed out that during the course of the national emergency, as many as 115,000 teachers had left the nation’s classrooms in order to help the war effort in one form or another.
When we read this transcript from The Congressional Record we were flabbergasted! You will find that it is a compilation that was pieced together in the late Fifties listing all the changes America’s Communist enemies wished to see take place in the United States in order to make their mission of conquest that much easier – yet as you read the list you quickly recognize that at least 85% of this tally fell into place as recently as 2020.
This 1907 article refers to a report made by journalist and suffragist Ida Husted Harper (1851 – 1931), concerning the status of the suffrage movement as it could be found throughout the Western world. A number of interesting issues and seldom remembered concerns are sited throughout this article on the matter of the bullying and boorish ways of those wishing to hamper the advancement of women’s suffrage.
When it became clear to the employers on the American home front that there was going to be a shortage of men, their attention turned to a portion of the labor pool who had seldom been allowed to prove their mettle: they were called women. This article recalls those heady days at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground when local women were trained to fire enormous artillery pieces in order that the Army weapons specialists understand the gun’s capabilities. This column primarily concerns the delight on all the men’s faces when it was discovered that women were able to perform their tasks just as well as the men.
A year after the Pearl harbor attack, one of the PM journalists recalled for their readers how many Americans in the lower 48 had heard the news on the radio that evening.
On Friday, November 3, 1950 Mao Tse-Tung (1893 – 1976) ordered the Chinese Army to intervene in the Korean War on behalf of the the retreating North Korean Army:
…perhaps [as many as] 250,000 Chinese Communists jumped into the battle for Northwest Korea; at best, their intervention meant a winter campaign in the mountains; at worst, a world war.
From Amazon: The Korean War: The Chinese Intervention
The Korean War was all of two weeks old when this column went to press describing the combustible atmosphere that characterized the Nation’s Capitol as events unfolded on the Korean peninsula:
A grim Senate voted the $1.2 billion foreign arms aid bill. Knots of legislators gathered on the floor or in the cloakrooms for whispered conversations. Crowds gathered around news tickers…
On everyone’s lips was the question: ‘Is this really World War III?’
Click here to read about the need for Army women during the Korean War.
A psychologist, in discussing some of the widely publicized ‘miracles’ of the war, puts it this way: ‘God may be likened to an electric dynamo. We can receive the power of this dynamo by attaching ourselves to it by prayer; or we can prove it has no influence in our lives by refusing to attach ourselves to it by prayer. The choice is ours…’ Today indisputable proof of the power of prayer are pouring in from every quarter of the globe. The only surprising thing is that we think it surprising. These praying soldiers, sailors and aviators of ours are merely following the example of Washington who knelt to ask for aid in the snows of Valley Forge and of Lincoln who, in the darkest days of the Civil War, declared: ‘Without the assistance of That Divine Being Who attends me I cannot succeed; with that assistance I cannot fail.’
Click here to read about one of the most famous prayers of the Second World War…
With the end of the Second World War in 1945 came numerous social changes to the nation. Among them was the Civil Rights movement, which soon began to find followers in the white majority and acquire an unprecedented traction in Washington as a result of the Cold War (an article on this topic can be read here). It was these two factors, the Cold War and the Civil Rights movement, that combined in the Fifties to call for the creation of a new immigration policy. It would be naive to assume that race alone was the sole factor in drafting a more inclusive policy because, as the attached editorial spells out, the Cold War climate demanded that the U.S. make more friends among the developing countries if the Soviets were to be defeated economically and militarily.
Twenty-three years after Harold Ross (1892 – 1951) launched The New Yorker, this profile of the man appeared on the newsstands:
Ross is a kind of impostor. The New Yorker is urbane; cactus is more urbane than Ross. The New Yorker carries understatement almost to the point of inaudibility; with Ross the expletive crowds out most of the eight parts of speech….It is true that he never had a high school education; but it is also true that he is a master grammarian, and that the superb sense of style which informs The New Yorker flows in part from his clean, uncompromising feeling for the English language.
Click here to read the second half of the Harold Ross profile. This portion is decorated with rejected cartoons from The New Yorker …
Ross never forgot his days in Paris as the editor of The Stars & Stars, click here to read an article about that period in his life.
When The Noble Experiment ended in 1933 the United Sates was a far less sober nation than it was thirteen years earlier. Organized crime was stronger than ever before, more Americans were in prison then ever before and more Americans than ever before had developed an unfortunate taste for narcotics. If prohibition was undertaken in order to awaken Americans to the glories of sobriety, it was the opposite that came to pass – Americans had become a people that reveled in drink. The writer who penned this column recognized that with the demise of Prohibition arose a culture that was eagerly buying up
a flood of utensils, mechanisms, gadgets, devices and general accessories [that celebrated the] noble old art of public drinking…
This is a report from 1952 on the largest group of Christians in the United States during that period in time:
The United States is sometimes called a ‘Protestant nation.’ It isn’t, of course. It is a nation of 150,697,361 free people, free to choose whatever path to God they please. But it was settles largely by Protestant denominations; it has, in fact, the largest Protestant population of any nation on earth. By latest tally, 81,862,328 Americans belong to religious bodies. Of these 59 percent are Protestant. Roman Catholics account for 33 percent, Jews for six percent and other faiths for two percent.
Ridgway wants no repetition of the Korean experience. If the U.S. is to fight in Asia again, he wants an army equal to the task and free to win. And, until his Army is capable of undertaking the job, he opposes even limited action by air or sea forces. The General disagrees with those who hold that a war can be won by air or sea power alone.
