Part of the personal tragedy inherent in President Roosevelt’s suggestion to rid the Supreme Court of men over 70, part of the uncertainty with which liberals greet his plan, must arise from consideration of Louis Demblitz Brandeis. At 80, Brandeis is the oldest of the nine justices… Liberals cherish him, conservatives respect him and the [FDR] administration is grateful to him.
The attached article is but a small segment addressing the history of Hollywood during the war W.W. II years; clipped from a longer Photoplay Magazine piece that recounted the illustrious past of Hollywood some thirty-five years earlier.
After Pearl Harbor, the men really began leaving town. David Niven was gone now. So too, was Flight Officer Laurence Olivier. And more and more from the Hollywood ranks kept leaving. Gable, Fonda, Reagan, the well-knowns and the lesser-knowns. Power, Taylor, Payne, Skelton and many others…More Hollywood regulars went away, so other, newer newcomers had to be found to replace them because the box office was booming.
The Newsweek report on the under-supplied Red Army counter-offensive at Stalingrad.
Russia’s hope was Hitler’s despair. His schedule for the year had already been irreparably disrupted and none of his major objectives – Stalingrad, the Caspian Sea, the oil of the Caucasus – had yet been attained. And already the Nazi soldiers could feel the cold breath of winter through their summer uniforms…
If advertising is defined as the craft of convincing people they want something that they actually don’t care for, then World War II proved to have been the perfect challenge to the ad men of the 1940s. The wordsmith who penned this article regarding home front advertising chortled loudly when he saw the manner in which the bloodiest brawl in history was being marketed to the American consumers.
Advertising has gone to war… and the advertising profession not only knows what we are fighting for; it knows down to the last uplift bra, what we want when we come home…It is the copywriters of advertising who nurse the carefully guarded secret that this war is, in reality, a luxury cruise.
Articles about the importance of fashion models in 1940s advertising can be read here.
Attached is a magazine article concerning the on-going debate regarding women drivers and the continuing balderdash as to which of the genders is the better driver: the issue was decided in 1936 and the men lost:
…according to the report of a university professor who took the trouble to find out. Armed with statistics, he asserts that the female of the motoring species is not nearly so deadly as the male.
As the April of 1949 was winding down, 11 members of the Communist Party U.S.A. were standing trial in a Federal courtroom spilling every secret they had in an all-out effort to lighten their load further down the road. Among these classified plots was a 1930s plan to invade the United States and create two separate Soviet republics – one White, the other Black. The region they had in mind for the African-Americans would cover nine of the old Confederate states.
A Quick Read About Soviet-Enforced Atheism Behind the Iron Curtain…
The attached Collier’s article was written by two post-debs of the Boston/Manhattan variety who were both products of what they called the approval mill of America’s upper-crust. Having been run through the right schools and the right summer camps, they attended the right parties and made charming with all the right people; looking back in their 20s, they were able to see how this long-treasured practice prepared them poorly for life – tending to perpetuate the spiraling vortex of women who were educated and polite, yet unable to think.
They’re career women, housewives, professionals, factory hands, debutantes. They’ve taught school, modeled, supported themselves, as secretaries, salesgirls, mechanics. Single and married, white and colored, between the ages of 21 and 45, they’re corresponding with a beau, in Ireland, a husband Australia, or the ‘folks back home’ in Flatbush. But varied as their background may be, they’ve enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) with a common purpose: to get behind America’s fighting men and help win a lasting peace.
When well-versed in army-administrative methods, the WAAC will cause the transfer of 450 enlisted men to combat areas each week. It realizes full-well its responsibility and has dedicated itself to the idea that the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps will prove itself equal to the opportunity.
Lady Leathernecks’, as the trimly-clad members were affectionately dubbed, responded to their country’s call some 19,000 strong, accomplishing more than 150 different jobs at more than fifty Marine bases and stations throughout the United States.
Organized February 13, 1943 the Women’s Reserve was directed by Lt. Colonel Ruth Cheney Streeter (1895 – 1990). Women in the Marine Corps were authorized to hold the same jobs, ranks and pay as Marines.
To those who have followed the political career of President Roosevelt, this unprecedented emphasis on public relations and publicity is no surprise. No president has ever been more alive to the potentialities of maintaining a ‘good press’, of gauging public reaction to his policies and of timing his announcements to obtain the widest and most sympathetic audience possible… No party organization could afford the elaborate press relations machinery which existed on March 4, 1933. Its cost, including salaries, printing, supplies etc., is today in excess of $1,000,000 annually, and it is being paid for by the American taxpayer.
Click here to read about President Harry Truman…
At 5:45 p.m. telephones rang simultaneously in the Washington bureaus of the AP, UP and [the International News Service] on a conference call from the White House. The familiar voice of Steve Early, who had retired only recently after twelve years as White House press secretary, called the roll to make sure all were listening. Then: ‘Here is a flash. The President died suddenly early this afternoon’
Swiftly the news went around the world… No president had meant quite so much to the press as Mr. Roosevelt. Few in history had been more consistently and bitterly opposed by a majority of publishers. Perhaps none had more admirers and fewer detractors among working newsmen. No president since his cousin Theodore, who coined the word ‘muckracker’, had on occasion denounced press and newsmen alike more harshly. Yet most newsmen forgave him his peevish moments. Certainly none had been more news-rich and none had ever received the voluminous coverage that President Roosevelt had. Over the years, the Roosevelt twice-a-week press conference was the Capital’s biggest newsmaker.
The Yank is not expert at deception, but he can change his plans rapidly. He is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.
– so wrote one of the bewildered Japanese Army generals concerning his experiences with the American military in the Pacific.
A U.S. Government study regarding the conscription policies of the German Army during World War II. Attention is paid to the development of this policy from it’s earliest days in 1935, when the draft was introduced, to the total mobilization scheme that followed the battle of Stalingrad.
Eighteen years after the last shot was fired in World War I, Americans collectively wondered, as they began to think about all the empty chairs that were setting at so many family dinner tables, Do the French care about all that we sacrificed? Do they still remember that we were there? In response to this question, an American veteran who remained behind in France, submitted the attached article to The American Legion Monthly and answered with a resounding Yes on all six pages:
…I can assure you that the real France, the France of a thousand and one villages in which we were billeted; the France of Lorraine peasants, of Picardy craftsmen, of Burgundy winegrowers – remembers, with gratitude, the A.E.F. and its contribution to the Allied victory.
The article is accompanied by eight photographs of assembled Frenchmen decorating American grave sites.
Click here to read about the foreign-born soldiers who served in the American Army of the First World War.
A 1919 article that recalled the U.S. Army’s First Division Armistice Day assault in the Bois de Romaigne:
The First Division was a pretty tired outfit. It had seen eleven months of almost continuous fighting…Rumors were around that there was going to be an armistice, but few listened and none believed. We had been bunked before.
The artillery fire increased and the machine guns rattled. You were on outpost and you fired your rifle, just fired it at nothing in particular. Everybody was doing it. The din increased until 11 o’clock, it ended with a crash that startled you. Fini la Guerre?
A Congressional committee of investigation has recently been treated to a scathing arraignment of the General Staff because military operations on the front of the Second Army were continued up to the hour of the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Members of the operations Section of the Staff, particularly the chief, Brigadier General Fox Conner, have been accused of slaughtering men on the last day of the war in order to satisfy their personal ambitions.
In the attached 1945 article an anonymous YANK MAGAZINE correspondent describes for his young readers how the last World War ended; the widely reported misinformation of a premature armistice treaty that was reported as being signed on November 7, 1918 – the retraction, and the subsequent announcement of the genuine armistice being signed four days later. General John J. Pershing recalled the scene in Paris:
It looked as though the whole population had gone out of their minds. The city turned into pandemonium. The streets and boulevards were packed with people singing and wearing all sorts of odd costumes. The crowds were doing the most clownish things. One could hardly hear his own voice, it was such bedlam.
Click here to read another article describing the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 Paris.
Click here to read an explanation as to what was understood about the truce of November 11, 1918.
By the time this column was read by the American Doughboys, the truce was old news and this STARS AND STRIPES article makes for an interesting read as it imparts much of the November, 1918 excitement that filled the streets of Paris when the news of the Armistice hit the previously gloomy boulevards. This front-page article makes clear that many of the rumors pertaining to the German collapse could not be verified, yet affirms reports concerning the revolution in Germany, it’s food shortages and the Kaiser’s exile to Holland.
