In the early Sixties, American church attendance was dropping as a new spirit of secularism was sweeping across the fruited plains. More and more merchants and restaurateurs were opening their businesses on Sundays and challenging the age-old Blue Laws as a result. This article examines what the Bible said about “keeping the sabbath holy”, and why Blue Laws were enacted in so many states.
George Creel (1876 – 1953), the nation’s first and only official censor (1917 – 1918), knew FDR for twenty-five years, and in this wartime recollection he made FDR wish that the two had never met. This is the type of article Creel would never have allowed to be published twenty some years earlier because it sought to reduce confidence in the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, with the war in its eleventh month, Creel gave it to FDR with both barrels:
“No man ever dreamed more nobly or had less skill in making his dreams come true.”
By the end of the war, FDR’s administration had placed taxable personal income as high as 94%(!). His Brain Trust were all big believers in Federal intervention into the economy – offering all sorts of price freezes and wage freezes in order to limit competition during the Great depression (as if that was a good). As the war kicked-in to high gear, FDR installed a low ceiling upon all high-earners and capped their salaries at $25,000.00 per-year.
Click here to read about FDR’s airplane.
The Leftists who ran the shop over at New Masses could easily have lived with the muscle-bound posing’s of Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955), but when he grew discontent with mugging it before the cameras and started writing anti-FDR editorials in a popular magazine, they knew they had to shut him down.
“The attack on business so well popularized by the present administration at Washington unquestionably prolonged the Depression, perpetuated the dole, and added millions to the unemployed”
With W.W. II just around the corner, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps’ “subsistence laboratory” in Chicago was burning the mid-night oil trying to create a nutritious light weight ration with little bulk for the nascent paratrooper divisions.
“From the start the naval Construction Battalions were unusual outfits, mostly because of the men in them and because theirs was a new kind of warfare… Every Seabee found himself doubling in various trades. It was thus the construction men developed their most important tools – improvisation, ingenuity and guts. Often parts, materials and equipment had to be manufactured on the spot in shops hastily thrown together from salvaged enemy materials and tools… But as the Seabee organization grew (from an original force of 3,300 to a peak of 247,155, of which 83 percent were overseas) and its activities increased, the battalions picked up plenty of know-how, enabling them to smooth out and speed up operations.”
Here is first-person account of life in an M3 Stuart tank fighting in Tunisia:
“We were ordered to hold, and hold we did. But we took a terrible shellacking. We dodged around, spitting at the Germans with our little 37mm gun. Every now and then one of their heavy tank shells or high-velocity 88s would hit one of our light tanks and smash it. The wounded would crawl out, and those who could walk would carry or drag those who couldn’t… In the afternoon, when we were finally ordered to withdraw, we had only 9 of 18 tanks left, and some of those were damaged. We took what wounded we could into the tanks and held them in our arms.”
Here is a page listing everything that the Flappers adored and found worth getting up in the morning to pursue.
In another article on this site, these words were quoted from the captured dispatches of a Japanese general writing to his superiors:
“[The Yank] is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.”
– he was, of course, referring to the famous Construction Battalions (Seabees) of the U.S. Navy. This article will tell you all about them.
Looking back from a point four months after VJ-Day, this anonymous journalist recalled the first six months of the Second World War, and how ill-prepared the U.S. Navy was to take on the two-ocean war.
Assorted well-campaigned swab-jockeys lounge-about and discuss their various experiences on both oceans.
Click here to read the observations of a general who fought both the Germans and Japanese.
“Another Now It Can Be Told story – one of the best kept secrets of the Pacific war – came out last month when it was revealed that a U.S. naval group had been operating with Chinese guerillas behind the Jap lines in China. Their combined efforts, the Navy disclosed, had been a vital factor in the smashing blows of the Pacific Fleet against Jap-held islands, the Jap Navy and, finally Japan itself.”
Eight months before the American entry to the war, FDR’s Commerce Department Office turned its attention to the thousands of Black-owned businesses throughout the country in order to help maximize their profits and bring them into the wartime economy.
Throughout the course of World War II, there were three admirals who commanded to U.S. Atlantic Fleet: King, Ingersoll and Ingram. It was Admiral Jonas Ingram (1887 – 1952) who wrote the attached article about battle for the Atlantic:
“The Atlantic Fleet’s record speaks for itself. Since the declaration of war we have escorted 16,760 ships across the Atlantic. Of these, less than a score were sunk in convoy…We know definitely that we sunk 126 U-boats…”
Click here to read a related article.
“Throughout Russia last week Dictator Joseph Stalin continued his ‘purge’ against ‘Trotskyites’.”
“In this natural aftermath of the execution a fortnight ago of 16 conspirators against the Soviet regime, no Trotskyite was spared. Nor was anyone suspected of Trotsky leanings overlooked. Journalists, officials, high-ranking Red Army officers, heads of banks, railroads, publishing houses, and many celebrities in literary and theatrical pursuits felt the heavy hand of the Kremlin government.”
Here is an interesting article from World War Two that goes into some detail explaining what is involved when a lieutenant colonel in an infantry regiment presents his plan of attack on a German town that is heavily defended. We hear him as he addresses the junior officers who will do the heavy lifting, and we get a sense of their concerns. Few reporters have ever paid any attention to this aspect of an assault.
