All thanks to the efforts of a private donor, three lounges were built explicitly for the women volunteers of the WACs and WAVES. Furnished with vanities, hair dryers, magazines and ping-pong tables; they must have been a big hit – they look very much like the sets of a Fred Astaire movie.
The attached article was written by Dr. George Gallup (1901 – 1984), the pioneering American pollster and founder of the Institute of Public Opinion. Gallup’s article reveals some surprising information about American voters and their thoughts concerning FDR’s 1940 bid for re-election against Wendell Willkie (1892 – 1944).
Whether it was due to the urgency of the war or whether it was simply business as usual on Capitol hill, who knows – but ever since he came to Washington in 1929 Representative Joseph Gavagan (D., NYC: 1892 – 1968) tried numerous times to get his anti-lynching legislation through Congress. In April of 1937 he succeeded in getting one of his anti-lynching bills passed (277 to 118) – but the Southern Democrats saw to it that he wouldn’t get an encore performance in ’42; this was his last attempt, he retired from the House that same year.
The Titanic catastrophe was not seen by many to be a poetic topic, however there were a few wordsmiths who did address the subject. The link above will lead you to two of these poems; one by Charles Hanson Towne (1877 – 1949), a poet, essayist and playwright who, at the time of the sinking, was serving as an editor at Designer magazine. The second poem was penned by M.C. Lehr, of whom there is no surviving information.
The 1953 Titanic reunion took place in New York City. Numbered among the nine survivors was Edith Russell, who had been nineteen at the time of the ship’s sinking. Also in attendance that day was the writer Seymour Ettman, who collaborated with Russell in crafting the attached five page article about her experiences the night Titanic slipped below the surface of the North Atlantic:
If the Titanic sinks, will they transfer the luggage?
Miss, if I were you, I’d go back to your room and kiss your lovely things goodbye.
Two eyewitness accounts relaying the last moments in the life of millionaire investor John Jacob Astor IV (born and his gallantry in refusing a place in the lifeboats. According to Mrs. Churchill Candee (born Helen Churchill Hungerford, 1859 – 1949)and Second Class passenger Hilda Slater (1882 – 1965) he lived up to the expected standards of the day:
I saw Colonel John Jacob Astor hand his young wife into a boat tenderly and then ask an officer whether or not he might also go. When permission was refused he stepped back and coolly took out his cigarette case.
‘Good bye, dearie’ he called gaily, as he lighted his cigarette and leaned over the rail, ‘I’ll join you later.’
The arctic explorer Admiral Robert Peary (1856 – 1920) was no stranger to icebergs. In this short essay he reminisces about spotting icebergs, the most dangerous types of icebergs, the times when an iceberg can prove helpful to a skipper and the remedies for the future.
The attached obituary of Isador Straus (born 1845) as it appeared in THE NEW YORK TIMES the day after the news of his death was made known. At the time he had secured passage on board Titanic, Straus was co-owner of the Macy’s department store with his brother Nathan. A trusted advisor to U.S. President Grover Cleveland, he was elected to represent the New Yorkers of the fifty-third district and served in that post between 1894 and 1895. He died in the company of his wife Ida; unlike Straus, her body was never recovered.
A couple of admirals weigh in as to the innocence or guilt of Bruce Ismay (1862 – 1937), Managing Director of the White Star Line. While the PITTSBURGH DISPATCH seemed to think that a debate was simply not necessary:
…But it cannot be ignored that the man who in the management of the line had sent the great steamer to sea with lifeboats for about one-third of the ship’s company, bore a responsibility that might well have been atoned by joining the gallant men who went down with the ship.
Not long after the Titanic catastrophe was made known to the world there were many rumors and half truths that had to be sorted out and recognized as such in order to fully understand the full scope of the catastrophe; the editors of The Nation printed this article which contributed to that effort:
…two terrible, damning facts stand out: the first, that the ship was speeding through an ice-field of the presence of which its officers were fully aware; the second, is that every life could readily have been saved had there been boats and rafts enough to keep people afloat in a clear, starry night on an exceptionally smooth Atlantic sea. Both these facts are indisputable.
As for the lifeboats, these expensive affairs that could cost the large sum of $425.00 apiece – there were but twenty of them in addition to a few rafts…
An eye-witness account from one of the survivors concerning the last minutes of Titanic Captain Edward Smith:
‘I will go down with the ship,’ he cried. He sank immediately, and although those on the collapsible boat watched for him to come up that they might drag him aboard, he never appeared.
This is a small notice from THE NEW YORK TIMES reporting on the surprisingly impulsive behavior of the men of high civic standing on-board Titanic who were among the first to scramble for the lifeboats:
It was our Congressmen, our Senators, and our ‘big men’ who led in the crush for the lifeboats.
It was also pointed out that many of the Titanic heroes that night were also men of prominence within their communities, fellows such as Isador Straus and John Jacob Astor who refused to accept lifeboat seating.
The apathetic France of 1939 is dead. Collier’s correspondent, journeying across southern France, found high hope of unity and determination to punish all collaborationists. France, he feels, is reborn.
Events are moving now toward a military showdown in Vietnam – with a decision to be made by combat.
The question at this time is whether the coming crisis will be resolved in South, middle or North Vietnam. As the showdown approaches, the U.S. finds itself involved in three forms of war in Southeast Asia:
• An anti-guerrilla war in southern South Vietnam.
• A base-defense war in northern South Vietnam.
• An anti-logistics war in southern North Vietnam.
The military man who penned this article weighs all these scenarios and also discusses the nuclear option.
One terrible and overwhelming fact must be faced: Our soldiers and our pilots are being maimed and killed fighting a war that they are not being allowed to win. The Johnson Administration is not keeping faith with the men who must fight this war, with the half-million super-patriots, the half-million anti-Communists, who are fighting and dying in action against the forces of the International Communist Conspiracy.
Directed by Ben Mindenburg, Scorched Earth was released in April of 1942 in order to show the beastliness of the Japanese military in China.
The night before [the Miami] citizens went to the polls to decide among 15 candidates for three commissionerships, the old specter of the Ku Klux Klan was raised to scare away the colored votes.
The scheme didn’t work.
Attached is a 1922 report from THE LITERARY DIGEST regarding how remarkably close two KKK candidates for governor came to winning their respective state primaries. The two political contests in question, Oregon and Texas, caught national attention and became popular subjects for concern across the United States:
The closeness of the vote ought to be a warning…If the Ku Klux Klan insists on entering politics, good citizens must show it the way out.
