The editors of Pathfinder Magazine were rightfully scandalized to report that the Mississippi State Senate voted in favor of purchasing two sets of civics books for the school children of their state:
[The] idea behind this, said the Senate Education Committee, was to eliminate instructions for voting from the books to be distributed to Negro pupils.
This article lays out the many responsibilities and challenges that made up the day of a U.S. Border Patrol officer stationed along the Rio Grande in 1940:
In one month these rookies must try to absorb French and Spanish, immigration law, criminal law, naturalization, citizenship and expatriation law, fingerprinting, criminal investigation, first aid, firearms and the laws of the open country through which refugees are tracked down in the desert and forest.
In this 1920 American Legion Weekly article the mojo of the Red Scare (1917 to 1920) is fully intact and beautifully encapsulated by W.L. Whittlesey who condemned the U.S. Government for ever having allowed large numbers of socialist immigrants to enter the country and spread their discontent throughout the fruited plane. On the other hand, the writer was grateful that the government was finally tending to the matter of deporting them in large numbers and doing so with every means available.
Published one month before her disappearance, this is one of the last interviews Amelia Earhart was to give.
A report on the August, 1925 KKK march in Washington, D.C.:
The parade itself marshaled ‘from 50,000 to 60,000 white-robed men and women’ as the correspondent of the The New York Times estimates, and H.L. Mencken tells us in the New York Sun:
The Klan put it all over its enemies. The parade was grander and gaudier, by far than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour. When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill – a full mile of Klansmen…
Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.
Theodore Roosevelt had loomed large in Washington for a long time – so when it was learned that his nephew, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (a Democrat!), was chosen to work in Woodrow Wilson’s Department of the Navy he was an instant curiosity.
Click here to read a 1913 article about another young man on the move: Winston Churchill.
During the Civil War many young boys enlisted. In fact, three out of every ten men on the Union side were under 21, and not until 1864 did Congress pass a law forbidding the enlistment of of anyone under 16. But Johnny Clem, who joined up at ten, had them all beaten.
– Indeed he did. In fact, at the age of 12, Johnny Clem was a hero.
For many it will come as no surprise that the Confederate States of America entered it’s twilight with the same hubris and cupidity that gave it life. This 1912 article solved a mystery: what had become of the gold and silver from the vaults of the CSA when it finally became clear to all that the rebellion was over.
Click here to read a memoir of the Union victory parade in 1865 Washington.
In 1938, Fulton Oursler (1893 – 1952), editor of Liberty, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in order to ask Benito Mussolini why he invaded Ethiopia and to get his thoughts as to whether there would be peace in Europe. We can’t say that Il Duce gave very thorough answers to those questions, but Oursler did find out what was eating Mussolini:
Why is it that the people of the United States are so against Fascism? What is the matter with them? Why is the whole press so bitter against Fascism? Can you answer me that?
Attached is an editorial that was co-authored by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken from their reoccurring column in The Smart Set: Répétition Générale. This brief column sought to expose the damages inflicted upon the country by the guardians of the national virtue and their bastard children, Prohibition and the Volstead Act, which will primarily serve to promote the wide (though illegal) distribution of all the poorest distilled spirits concocted in the most remote frontiers of civilization.
