A British journalist encountered the United States Marine Corps and found them to be an impressive curiosity that spoke an odd, nautical language. One Marine in particular was singled out and, although anonymous some of you will recognize right away that he could only be one man: Sergeant Dan Daily of the Fifth Marines.
Click here to read about the high desertion rate within the U.S. Army of 1910.
Although Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1856 – 1943) enjoyed a lengthy tenure as the president of Harvard University (1909 – 1933), his reign there was not entirely free from controversy. One of the more unpleasant policies associated with his term was one in which he stated that Jewish enrollment to the university should be confined to an admissions quota that should not exceed the 15-percent mark.
This column concerns Jackie Robinson’s non-professional days in sports; his football seasons at Pasadena Junior College, basketball at UCLA and the Kansas City Monarchs. Being an Army publication, the reporter touched upon Robinson’s brief period as a junior officer in the 761st Tank Battalion.
A 1951 article about the Negro Baseball League can be read here
In 1969, Jackie Robinson wrote about African-American racists, click here to read it…
Click here to read a 1954 article about Willie Mays.
At the very peak of bourgeois respectability, one of the high priests of art and culture, Gilbert Seldes (1893 – 1970), sat comfortably on his woolsack atop Mount Parnasus and piled the praises high and deep for one of the lowest of the commercial arts. The beneficiary was the cartoonist George Herriman (1880 – 1944), creator of Ignatz Mouse and all other absurd creations that appeared in his syndicated comic strip, Krazy Kat (1913-1944):
His strange unnerving distorted trees, his totally unlivable houses, his magic carpets, his faery foam, are items in a composition which is incredibly with unreality. Through them wanders Krazy, the most tender and the most foolish of creatures, a gentle monster of our new mythology.
The fruits of the Third Reich Population Policy are shocking indeed. Fifteen and 16-year-old girls are having babies with the blessings of their Hitler Youth leaders. Unwed mothers with illegitimate children have the right to evict married but childless couples from apartment houses…laws are passed entitling unmarried mothers to call themselves ‘Mrs.’ instead of ‘Miss’, and providing state subsides for illegitimate children and crushing taxes for childless adults.
The short-lived soap opera These Are My Children was the brain-child of Irna Phillips (1901 – 1973) and it is no matter that the daytime drama lasted less than a year on Chicago’s WMBQ – the significance of the program rests in the fact that it was the first soap opera to be seen on American television screens:
Last week television caught the dread disease of radio: soapoperitis… ‘These Are My Children’, however is no warmed-over radio fare. To make sure of this, Miss Phillips and director Norman Felton built the first episodes backward… Whether [a] soap opera on television can coax housewives to leave their domestic duties [in order] to watch a small screen was a question yet to be answered.
Much has been written and much more whispered about relations between American Negro soldiers and white girls in Britain and elsewhere. To get at the facts, Newsweek assigned William Wilson of its London bureau to a candid review of the subject. His findings , largely from the standpoint of the Negro soldiers themselves [are as follow].
During the Autumn of 1944, when the great momentum was with the Allies and the German Army was in rapid retreat, the SS newspaper Das Schwartz Korps declared that an Allied-occupied Germany would not be a placid land:
The Allied soldiers shall find no peace. Death will lurk behind every corner. They might establish a civilian administration, but its leaders would not live a month. Nobody could execute the enemy’s orders without digging his own grave. No judge could pronounce sentences dictated by the enemy without being crucified in his own window frame in the dead of night.
This article goes into great detail concerning how the SS intended to make good on these words.
A list of five outstanding Britons (two women and three men) accompanied by a description of their selfless acts performed during the Nazi Blitz on their homeland.
Who dares to doubt when Britons sing that there will always be an England?
Paulette, the fashion critic for the long-defunct Beverly Hills society rag, Rob Wagner’s Script, joyfully reported that color had at long-last come to liven-up the drab wardrobe for the Great American male:
The myriads of color, diversity of design and gamut of styles displayed in men’s shops are revolutionary…The new page in fashion history began when daring members of the nations’ social elite first braved formal dinners in suits showing decided sheens of blue and red.
[As the 19th Century was coming to an end] salesmanship evolved a technique more refined than pulpit or platform oratory; advertising became more subtle in method, more concrete in results than any form of proselyting argument. The art which Milton put into selecting words which should make man think about God was excelled by the care with which American writers of advertisements assembled words designed to persuade man to consume more chewing gum. The man, or advertising agency, who wrote an effective selling slogan, such as ‘It Floats’, received far greater compensation than Milton for Paradise Lost.
In every engagement with the enemy during the Second World War, only 12 to 25 percent of American riflemen ever fired their weapons. This was an enormous concern for the brass hats in the Pentagon and they got right to work in order to remedy the problem. Five years later, when the Korean War rolled around, they found that the situation was somewhat improved: 50% of the soldiers were now able to return fire. This article tells the story of U.S. Army General S.L.A. Marshall (1900 – 1977) and his research in addressing this issue. A good read.
This article appeared in an issue Click Magazine that was deliberately edited to aid those young men who had been wearing uniforms for the past few years and, subsequently, had no knowledge whatever of tailoring or of fabric that was not government issued. It consists of a handy guide for the aspiring dandy showing just how a gentleman’s suit should fit if it is to be properly worn.
A short news piece from The Literary Digest reported on an investment that the Nazi forces were making to insure a lightening-fast attack:
Motorcycles, a cool million of them, have become a German army specialty. The new Wehrmacht specializes in them. (it knows it will be short of horses; as when in March, 1918, the Teuton cavalry arm was virtually abolished, west front and east.) The British and French have only half a million machines apiece.
Nobody has been able to figure out to anyone’s satisfaction why Sinatra has the effect he has on his Bobby Sox fans. One of his secretaries, a cute dish whose husband is serving overseas, said: ‘The doctors say it’s just because he’s got a very sexy voice, but I’ve been with him a year now and his voice doesn’t do a thing to me’.
Maybe it’s the war.
It was 1933 interviews like this one that made the studio executives at RKO go absolutely bonkers; what were they to do with Katharine Hepburn (1907 – 2003)? She simply refused to take all matters Hollywood with any degree of seriousness; although she hadn’t been a movie actress for very long at all, Katherine Hepburn was downright impious and goofy when reporter’s questions were put to her:
‘Is it true that you have three children?’ asked the interviewer.
‘I think it’s six,’ she answered.
Such responses served only to frustrate the members of the fourth estate to such a high degree and it seemed only natural that the fan magazine journalists would want to have the final word as to who Katherine Hepburn really was…
-But the Hollywood press did like her future co-star Carry Grant, click here to read it.
A single page report on the instituted racist policies practiced by the U.S. Navy throughout the course of the Second World War.
Click here the institutional racist policies of the W.W. I American Army.
Unlike Reinhold Pabel, the W.W. II German P.O.W. whose story is told in the article posted above, the five escapees in this article remained at large long after the war ended. Five minutes researching their names on the internet revealed that every single one of them remained in the U.S. where they held jobs, paid taxes and raised families well into their golden years.
