Using a public forum, retired U.S. Air Force General Edward Lansdale (1908 – 1987) proposed a plan for the withdrawal of American and Allied Forces from Vietnam – a plan that came to be known as Vietnamization.
Two million Americans have as their principal form of visual entertainment nomad movies, run by some 3000 road-showmen who present their motion pictures in tents, auditoriums or churches. Few city folks realize that this is the way in which entertainment is brought to about 5000 U.S. towns of less than 1000 population… Road-showmen say that the favorite shows are fast-action westerns and occasional comedies. Mushy love scenes are box-office poison among their clientele. During harvest seasons, when customers can best afford the ten to twenty-five cents admission charge, these showmen take in between $75.00 and $150.00 a week.
These were not the only traveling entertainers during the Thirties: the Federal Theater Project also sent hoards of players throughout the nation to amuse and beguile – you can read about that here
Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.
Attached is a brief notice concerning Joseph P. Kennedy (1888 – 1969), Hollywood producer, politician, adulterer and FDR’s one-time ambassador to Britain – and his thwarted attempt to merge the Boston Post with the Boston Globe in order to best influence voters in the 1952 Massachusetts congressional elections.
From Amazon: Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia
A ranking member of of the German embassy staff in Tokyo told me a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, ‘If Japan goes to war against America and Britain, our days will be numbered here, too. Japan will wage a race war in which we Germans will be regarded as enemies along with the rest of the white race. It is only a matter of time. They intend to conquer all of us, but they are smart enough not to tackle all of us at once.’
Imperial Japan had a great many reasons to dislike their Nazi ally and most of them were far more legitimate than this one. All of them are are laid out in the attached article.
Although the steel tennis racket would not know true glory until Jimmy Connors used his Wilson T2000 in the 1970s, a big splash was made by William A. Larned (1872 – 1926; seven times champion of the U.S. Open) when he designed the Dayton Steel Racket in 1922. It wasn’t the first steel racket, but it was an improvement on the existing ones.
Without a doubt, the strongest impulse to buy the earliest televisions came from sports fans. The deep lust in their hearts to witness their favorite sporting events as it happened, free of a bar tab, was a strong one – and the television industry loved them right back. This glorious trifecta consisting of viewers, TV networks and team owners not only altered the way America watched sports, it totally transformed sports itself. Author Steven D. Stark put it nicely in his book Glued to the Set (1997):
Television has changed the sports landscape — changing everything from the salaries, number of teams, and color of uniforms, to the way that fans conceive of sports and athletes alike,
Here is a 1937 article marking the significance of General Edmund Allenby’s (1861 – 1936) march into the ancient city of Jerusalem in 1917. Written twenty years after the event, the article also marks the twentieth anniversary of the the Balfour Declaration – the British edict that declared British Palestine as the home of world Jewry.
This article was written by the silent film star herself for a fashionable American magazine concerning a few of the difficulties in the way of dress, make-up, manners and technique an actress might consider before portraying a child on stage or screen.
Alabama native John Purifoy was a regular contributor to Confederate Veteran Magazine and he wrote most often about the Battle of Gettysburg; one of his most often sited articles concerned the roll artillery played throughout the course of that decisive contest. In the attached article Purifoy summarized some of the key events from a rebel perspective. In the last paragraph he pointed out the one crucial error Lee soon came to regret- take a look.
1920s sportswriter Arthur Robinson wrote this profile of his pal Babe Ruth (1895 – 1948) for the editors of Collier’s:
For some years I have had a peculiarly intimate friendship with Babe Ruth…to the alternately and jeering millions who have watched this modern Beowulf at bat, driving out his smashes, it may have appeared that he was just a thick-skinned ballplayer, schooled to deafness on the field. The skin of my friend Babe Ruth is not thick.
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 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.
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.
The Navy Yard in Brooklyn (NY) got along with men mechanics for 141 years, up to now – but this is a tough war. Women are now being hired to help build and repair warships and their accessories.
Looking back fifteen years at the greatest espionage trial of the Fifties, Medford Evans, a former administrative officer of the U.S. Atomic Energy Project, re-read the court testimony and concluded that Harry Gold and David Greenglass had lied on the stand.
In this article, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt (1884 – 1962) attempted (very politically) to play both sides of the street, implying on the one hand that the creation of the Japanese-American internment camps seemed a reasonable measure in wartime; but the reader doesn’t have to have a degree in psychology to recognize that she believed otherwise:
‘A Japanese is always a Japanese’ is an easily accepted phrase and it has taken hold quite naturally on the West Coast because of some reasonable or unreasonable fear back of it, but it leads nowhere and solves nothing…
