While thousands of American men lay down their lives in a cruel jungle war, our own president is urging us to trade with the Kremlin that is financing this war and providing the main source of supply to the enemy.
Rumor has it that when the U.S. Army’s senior staff officers had learned of the victory that the U.S. Marines had achieved at the Bois de Belleau in the summer of 1918, one of them had remarked, Those head-line hunting bastards! When reading this next piece you will immediately get a sense that the army was fed-up with the folks at home believing that the same Marines were responsible for the Army’s success at Chateau-Thierry. The war was already over by the time this piece appeared, making it clear to all that Chateau-Thierry was a feather in the cap for the Army, and no one else.
The veterans magazine that published the attached column, THE HOME SECTOR, was edited by Harold Ross, who, just a few months earlier, had held that same post at THE STARS and STRIPES; the article was written by Alexander Woollcott – previously a journalist with that same paper. I’m sure that this was quite common in 1919, but it would seem that these two men wanted to be forthright with their readers and set straight an issue that they wrote about when they were in the employment of Uncle Sam: the Doughboys who were victorious at Chateau-Thiery and Belleau Wood did not save Paris. Just as German historians have insisted for many years, those German divisions were simply not headed for Paris.
One writer’s reminiscence of attending a London party and being introduced to Oscar Wilde (1854 – 1900) and the object of his affection, John Gray. The author insists, as has been documented in other places, that Gray was the model for Wilde’s character Dorian Gray:
Once at a Private View in the New Gallery, as I came downstairs, I came on Wilde, in the midst of his admirers, showing more than ever his gift of versatility. Seeing me he made a gesture, and as I went up he introduced me to John Gray, then in what is called ‘the zenith’ of his youth. The adventure was certainly amusing…
An additional article about Wilde can be seen here.
Click here to read a 1940s article about American sodomy legislation.
Wise words from the Victorians regarding the perils of bachelorhood:
There is no tear shed for the old bachelor; there is no ready hand and kind heart to cheer him in his loneliness and bereavement…
Click here to read other Victorian Gems.
This 1908 magazine article serves to define the Young Turk movement and present a brief history of those reformers who sought to modernize the government of Turkey and introduce a constitutional form of government that would benefit not only the Turks but also the people who reside within the dominions of the Ottoman Empire:
The program of the Young Turks includes individual liberty to all Ottomans; this liberty is to be inviolable excepting by process of law; the press is to be free, Ottomans may form commercial, industrial, or agricultural associations, so long as no law is infringed. All are to be equal before the law.
Although Hitler was no mystery to the readers of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE (the editors had been following his trajectory since the early Twenties), the attached article tells of the maniac’s impoverished boyhood all the way up to his exulted status in 1937.
Originally published in the Stars & Stripes of the U.S. Marine Corps, The Leatherneck, this is an interesting eight page article illustrated with fifteen photographs regarding the dramatic growth in that institution that took place in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Click here to read a CLICK MAGAZINE article about the Marines of W.W. II.
Articles about the W.W. I Marines can be read HERE…
Read what the U.S. Army psychologists had to say about courage in war.
Read what the editors of YANK MAGAZINE thought about the Marine Corps Magazine, LEATHERNECK…
Read about the Women Marines of W.W. II HERE.
World War II terms such as tail gunner, waist gunner and belly gunner are no longer a part of our vocabulary; they are uttered, if at all, about as often as the word blacksmith. However, since you found this website, there is a good chance that you use these terms more often than most – which means you’ll appreciate the attached color photo-essay from 1943 illustrating how vital W.W. II Allied aerial gunners were in winning the air war over Germany and Japan.
Three cheers for the late Earl S. Parker, long-suffering secretary of the now-defunct American League of Justice (California) who recognized the tyranny inherit in the California Alien Land Bill of 1921! Seeing that the Japanese immigrants had been dealt enough cruelty by being denied citizenship, he was quick to point out that it was wrong to deny them real estate as well.
Click here to read about the Yellow Peril in Canada.
What we enjoyed about this piece by the Muckraking Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) was that it was written some six months after the heavy handed George Creel had ceased influencing Yankee magazine editors into printing pro-American blather, and so we tend to feel that her praise of the American Doughboys was quite sincere – and praise she does! Up hill and down dale, the Doughboys can do no wrong in her eyes.
This essay appeared in print around the same time the French had decided that all the Doughboys were just a bunch of racist hurrah-boys and were becoming increasingly sick of them. The Yanks might have squared their debt with the Marquis de Lafayette, but the recently returned Poilus were not above taking an occasional swipe at Ida Tarbell’s Doughboys…
Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.
The anonymous journalist opened this 1935 magazine article explaining how the Indian caste system took root and reasoned as to why he believed such a system was an inevitability in the United States as well.
With the California Council on Oriental Relations waging an eloquent campaign for repeal of the Japanese Exclusion Act, a quota-basis solution is suggested.
Read another article about Asian immigration to California
Click here to read about the 1921 [anti-]Alien Land Bill in California.
You might also be interested in reading about the Yellow Peril in Canada.
An article that marks the date of November 13, 1922 as a poor one for the assembled masses who happened to have been of Japanese ancestry in the United States. On that date Justice George Sutherland (1862-1942), of the United States Supreme Court, handed down the ruling that the Japanese can not be citizens of this country. The opinions of many American Newspapers are presented herein, among them an excerpt from the St. Louis Star which summed up the opinion just so:
The law which prevents the naturalization of Japanese is plainly intended to exclude the Japanese because they are racially unassimlable and their presence creates economic difficulties.
You can read more about Justice Sutherland HERE…
In 1915, some newspaper readers might have preferred to interpret the passage of the Smith-Burnett Immigration bill as a legal measure that would insure a higher standard for immigrants to meet in order to guarantee citizenship; while others tended to interpret the legislation as a restrictive law that was intended only to exclude from citizenship Italians and Eastern-European Jews. This article reported on a massive New York protest decrying the Smith-Burnett bill that was attended by Louis D. Brandeis (1856 – 1941; appointed to the Supreme Court a year later), Episcopal Bishop David Hummel Greer (1844 – 1919) and former president of Columbia University Seth Low (1850 – 1916).
Green Card holders are to this day still required to show fluency in the English language, although the swearing-in ceremony and their voting ballots are often in their native language. Go figure.
In this article Vladimir Lenin speaks of his fondness for The New York Times.
Interesting figures revealed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1920 served to relieve much of the race-conscious anxiety among some of the members of the Anglo-Saxon majority:
The report of the Census Bureau on the number of Japanese residents in the United States shows that the number has been much exaggerated by those panic-stricken persons who affect to dread the rise of a new Japan in America…the Japanese population of the three states on the Pacific coast increased more slowly from 1910 to 1920than it did in the previous decade. There are 70,196 Japanese in California, which has a total population of 3,426,861; in other words about one Californian in every fifty is a Japanese.
The U.S. Census figures for 2011 indicated that the Asian-American population numbered over 17 million, with the lion’s share still residing in the West and the vast majority having arrived after 1965.
This article reported that as of 1922, the United States Government saw fit to deny 19,000 immigrants U.S. citizenship. This number, when added to the other repatriated applicants of the previous ten years, totals up to 760,000 people; which was, at that time, more than the entire population of North Dakota. The Ellis Island based naturalization service classified all rejected immigrants in fifteen different categories, this reporter preferred to name just two: Ignorance and Immoral Character. Immoral Character speaks for itself. And Ignorance covers those who didn’t appear to know enough to exercise the rights of citizenship intelligently. Oddly, there seemed to have been no talk of amnesty.
A report on the California Supreme Court of 1921 which saw fit to overturn a piece of legislation that mandated an alien poll tax.
The tax had been passed into law just one year earlier and was found to be in conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
Even under the gloomy conditions of the camps the wheels of commerce continued to turn ~and they turned out an impressive $3,526,851.77! As can clearly be seen in the plans of the camps that are offered on this site, the camps all had commercial districts where the interned families could purchase needed goods and services; the ten Japanese-American internment camps had 160 businesses operating within their gates that managed to employ 1,853 souls. The attached chart from the 1944 records of the War Relocation Authority serves to illustrate the productivity of all these assorted commercial operations that had once thrived in the camps.
