New Yorkers milled around the Wall Street district and Times Square, and over a loudspeaker Mayor Fiorlello H. LaGuardia told them to behave themselves…
Click here to read about the VJ-Day celebrations around the world.
Attached is a page from the Diary of Participation in W.W. II which was compiled by the editors of THINK MAGAZINE; this page contains the printable text of a portion of President Harry Truman’s VE-Day Proclamation of May 8, 1945:
The Allied armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help, have won from Germany a final and unconditional surrender. The Western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men… Much remains to be done. The victory won in the West must now be won in the East…
A report from Boston, Atlanta, Baltimore, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St Louis and Springfield (Mass.) as to how VE-Day was celebrated (or not) in these cities:
To get an over-all view of VE-day in America, YANK asked civilian newspapermen and staff writers in various parts of the country to send an eye-witness reports. From these OPs the reports were much the same. Dallas was quiet, Des Moines was sober, Seattle was calm, Boston was staid.
By the time this article hit the newsstands, the airline stewardess job was no longer a novelty and there were twenty-five women working in relays on the trans-continental run between Chicago and Oakland. The woman who held the record as the first airline stewardess, Ellen Church (1904 – 1965), was hired two and a half years earlier.
In addition to other restrictions, the earliest flight attendants of the Thirties were all required to be no older than 26, weigh no more than 118 pounds, stand no taller than 54 and hold nursing degrees in order that they be prepared to soothe the frayed nerves of the flight-fearing passengers.
With the birth of passenger airlines came the need for those who had particular set of culinary skills: read about them here.
Times have changed: when this article about Beverly Hills first went to press, that famed little hamlet could support as many as ten bookshops. It is now barely able to support one:
Beverly Hills became famous in 1926 when, in one of the smartest publicity stunts of the century, the movie star Will Rogers was elected honorary mayor. Installed in drizzling rain, Rogers declared that all the budding town needed for progress was a little scandal and a few murders…
This was not a problem.
Beverly Hills Confidential: A Century of Stars, Scandals and Murders
During the Second World War, millions of American military personnel passed through Los Angeles. Many were attracted to the simple domestic architecture, the smell of orange blossoms, Hollywood, the glorious weather – all of these or none of these, but many of them promised themselves that if they survived the war, this is where they would want to start their lives.
Many of these men fulfilled that promise, and they brought with them the government guaranteed housing loans provided by the G.I Bill – and a dusty, arid flat land just over the hill from Los Angeles called the San Fernando Valley began to grow as a result. By 1951, just six years after the war, two thousand building permits were issued for this area each month.
In an attempt to define modernism for a broad audience, architect/designer Alexander Girard curated the Exhibition for Modern Living
Modern design implies shape for use, simplicity, new forms to utilize new materials, easier housekeeping, and honest expression of mass production… Up the richly carpeted ramp, viewers walk up to a dining room done by Alvar Aalto; past two studies Bruno Mathsson and Jean Risom and a bedroom and living-room representing a variety of designers; then up another level to a space furnished by Charles Eames; and finally to a small balcony overlooking George Nelson’s living area. The quiet simplicity of the rooms and the gentle tones of symphonic music have people talking in whispers. Sighed one woman: ‘I’d like to live here.’
This editorial was one of the first of its kind and many more would follow on its heels. The opinions expressed would be repeated in American schoolrooms, barrooms, dinner tables and state houses all the way up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was not merely the parents of draftees who wondered aloud as to the whereabouts of the U.N. signatories in times of crises, but practically the whole nation:
For two months the American and South Korean ground forces fought it out alone. For two months they fought without even the promise of help from other major powers…
Standing before the United Nations General Assembly during the Fall of 1950, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson reminded the diplomats that five years earlier, when the U.N. Charter was conceived, it was agreed that the institution should have a military arm with which to enforce its edicts.
Situated where the Tennessee River passes through the Cumberland Mountains, forming gaps, Chattanooga was called the Key to East Tennessee and Gateway to the deep South. The possession of Chattanooga was vital to the Confederacy, and a coveted goal of the Northern armies. Chattanooga’s principal importance during the Civil War was it’s position as a railroad center.
Click here to print American Civil War chronologies.
The Cold War was not often seen as a subject for poetry – but that didn’t stop a popular versifier like Berton Braley (1882 – 1966). He took a look around at the post-war world and saw plenty subjects that rhymed:
You’ll meet, methinks, a lot of pinks
Whose statements are dogmatic
That Communists are Liberals
And really Democratic;
But when you hear that type of tripe
Keep this fact in your nut
– That Communists are Communists and nothing else but!
His poem went on for three more stanzas…
Attached is an article about Val Peterson (1903 – 1983), who had been appointed by President Eisenhower to serve as the director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration between 1953 through 1957. Peterson is remembered as the Washington functionary who mobilized graphic designers, copywriters, cartoonists and filmmakers in an effort to shock America’s youth out of their complacency and recognize that nuclear warfare was a genuine possibility.
America has always depended on its youth. The Atomic Age of nuclear weapons has not changed this – it has intensified it.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover called him the most dangerous Communist in the United States – his name was Herbert Aptheker (1915 – 2003) and in this magazine article he explained to his readers that as he traveled the Western states he saw an America that was heartily sick of the Cold War.
Without Haydée Sanatamaría (1922 – 1980), the [Cuban] revolution might never have been. She was the actual founder of the freedom movement known as the 26th of July. Haydée Sanatamaría was known to Cubans simply as Maria.
In January, 1950, a British scientist named Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988) was arrested for passing atomic secrets on to Soviet agents.
In his confession Fuchs admitted that the transfer of information began in 1942, shortly after he joined the [British Ministry of Supply] as a German Refugee.
This magazine article covered a speech made by Hitler four years into his rule:
In his efforts to wipe out the country’s status as a pariah among the nations, Hitler boasted Saturday, he had rearmed the Reich and seized the disarmed Rhineland. Still denouncing Versailles, he last week erased one of the most painful of the treaty’s blots on German honor with a few words:
‘I hereby and above all annul the signature extorted from a weak and impotent Government against its better knowledge, confessing Germany’s responsibility for the late war.’
With the 1938 merging of Austria with Hitler’s Germany came the Nazi coercion of Austrian Christianity. One of the first clerics to rebel against their repression was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer (1875 – 1955) of Vienna who made clear his outrage in a series of open letters criticizing the various Nazi restrictions involving marriage and the removal of nuns and priests from various schools and hospitals.
This 1933 magazine article anticipating the reign of FDR appeared on the newsstands on the same day as the man’s first inauguration. The article is composed of various musings that had been published in numerous papers across the economically depressed nation as to what manner of leadership might the Americans expect from their new President.
No President has ever inherited such a load of problems and responsibilities as Roosevelt.
Click here to read President Hoover’s
farewell warning to the nation.
