Trench Mortar
(The Great War, 1918)
The attached photo first appeared in a 1918 issue of Great War Magazine and pictures the Brandt Grenade-Thrower. Designed in
The Dummy Horse Observation Post
(Popular Mechanics, 1918)
History’s ancient example of camouflage, the Trojan horse, has a modern twist in this illustrated article. The journalist reported that at some undated point earlier in the war the French had a chance to set a mock horse-carcass between the opposing trenches and use it as an observation post.
Eating Crow
(PM and Newsweek Magazine, 1945)
Four years after Pearl Harbor, the editors of the Japanese newspaper Asahi gazed out of the windows from their offices and saw the charred remains of their enemy-occupied homeland and recognized that they’d made a fatal mistake:
We once more refresh our horror at the colossal crime committed and are filled with a solemn sense of reflection and self-reproach…
Fully Abdicated
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1936)
“In a fast traveling automobile, Edward, no longer a king but still wealthy with a reputed income of $5000,000 a year, sped to Portsmouth, England. Accompanying him into exile were only his loyal equerry, Col. Piers Legh; his private detective, David Storier; a valet and a pet Cairn terrier. Leaving the auto, the party went aboard the warship Fury which immediately steamed for Boulogne in France.”
The Night of Long Knives
(Literary Digest, 1934)
This article reported on a nasty event that took place in Germany between June 30 and July 2, 1934 and it has come to be known as “the Night of long knives”. In the immediate aftermath, the Western press had a hard time figuring it out, but the long and short of it revealed that Hitler had killed a good many of his political rivals and consolidated his power.
FDR Looked Back on his Plan for the Court
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)
The attached article was written by FDR himself, and in it he explains the ‘court crises’ (as he called it) quite clearly. On page five, he eloquently lays out his plan for the Supreme Court.
Justice Willis Van Devanter
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
When FDR sat down and planned whose voice on the Supreme Court he would most like to nullify, it wasn’t always that of Justice Van Devanter. Although Willis Van Devanter was a conservative, he was a thoughtful jurist who was known to, from time-to-time, vote in support of some of the New Deal legislation.
Justice Pierce Butler
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Justice Pierce Butler “was born in a log hut near Northfield, Minn., on St. Patrick’s Day, 1866… Butler believes in few laws and little regulation because he himself grew up under a system of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.”
Justice James Clark McReynolds
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Bingo! Justice James Clark McReynolds was the stick-in-the-mud FDR wished to have disappeared from the court. This journalist observed that McReynolds “seemed to regard himself as the last Bulwark of a social order which Woodrow Wilson deemed too antiquated in 1914”. Indeed, he was cranky and crusty and disliked Jews and black people equally and didn’t seem to care who knew it.
Justice Louis Brandeis
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Oldest and most consistently liberal of the justices is Louis Brandeis. Together with the three younger members of the court – Roberts, Cardozo and Stone – Brandeis has frequently seen eye to eye with the objectives of the present administration.
Justice George Sutherland
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
Attached is a three-and-a-half-page summation of Associate Justice George Sutherland and the various cases he heard while sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Justice Charles Evans Hughes
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)
“It has been pointed out that a number of cases in which Justice Hughes (1862 – 1948) sided with Liberals have involved civil liberties. On this phase of liberalism, Hughes has consistently upheld traditional American freedoms…”
Solar Energy Panels
(Literary Digest, 1934)
“The latest large-scale effort to harness the sun is taking place at Tashkent, capital the Uzbek Soviet Republic of Central Asia, USSR. Near this city, Soviet scientists, according to Science Service, have been operating on kitchen, bath, and water-tower with power supplied by the sun…
FDR Compared to Lincoln
(Philadelphia Record, 1945)
An anonymous Philadelphia journalist, dumbstruck by the sudden death of FDR, compared the fallen president to Abe Lincoln because both were successful military leaders. He goes a step further by insisting that Walt Whitman’s famous ode to Lincoln is equally applicable for FDR.
Congress Addresses Meat Scarcity
(Philadelphia Record, 1945)
During the closing days of the war in Europe, U.S. Representative Clinton P. Anderson (D. NM. 1890 – 1975) adhered to the many cries of his constituents and looked into the possibility that the American military had abused the trust placed in them concerning allocation of meat.
Ernie Pyle on Okinawa
(Philadelphia Record, 1945)
War Correspondent Ernie Pyle (1900 – 1945) earned his fame by writing about the American Army in North Africa, Italy and France. In April of 1945 he was embedded with the Marines when they invaded Okinawa. To his surprise, sharing foxholes with Marines in Asia was no different from sharing foxholes with GIs in Europe.
The Collapse of the Bull Market
(Literary Digest, 1929)
“The New York Herald Tribune thinks the New York Stock Exchange is partly to blame for the panicky selling of the worst days, because the inadequacy of its present ticker service kept shareholders so long in ignorance of the course of prices.”