tor Worth Clark of Idaho; William H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, former Governor of
Oklahoma; and, no surprise again, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin of Montana,
who had cast the only vote against war in 1917. The intellectual integrity of the
committee was vouched for by the president of Notre Dame, Reverend Clarence
Manion, and its esthetic outreach by Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle, the celebrated
dance team. 31
*
The conf licting views on American policy were exemplified by the race in Mas-
sachusetts’s Seventh Congressional District, where ten candidates vied for the
seat vacated by the death of Representative Lawrence J. Connery. The three
leading candidates spanned the range of policy positions. State Senator Joseph
B. Harrington, who was a leader in the America First Committee, stood on an
out-and-out isolationist platform. He was he said “100 percent opposed to Presi-
dent Roosevelt’s foreign policy and 100 percent in support of the Wheeler-Nye
faction in Congress.” At the opposite pole was Thomas J. Lane, assistant Demo-
cratic f loor leader in the Massachusetts Senate, who pledged his full support to
Thursday, December 4, 1941 99
the President’s foreign and domestic policy. Probably J. Fred Manning, a county
commissioner, represented the opinion of many, if not most of the public in
wanting to have it both ways.
I stand steadfastly behind the foreign policy of President Roosevelt in get-
ting all aid to the powers fighting the Axis without sending our boys
across to fight on foreign soil. . . .
He added that he would “never vote for war.” 32
*
For some the situation was not so simple as the alignment of America and its
prospective allies against Germany and its satellites. Archbishop Michael James
Curley of Baltimore issued a warning that the Soviet Union was “quite capable”
of turning on the United States whenever doing so suited its purpose. It had
reversed course once; it might well do so again. The archbishop did not hesitate
to call Stalin the greatest murderer the world had ever known. He castigated the
“moronic” Hollywood geniuses, the scions of millionaires, the university pro-
fessors, and the writers who had f lip-f lopped from foes to friends of the Soviet
Union in accordance with their instructions from Moscow. Once they had cried
out for peace; now they cried for all-out war. And these included very specifi-
cally “Mrs. Roosevelt’s American Youth Congress.” 33
*
It was not only the prelates of the Catholic Church who inveighed against com-
munism. In the more tranquil precincts of the editorial pages of The New York
Times , communism was called an “evil force” among college and high school
students, and a corrupting inf luence into the bargain. The nucleus of commu-
nist activity was the Young Communist League, which followed the familiar
strategy of boring from within. There was nothing wrong, The Times observed,
with a dislike of the Franco government in Spain or even with the supporting
of lower admission charges for school dances. But behind their position on such
respectable issues, the communists utterly rejected “bourgeois mentality” in its
entirety. Communism, The Times wrote, was the sworn enemy of true education
and, what was more, was the attempt of a minority to mislead and intimidate
the majority. 34
*
If a fear of communism was abroad in the land, there was also a fear of its ideo-
logical twin, fascism. William A. Hamley, President of the American Society of
Mechanical Engineers, speaking at a dinner in the Hotel Astor, said that at the
end of the war the nation would have the enormous task of putting to work more
than twenty-six million workers presently engaged in the defense industry. The
alternative to placing fifteen to twenty million workers on WPA work and in
100 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
CCC camps was to create the necessary jobs in private industry; this was the best
way to avoid fascism. If, Mr. Hamley speculated, there were on hand ten million
orders for new cars in the first two years after the war, it would help enormously
to bridge the gap from a wartime to a peacetime economy. It would enable the
country to save its way of life and to avoid fascism. 35
*
In any era there have been oracles to whom journalists can reliably turn for a
colorful and sometimes even trenchant quotation. In the field of heavy industry,
one such was Henry Ford, who managed to combine a reputation for taciturnity
with copious opinions and commentary. Henry Ford was an avowed pacifist. In a
celebrated adventure he had attempted to stop the First World War with his Peace
Ship. Now his production lines were humming with tanks, trucks, engines and
weapons of war. When he was asked how he could reconcile his distaste for war
with his company’s status as one of the very largest defense contractors, he had
replied with a brevity that Calvin Coolidge might have admired: “It’s the law of
the land, isn’t it?”
Asked on December 3 by The Washington Post for his opinion, Ford was sur-
prisingly literate and referred to Tennyson’s famous poem “Locksley Hall,” which
foretold the silencing of the guns of war and a parliament of man, a worldwide
federation. And if, Ford said, such a federation did not emerge from the war, then
that war would have been nothing more than a dress rehearsal for one even more
terrible. Unsurprisingly, Ford cited the United States as a “practical example” of
such a federation. It had some states larger than whole countries in Europe but
without Europe’s international boundary lines and without its different curren-
cies, its customs barriers and its armies. 36
Economic Indicators: Illegal Immigration
Los Angeles had long been concerned with illegal immigration, especially with
its financial impacts. Its City Manager calculated that there were in the county
17,500 aliens, about 80 percent of whom were Mexicans. He proposed to pay a
$100 bonus to immigrants who would go back to Mexico “and start supporting
themselves rather than continuing on the regular relief rolls” where they had
been for several years. He feared that more than a few would collect the bonus,
return to Mexico and then surreptitiously reenter the United States under a dif-
ferent name, thus positioning themselves again to become candidates for repa-
triation. According to the report, the Southern Pacific Railway had for a long
time made half-price tickets available for the return of indigents to Mexico, only
to see those tickets used by tourists. It recommended that any such bonus be paid
in monthly installments, as a lump sum might attract abuse. He warned a good
identification system was needed, if not an international protocol and a force of
border rurales , to prevent repeating. 37 The editorialist’s conclusions remind us how long the problem of immigration has existed, and how little has been done
to address it.
Thursday, December 4, 1941 101
Life in These United States: Here and There
Not all stories were concerned with momentous events, critical issues, and
the perennial human interest in the human condition. The Oregonian , pointing
to the fact that 400 Oregonians had left their homes during the year to enter
tuberculosis hospitals, urged its readers to support Christmas seals.
Mrs. Ellen Fletcher, 108, thought to be the oldest woman in Britain, had had a
narrow escape when a bomb fell in her neighborhood the previous winter. “This
young fellow Hitler isn’t going to frighten me,” she said. She refused to wear her
gas mask and kept busy knitting comforts for the armed forces. Enjoying a glass of
beer, she was living proof that hearts of oak continued to thrive in Britain.
At the Lucyle Richards trial, the jury had been out twenty-one hours. On the first
ballot, seven jurors had voted for acquittal and five for conviction. The next morn-
ing (the morning of the 4th) the vote was six to six and the jury deliberated until
after they had eaten lunch when the vote stood at eleven for acquittal. After asking
for some of the evidence to be reread, the jury brought in a unanimous verdict of
not guilty. Two jurors wept as the verdict was read but the defendant remained calm
showing no emotion. She thanked the foreman of the jury and announced that she
would join Taft who now appeared to be her legal husband. Asked about her plans,
she said she hoped to fly bombers from American production lines to embattled
Britain. Flying heavy bombers across tempestuous expanses of the wintry North
Atlantic was a venture that might expose her to risks no graver than those she had
faced before astride a bucking bronco or in the arms of a jealous lover.
*
Humor from time to time leavened the salinity of local and regional politics. In a
mock rebellion, representatives of the border counties of California and Oregon
gathered in a “territorial assembly” presumably to establish the new state of Jef-
ferson. It proved to be a bloodless rebellion whose prosaic goals were to create
publicity for the area and call for better highways. If there had been a vein of
seriousness in the project, it soon faded and its rebels were left without a cause. 38
*
On the social scene, hands were joined across the sea in the matrimonial mart.
Mrs. Josephine Armstrong Gwynne, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. George Arm-
strong of Glenns, Virginia, was to be married to the seventh Earl of Sefton,
widely described as “one of England’s most eligible bachelors.”
The Earl brought splendid possessions to the marriage, half the land on which
the city of Liverpool stands. He was in addition the proprietor of the Aintree
Race Course where the Grand National was run. The Earl also enjoyed distinc-
tion as Steward of the Jockey Club of Great Britain. Adorned with the stately
name Hugh William Osbert Molyneux, he was a captain in the Royal Horse
Guard Reserve, a graduate of Harrow and Sandhurst, and, finally, a former Lord-
In-Waiting to the King.
102 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
The prospective bride was not without her own connections. She had formerly
been married to Erskine Gwynne, a grandnephew of the late Mrs. Cornelius
Vanderbilt. She was, in fact, a descendant of Jefferson Davis, President of the late
Confederacy. The prospective bride had formerly been employed in a couture
house in Paris where her first marriage had taken place.
There were other distinguished heritages in the matrimonial news. Miss Ruth
Berrien was engaged to Dr. Henry Morgenthau Fox, the son of Mr. and Mrs.
Mortimer Joseph Fox of Foxden, Peekskill, New York. Dr. Fox had graduated
from Harvard and Johns Hopkins Medical School. He was a grandson of Henry
Morgenthau, former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and a nephew of Henry Morgen-
thau, Jr., Secretary of the Treasury.
Ms. Berrien, a Vassar alumna, labored on the editorial staff of Life magazine. Her antecedents included Cornelius Jansen Berrien, who had arrived in New York
from Holland in 1669, and John MacPherson Berrien, Attorney General in the
cabinet of President Andrew Jackson. We are left to contemplate the aphorism of
Archy, the literary cockroach: “blood will tell, but sometimes it tells too much.” 39
*
Even customary diversions showed signs of change. More echoes of war:
books advertised in The New York Times included The Devil in France by Lion Feuchtwanger and London Pride by Phyllis Bottome. Ebullient Ludwig Bemel-mans turned his gaze aside from war and rumors of war with sparkling tales of
the Hotel Splendide .
A level of sophistication characteristic of Hotel Splendide was offered to the
smokers of Phillip Morris cigarettes, who were promised a lower level of irrita-
tion and unspecified health benefits under the caption: “Finer Pleasure Plus Real
Protection,” lauding “America’s Finest Cigarette.” 40
At a banquet held to celebrate Fordham’s selection to play Missouri in the
Sugar Bowl, the speakers were Fordham President Robert L. Gannon, S.J. and
Coach Jim Crowley, one of Notre Dame’s immortal Four Horsemen. Father
Gannon extolled a vision of football and of sport that has long since faded from
the public consciousness, evoking the spirit of an earlier age: “We are extremely
grateful to these young men and not only for their victories, but also because they
have given to the country and to the name of Fordham a fine example of sports-
manship and every attribute that makes for a gentleman.” 41
That times were changing was evident in a New York Times “Topic of The
Times” which concluded, and not happily, that America’s national game was chang-
ing from baseball to football based on the attendance at the two sports. The Times
pointed out that recently published statistics showed nearly 8.5 million spectators
at 360 football games involving 74 colleges. Professional football, it added, would
bring the audience beyond the ten-million mark. If comparable figures for baseball
were not then and there available, The Times pointed out that in 1940 college football attendance had surpassed eight million while major-league baseball drew fewer
than five million spectators. The trend appeared to The Times to be regrettably clear.
Thursday, December 4, 1941 103
Another commentator marveled at the proliferation of football bowl games.
Once upon a time, he wrote, there had been the Rose Bowl at Pasadena. Then the
heavens had opened up and rained bowls: the Sugar Bowl at New Orleans, the
Sun Bowl at El Paso, the Cotton Bowl at Dallas, and the Orange Bowl at Miami.
The commentator could envision a bowl of oranges. But who could capture the
sun in a bowl or cotton that came, not in bowls, but in minute pharmacological
containers?
Then there was the matter of geography. Traditionally football had been played
by “armored young giants in rain and mud and fog and snow.” Now they played
in bowls named for roses, oranges, and sugar cane. The commentator foresaw
future savage battles in the Magnolia Bowl, the Jasmine Bowl, the Oleander Bowl,
and the Pineapple Bowl, all further evidence of the continuing Southern conquest
of the football world.
Notes
1.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 1
/> 2.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 3
3.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 3
4.
Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 7
5.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 4
6.
Washington Post , December 4, 1941, 2
7.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 4
8.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 5
9.
New York Times , December 4, 1941, 5
10. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 16
11. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 24
12. Oregonian , December 4, 1941, 3
13. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 24
14. Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 19
15. Washington Post , December 4, 1941, 19
16. Washington Post , December 4, 1941, 18
17. Atlanta Constitution , December 4, 1941, 6
18. Houston Chronicle , December 4, 1941, 1
19. Houston Chronicle , December 4, 1941, D2
20. Oregonian , December 4, 1941, 1
21. Atlanta Constitution , December 4, 1941, 3
22. Atlanta Constitution , December 4, 1941, 3
23. Oregonian , December 4, 1941, 4
24. Washington Post , December 4, 1941, 5
25. Los Angeles Times , December 4, 1941, 2/4
26. Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 10
27. Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 10
28. Houston Chronicle , December 4, 1941, 12
29. Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 1
30. Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 1
31. Chicago Tribune , December 4, 1941, 18
32. Houston Chronicle , December 4, 1941, 24
33. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 3
104 Last Week at Peace: December 1–6, 1941
34. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 24
35. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 16
36. Washington Post , December 4, 1941, 19
37. Los Angeles Times , December 4, 1941, 2/7
38. Oregonian , December 4, 1941, 4
39. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 34
40. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 4
41. New York Times , December 4, 1941, 36
9
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 1941
A World in Flames: Continuing Campaigns
Gigantic combats continued to rage across the breadth of Russia from Leningrad
in the north to the Sea of Azov in the south. The Russians were maintaining
Crucible of a Generation Page 17
