The former Emperor of China, Puyi, was expelled from the Forbidden City by Gen. Feng Yuxiang who unilaterally revoked the Articles of Favourable Treatment of the Great Qing Emperor after His Abdication
Puyi lived a tragic life, having been born into the anachronism of the Chinese Empire at a time it was collapsing. He'd go on to be Emperor of Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria, a prisoner of the Soviet Union, a prisoner of the Red Chinese, and finally, a gardener. He died in 1967 at age 61.
President Coolidge made a Thanksgiving proclamation:
The U.S. M3 Scout Car was produced by White Motor Company from 1939 to 1944. The early version, the M3, was made in only limited numbers, but the successor M3A1 was fairly widely produced.
Envisioned as a cavalry vehicle, it really wasn't up to the task and therefore while produced, it was arguably obsolete from the onset.
The M8 was introduced in 1943 and picked up where the M3 left off, being a much more combat worthy vehicle. It remained in service into the 1950s in the US but had a long life in other countries, with some still being used.
The M20 Armored Utility Car was another US armored vehicle that came in and supplemented the M3.
Oh, sure, there were snowplows that went out on the narrow two lane highways, but off the highways? Well, you better be pretty sure you could get back.
Now, my father only ever owned one 4x4 vehicle, and it was one he bought from me. But we didn't go up in the high country or into the foothills once winter started. That was out. You stuck to areas that were relatively near a county road or that were blown off, and probably down around 5,500 feet or less. Beyond that? Forget it.
And this was true for ranchers too. Some men stayed up in the high country, but they stayed there. . . all winter long. People often fed by horse drawn wagon (and in a few places, still do).
The Dodge Power Wagon changed that. And it was a creature of the Second World War.
The father of the Dodge Power Wagon, the 1/2 ton truck, a fair number of examples of which can be found in the Rocky Mountain West in spite of the small number produced, was in addition to being too light, too top heavy.
With the Power Wagon, you could now get there in winter. Maybe not everywhere, but darned near everywhere, even up in the high country.
And that meant you didn't need to keep hired men up in the high country in line shacks all winter. For that matter, with a trailer, you could easily feed in a fraction of the time it had taken with a wagon. You probably didn't need hired men for that either, if you had them.
And while it would take awhile, really when NAPCO started converting Fords and Chevys into heavy duty 4x4s, it would also mean that sportsmen could get back there in the winter too.
The German backed fascist coup in Hungary, designed to keep the country in the war, completed with the leader of the banned fascist Arrow Cross Party, Ferenc Szálasi, becoming prime minister of a "Government of National Unity" w hich was controlled by the Germans. Horthy was taken prisoner.
Horthy, who appears here a lot, died in Portugal in 1957 at age 88. Szálasi was executed in 1946 at age 49.
Who the crap could think that the fascist were going to win in late 1944?
T/5 Ray Tintera, Tampa, Fla., and Sgt. Elwood Johnson, Ogema, Wisc., check civilians at an outpost in Monschau, Germany. 16 October, 1944.g, Admiral Miklós Horthy was forced out of office and replaced by Ferenc Szálasi of the fascist Arrow Cross Party.
Registration slips of these two German frauleins are checked by T/4 Nick Kellen, Woodstock, Mich., as they pass through the outskirts of Monschen, Germany. Slips showed them to be Karolina Rader and Johanna Kirch. 16 October, 1944.
The Soviets launched the Gumbinnen Operation with the goal of penetrating the borders of East Prussia.
Albanian partisans liberated Vlorë.
Maj. Gen. Eurico Jaspar Dutra, (left), Brazilian Minister of War and Maj. Gen. Mascarenhas De Moraes, C.G. of the B.E.F., shown in hatches of a medium tank in which they took a ride during an inspecting tour at the IV Corps recently. Fifth Army, IV Corps area, Italy. 16 October, 1944.
The U.S. launched an offensive towards Bologna.
The 10th Indian Division crossed the Savio River.
A U.S. bombing raid on Salzburg destroyed the dome of the cathedral and most of the Mozart family home.
Troops of the 44th Division await truck transportation after unloading at a station in Northern France. They are on their way to the front. 16 October, 1944.
Pfc. Victor Henry, Pontotoc, Miss., fires his machine gun through a hole in a wall, at Germans in a barn 300 yards away, beyond Kohlscheid, Germany. He is flanked by two of his buddies. 16 October, 1944. Company K, 3rd Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division.
Evelyn Nesbit, model and archetypical Gibson Girl, 1903.
And indeed, I'm likely foolish for bringing up this topic.
Model in overalls . Photos by Alfred Eisenstaedt, 1944. This is posted under the fair use and other exceptions. Life, by 1943, was already posting some fairly revealing photographs on its cover, but there was a certain line that it did not really cross until 1953, when it photographed the full nudes of Marilyn Monroe prior to Playboy doing so, in an act calculated to save her career, as it was a respectable magazine. The publication of nude Monroe's from the 1940s went, to use a modern term, "viral" both in Life and in Playboy showing something was afoot in the culture. This photo above shows how much things were still viewed differently mid World War Two, with a very demure model demonstrating work pants.
This post actually serves to link in a video posted below, which probably isn't apparent due to all of the introductory photographs and text. And that's because of all the commentary I've asserted along the way.
If you do nothing else, watch or listen to the video.
This post might look like a surprising thing to have linked in here, but in actuality, it directly applies to the topic of this website, the same being changes over time. Or, put another way, how did average people, more particularly average Americans, and more particularly still, average Wyomingites, look at things and experience things, as well as looked at things and experienced things.
This is an area in which views have changed radically, and Fr. Krupp's post really reveals that.
At some point, relatively early in this podcast, Fr. Krupp, quoting from Dr. Peter Craig, notes that what the Sexual Revolution did was subtract, not add, to sex, by taking out of it its fundamental reality, that being that it creates human beings.
That's a phenomenal observation.
And its correct. What the Sexual Revolution achieved was to completely divorce an elemental act from an existential reality, and in the process, it warped human understanding of it, and indeed infantilized it. That in turn lead, ultimately, the childish individualist focus on our reproductive organs we have today, and a massive focus on sex that has nothing whatsoever to do with reproduction, or at least we think it doesn't. It's been wholly destructive.
We've addressed that numerous times here in the past and if we have a quibble with the presentation, it would be a fairly minor one, maybe. Fr. Krupp puts this in the context of artificial birth control, but the process, we feel, had started earlier in the last 1940s with the erroneous conclusions in the Kinsey treatise Sexual Behavior in the Human Mail, which was drawn from prisoners who were available as they had not been conscripted to fight in World War Two and who displayed a variety of deviances, including sexual, to start with. The report was a bit of a bomb thrown into society, which was followed up upon by Hugh Hefner's slick publication Playboy which portrayed all women as sterile and top heavy. Pharmaceuticals pushed things over the edge in the early 60s.
Lauren Bacall, 1943.
The point isn't that prurient interests didn't exist before that time. They very clearly did. La Vie Parisienne was popular prior to World War Two for that very reason, and films, prior to the production code, were already experimenting with titillation by the 1920s. But there was much, much less of this prior to 1948 than there was later, and going the other direction, prior to 1920, it would have been pretty rare to have been exposed to such things in average life at all.
Indeed, it's now well known, in spite of what the Kinsey report claimed, that men and women acted very conventionally through the 40s. Most people, men and women, never had sex outside of marriage. Things did occur, including "unplanned births" but they were treated much differently and not regarded as the norm. Included in that, of course, was the knowledge that acting outside of marriage didn't keep things from occuring in the normal and conventional biological sense.
Given that, the normal male's view of the world, and for that matter the normal female's, was undoubtedly much different, and much less sexualized. Additionally, it would have been less deviant than even widely accepted deviances today, and much more grounded in biology. That doesn't mean things didn't happen, but they happened a lot less, and people were more realistic about what the consequences of what they were doing were in every sense.
Something started to change in the 1940s, and perhaps the Kinsey book was a symptom of that rather than the cause, although its very hard to tell. Indeed, as early as the 1920s the movie industry, before being reined in, made a very serious effort to sell through sex. It was society that reacted at the time, showing how ingrained the moral culture was. That really started to break down during the 1940s. I've often wondered if the war itself was part of the reason why.
From Reddit, again posted under copyright exceptions. This is definitely risque and its hard to imagine women doing in this in the 30s, and frankly its pretty hard to imagine them doing it in the 1940s, but here it is. The Second World War was a massive bloodletting, even worse than the Frist, and to some extent to me it seems like it shattered moral conduct in all sorts of ways, although it took some time to play out.
Kinsey released his book in 1948, and like SLAM Marshall's book Men Under Fire, its conclusions were in fact flat out wrong. Marshall's book impacted military training for decades and some still site it. Kinsey's book is still respected even though it contains material that's demonstratively wrong.
By 1953 (in the midst of a new war in Korea) things had slipped far enough that Hugh Hefner was able to introduce a slick publication glorifying women who were portrayed as over endowed, oversexed, dumb, and sterile. There were efforts to fight back, but they were losing efforts.
Cheesecake photograph of Marilyn Monroe (posted here under the fair use and commentary exceptions to copyright. This photograph must be from the late 1950s or the very early 1960s, which somewhat, but only somewhat, cuts against Fr. Krupp's argument, which is based on the works of Dr. Peter Craig and heavily tied to artificial birth control as the cause of the Sexual Revolution. I think that's largely correct, but the breakdown had started earlier, as early in 1948 in my view, such that even before the introduction of contraceptive pharmaceuticals a divorce between the reality of sex and reproduction had set in, leading to the "toy" or plaything concept of women that we have today.
And then the pill came, at the same time a society revolution of sorts, concentrated in young people, started to spread around the globe.
We've lost a lot here. A massive amount. And principal among them are our groundings in the existential, and reality. And we're still slippping.
One of the most monumental actors of the second half of the 20th Century, and one of the most memorable voices of all times, James Earl Jones died at age 93 yesterday.
A lot has been written about Jones over the past day, and so we won't go back into most of it. Born to actor Robert Earl Jones, whom he closely resembled in appearance and voice, and Ruth, he mostly grew up outside of the presence of his father who left the family shortly after he was born. He mostly grew up on the farm of his maternal grandparents in Michigan. After high school he started off towards a career in medicine but realized it wasn't for him and switched to drama, graduating from the University of Michigan in 1955. He participated in ROTC while a university student and had expected to deploy to the Korean War, but it ended shortly after he graduated. He attended Ranger school, something very difficult to graduate from and frankly making him an unusually large graduate of a program which tends to favor smaller men. While in the Army, he converted to Catholicism.
His first film appearance was in Dr. Strangelove in 1964. His last was in 2021 in Coming 2 America. He had various monumental roles in between, including famously being the voice of Darth Vader and Terrence Mann in Field of Dreams.
Calvin Coolidge was nominated for President at the GOP convention.
The Newton Gang robbed the express mail train number 57 of the Milwaukee Road (the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad) near Rondout, Illinois. The train was stopped at the time. The gang made away with more than $3M, worth about $54.3M today. Their success was brief as one of their own members wounded another, preventing their escape.
Asphyxiation following a main battery turret explosion killed 44 crewmen of the USS Mississippi. The incident was the largest peacetime loss of life in the Navy up to that time.
The ship would serve until 1956 and was broken up in 1957.
George H. W. Bush was born in Milton, Massachusetts.
Joseph Welch, hand in head, being questioned by Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Welch was the chief legal counsel for the U.S. Army when it fell under the gaze of Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy asserted that there were Communist that had not been brought to light by the Army in the Army, in defense plants, or in institutions associated with national defense. The claim wasn't actually wholly without merit, actually as at least a few Communists, in 1954, were in the service and more in industry, which was not surprising if we consider that the 1930s had been the high water mark of American Communism and there were more at that time, the 30s, than there ever would be again. Some would end up in the service by default, and indeed at least one openly Communist American officer, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, received the Silver Cross for heroism in the Pacific before later being killed in action. The Army certainly wasn't a hotbed of Communism, however, and the claims were seen as extreme at the time.
On June 9, 1954, Welch, now in day 30 of the hearings, challenged McCarthy confederate Roy Cohn to provide the Attorney General with the names of the 130 subversives that McCarthy claimed were working in American defense plants "before sundown" that day. That wasn't done, but McCarthy called out the name of a lawyer who worked in Welch's Boston law office as a member of a Communist front organization. The lawyer had indeed been a member of it in his youth (recall the comment about the 30s again).
When this occurred, the famous exchange resulted. Welch at first commented:
Until this moment, Senator, I think I have never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to the Harvard Law School and came into my firm and is starting what looks to be a brilliant career with us....Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad. It is true he is still with Hale and Dorr. It is true that he will continue to be with Hale and Dorr. It is, I regret to say, equally true that I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentleman, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.
McCarthy should have known better than to attempt to joust with a figure like Welch, but he kept on and didn't yield, resulting in:
Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyers Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
McCarthy still wouldn't yield. Welch rebuked him and informed him he wouldn't answer any more questions. The audience broke into applause.
McCarthy was wrecked forever.
Yesterday Republicans in the Impeachment hearings suggested that Lt.Col. Vindman, the child of Ukrainian immigrants, might not be fully loyal to the United States as the Ukrainian administration offered him a position as their defense chief several times. He declined every time. There's no suggestion that he ever entertained the offer, and to entertain it would not be a sign of anything in particular. After all, Douglas McArthur was head of the Philippine's army after retiring, the first time, from the U.S. Army. That didn't make him disloyal. And apparently at least one senior American Air Force officer with Eastern European ties has taken up such a position. Claire Chenault spent years in the service of the Nationalist Chinese, but he's never been considered to have been disloyal.
The real question should have been what did Lt. Col. Vindman hear, and what did it mean. Both Vindman and another witness said that they were distressed by what they heard, Vindman very much so, but that they didn't hear the word "bribe" and neither came so far as to claim what they heard was regarded as a bribe. Vindman did go further than the other witness in his opening remarks in upholding the reputation of the removed ambassador, a noble thing to do, but perhaps straying outsides of the confines of what he should have done.
Still, for the second time in two weeks the House Republicans have managed to attack a witness and have the attack fall back on themselves.
Joseph McCarthy attacked a lot of witnesses in his hearings in the early 1950s. Now forgotten, McCarthy's claims were a lot more accurate, indeed highly accurate, than recalled. He benefited from the work of a prior committee from the 1930s and he was also almost certainly getting information secretly and without Administration knowledge from the FBI. But his behavior just went to far. Attacking the Army itself went too far, and then attacking Fred Fischer in a collateral attack went way too far. It was so devastating, in fact, that McCarthy's apologist have accused Welch of cleverly setting it up. But McCarthy' set himself up.
Americans don't like politicians attacking servicemen, and the GOP, which has been closest to the service since World War Two, has members who dislike it most of all. McCarthy didn't survive attacking the Army. Today's House Republicans would have done well to remember that.
The results of these hearings, as already noted, are foreordained. But the election isn't. For undecided voters seeing a soldier like Vindman impugned may be hard to forget.
McCarthy ended up censured later that year. His career declined. He died in 1957 with the cause officially being hepatitis, but which is widely believed to have been due to alcoholism or contributed to by alcoholism. He was 48 years old. He left behind a wife of for years, Jean, whom was 33 years old at the time of his death.
Joseph Welch would die three years after that, at age 69. He's often best remembered today for his role as the judge in Anatomy of a Murder, which he played after his role in the Army McCarthy hearings.
