"Fools, Drunks, and the United States": August 12, 1941

By Markham Pyle

This is the story of America on August 12, 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor. Isolationism was still strong, FDR was hammering out the Atlantic Charter with Churchill (to the fury of America Firsters), the Japanese were ready to kick off a war, most Americans were more interested in baseball and radio shows than in a distant conflict, and Congress decided to keep the draft - by one vote.
Markham Shaw Pyle's snapshot of America on a day more fateful than any then knew is the story of farmers and big-league ballplayers, spies, editors, whores, Congressmen, housewives, and disgruntled draftees; of events in Europe, massacres in China, and Japanese war plans; and of "Mister Sam," House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, trying to get the draft extension through, come Hell or high water.
From border radio stations to Ebbets Field, from Congress to cruisers at sea; from Maine to Texas, Hatteras to the Golden Gate and far Hawaii, this is the rough music of America's serenade by destiny.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bapton Books
• Release date: Feb 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301240395

Markham Pyle

Markham Shaw Pyle holds his undergraduate and law degrees from Washington & Lee. He is a past or current member of, inter alia, the Organization of American Historians; the Society for Military History; the Southern Historical Association; the Southwestern Social Science Association; the Southwestern Historical Association; the Southwestern Political Science Association; the Virginia Historical Society; and the Texas State Historical Association. He is the historian of Congress’ August 1941 vote to keep the draft four months before Pearl Harbor and, with GMW Wemyss, the historian of the Titanic enquiries and that portentous year 1937, and the annotator of Kipling and Kenneth Grahame.

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Fools, Drunks, and the United States

August 12, 1941

Markham Shaw Pyle

A Bapton Books History Selection

Bapton Books

Copyright © 2011, 2012, 2013 by Bapton Literary Trust No 1 (for Markham Shaw Pyle)

All rights reserved

Published by Bapton Books at Smashwords for Markham Shaw Pyle

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Parliamentary material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of HMSO on behalf of Parliament, licence obtained 2010, afterward supplemented by the Open Parliament Licence 1.0.

The Congressional Record, US State Papers, Presidential addresses, and other official publications of the United States Government are non-copyright pursuant to 17 USC 101 – 105.

A note to the reader: it is the aspiration of this imprint, small though Bapton Books be, to have as few errors and literals – ‘typographical errors’, misprints – as occur in any average Oxford University Press publication (which, alas, in these thin and piping times, gives us a margin of perhaps five or ten). Any obliging corrections shall be gratefully received.

Book design by Bapton Books

To my mother

and to the memory of my father

and of the

officers and men of

3/116th INF

29th ID

Contents

Preface to the third edition

Foreword

There's good news tonight

The Light Crust Doughboys are on the air!

Play ball!

Whoops, Mr. Moto, I'm a coffee pot'

This … is London

The Harlem Fresh-Air Taxicab Company

Yoo-hoo….

Aunt Jenny's Real Life Stories

Chaplain Jim

'T'ain't funny, McGee!

Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea

'No aggrandizement, territorial or other'

The March of Time

Death Valley Days

Against the Storm

Afterword

Index

About the author

Sources and acknowledgments

Colophon

Preface to the third edition

The first edition of this work was published in the month in which my mother – a few weeks after – died. Since that time, I have – inter alia – researched and co-authored a centenary history of the investigations by the US Senate and the British Board of Trade into the sinking of Titanic (When That Great Ship Went Down: the legal and political repercussions of the loss of RMS Titanic, Bapton Books 2012); am finishing up at the time of writing a history of that year of portent 1937 (published Christmas 2012, '37: the year of portent (Bapton Books)); and have experienced much else that has somewhat refined my thinking, although without altering my conclusions, about the events of this volume. In addition, a few corrections have been made, proceeding from and compensating for my initial neglect of the elementary principle never to trust a family informant, no matter how reverend and august, even for events in that informant's own contemporary memory. With those exceptions, I stand by what I said at (as we say in Texas) the get-go.

Foreword

In Plain Tales from the Hills, in the story A Germ Destroyer, Kipling wrote,

Once in every five years, as you know, we indent for a new Viceroy; and each Viceroy imports, with the rest of his baggage, a Private Secretary, who may or may not be the real Viceroy, just as Fate ordains. Fate looks after the Indian Empire because it is so big and so helpless.

That was in 1888. For some forty years before that, the remark that God (or a special Providence) looks after fools, drunk[ard]s, [children,] and the United States had been, in one or another form, common currency. It had been attributed to all sorts of people, from the Portuguese diplomat and statesman the Abbé Correa (José Correia da Serra) to, eventually, Bismarck.

None of the distinguished men on whom that quotation has been fathered ever said it. No one knows who first did. But the point is the same as the point of this work: that it was believed to encapsulate a profound truth, uttered by some great statesman, and it was treated as being both well-sourced and worth repeating. Perception, not for the first time, drove reality: especially political reality.

For that reason, it furnishes, I think aptly, both a theme, and the title, of this book.

There's good news tonight

August 12, 1941, was a Tuesday.

It was the feast of St. Clare, and, in Auschwitz, that Conventual Franciscan, Father Maximilian Kolbe, was less than forty-eight hours from eternity, in the last days of his martyrdom.

His life before the war had included a mission to Japan. In Nagasaki, he had erected a monastery, on a site that was considered by the locals to be geomantically inauspicious: bad feng shui, fūsui (hûsui) in Japanese.

None of this was in the American mind on August 12, 1941.

**

On August 12, 1941, Americans were being pulled slowly out of the Great Depression. The New Dealers attributed this to government programs and Keynesian economics. Men and women who had left the ruins of Dust Bowl farms; the jerkwater, one-horse towns of rural America in all sections and regions; the Appalachian mountains; and the narrow, somnolent South, had a shrewd suspicion, as they went to their saving swing-shifts at the factories that were supplying the Allies with war materials, that there might be another reason. Nobody ever got rich working for the CCC; but Lockheed, say, was another thing entirely.

On August 12, 1941, Huey P. Long had been in his grave for almost six years. The minister who'd taken his funeral, Gerald L. K. Smith, was striving mightily to take up Governor Long's mantle, and was in bed with the Silver Shirts and any other fascists and white supremacists he could find. His taste for disloyalty and sedition had already proved too stout even for the America First Committee.

Radio had helped make Huey P. Long a national figure. The days of the Atwater Kent radio, with its elegance and higher prices, had passed, and the New York tone of national radio broadcasts had passed with it. The Texas Company – Texaco – sponsored the broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera Company, certainly, and found them pulling a surprisingly large and varied audience. But grand opera and sophisticated big band jazz were no longer the only fare on radio. Now the Americans, uprooted and longing for home and simpler times, simpler answers, could drink from their baptismal font. When the whistle of the Louisville & Nashville's crack passenger train, the Pan-American, passed by, and WSM – the radio station owned by the National Life and Accident Insurance Company of Nashville, Tennessee, whose slogan We Shield Millions gave the station its call-sign – took you to the Ryman Auditorium and George Hay, the Solemn Old Judge, grand opera gave way to the Grand Ole Opry. And goat-gland-prescribing physician to Priapus, Doctor John R. Brinkley, quack, demagogue, and all-around huckster, had begun the era of the border blasters, Mexican border radio, transmitting into the US and clear to Canada, at XERA, Cuidad Acuña. Imitators had followed – Pappy Lee O'Daniel had become governor of Texas based on folksiness, a career as the front man for a Western Swing band, flour-mill advertising, and the cunning use of border radio – but XERA ruled the airwaves thanks to its having the Carter Family as its lead act. Displaced and dispossessed Americans, lost in the cities, uprooted, Wildwood Flowers taken from their native soil to wither and die, could hear Mother Maybelle on the autoharp with the turn of a dial, and go home again in memory. To this day, the Mexican trumpets in Ring of Fire carry on the tradition that June Carter Cash imbibed as a young girl in Del Rio.

The big bands and Western swing (Aw-haw, cried Bob Wills, and Tommy Duncan laid down a solo), and country-and-western music, were the demotic of American entertainment; and the radio brought to the smallest town the deeds and doings of sports heroes, and the comedy of Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and – deplorably – Amos 'n' Andy. Places that had never seen a vaudeville show or had a theater to host one could now hear the old routines: the train was now boarding for Anaheim, Azusa, and Cucamonga.

You could hear a prize-fight and, Lordy, it was almost just like you were Right There. And with Joe Louis punching through the Bum of the Month Club all through the year, followed by his incredible contest with Billy Conn, you were Right There pretty often, if you had a taste for pugilistic performances.

The Bigs, the Show, Major League Baseball, ended in those years at the Mississippi: St. Louis, home to the Cardinals and the hapless Browns, was as far west and south as baseball went. Beyond Sportsman's Park there was no big league ball. The Pacific Coast League was all but the Bigs, but it wasn't the Bigs, and any player in the PCL would take a pay-cut to have a cup of coffee in the Bigs.

Three DiMaggios did – and stayed. But the inter-mountain West and the South were Cardinals Country, thanks to the powerful signal of KMOX in St. Louis and the acumen of Branch Rickey: these were the days when, it was said, every small town had an A&P and a Cardinals farm club.

Radio had come of age. It was broader now in its appeal; and, too, a wary government had seen to it that its rough edges were smoothed off. Father Coughlin was off the air; FDR was broadcasting fireside chats instead.

There were the movies, too; the movies, the shorts – Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes – and the newsreels, with Lowell Thomas' mellifluence in full play. But it was the radio that gave you the news, As It Happened: scandal from Winchell and Pearson, gravitas from Murrow in London and Shirer in Berlin, and pep and jollity from Gabe Heatter. Why, you could go to church with those crystals lined up just right, listening to Monsignor Sheen, say, or you could hear the sounds of London as Britain stood alone and battle raged in the skies of Kent, you could listen – oohhhhh, Doctor! – to the Dodgers tearin' up the pea-patch as Red Barber called the game….

That was somnolent, searing August in 1941, with the rest of the world at war, and that war very far away – and as near as the signal on the radio.

***

The Light Crust Doughboys are on the air!

August 12, 1941, was a hot, torpid sort of day in Columbus, Mississippi. Columbus was the birthplace of Henry Jackson, Jr., a sharecropper's son. There wasn't just a whole hell of a lot of scope for sharecroppers, their sons, or anyone who happened to be Black, there in Columbus. The family had moved to St. Louis when young Henry was quite small. He was twenty-eight now, and not at all small, and went by the name of Henry Armstrong. He was generally referred to by sportswriters as Hammering Hank, Hurricane Henry, sometimes as Homicide Hank, even now, seven months after Fritzie Zivic had knocked him out in the twelfth round of a fifteen-round bout at Madison Square Garden. Henry Armstrong had been the World Welterweight Champion since 1938 – a year in which he, incredibly, had also been the World Featherweight Champion and World Lightweight Champion as well.

Thomas Lanier Williams III was a year and a half older than Henry Armstrong: white, well-connected on his neurotic mother's side, talented with words rather than fists, the grandson of the rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church there in Columbus. The family had moved to Clarksdale when Tom was young, when the rector took a new parish; they moved, later on, to St. Louis, where Tom began his long reinvention as Tennessee Williams, another outsider for whom there also wasn't just a whole hell of a lot of scope in Columbus, Mississippi, on the Alabama line, with its surviving antebellum mansions and antebellum attitudes that had been preserved from Yankee destruction by the troopers of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

A distant cousin of Tennessee Williams had been born in Columbus three years before the playwright (now a WPA writer in New Orleans, and itching to get back to New York) had come along, and his family had stayed in Columbus until he was ten. Walter Lanier Barber had grown up thereafter amidst the orange groves of Sanford, Florida. But there wasn't quite sufficient scope in Sanford, any more than there had been in Columbus or, in his college days, in Gainesville, Florida, for the redheaded Mr. Barber. The Cincinnati Reds were a better fit, but even broadcasting from Crosley Field wasn't quite wide enough a stage; and since the 1939 season and his move to New York, Red Barber had had plenty of time to make himself the nationally-known Voice of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Columbus had been a place to get away from, for a lot of people, for various reasons. On August 12, 1941, it was a place a goodly number of folks were going to, not from. In June, the War Department had authorized the construction of an Army Air Field at Columbus, to train pilots. On August 12, 1941, the city leased the site to the United States for a dollar a year.

A hundred and twenty-three miles to the east, there was soon to be a similar dollar-a-year lease: Birmingham, Alabama's Birmingham Army Airfield was, when war came, given over to the Federal government for the duration, and civilian aviation at Birmingham Municipal Airport ceased. A young contemporary of Henry Armstrong's, born in Birmingham to a worthy, solid Jewish family, had already flown. Melvin Allen Israel, Esq., a lawyer educated at the University of Alabama and its school of law, had left the Pittsburgh of the South, the legal profession, and part of his Englished name behind him. He never ceased to be Mordechai ben Yehuda Aliah; but it was as Mel Allen that he was the broadcast voice of the Yankees and the Giants. (Hell of a place, America: three Big League ballclubs in New York, and the announcers for all three were Southerners who could drawl for Dixie.) Mel Allen could broadcast for both teams because the New York teams had agreed to broadcast only home games, with an eye on tickets and the all-important gate.

On August 12, 1941, Noble Jones Gregory was the United States Representative for the First District of Kentucky. Madisonville, Kentucky, was one of the towns in his district.

Madisonville, too, had seen its emigrations. One soft-spoken clergyman from an old Kentucky family, with a wife from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, had left Madisonville some years ago, and now had a parish in St. Louis. A cousin of the good padre's wife's was aboard the USS Arizona. His eldest daughter, of a fairly large family, was soon to enter the service of the Veterans Administration when the men went off to war: and to stay there after the boys came marching home expecting their old jobs back. His youngest child and third daughter – he had two sons – was teasingly called Princess Alyce: she was twelve years and one month old on August 12, 1941, and remembered little of Madisonville but the great flood there and the poverty so endemic in the region that part even of her father's stipend in those Depression years was paid in kind: eggs and butter, hens and hams….

On August 12, 1941, Mississippi's First Congressional District, which included Columbus, was represented, as it had been for twenty years, by the race-baiting, Jew-hating John E. Rankin, coauthor of the bill that created the Tennessee Valley Authority, champion of rural electrification, and Chairman of the Veterans Committee. He was a demagogue who hated kikes, niggers, and Communists – and used those terms freely on the floor of the House. He tended to think that Jews, Blacks, and Communists were pretty nearly the same thing, or at least partners with one another: a view that suited most of his fellow members of the House Un-American Affairs Committee right down to the ground.

Congressman Rankin, like Congressman Gregory of Kentucky, was a member of the majority party in Congress. He was a Democrat.

The First Congressional District of Texas was stiff with Shaws, Coopers, Eatons, Rayfords, and their kinfolk: in Rusk County and Smith County and Henderson County, in the Piney Woods where dogwood and magnolia flourished in the red dirt of the westernmost fiefdom of