The Aspirin Age: 1919-1941: The essential events of American Life in the chaotic years between the two World Wars by Isabel LeightonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
1919
Contents
The Forgotten Men of Versailles HARRY HANSEN
1920
The Noble Experiment of Izzie and Moe HERBERT ASBURY
1921
Aimee Semple McPherson: "Sunlight in My Soul" CAREY MCWILLIAMS
1923
The Timely Death of President Harding SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS
1923
Konklave in Kokomo ROBERT Coughlan
1924
Calvin Coolidge: A Study in Inertia IRVING STONE
1926
My Fights with Jack Dempsey GENE TUNNEY
1927
The Last Days of Sacco and Vanzetti PHIL STONG
1927
The Lindbergh Legends JOHN LARDNER
1929
The Crash-and What It Meant THURMAN ARNOLD
1930
The Radio Priest and His Flock WALLACE STEGNER
1931
The Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull MORRIS MARKEY
1933
The First Hundred Days of the New Deal ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.
1934
Full House: My Life with the Dionnes KEITH MUNRO
1934
The Peculiar Fate of the Morro Castle WILLIAM MCFEE
1935
Huey Long: American Dictator HODDING CARTER
1936
"The King and the Girl from Baltimore MARGARET CASE HARRIMAN
1937
An Occurrence at Republic Steel HOWARD FAST
1938
The Man on the Ledge
JOEL SAYRE
1938
The Night the Martians Came CHARLES JACKSON
1940
Wendell Willkie: A Study in Courage ROSCOE DRUMMOND
1941
Pearl Harbor Sunday: The End of an Era JONATHAN DANIELS
Madge Oberholtzer who brought down D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan. Newsman Harold C. Feightner wrote about her saying, “Few deaths of comparatively inconspicuous people have had the far-flung effects that hers did”. Her passing marked the beginning of the end of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana; it resulted in the indictment of several political figures and the complete change in the capital cities’ administration, and it nearly wrecked a political party.
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Source: The Irish Times https://share.google/aL2vtNRCw7wR8Ey7C
It is not likely that Father Coughlin or any of his American imitators can ever again be more than public nuisances, vermin in the national woodwork. But let conditions again become as bad as they did in the deep thirties, and the vermin will reappear.
On the other hand, there will be thousands of Americans, burned by this one experience with fascism under an American and Christian label, who will be warier when the next demagogue arises. The last ironic act of Ben Levin's real-life drama was symbolic, and like the death of his son it had almost too pat a moral. When the contents of his dead son's pockets were sent him by the War Department, he donated the money not to any golden-tongued radio orator or any leader with a panacea, but to a Good Neighbor Association formed to resist the racial hatreds that the leader had brought on.
https://share.google/aimode/kxIq6DDLX...
Letters poured in. Some wanted to know, as correspondents wanted to know for the next twelve years, what a priest was doing talking on such subjects. Others cheered and wanted more. Taken together, that flood of mail meant that people would listen to anyone who sounded as if he knew answers. Father Coughlin's trial balloon had proved what people wanted to hear, and had shown him how to spread the walls of the Shrine of the Little Flower and bring into one audience thousands upon thousands of listeners. Most of those listeners were angry at the bankers; many were afraid of Communists. Though he added other scapegoats later, Father Coughlin really built his structure on those two. By a miracle of illogic, he eventually combined them.
By the end of 1930 the priest had organized his unseen listeners into the Radio League of the Little Flower, dedicated to the unraveling of the tangled economic web, and was pulling in letters in quantities that amazed WJR and may have amazed Coughlin. Other demagogues in the American tradition have been hay-wagon orators, shirt-sleeve spell-binders from park bandstands and town-hall platforms. But Father Coughlin was the first to discover how he could do the whole job by remote control, be free of hecklers, be just as sure of taking up the collection, and in addition have documentary proof by letter of what his audiences wanted.
From 1919 "The forgotten men of Versailles" by Harry Hansen
The day after the Jewish representatives made their plea for Palestine, a remarkable letter, filled with the spirit of good will, was sent by the Emir Feisal to Felix Frankfurter. In it he spoke of the deep sympathy with which the Arabs, "especially the educated among us,” looked upon the Zionist movement, and said the Arab deputation considered the Zionist proposals both "modern and proper." "We will do our best," he continued, "in so far as we are concerned, to help them through; we will wish the Jews a most hearty welcome home.... The Jewish movement is national and not imperialist; our movement is national and not imperialist; there is room in Syria for us both."
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