December 1941 (46 page)

Newspaper articles of the era routinely identified the race of African Americans as either “colored” or “negro” in reporting exploits both good and bad. Whites were never identified as white, and the papers almost never covered Hispanics. It wasn't just the newspapers that were segregated. So too was Washington, essentially a Jim Crow town. “Blacks looked out on city that was rigidly and thoroughly segregated. Throughout the city,
[the]
hotels, restaurants, movie theaters, libraries and taxicabs refused to serve blacks.”
⁷⁸

The war and the military had swiftly become a deeply and tightly woven stitch in the American cultural fabric. There was virtually no place anyone could turn now and not be reminded of the war; even children, even on Santa's lap. In Atlanta, a department-store Santa Claus was entertaining kids, listening to their Christmas wishes, playing his role to perfection, when his mood suddenly changed, becoming somber and stoic. Stepping out of character, he began to read to the children a letter from one of his three sons, all of whom were in uniform.

“Dearest Dad,

There is a war on and I am now in it, but that must not be a cause for you to worry. Of course, there is danger and there will be more danger to come but if I am to die a soldier's death, so be it. . . . You must think of me as doing my duty to God and country. Be brave and show outward pride, that the mite of humanity you helped bring into the world is now a soldier doing his part of defending our great and wonderful country. . . . You must pray, not only for me and others in the Army, but for the innocent women and children who will have to endure untold suffering from this fight for freedom of religion, speech and democracy. I am not afraid to die for this. . . .

Until then I remain and always,
Your Loving Son.”
⁷⁹

The letter was not unique. Hundreds of thousands of mailboxes were filled each day with letters to and from G.I.'s, and within a matter of months, millions of mailboxes would be filled with long missives from sons and daughters in uniform in the far-flung regions of the globe. Uniformly, the letters were tender, funny, inquisitive, brave, confident, patriotic, self-deprecating, and well-written.

Public education in America in 1941 was the best in the world, and dedicated teachers led by rote, by repetition, and by discipline mixed with a healthy dose of tenderness and the knowledge that the hand that rocked the cradle truly ruled the world. A high-school diploma was a hard-earned document and those young Americans who received a diploma had language skills, writing skills, citizenship skills, geology, biology, physics, Latin, Greek, and an expansive list of books read. According to 1940 census only 24.5 percent of young Americans received a high-school diploma in 1941,
⁸⁰
and less than 5 percent completed four years of college.
⁸¹
All in all, well-educated, even erudite and mannerly, young men and women came out of high school, ready to go out into the real world and contribute to society.

America in 1941 was a do-it-yourself enterprise, despite the welfare state created by the New Deal. People still looked to themselves to solve their own problems. Many schools still used the McGuffey Readers, which had worked so well for their parents and grandparents, to help young students expand their vocabularies. The “Palmer Method” of cursive writing was taught, over and over and over, and penmanship across the culture was generally excellent. Men and women took pride in their cursive script and their ability to write numerous letters each day. Because the rule was, if you got a letter, you had to send a letter. At three cents for a first-class stamp, letters were frankly practical as well. Long-distance phone calls were hugely expensive, car travel was for sensible reasons such as going to work, and flying on planes was for businessmen and G.I.'s, but not for the average citizen's pleasure. Taking a train or a bus trip was a big deal, and people dressed accordingly.

Letters were the standard form of personal communication for private citizens and government officials alike. The worst to receive, of course, was the telegram from Uncle Sam. “We regret to inform you that your son. . . .”

CHAPTER 13
THE THIRTEENTH OF DECEMBER

Saboteurs Light Flares in Blackout at Manila; Sentries ‘Shoot to Kill'

Atlanta Constitution

4000 Japs Drown

Boston Evening Globe

Weather Bureau Halts Forecasts

Los Angeles Times

House Gets Bill to Register All Men 18 to 64

New York Times

A
mid all the bad news in America emerged a small bit of comic relief. In San Francisco, the Japanese proprietors of dry cleaning establishments were apprehended, and all of their assets, financial and otherwise, were confiscated or frozen by government officials—including the clothing of their customers, who, predictably, got hot under the collar. “The United States attorney's office, besieged with irate demands for a ruling, said Washington would probably issue an order allowing persons to submit affidavits declaring that their pants—and coats and vests—were not Japanese assets.”
¹

Clothing and closets were on the mind of other government pen pushers, especially the nosy officials of the Census Bureau. Originally mandated by the Constitution to count the population once every ten years as a means of apportioning congressional representation, bureaucrats had expanded the mission over the years into something considerably more intrusive: to gain demographic data on the American people. Incredibly, government poll takers in the 1940 census asked American men and women how many individual articles of clothing they owned and how many they purchased each year. “Census Bureau officials declare they have found the explanation for cluttered clothing closets in the American home; people just buy more than they need.” Apparently the government thought that women who annually purchased: “Four dresses; 16 pairs of stockings; 4 pairs of shoes; 2 hats; one pair of gloves; 1 blouse; 1 apron or smock; 7 lingerie items; 1 sleeping garment” were buying too much.
²
The breakdown of men's clothing purchases was just as conservative as the women's, but they too got a lecture from meddlesome Census officials.

Americans accepted constitutional provisions to create armies and navies in order to protect them, their freedoms, and their livelihoods, but it was open to question how much Americans needed or wanted the government's sartorial advice or input on the condition of private closets. To civil libertarians, it was more worrisome than laughable.

Some of the wartime black humor coming from government was just in bad taste. A prankster at the Tennessee Department of Conservation asked for a requisition for 6,000,000 licenses at $2 apiece for hunting “Japs.” The response from another bureaucrat was in equally bad taste: “Open season on ‘Japs'—no license required.”
³
Political correctness was still decades away.

Other government agencies reacted petulantly as well. The Maritime Commission changed the name of a large packet ship from the
Japan Mail
to the more palatable
China Mail
.
⁴
The merchant marines also “weeded out” Japanese, German, and Italian nationals from service, even taking those already on ships, off.
⁵
Of more immediate importance, the Attorney General's office made a new announcement that over 2,500 aliens had been arrested, not including those in the Canal Zone or the Philippines.
⁶
In the Canal Zone, dozens of Japanese civilians had been arrested, taken from their homes and placed in “quarantine stations, a tent city mushroomed to accommodate the aliens and alleged Axis sympathizers as roundups began.”
⁷

Also, forty-three Americans in Hawaii were “placed in custody,” suspected of subversive activities against their country.
⁸

American allies in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Mexico also began the roundup of Nazi diplomats and those alleged to be supporters of the Axis Powers, including Japanese fishermen on the west coast of Mexico who were “suspected of ‘espionage.'” President Batista of Cuba seized all Axis possessions and was holding all Axis personnel on the Isle of Palms, some forty miles south of Cuba.
⁹

In the “funny, dumb, and dangerous” category was the story of a housewife in Detroit. Mrs. Donald de Rusha had been walking along the shore of Lake St. Clair when she happened upon a “gadget.” While she did not know what it was, she thought the fifty-pound object would make a nice doorstop. The object was an undetonated piece of military ordinance.
¹⁰
Luckily, her error was pointed out in time, and no one was hurt.

Even as war and enemies—real or imagined—dominated the thoughts of the citizenry, they still enjoyed distractions to take their minds off the crisis. A long running “soap opera” was the ongoing private/public tale of poor little rich girl, Gloria Vanderbilt, thin, pretty, inheritress, and hugely controversial as the granddaughter of a robber baron and the daughter of two supremely narcissistic and unbalanced parents.

Gloria herself was a bad news buffet. At only seventeen years of age, she was in the newspapers constantly, photographed in skimpy cocktail dresses at nightclubs in New York and Los Angeles. On the twelfth, it was announced that she was going to marry a man fifteen years her elder, Pasquale Di Cicco, who had already been married, divorced, and, as a Hollywood agent, romantically linked to a number of other women—none of whom stood to inherit another $4 million when they turned twenty-one, however.
¹¹

Poor Gloria's life had already been a mess-and-a-half. Her mother had been declared unfit when Gloria was a child, and the court remanded her to an aunt. Gloria's life up to that point had been a movable feast of wine, men, and scandal. Americans, by and large, followed her car wreck of a life with salacious and prurient
schadenfreude
. It was all outrageous stuff in 1941, a time when society regarded the low brow hijinks of high society with an almost Victorian sense of propriety.

In the
Atlanta Constitution
, as in many other newspapers around the country, there were listed the “Downtown Theatres,” “Night Spots,” “Neighborhood Theatres,” and “Colored Theatres.” The movies shown at the theatres for black Americans were generally low budget, little known, or had already been shown first in the “whites only” movie houses. These included
Wyoming Wildcat
,
Buck Benny Rides Again
(starring Jack Benny and his manservant, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson),
Beat Me Daddy
, which was the name of an Andrews Sisters song, and
White Eagle
, of cowboys-and-Indians genre. In the heart of Dixie—Atlanta—one of the most popular black movie houses was named the “Lincoln.”
¹²

Besides celebrity scandals and movies, another pastime available to Americans, and indeed the world, was the Geminids meteor shower which appears every December and promised to be especially brilliant this time around. Some theologians thought this meteor shower was what led three kings to a small manager one thousand nine hundred and forty-one years earlier.

Newsreels detailing the December 7 attacks were beginning to hit America's movie houses. “War took the play in all newsreels on programs opening yesterday at movie theatres.”
¹³
No actual footage of Pearl Harbor was shown for obvious reasons, and most of the news shorts dealt with the history of the relationship between the United States and the Japan. The “March of Time” newsreel was judged to be among the better of those shown, but Fox also produced some that were informative. However, in each case, only the shots of civilians in action in Honolulu were shown, almost nothing about the navy or the Air Corps.

Of course, none of the newsreels reported on the
Arizona
. It was nearly a week after the attack when the name of the ship finally appeared in the newspapers, though it was a wire story of a London report of a Japanese propaganda claim. American editors ran the item, but some ran it with headlines that doubted its veracity. “Reuters today quoted a Japanese naval communiqué broadcast from Tokyo as saying that the 32,000-ton United States battleship
Arizona
had been sunk in action in Hawaii. The
Arizona
was launched in 1915, and its normal complement is about 1,359 men.”
¹⁴

But the story, fourth-hand, was generally treated as an unfounded rumor except by the
Boston Globe
, the
LA Times
and the
New York Times
, all of which gave the Japanese claim a bit more veracity. As the
Birmingham News
noted, “It has been an Axis technique to make spectacular war claims, especially naval, in hopes of learning the true results of attacks from its adversaries' denials.”
¹⁵

The Japanese also claimed they had hit Honolulu again at the same time that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox was conducting his investigation. But this was, like so much other radio traffic, chalked up to propaganda. Still another rumor was going around Washington that “as long ago as November 15 Government officials had received confidential and reliable information from Tokyo pointing out that Japan had definitely decided to wage war on the United States, even before it sent Saburo Kurusu with a badly camouflaged peace dove to Washington.” But this conspiracy theory had it that Japan's Black Dragon Society was behind the attack on America.
¹⁶
The attack had been planned for months, but the Japanese fleet did not leave the home waters until November 26.