December 1941 (6 page)

The NFL title game was set for December 21, between the New York Giants and either the Green Bay Packers or the Chicago Bears, who still had one game left to play and were tied for the Western division championship. Depending on the winner, the game would be held either in Green Bay or the Windy City because of their superior records.
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The American Professional Football League was considering expanding in order to compete with the National Football League. Washington could have used a new franchise after a dismal loss, which marked their worst record since 1935. They were scheduled to get a second pro team, which many thought the city needed given the sad sack Redskins, often derided as the “Deadskins”.
¹⁹

In Manhattan, Tommy Manville, age forty-seven, a scion of the twenties era of “Wonderful Nonsense,” professional inheritor, and reminder of why so many hated the rich, took a wife—his fifth—Bonita Francine Edwards, twenty-two, heiress to a Chicago lumber fortune. Meeting only four days before their betrothal, Manville said, “[L]ong engagements may be out of style,” and Edwards confessed, “I'm not in love with Tommy—I'm just infatuated. I hope to fall in love with him after a while.”
²⁰
F. Scott Fitzgerald was right about the rich, and Manhattan was still ruled by the Vanderbilts, Warburgs, and Astors, for whom the rules seldom applied because the rich were different—or at least always assumed as much about themselves.

On the other side of the rules spectrum, the first inductee under the new Selective Service act, buck private John Edward Lawton, said after a year as a dogface, “Army life is alright . . . but I don't think I'm exactly cut out for it.”
²¹
Senator Henry Cabot Lodge told Republicans in Massachusetts that the United States needed a standing army of no less than 750,000 men, but if the country went to war, it might need on the order of 5 million men in uniform.
²²

At Jordan Marsh, a high-end department store in Boston, women's shoes were going for $7.50.
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Customers looking for something a bit more affordable could turn to R.H. White's “bargain basement” where they could be purchased for $1.95.
²⁴
Stockings at Jordan Marsh went for $1.15 a pair—the “philmy” kind—but “conditions may soon mean that silk top-to-toe stockings will be a luxury-memory.”
²⁵
“Health girdles” were squeezing American women for $7.00 apiece at Conrad's store in Boston.
²⁶
In Washington, another expensive department store, Woodward & Lothrop, was touting men's dinner jackets for $75 for the “holiday season.”
²⁷

The Office of Price Administration called on consumers to limit the wrapping on Christmas packaging. The call was issued by Lessing J. Rosenwald, director of the OPM's Industrial Conservation Bureau.
²⁸

But in her press conference, Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that Americans not be “too practical” in their gift buying. Gifts, she said, “should include those traditionally dispensed by Santa Claus.” Mrs. Roosevelt revealed that the White House Christmas tree in the East Room would be “all white . . . and the White House will be decked out in holly, mistletoe and poinsettias. There'll be presents for the White House staff. . . . Just as on eight other Christmas Eves, the President and Mrs. Roosevelt will hang up their stockings at the big mantle in the chief executive's bedroom. There will be a sock, too, for Fala, just as there was last year when the President's Scottie got his first rubber bone.” She told the reporters all of her shopping was nearly done.
²⁹

A delegation of Washington State Indians went to Washington to complain about government regulations that prevented them from purchasing liquor. A headline in the
Washington Post
read, “Indians Here to Demand Fire Water.”
³⁰

William Henry Murray, a philosopher of sorts known as “Wild Bill,” advised city folk to burn their paper money, “move to the country, can fruit and vegetables, and bury them in the ground to ‘have something to eat when the trouble comes.'”
³¹

Meanwhile, actress Tallulah Bankhead was hospitalized with the flu in Philadelphia, but it was reported that she was “much better after a day in an oxygen tent.” Actor John Barrymore was also hospitalized, reportedly for an intestinal flu.
³²
Though not reported, it was known they both drank deeply from the wrong bottle and often, although Bankhead's tastes sometimes ran more to cocaine and other drugs. She once quipped about cocaine not being habit forming—“I ought to know, I've been using it for years.”
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Her father, William Brockman Bankhead, had been Speaker of the U.S. House from 1936 to 1940 until his untimely death, and she was frequently in Washington, partying from Anacostia to Bethesda, shocking women and delighting men.

In California, the first of the paper drives was announced, as there was a shortage of wood pulp in the country according to the government. The Boy Scouts and the Salvation Army joined forces to collect old paper.

Federal taxes were scheduled to rise in 1942, but so too were many state and local taxes. For some in the higher brackets, they would only get one seventh of any raise while the Federal government would take the other six-sevenths.
³⁴

FDR officially signed legislation repealing portions of the Neutrality Act while also calling for the passage of legislation that curtailed strikes by unions in war-related industries.
³⁵
But almost anything could fall under that designation, from agriculture to steel to newspapers. Yet another strike was threatened, this one by railroad workers. A deadline by the railroad union was set for December 7.

Meanwhile, a Japanese “expert” on America offered his assessment to his government on why America would be no competition for them in a war. “The national debt, a ‘spoiled child' mentality, low national morale at the first defeat [Robert] Taft, [Gerald] Nye and [Charles] Lindberg will lead a revolt, Roosevelt is a ‘buffoon,' hesitancy, Americans excite easily and cool easily, disunity—with 20,000,000 Negroes, 10,000,000 unemployed, 5,000,000 trade unionists, inflation.”
³⁶
Taft, Nye, and Lindberg were all leaders in the isolationist movement.

Many headlines referred to “Japs” or “Nips” (for “Nipponese”), and virtually every political cartoon of the era depicted the Japanese in the worst possible racial stereotype: short, squinty eyes, large glasses, buck teeth, in a menacing military uniform.

America and Great Britain considered and finally—after much haggling over fishing rights, fish oil, and wheat—aided Iceland under Lend-Lease, and troops from both countries were sent there, “all with a healthy taste for blondes.” Iceland was the oldest democracy in the world, with a Parliament dating over one thousand years, the
Althing
. Despite rampant inflation, the Icelandic government “rejected price control-plans as smacking of State Socialism.”
³⁷

While not the case in Iceland, America's and England's economies were heavily regulated and rationed. A black market thrived in the midst of the rationing, and in Britain a person could get everything from eggs, perfume, and lipstick to fruits, silk stockings, and clothes. Politicians' wives seemed to have no difficulty purchasing consumer items, including fur coats. Silk stockings were highly prized. Oranges—supposedly only for children—were consumed by all. With paper in short supply, the government ordered a “no-wrapping” rule, but this simply made it easier for thieves to identify what they wanted to steal. Shoplifting was rampant. False identity cards were sold by the thousands, allowing British subjects to register at multiple stores in order to purchase double or triple their allowed quotas of milk and other food stuffs.
³⁸
The British experiment at managing the economy was an incomplete success.

Still, the Brits were facing the war, depravations, and bombings with a very proper stiff upper lip. The Royal Air Force had considered the stress young pilots must being going through before, during the Battle of Britain and after, and set up psychiatric hospitals and counseling centers for the flyers, but no one partook. The facilities stood idle and were eventually converted to other uses. Understandably, one British pilot who crashed six times “went berserk.”
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A British psychiatrist said that the lower classes handled stress better than the upper classes, as did children even more so than before the war and those who did exhibit psychiatric problems were from broken homes and were not suffering as a result of the bombings. They even took to playing “air-raid games.” Women too showed less signs of neuroses than before the war, it was felt, because the war gave them a new set of priorities and “pivotal values.” “In London department stores, during heavy bombardment, the absence rate was lower than before.”
⁴⁰

The American economy—especially outside of the industrial effort to support Great Britain and Russia—continued to suffer, and government agencies were created to help the small businessman. A premium was placed on advertising, as with the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, which offered “sterilized glasses in your bathroom” and the loan of “pajamas . . . a typewriter,” or a “non allergic pillow!” The ads were specifically targeted to businessmen traveling for the war effort, and a single room went for $3.85 per night and $5.50 per night for two. “The lobby, public rooms and restaurants are gay with new decorations.” Glenn Miller was performing in the hotel's club room.
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The economy of the South was showing improvement as demand for cotton for military uniforms had jacked up the cost sky high. The price had reached a twelve-year peak, and farm income across the South was up substantially since the advent of Lend-Lease in early 1941.

On Capitol Hill, the House passed legislation regulating the importation of sugar from outside the country, while favoring and expanding quotas for domestic cane and beet sugar growers. The State Department opposed the action, seeing it as antagonistic toward potential war allies, but the Department of Agriculture supported it, seeing it as favoring domestic allies.
⁴²

For some there was no Great Depression. The Andrews Sisters—LaVerne, Patty, and Maxine—sold their eight-millionth record, for which Decca Records paid them the princessly sum of 2 cents per. They were harmoniously making on average $5,000 per week, before taxes.
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For American amateur and professional painters, it was another scene. Because so many of their canvases and brushes were imported from Ireland, Belgium, and Russia (there, brushes were made from Russian squirrels) they faced a shortage, and because so many of their paints contained precious metals such as zinc and cadmium—rare earth metals possibly needed for the war effort—they faced a possible confiscation of the metals by the government. “Manhattan's American Artists' Professional League recently petitioned Washington for cooperation in keeping artists supplied with their annual ration of paint (about a gallon apiece.)”
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America's parents and educators worried about the low reading proficiency of pupils. There were “16,000,000 illiterates in the United States—they cannot read beyond the fourth grade reading level.” Of all places, Harvard found that incoming freshmen had low reading acumen, and the school was forced to “start a course in reading fundamentals.” Professor Reed Smith, sixty, of the University of South Carolina thought he knew the problem. “The old principle . . . that you can't sharpen an ax on a velvet grindstone has given place to the view that if the pupils don't like it, they shouldn't be required to do it . . . the underlying assumption seems to be . . . that students will write clearly and correctly by some sort of blessed intuition if only the teacher does not depress them with such inconvenient and unprofitable matters as spelling, paragraphing, punctuation, sentence structure, grammar and the choice and order of words.”
⁴⁵

On American campuses, there was growing agitation for war with Germany. At the University of Chicago, Professor Bernadette Schmitt said that “western civilization would not be safe until the German people were crushed on their own soil.” She made her comments at the twenty-first annual meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies, gathering in Indianapolis.
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FDR had passed through Atlanta on his way to Warm Springs, but did not get off the train, though he did have his window open so he could be seen. On the way back to Washington, the curtains to his private car were closed. Had he stayed there, he might have tuned in to WGST to hear
Aunt Hattie
or
Man I Married
. The station was turned on at 6:00 a.m. and turned off at midnight. On 750AM, WSB, he might have heard the
Dixie Farm Hour
, or later, the soap opera
Guiding Light
, or later still,
Fred Waring
, a popular band leader. Like WGST, the station WSB also came on at 6:00 a.m. and “signed off” at midnight.
⁴⁷

One region where the economy—at least for the “nobility” there—was doing well was Hollywood. It was raking in millions each week, mostly for the top four studios: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century Fox, and Warner Bros. Fifty-four actors made over $100,000 per year, but 50 percent of all the actors there had never made more than $10,500 per year. Indeed, the average annual income for over seven thousand extras “was $350.00.”