Year 1942

__________ 

“Is the kind of America I know worth defending?” 

James G. Thompson

__________

 

MORE THAN 40,000 men are classified as conscientious objectors during World War II. Most accept noncombatant duty in the armed forces. Approximately 12,000 are assigned to Civilian Public Service camps. “The remaining 6,000, most of whom were Jehovah’s Witnesses, went to prison.” (1127-103)

 

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Elizabeth “Betty” Catlett, the first African American woman to ever earn an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa, moves to New York City. There, in the quiet heroism of the people around her, she finds inspiration for her sculpting and painting.

Some of Catlett's work.

 

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The “Texas Tornado” takes the crown. 

September 12: Jo-Carroll Dennison wins the Miss America contest, including a win in the “talent contest,” where she gave a spirited rendition of “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” while dressed in a cowgirl outfit. 

The press labeled the 18-year-old the “Texas tornado.” 

Miss Dennison also won the swimsuit contest, but in some ways came to regret her victory. The New York Times explains. She was happy to entertain the troops, to sing and dance as she had been doing in shows since she was a child, but, she didn’t like being a sex symbol. 

In addition to entertaining the troops, her reign as Miss America called for her to appear in her swimsuit. She felt this would be demeaning, she wrote, especially in some of the low-rent venues where she was sent; she refused to do it and even cut her tour short, though this received little public notice. …

 

While Ms. Dennison loved certain aspects of being Miss America, she also felt the title gave people the impression that she was an empty-headed sex object. At parties, she wrote, it “was more a stigma than an accolade.” She still smarted years later when she recalled Groucho Marx telling her, “You’re almost articulate — for a bathing beauty.”

 

When she had toured military bases as Miss America, she raised morale but knew that the soldiers were cheering her as a symbol, not for anything she had done. “But when working directly with hospice [which she did when she was older],” she wrote, “I felt that I was fulfilling that purpose and using the Miss America title in a far better way.”

 

Later, Dennison talked about being sexually assaulted when she was 12, and the pain she felt at age seven, when her father left her and her mother. 

Dennison is at right on stage.

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Spring: Joe DiMaggio is coming off a season in 1941 where he hit .357, had a hitting streak of 56 consecutive games, drilled 30 home runs, and drove in 125 runs. Ed Barrow, the Yankees general manager offers him a salary of $35,000 for 1942, a cut of $2,500. “There’s a war going on,” he explains. 

In those days, players were not unionized, and owners had the whip hand. Even some former players were not sympathetic to complaints. 

Paul Waner explained around this time, “Guilds have no place in baseball. I was in the big leagues for 20 years and never once figured I was being underpaid or mistreated. Baseball is very generous and has kept quite a number of fellows from pushing plows for a living.” (The Ol’ Ball Game, p. 106)

 

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Dr. Robert N. Hall was working in a G.E. Lab in 1942, developing a magnetron to jam enemy radar. One day an engineer at Raytheon noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted near the magnetron. Raytheon then used this “discovery” to develop the microwave oven. (NYT obituary, 5/10/18) 

Hall first became interested in science after his uncle, Sydney Hall, an early aircraft-engine designer, took him to a science fair. Dr. Hall would later talk about his love for science: “You see there is a problem to be solved and you think about it, and you solve it, and it’s a thrill.” 

In 1962 he built the first solid-state laser; it also allows fiber optics to carry data; he spent his entire career with G. E.

 

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“Moldy Mary” aids in the hunt for penicillin. 

Two scientists, Howard Florey and Norman Heatley, fly from England to the U.S. to discuss ways to boost production of penicillin. 

In America, the team was quickly set up with a lab at the Department of Agriculture’s Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, Ill. The project quickly gained the support of U.S. military officials, who were eager to find a drug that would protect the troops from deadly infections — and of several American drug companies, including Merck and Pfizer. 

It might seem strange that Florey and Heatley were set up in an agricultural lab when they were working on a medical drug. But Peoria turned out to be the perfect spot for them. The agricultural scientists had extensive experience with molds and other soil-based organisms. And the heartland location had one meaningful advantage: its proximity to corn. The mold turned out to thrive in vats of corn steep liquor, which was a waste product created by making cornstarch.

 

While the scientists experimented with creating larger yields in the corn steep liquors, they also suspected that there might be other strains of penicillin out in the wild that would be more amenable to rapid growth. At the same time, U.S. soldiers and sailors collected soil samples around the globe — Eastern Europe, North Africa, South America — to be shipped back to the American labs for investigation. An earlier soil search in the United States had brought back an organism that would become the basis for streptomycin, now one of the most widely used antibiotics in the world. In the years immediately after the end of the war, Pfizer and other drug companies would go on to conduct major exploratory missions seeking out soil samples everywhere, from the bottoms of mine shafts to wind-borne samples gathered with the aid of balloons. In the end Pfizer collected a staggering 135,000 distinct samples.

 

The search for promising molds took place closer to home as well. During the summer months of 1942, shoppers in Peoria grocery stores began to notice a strange presence in the fresh produce aisles, a young woman intently examining the fruit on display, picking out and purchasing the ones with visible rot. Her name was Mary Hunt, and she was a bacteriologist from the Peoria lab, assigned the task of locating promising molds that might replace the existing strains that were being used. (Her unusual shopping habits ultimately gave her the nickname Moldy Mary.) One of Hunt’s molds — growing in a particularly unappetizing cantaloupe — turned out to be far more productive than the original strains that Florey and Chain’s team had tested. Nearly every strain of penicillin in use today descends from the colony Hunt found in that cantaloupe.

 

Aided by the advanced production techniques of the drug companies, the United States was soon producing a stable penicillin in quantities sufficient to be distributed to military hospitals around the world. …

 

Penicillin, alongside the other antibiotics developed soon after the war ended, triggered a revolution in human health. Mass killers like tuberculosis were almost entirely eliminated. People stopped getting severe infections from simple cuts and scrapes, like the rose-thorn scratch that killed Albert Alexander [the first English patient to get treatment with penicillin, till doctors ran out]. The magical power of antibiotics to ward off infection also opened the door to new treatments. Radical surgical procedures like organ transplants became mainstream.

  

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“The beginnings of gender equality.” 

May 29: “Rosie the Riveter” (NYT; 4/25/15): Mary Keefe modeled for Norman Rockwell in 1942; she was 19, weighed 110; had never handled a rivet gun, was a Vermont telephone operator and red-headed. “Her picture,” greatly altered, appeared on the Memorial Day cover of the Saturday Evening Post. 

Penny Coleman, author of a book about women working in WWII, says the picture is “iconic because it portrays a rarity – an image of a powerful woman with a don’t-mess-with-me attitude.” Chris Coleman, a museum curator says the work “is emblematic of a sea change in American culture.” “Importantly, the artist’s depiction celebrates, even helps to invent, due to mass distribution as a War Bond poster and a magazine cover, the beginnings of gender equality.” 

Rockwell added lipstick, rouge, and polished nails to emphasize the femininity of the worker aiding the war effort. 

He did 300 + covers for Post. A story about Rosaline P. Walter, a 19-year-old high school graduate who had gone to work for an aircraft factory sparked the idea. First came a song: 

All the day long, whether rain

Or shine

She’s a part of the assembly line

She’s making history, working

For victory

Rosie [sound of rat-a-tat-tat]

The riveter.

 

Rockwell picked it up there, paying Keefe $5 each for two sessions, $5 then is equal to about $144 today. In the finished work her right shoe is placed on a copy of Mein Kampf. She’s holding a ham sandwich and her lunchbox has her name. Rockwell felt bad because Mary took kidding about her “size” when he bulked her up. 

He said, “I really thought you were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”

 

* 

June 23: A Japanese submarine surfaces at night and fires 21 shells at Fort Lewis, a U.S. military base. 

Little damage is done and this marks the only time a military target is hit on the mainland in four years of war.

 

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“I had to fight like hell for the right to fight for my country.” 

Japanese Americans in WWII: (NYT book review, 4-26-15): Theodore Seuss Geisel did a cartoon showing Japanese lined up all along the West Coast, getting packs of dynamite. The caption: “Waiting for the signal from home.” 

Eleanor Roosevelt warned people not to be hasty in locking everyone up. 

Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy: “If it is a question of the safety of the country and the Constitution…why, the Constitution is just a scrap of paper to me.” 

General John DeWitt: “A Jap is a Jap…You can’t tell one Jap from another.” 

Governor Chase Clark of Idaho: “The Japs live like rats, breed like rats and act like rats.” 

Young opera star, Fumiko Yaba, packed a bathing suit when she heard she was heading for Tule Lake. 

Ben Kuroki was born in Nebraska and grew up in Hershey, Nebraska. He had trouble getting accepted in the U.S. Army. “I had to fight like hell for the right to fight for my country,” he said long after the war. Fight like hell he did. His local draft board gave him the chance – and he enlisted with brother Fred. Ben was soon flying in the U.S. Army Air Force. 

“When you live with men under combat conditions for fifteen months, you begin to understand what brotherhood is all about, what equality and tolerance really mean.” 

His nickname, given by a fellow crew member, was: “Most Honorable Son.” He flew the required 25 missions in Europe, volunteered for five more, and then flew 28 over Japan. “I have the face of a Japanese but my heart is American,” he said when given approval to fly missions over Japan. Near the end of the war, a drunken serviceman stabbed Kuroki in the head. 

Bill Mauldin said of him: “It is the story of a little guy who went through the war, made his buddies proud to wear the same uniform he did and will make you proud to be his countryman.” (Intro to a 1946 book about his life; NYT obit; 9/6/15).

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I tried to teach my students ever year that using dehumanizing language (like referring to Japanese Americans as “rats,” above), was the easiest path to cruelty aimed at others. I taught seventh graders, and we had great discussions on this topic ever year. See my post: “Two ‘N’ Words and a ‘D’ Word.”

 

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Time magazine did a brief article on George Takei, who spent part of his childhood in an internment camp. “Gaman,” Time wrote, is a word often heard in the movie about his life, To Be Takei. He translates it, the critic notes, as “to endure with dignity or fortitude.” 

Gaman got his family through time spent in internment camps for Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, to which Takei, born in Los Angeles, was sent at age 5. He was nearly 9 when the Takeis were released, only to endure life on L.A.’s Skid Row. When he became an actor, his fortitude still proved valuable as he was relegated to stereotypical Asian roles.

 

In 2005, after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s veto of California’s gay-marriage bill, Takei revealed that he and his longtime manager, Brad Altman, had been partners for nearly twenty years.  

They married in 2008.

 

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Young Japanese Americans in a camp.

 

A story in The New York Times (12/2/15), “Diary Paints Life as an Internee,” has interesting details about life in the internment camps. Yonekazu Satoda did his writing in the laundry building, the only private place he could find inside the camp. 

Satoda was 22 when he and his family were forced to leave their home in San Francisco and head for a relocation camp in Arkansas. “Today was supposed to be my graduation at Cal,” he wrote on May 13, 1942. “Got hell from Mom for fooling around with women,” he noted on May 19. “Hot as hell,” he said on May 20. His diary is now part of an exhibit, “Out of the Desert: Resilience and Memory in Japanese American Internment,” now being shown at Yale. 

In 1945 he was released from the camp and promptly drafted into the U.S. Army and hadn’t seen his diary, or thought about it since. 

Journalists often called the prisoners “evacuees.” George Takei was also imprisoned at Rohwer, not far from Jerome, Arkansas. Satoda was born and raised in California and kept his diary under a pillow so his mother wouldn’t see it. He worked making furniture in the camp and also did some teaching. 

Satoda spent two years in Japan after the war, serving as an intelligence officer, and twenty years in the army, retiring as a major in the Army Reserve. 

His wife Daisy had been interned at Topaz, she being one of ten siblings. “I look back at the injustice, but when you’re young, you’re not saddled with those responsibilities. It was my parents’ burden,” she says. 

He adds: “You know how you go on vacation and have a flat tire? Fifty years later, you don’t remember the flat tire.” He remembers the bonds of friendship he made during those years.

 

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“Treated worse in Southern towns than German prisoners of war.” 

“A Most Dangerous Newspaper” (NYT book review; 1/10/16): Black recruits were turned away in some localities because there weren’t enough segregated units to take them, or confined to units that built roads, loaded ships and dug latrines. 

Men who were eager to prove themselves in battle grew demoralized marking time on bases that gave them ramshackle housing and confined them to Jim Crow buses and even ‘colored only’ sections of movie theaters. The Pentagon made matters worse (if such a thing were possible) by intentionally placing black soldiers under the command of white Southern officers – on the premise that Southerners better “understood” black people.

 

As Brent Staples notes in his book review:  

The Negro press warned black men against Navy recruiters who would promise them training as radiomen, technicians or mechanics – then put them to work serving food to white men. It made its readers understand that black men and women in uniform were treated worse in Southern towns than German prisoners of war and sometimes went hungry on troop trains because segregationists declined to feed them.

 

The Pittsburgh Courier came up with the Double V campaign, victory over fascism abroad, victory over racism at home. 

That campaign, by the way, was sparked by a letter a young African American wrote to the paper. James G. Thompson, 26, from Wichita, Kansas, wondered: 

Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending?”

 

Other black-oriented newspapers questioned the conduct of the U.S. government during the war. Military units were still segregated; and Jim Crow laws, and more subtle racism in the North, made life difficult for all African Americans – at a time we claimed to be fighting evil around the world. Attorney General Francis Biddle called the publisher of the Chicago Defender to his office in 1942. Biddle told John H. Sengstacke that the black newspapers were flirting with sedition. He would “shut them all up,” if necessary. 

Sengstacke responded: “You have the power to close us down. So if you want to close us, go ahead and attempt it.”

 

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Heinz, a refugee from Germany, is drafted by the U.S. Army. Better known as “Henry,” young Henry Kissinger will soon be sent to Europe, where his knowledge of German will often pay off.

 

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November 13: A Japanese submarine torpedoes and sinks the USS Juneau, in fighting off Guadalcanal. 

Five brothers, the Sullivans, serving onboard are lost: George, Francis, Joseph, Madison, and Albert. This marks the greatest loss of life by any American family during World War II.

 

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November 28: A fire breaks out at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Boston. Patrons panic and rush for the exits, many of which are locked. The New York Times reported that “the chief loss of life resulted from the screaming, clawing crowds that were wedged in the entrances of the club.” 

By the time firefighters extinguished the blaze 492 people were dead.

 

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A radio operator and gunner on the B-17 nicknamed “Umbragio,” after a Jimmy Durante catch phrase, watches bombs rain down on a German city. “Screw ’em,” he thinks. Then he has second thoughts. “I remember thinking, imagining a table of family, of Germans, sitting around the table as the bombs dropped.” 

That man is Norman Lear, a Jew himself, later a famous TV producer, who, one writer explains, will later fight “for his country in his sitcoms,” showing the same kind of empathy for complex characters he felt that day over Germany. (The most famous: “All in the Family,” will lead TV ratings for much of the 70s.)