V Was for Victory.... (12)

 Politics and American Culture During WWII (12). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“…those who interpreted all government planning as socialism or worse.” p. 222.

On Thomas E. Dewey: “The boy orator of the platitude.” “Intellectual halitosis.” p. 278.

“The familiar Republican charges, Dewey’s charges, that the administration relied on one-man government, that it was old and tired, had a new impact in 1944, for the President looked and often acted just that way.” p. 295.

“Victory had come at last, victory over Germany, victory over Japan, and victory, too, achieved much earlier, over the Great Depression.” p. 301.

“…lacking both eloquence and elegance, Truman simply did not fit the picture of a president that Roosevelt had engraved so deeply on the consciousness of Americans.” p. 303.

“American forces had returned about 12,807,000 veterans of WWII to civil life.” p. 333.

To be concluded.

V Was for Victory.... (11)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (11). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“…incarcerate thousands of guiltless Japanese-Americans in internment camps that the Army preferred to call ‘relocation centers’…the most blatant mass violation of civil liberties in American history.” p. 155.

“Though neither aliens nor enemies, American blacks during World War II suffered, as ever, from white hostility and oppression.” p. 182.

Lloyd Brown, an American black soldier on his experience in Salina, Kansas: “The people of Salina would serve these enemy soldiers [POWs] and turn away black American GIs….” p. 191.

Pauli Murray: “What’d you get, black boy/  When they knocked you down in the gutter,/ And they kicked your teeth out,/ And they broke your skull with clubs,/ And they bashed your stomach in? / …What’s the Top Man say, black boy? / Mr. Roosevelt regrets….” p. 207.

To be continued.

V Was for Victory.... (10)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (10). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“John Hersey on General Marvin modeled on Patton in Bell for Adano: ‘But…General Marvin showed himself during the invasion to be a bad man, something worse than what our troops were trying to throw out.’ ” p. 87.

“Bell [for Adano], Hersey wrote, ‘was the first novel or book of any kind, during the Second World War, to suggest that the American hero…might be a dangerous shit.’ ”

“…it was a lovely war after all, with the fighting remote and prosperity returned.” p. 116.

“The accomplishments of American industry during the war restored much of the prestige that businessmen had lost after 1929.” p. 117.

“ ‘Roberto,’ an acrostic consisting sequential of the first letters of Rome, Berlin and Tokyo, the capital cities of the Axis powers.” p. 147.

To be continued:

V Was for Victory.... (9)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (9). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“Official Russian communiqués regularly devoted half their space to the details of individual exploits.” p. 72.

“I think a Jew is a Jew…because he suffers.”

“…the armed services in the protest novels of the war gave to the cruel and the incompetent power over the lives of the helpless and the sensitive.” p. 83.

Norman Mailer on the war: “Individuality was just a hindrance.” p. 84.

Randall Jarrell: “In bombers named for girls, we burned/ The cities we had learned in school--? Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among/ The people we had killed and never seen.” p. 85.

To be continued.

V Was for Victory.... (8)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (8). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“The President, deliberately avoiding talk about grand post-war plans, concentrated on victory first and almost exclusively.” p. 68.

“But all I want to do is beat these Nazi sons-of-bitches so we can get at those little Jap bastards.” p. 69.

Ernie Pyle: “You don’t fight a Kraut by Marquis of Queensbury rules.  You shoot him in the back, you blow him apart with mines, you kill or maim him…with the least danger to yourself and he does the same to you…and if you don’t beat him at his own game, you don’t live to appreciate your own nobleness.” p. 69.

Billboard over Tulagi harbor: “Kill Japs; kill more Japs; you will be doing your part if you help to kill those yellow bastards.” p. 69.

“German reporting stressed the bravery of military groups rather than individual soldiers.” p. 71.

To be continued.

V Was for Victory.... (7)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (7). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“…war reporting continually discriminated against those Americans who had grown up outside of the dominant culture.” p. 63.

John Hersey: “But what I really wondered was whether any of them [soldiers] gave a single thought to what the hell this war was all about.” p. 66.

“Did these men, who might be about to die, have any war aims?” p. 66.

“What were they fighting for, anyway?” p. 66.

“Jesus, what I’d give for a piece of blueberry pie.” p. 66.

“To get the goddam thing over and get home.” p. 66.

“Most regard the war as a job to be done and there is not much willingness to discuss what we are fighting for.” p. 67.

Ernie Pyle: “We see the war from the worm’s eye view, and our segment of the picture consists only of tired soldiers who are alive and don’t want to die…of shocked men wandering back down the hill from battle….” p. 68.

To be continued.

V Was for Victory.... (6)

Politics and American Culture During WWII (6). John Morton Blum. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1976.

Why read it? Perspective from the Home Front in World War II. The effects of American propaganda on the American people. A completely different view of a war from our more recent wars, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan.

Ideas:

“Whether consciously or inadvertently, the reporters tended to find in the young men they described the traits that Americans generally esteemed.” p. 55.

“ ‘These Are the Generals,’ a series of articles published during 1943 in the Saturday Evening Post, linked athletic prowess, academic mediocrity and success in command.” p. 57.

“American boys were ex-grocery boys, ex-highway laborers, ex-bank clerks, ex-school boys, boys with a clean record…not killers.” p. 59.

“Perhaps because they were by the 1940s so dominantly an industrial and urban people, Americans selected their heroes disproportionately from the ranks of country boys.” p. 59.

“The habit of joyful hard work, one ingredient of the cult of success, had always beguiled the Saturday Evening Post, which built its circulation…upon continual publication of updated Alger stories.” p. 60.

To be continued.