Robert Moses (1888 – 1981) was an American urban planner who worked as the New York City Parks Commissioner between 1934 and 1960. During the Second World War his phone was ringing off the hook:
"All over the country plans are being hatched for war memorials. Demands upon public officials for space in parks and public places are daily becoming more insistent. [But] if truth be told, most gestures of patriotism are pathetic, third-rate, inadequate [and] ugly..." A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, many Americans, 10,000 to be exact, were active in welcoming British children, ages 5 - 16, to their homes. This was a time when it was widely believed that a Nazi invasion of Britain was imminent and the Battle of Britain was in full-swing:
"Nobody knows how many will be admitted or how many will land in Canada on the first child-refugee ship, due three weeks from now.The quota for British children is 6,500 a-month; for children from other countries quotas are considerably lower."
To read about the short and productive life of New York's PM, click here...
A grocer and his bookkeeper were sentenced to prison for jacking-up chicken prices in violation of Federal law. We were terribly surprised to learn of a peace movement that existed on the 1944 American home front. Baring an awkward name that was right out of Seventiespeak, Peace Now printed pamphlets that played the class game so prevalent in the other leftist organizations that would come forth twenty years later. When World War II was inching toward it's bloody conclusion, Japan launched its Fu-go Campaign - a project designed to deploy thousands of high-altitude hydrogen balloons armed with incendiary devices. These balloons were to follow the westerly winds of the upper atmosphere, drifting to the west coast of North America where they were expected descend into the forests and explode.
The Japanese home front suffered from tuberculosis - click here to read about it... The fact that more boy babies are born during and immediately after major wars is a phenomenon that was discovered by the underpaid statisticians employed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in 1942. The articles that are attached are but two of what was probably four hundred articles that appeared on the topic that year. The writers and thinkers of the digital age continue studying this actuality - among them is the gang over at Psychology Today who wrote:
"Scientists have known for a long time that more boys than usual are born during and after major wars. The phenomenon was first noticed in 1954 with regard to white children born during World War II in the United States. It has since been replicated for most of the belligerent nations in both World Wars. The phenomenon has been dubbed the 'returning soldier effect.' There is no doubt that the phenomenon is real, but nobody has been able to explain it. Why are soldiers who return from wars more likely to father sons than other men?"
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