In the course of his uphill campaign to unseat the Democratic President, Martin Van Buren, the Whig candidate Gen. William Henry Harrison introduced a new element to American politics: the stump speech. Harrison broke the tradition of candidate silence, delivering twenty-three speeches ranging in length from one to three hours. Though not known as an inspiring orator, Harrison drew large crowds made up of both supporters and curiosity seekers.
His most dramatic address took place on September 10, when the old general appeared before a huge rally in a valley outside Dayton, Ohio. The former governor of the Indiana Territory and hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe depicted himself as a common man who had humbly accepted the mantle of leadership. “I am no statesman by profession,” he said, contrasting himself to the politico Van Buren. “I am a half soldier and a half farmer .. .”
Harrison decried “the violence of party spirit” that had characterized the campaign, calling it “a serious mischief to the political welfare of the country.” Regardless of his expressed distaste for partisan politicking, Harrison would sweep into the White House in December behind a barrage of Whig songs, slogans, and symbols.
The Lowell Offering, the first women factory workers’ magazine, began publication in October. Founded by Rev. Abel C. Thomas of the First Universalist Church of Lowell, Massachusetts, the Offering provided a creative outlet for the well-educated young female factory workers who had been drawn to the area’s textile mills by wages six to seven times greater than what the average schoolteacher earned.
The Offering’s contents ranged from romantic poetry to autobiography to scientific discourse, and contributors favored outlandish pen names like Dolly Dindle and Grace Gayfeather. Only one self-imposed rule seemed to limit the content: Rarely did the editorials criticize working conditions.
The presence of these educated women in the mills declined in the mid-1840s as millowners found a cheaper and more permanent source of labor in Irish immigrants, many of whom were illiterate. The Offering published its last issue in 1845. But other workers’ magazines followed in its path, and it would be widely studied as a seminal document of both feminism and industrialization in mid-nineteenth-century America.
1940 Fifty Years Ago
Americans listened anxiously on September 10 as Edward R. Murrow reported from London on the German Luftwaffe’s air assault on Britain: “I’ve seen some horrible sights in this city during these days and nights, but not once have I heard man, woman, or child suggest that Britain should throw in her hand. These people are angry. How much they can stand I don’t know.”
A week earlier President Franklin D. Roosevelt had announced an executive agreement between the United States and Great Britain. The United States would lend the British fifty aging destroyers in return for rent-free, ninety-nine-year leases on naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and five other British territories.
Congress joined in the war preparations September 16, instituting the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. During the next month more than 16.4 million men ages twenty-one to thirty-five signed up. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson picked the first draft number from a bowl of eighty-five hundred capsules on October 29. The number 158 belonged to Alden C. Flagg, Jr., the son of the first civilian drafted in the 1917 lottery for World War I.
Meanwhile, relations with Japan, Germany, and Italy continued to deteriorate. On September 26 Roosevelt announced an embargo on the export of scrap iron and steel to all countries outside the Western Hemisphere except Great Britain. The next day in Berlin, representatives from Germany, Italy, and Japan signed a tripartite military and economic pact. Each country pledged to defend the other should they be attacked by a non-pact nation. The Axis was born.
Roosevelt was fighting off a spirited challenge from the neophyte Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, who gained political mileage by portraying the President as a reckless warmonger. In his quest for an unprecedented third term, Roosevelt could not remain silent in the face of these charges. The President lashed out at the Republicans. In an October 28 speech at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Roosevelt singled out isolationist Republicans for their “remarkable somersault” on national defense issues: Having criticized his defense build-up for years, they now claimed the country was too weak to enter a war. Continuing his campaign in Boston on Halloween, Roosevelt reassured the electorate: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” The word foreign was a carefully chosen caveat. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor thirteen months later, the war would no longer fit this description.
The Great Dictator, film maker Charlie Chaplin’s bold lampoon of Adolf Hitler, premiered in New York City on October 15. Chaplin starred in a dual role as the mad dictator Adenoid Hynkel and the look-alike Jewish barber who unwittingly topples his empire. He would withdraw the film from circulation during World War II. “Had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator,” Chaplin would later admit. “I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.”
1965 Twenty-five Years Ago
As troop levels neared President Lyndon B. Johnson’s goal of 125,000, U.S. forces in Vietnam became involved in escalated conflicts. Daily bombing raids over North Vietnam began on September 16 as B-52s destroyed suspected Vietcong bases in the Mekong Delta.
Opposition to the U.S. presence in Vietnam crystallized as rallies took place in cities around the world the weekend of October 15. In Berkeley, California, the poet Allen Ginsberg led an estimated ten thousand marchers in an aborted attempt to reach the Oakland army base. The rally ended outside Berkeley as members of the motorcycle gang Hell’s Angels attacked Ginsberg and his “flower people.” In New York City another ten thousand protesters gathered, among them David J. Miller, a Catholic pacifist who burned his draft card in front of the cheering crowd. Three days later FBI agents arrested Miller for violating a law President Johnson had signed on August 31 making destruction or mutilation of a draft card a federal offense.
A chorus of denunciations answered the demonstrations. Senate Minority Leader Everett M. Dirksen said the marchers’ actions were “enough to make any person loyal to this country weep,” and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach announced in an October 17 press conference that the Justice Department had begun an investigation of Communist influence on antiwar organizations. As President Johnson recuperated from gall bladder surgery, Press Secretary Bill Moyers defended the inquiry, expressing the President’s concern that “even well-meaning demonstrators can become the victims of Communist exploitation.”
Forty programs debuted on the three television networks as the new fall season began the week of September 12, among them the spy spoof “Get Smart!,” the World War II farce “Hogan’s Heroes,” and the culture-clash comedies “Green Acres” and “I Dream of Jeannie.” Three Southern stations refused to air NBC’s “I Spy” because the black comedian Bill Cosby had been given a costarring role.
