Among the most colorful figures in American political history, Louisiana politician Huey Long (1893–1935) emerged as one of the strongest opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although both men were Democrats, Long considered Roosevelt too moderate in his response to the nation’s economic crisis. The textbook definition of a populist, Long favored massive redistribution of wealth, a version of socialism far more radical than Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. Long was making plans to challenge Roosevelt for the presidency in 1936 when he was assassinated. The alleged shooter, a doctor named Carl Weiss, was killed by Long’s bodygaurds in the incident.
Long, nicknamed “the Kingfish,” was initially supportive of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As Louisiana governor, he had enthusiastically backed public works projects in his home state, where bridges and buildings named after Long are still common. But as it became clear that Roosevelt’s reforms would not offer far-reaching aid to the poor, Long began to champion a more radical alternative.
The popularity of Long illustrates the pressure Roosevelt was under during the Depression and the degree to which many Americans of the time had lost faith in capitalism. Although Roosevelt was later embraced by the Left, his New Deal was often conservative and cautious in the context of the 1930s, eschewing both the radicalism of Huey Long and the anti-Semitism of Northern rabble-rousers like radio broadcaster Father Charles Coughlin (1891–1979).
Part of Long’s reputation rests on his personality and reputation for bare-knuckle politics, which partly inspired the main character in the classic novel All the King’s Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren (1905–1989). Long was undoubtedly corrupt. Accounting for the public works projects he brought to Louisiana was often unorthodox or nonexistent. Like most other Southern politicians of his era, he enthusiastically supported segregation.
On September 8, 1935, Long was shot and killed at the Louisiana state house in Baton Rouge. Long’s premature death has left many intriguing what-ifs for historians. Roosevelt was reelected in 1936, without a serious challenge from the Left.
1. Long’s last words were reportedly, “God, don’t let me die. I have so much to do.”
2. Long’s younger brother, Earl K. Long (1895–1960), served three terms as governor of Louisiana in the 1940s and 1950s.
3. After Long was assassinated, his widow, Rose McConnell Long (1892–1970), won a special election to fill his seat in the US Senate.
The victorious Allies created the United Nations (UN) in 1945 in an effort to foster world peace and prevent another cataclysmic conflict like World War II (1939–1945). The organization, headquartered in New York City, now includes representatives from virtually every nation in the world. More than sixty years after its founding, the United Nations remains the premier international forum for resolving disputes, although critics complain that it gives the World War II victors unfair influence in a world that has changed greatly since 1945.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) coined the term United Nations in 1942 to describe the international coalition against Nazism. As the Allies neared victory, delegates from fifty nations gathered in San Francisco in 1945 to sign a formal agreement creating the body. The UN was intended to replace the defunct League of Nations, which had proved powerless to prevent the outbreak of the war.
The various agencies of the United Nations govern international telephones, decolonization, even postage. But the most well-known part of the United Nations is the Security Council, a board of fifteen countries that is responsible for maintaining world peace. The principal Allies from World War II—the United States, Russia (then the Soviet Union), the United Kingdom, France, and China—hold permanent seats on and veto power in the Security Council. In recent years, India, Japan, and other populous countries have lobbied for permanent membership.
The UN’s record in international peacekeeping is mixed. Arguably, the fact that the Cold War of the late 1900s never broke out into actual war proves that the system worked. However, critics have charged that the international body has been slow to respond to emerging world threats like nuclear proliferation and terrorism. Since the UN’s establishment, successive American presidents from both political parties have sought to reform the body to make it more effective in the twenty-first century.
1. The United Nations compound, on the East Side of New York City, is considered foreign territory.
2. Traditionally neutral Switzerland did not join the United Nations until 2002.
3. The United Nations considered Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco before picking New York City as its permanent home in 1946.
In the aftermath of Japan’s 1941 Pearl Harbor bombing, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) authorized the military to imprison more than 100,000 Japanese-American civilians in internment camps scattered across the United States. One of the most controversial actions of World War II, internment was justified by the US military as a necessary precaution to prevent Japan from recruiting spies or saboteurs from among the Japanese-American population. More than forty years later, the US Congress and President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) officially apologized to surviving internees for the violation of their civil liberties.
The internment order, which Roosevelt approved about three months after the United States entered the war, ordered Japanese citizens and Japanese-Americans on both coasts to report to the authorities for relocation. They were transferred to ten camps located in isolated parts of the country, where most would remain in spartan barracks for the rest of the war.
Some Japanese-Americans attempted to resist internment. Fred Korematsu (1919–2005), a California shipyard worker who didn’t want to be separated from his non-Japanese girlfriend, challenged the order but lost a pivotal US Supreme Court ruling in 1944. “When under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threatened by hostile forces,” the Court ruled in the Korematsu decision, “the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger.”
During the war, patriotic Japanese-Americans fought with distinction in the US Army even while their families sat in internment camps. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, an all-Japanese-American US Army regiment, was one of World War II’s most decorated army units.
In 1988, Congress apologized for internment and paid $20,000 each to all surviving internees. Korematsu was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and died in 2005, shortly after filing amicus curiae briefs before the Supreme Court arguing against the imprisonment without charge of American citizens in the “war on terror.”
1. One young internee, Norman Mineta (1931–), was later a cabinet official for President Bill Clinton (1946–) and President George W. Bush (1946–).
2. Through World War II, internment of foreigners was viewed as a routine part of war; German-Americans were interned in camps during both World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945).
3. US senator Daniel Inouye (1924–) of Hawaii was an officer in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.
In 1918, film producer Louis B. Mayer (c. 1882–1957) moved to California, joining the rest of the fledgling movie industry in its exodus to Los Angeles. On the West Coast, Mayer became the head of the era’s biggest studio, MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), where he played a leading role in the creation of the Hollywood studio system and the modern entertainment industry.
Mayer was born in Ukraine, which was then a province of imperial Russia. His original given name was Lazar. His family fled to Canada to escape anti-Semitism when he was a child. Mayer eventually ended up in Boston, where he established himself as a film distributor to the nickelodeons—movie theaters that charged a nickel for admission—that were just beginning to emerge in New England in the early twentieth century. Mayer made his initial fortune distributing the 1915 blockbuster The Birth of a Nation.
By the end of the World War I (1914–1918), most major film companies had settled in Los Angeles, drawn by weather that was ideal for filming. Two years after making his fortune, Mayer joined the migration west.
MGM was founded in 1924, and Mayer was named the studio head, a position he would hold for the next three decades. In an era of studio “bosses,” Mayer wielded enormous power over the entire moviemaking process at MGM: he signed talent, picked scripts to produce, and managed production budgets. Mayer moved aggressively to sign Hollywood’s biggest names, including Greta Garbo (1905–1990) and Joan Crawford (1905–1977), to MGM contracts. He also oversaw the studio’s transition from silent to talking films in the late 1920s.
By the beginning of the Great Depression, MGM was the nation’s biggest movie studio, responsible for dozens of films distributed to American theaters every year. Mayer was highly conservative in his political views and cultural tastes, and he preferred uplifting movies with positive, patriotic messages. For example, MGM released such classics as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), and The Philadelphia Story (1940).
Mayer was forced out in 1951 after MGM suffered several consecutive years of boxoffice flops, marking the end of the formative era in Hollywood history.
1. Mayer usually went by “L. B.”
2. An ardent Republican, Mayer was offered the ambassadorship to Turkey by President Herbert Hoover (1874–1964) but declined the invitation.
3. Mayer was the highest-paid executive in the United States in 1936, with a salary of more than $1 million a year.
Built in less than eighteen months during World War II (1939–1945), the Pentagon is the world’s largest office building and a granite icon of American military might. More populous than many small cities, the giant structure holds more than 25,000 workers in its five concentric tiers. An embodiment of the American military establishment, the Pentagon was one of the targets of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The Pentagon was first proposed in 1941, as America’s entrance into World War II appeared imminent. Its purpose was to consolidate a dozen different War Department offices scattered across Washington, DC, under a single roof. The Pentagon’s simple design was a function of practicality and efficiency; President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) wanted a building that could be constructed quickly without spoiling the views from the adjoining Arlington National Cemetery. The blueprint was designed so that no two points in the building would be more than a seven-minute walk apart.
After the Allied victory in World War II, the Pentagon emerged as a symbol of American global military dominance in the Cold War. The term The Pentagon entered the language as shorthand for the United States Department of Defense, which has been headquartered in the building since its creation in 1947.
During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon became a locus for antiwar protests, including an infamous march on the building chronicled in the Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Armies of the Night (1968) by Norman Mailer (1923–). Although protesters failed to levitate the building through the force of their collective will, as planned, the demonstration did mark an early indication of souring public opinion on the war.
More recently, 184 people were killed at the Pentagon during the 2001 terrorist attacks. The building was quickly rebuilt, and evidence of the damage is virtually undetectable today.
1. Each of the building’s five sides is 921 feet long, roughly the same as the height of the Eiffel Tower.
2. The Pentagon is located in Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, but it has a District of Columbia zip code.
3. There are 691 water fountains scattered throughout the corridors of the Pentagon.
The literary acclaim of author Ralph Ellison (1913–1994) rests almost entirely on Invisible Man (1952), the sole novel he published during his lifetime. The story of an unnamed African-American protagonist and his struggle to find his identity as a black man in American society, Invisible Man won the National Book Award for fiction in 1953 and endures as one of the century’s greatest novels.
Ellison was born in Oklahoma City and attended the Tuskegee Institute on a music scholarship for three years. He moved to New York City in the 1930s, where he befriended Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes (1902–1967) and Richard Wright (1908–1960), who encouraged his early literary efforts.
A perfectionist, Ellison toiled over Invisible Man for seven years. Autobiographical in many respects, the story follows the path of an idealistic young African-American man who wins a scholarship to an all-black college modeled on Tuskegee. He is kicked out of college for reasons he does not understand, however, and moves to New York, where he struggles to fit in with both the fractious black community and the white mainstream. He discovers that despite his efforts, white American society refuses to see him as an individual. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” the narrator declares.
The novel was an immediate sensation and went on to sell millions of copies. Ellison took creative writing positions on the faculty of New York University, the University of Chicago, Rutgers, and Yale, and he began work on a second novel. However, the manuscript was lost in a fire at his house in 1967, and he was forced to start over. Meticulous in his literary craft, Ellison worked slowly but steadily on the new book, writing more than 2,000 pages, until a few weeks before his death in 1994, but he was unable to finish it. The novel, titled Juneteenth, was finished by an editor and published in 1999.
1. Ellison’s full name was Ralph Waldo Ellison; he was named after the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882).
2. Ellison served as a cook in the merchant marine during World War II.
3. Too poor to buy a ticket, Ellison traveled to college in Alabama by hopping freight trains.
The most acclaimed jazz master of the late twentieth century, trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–1991) pushed the genre in new directions by incorporating fusion styles inspired by rock, funk, and electronic music into traditional jazz. An artist of wide-ranging tastes who spent decades at the pinnacle of the music world, Davis collaborated with legends ranging from Charlie Parker (1920–1955) to Quincy Jones (1933–) during his long career.
Davis was born in Alton, Illinois, and moved to New York City in 1944 to attend the prestigious Julliard School of Music. He soon dropped out, however, and began playing gigs with Parker’s band. Davis launched a solo career later in the 1940s and soon won a recording contract.
New York in the 1950s was home to a thriving jazz scene, including legends like Charles Mingus (1922–1979) and Thelonious Monk (1917–1982), a generation that introduced a new level of sophistication to jazz music. The era’s musicians are also credited with introducing the elusive concept of cool to American culture. With his fashionable clothes and suave personality, Davis himself practically defined hip; one of his first albums released, in 1957, was titled Birth of the Cool.
In 1959, Davis released the album widely regarded as his masterpiece, Kind of Blue. One of the best-selling jazz records of all time, the album showcases Davis’s languid, lyrical trumpet solos as well as the talented backup band he assembled in the late 1950s. He released another seminal album, Sketches of Spain, in 1960.
Unlike some jazz purists, Davis was fascinated by the new musical styles of the 1960s, including the British Invasion bands. He began to incorporate elements of rock into his music, an unorthodox style sometimes referred to as fusion jazz. Davis even planned a collaboration with Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970), although the rock guitarist died before the project came to fruition. Davis released the groundbreaking fusion album Bitches Brew in 1970, which became an immediate hit.
Davis was plagued by drug problems for much of his adult life, and he temporarily retired for health reasons in the 1970s. He recovered in the 1980s and released a Grammy-winning antiapartheid album, Tutu, in 1986, shortly before his death.
1. Davis guest starred on an episode of the TV series Miami Vice in 1985.
2. To the consternation of jazz purists, Davis recorded a jazz version of the Michael Jackson (1958–) song “Human Nature” in 1985.
3. Davis won a posthumous Grammy Award in 1992 for the album Doo-Bop, a collaboration with rapper Easy Mo Bee.