LA FOLLETTE, ROBERT MARION, JR. (1895–1953). The son of the famous progressive politician of the same name, Robert M. La Follette Jr. was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and attended the University of Wisconsin from 1913 to 1916 before leaving to become a clerk and then his father’s secretary. When La Follette Sr. died in 1925, his son won the election to fill the vacant seat, and he held it as a Republican until 1947. Despite his party affiliation, after 1929 La Follette was highly critical of Herbert Hoover and supported many New Deal measures. In 1934, he joined his brother Philip in forming the Wisconsin Progressive Party and was reelected on that platform in 1934 and 1940. La Follette did not think Franklin D. Roosevelt went far enough and called for more radical measures. From 1936 on, he chaired the Senate Committee on Education and Labor and the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee, and he exposed the lengths large business corporations went to and the violence used against trade union organizations, like the Memorial Day Massacre in Chicago in 1937. He was an isolationist and a founding member of the America First Committee in 1940, but he did not vote against the war.
In 1946, La Follette was responsible for the introduction of the Congressional Reorganization Act that helped to streamline the legislative process. However, having rejoined the Republicans, he was defeated by Joseph McCarthy in the primary election of 1946, and in 1953 he committed suicide.
LA GUARDIA, FIORELLO HENRY (1882–1947). Fiorello La Guardia was born in New York City and raised in Arizona. His family went to Trieste, Italy, in 1898, and La Guardia worked for the United States consular service. From 1904 to 1906, he was acting consular agent in Fiume (now Croatia). He returned to the United States in 1907, graduated from New York University Law School in 1910, and practiced law in New York City. During World War I, he served as a major in the U.S. Air Force in Italy. He sat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican from 1917 to 1921 and from 1923 to 1933. He was president of the New York City Board of Aldermen from 1920 to 1921. While in Congress, La Guardia was cosponsor of the Norris-La Guardia Act. He lost his seat in Congress in the Democratic landslide of 1932, but in 1933 he was elected mayor of New York on a fusion ticket, supported by Republicans and reform groups.
As mayor, he was known as “the Little Flower,” and he established a reputation for honesty and for reforming the city government. La Guardia’s administration witnessed slum clearance and public housing development, the building of hospitals and childcare facilities, the construction of roads and bridges (including the Triborough Bridge and the airport that bears his name), and the unified the public transport system. He held the office until 1945 and was president of the United States Conference of Mayors from 1936 until 1945. La Guardia established a good relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and during World War II was appointed head of the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense (OCD). He found it impossible to do both jobs and was forced to drop the OCD in 1942. Weary of being mayor, he did not run again in 1945. In 1946, he became director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, a position he held for a year.
LADD, ALAN WALBRIDGE (1913–1964). Actor Alan Ladd was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, but moved to California at an early age. Although he was short, he was good at sport and a potential Olympic athlete in 1931. After graduating from school in 1933, he worked as a journalist and in a variety of minor jobs in and around film studios. In 1936, he found work in a number of roles in local radio, and from 1932 through the early 1940s, he played a number of often unaccredited minor parts in films. Ladd had a small part in Citizen Kane in 1941, but his breakthrough came in 1942 when he was cast opposite Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire. Unable to serve in the military for medical reasons, Ladd made China in 1943 and appeared in several more successful movies with Lake, including Duffy’s Tavern (1945), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Saigon (1948). He also starred in Two Years before the Mast (1946) and The Great Gatsby (1949). Ladd’s next major success was as the lone gunman in the western Shane (1953). He also starred in The Red Beret (1953) and The Black Knight (1954), but his career never reached the heights of his early successes. His last significant film appearance was in The Carpetbaggers (1964). See also CINEMA.
LABOR-MANAGEMENT RELATIONS ACT. See TAFT-HARTLEY ACT.
LAKE, VERONICA (1919–1973). One of the great movie stars of the 1940s, Veronica Lake was born Constance Ockleman in Brooklyn, New York. Although her first acting role was at the age of eight, she did not begin performing seriously until her family moved to Hollywood in 1938. She got her first film role under the name of Constance Keane in 1939. Her first part as Veronica Lake was in I Want Wings, which was a success in 1941, followed by Hold Back the Dawn the same year. Lake was described as “one of the most beautiful” stars in Hollywood, and her blond hair covering one eye “peek-a-boo” style, became her trademark. She appeared in Sullivan’s Travels and This Gun for Hire in 1942 and was a hit with Claudette Colbert in So Proudly We Hail in 1943. However, it was her pairing with Alan Ladd in The Glass Key in 1942 that established her most successful screen partnership. They also appeared together in Duffy’s Tavern (1945), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Saigon (1948). The latter did not do particularly well at the box office, and Paramount did not renew her contract after 1948. Lake appeared in a number of television shows between 1949 and 1951 and then worked on Broadway for about eight years. However, her string of broken marriages and alcoholism clearly affected her career, and she was forced to find employment in casual, low-paid work other than acting. She moved to Florida in 1965 and appeared in two low-budget films. In 1969, she moved to England but returned after two years and another divorce destitute and ill. She spent her last days in the hospital. See also CINEMA.
“LAME DUCK” AMENDMENT. See TWENTIETH AMENDMENT.
LAMOUR, DOROTHY (1914–1996). Born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton in New Orleans, Louisiana, the famous pin-up girl and actress of the 1940s won a beauty contest in New Orleans in 1931 and then moved to Chicago to become a singer, using the name Lamour. She had some success, particularly on radio, and moved to Hollywood in 1936. She became a star in The Jungle Princess in 1936 and further established herself in a role as an exotic beauty in The Hurricane in 1937. Her popularity peaked between 1936 and 1952, and she was associated with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the Road series of movies, beginning with The Road to Singapore (1940). During World War II, Lamour was very popular in tours to raise money for war bonds. Her film career was less successful in later years, although she appeared in The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 and toured in the 1960s as a nightclub performer. See also CINEMA.
LANDON, ALFRED MOSSMAN (1887–1987). Alfred, better-known as “Alf,” Landon was born in Pennsylvania, grew up in Ohio, and moved to Independence, Kansas. He obtained his law degree from the University of Kansas in 1908 and then worked in banking and the oil industry, a career he resumed after serving briefly in the army in 1918. Involved in politics as a progressive, Landon later returned to the Republican Party and was secretary to Governor Henry Allen in 1922 and organizer of the gubernatorial campaigns of William Allen White and Clyde M. Reed in 1924 and 1928. He was chosen as chair of the Kansas Republican Party that year but was pushed out by conservatives in 1930. Nonetheless, in 1932 he was elected governor in his own right defeating Democratic incumbent Harry Woodring. Landon implemented measures to counter the Great Depression, including a moratorium on farm mortgage foreclosures, restriction on bank withdrawals, regulation of utilities, and conservation of natural resources, while maintaining a balanced budget. He was the only Republican governor to be reelected in 1934.
In 1936, Landon was chosen as the Republican presidential candidate. While he was critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s deficit spending and advocated government efficiency and a balanced budget, his platform was a moderate reform one. He lost overwhelmingly and did not run for public office again. He served as vice chairman of the U.S. delegation to the Inter-American Conference in Lima, Peru, in 1938 and continued to speak on political matters right through the 1960s.
LANGE, DOROTHEA (1895–1965). Born Dorothea Margarette Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, the photographer and photojournalist dropped her middle name and adopted her mother’s maiden name after her father abandoned the family. A victim of polio at the age of seven, she was left with a permanently weakened leg. She studied photography in New York City and in 1918 moved to San Francisco, California, where she opened a portrait studio. In 1936, she joined the team of photographers in the federal Resettlement Administration, later called the Farm Security Administration, and began capturing the impact of the Great Depression. Many of her photographs of unemployed men and women became nationally and internationally known, but her best-known photo was of a migrant woman in Nipoma, California, that became known as Migrant Madonna (1936). In 1941, Lange gave up a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the relocation of Japanese Americans. Her photographs were consequently impounded by the army. She also photographed war workers and other individuals of the period, documenting the social impact of World War II for the Office of War Information, and the writing of the United Nations Charter for the State Department. In 1952, Lange was one of the founders of the magazine Aperture, but her declining health limited her work.
LATTIMORE, OWEN (1900–1989). Born in Washington, D.C., Owen Lattimore was raised, educated, and spent much of his early life in China, other than when he attended school in Switzerland and England. He returned to China in 1919 and worked in commercial insurance. He also traveled throughout Asia and wrote several accounts of his journey, including Desert Road to Turkestan (1929), High Tartary (1930), Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (1932), and Mongols of Manchuria (1934). From 1928 to 1937, Lattimore held a fellowship at Harvard University and was editor of the journal Pacific Affairs. From 1938 to 1950, he was the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Johns Hopkins University. In 1941, he was sent as the U.S. political adviser to Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. He returned to work in the Pacific Affairs Office of the Office of War Information in 1942.
In 1944, Lattimore traveled to the Soviet Union and China with Henry A. Wallace, and after the war he suggested delaying recognition of the nationalists in China and appeared sympathetic to the communists led by Mao Zedong. In 1950, Joseph McCarthy accused him of being “the top Russian spy,” but he was cleared in the subsequent investigation. However, in 1952 Lattimore was indicted for perjury, having been accused of lying to a Senate subcommittee on internal affairs by denying that he had promoted communism. All charges were dropped by 1955, but his passport was withheld and he was unable to find work in the United States. Once he was allowed to travel again, he became professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds in England from 1963 to 1970. He authored several books on Chinese history and politics and an account of his experience of McCarthyism in Ordeal by Slander (1950).
LEE, RUSSELL WERNER (1903–1986). Born in Ottawa, Illinois, and orphaned at an early age, Russell Lee was educated at Culver Military Academy and Lehigh University, where he trained as a chemical engineer, graduating in 1925. After working as an engineer in 1929, Lee took up art and moved to California and then Woodstock, where he began working with photography. In 1936, he joined a team of photographers under Roy Stryker at the Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration, and was noted for several of his powerful images of migrant workers and rural communities.
Lee served as a photographer for Air Transport Command during World War II and then resumed work under Stryker and produced public relations photographs for Standard Oil and the coal industry. He moved to Austin, Texas, in 1947 and helped to document the housing condition of Hispanic workers and also those in mental institutions. In 1965, he became instructor of photography at the University of Texas, where he worked until his retirement in 1973.
LEHAND, MARGUERITE (1898–1944). Born in Potsdam, New York, Marguerite LeHand qualified as a secretary after leaving high school and worked at the Democratic Party National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., before becoming the private secretary to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1920. She remained with Roosevelt through his political career until she suffered a stroke in 1941. Known as “Missy” in the Roosevelt family, LeHand had an extremely close relationship with the president and acted as hostess at official functions when Eleanor Roosevelt was absent. Although she predeceased him, the president had willed her half of his estate.
LEHMAN, HERBERT HENRY (1878–1963). Herbert Lehman, New York’s longest-serving governor, began work in a textile company in 1899. By 1906, he had risen to vice president and treasurer of the company. In 1908, he joined his father’s investment banking company, Lehman Brothers. He worked for a number of charitable organizations, including the Joint Distribution Committee formed during World War I to aid Jews in Eastern Europe. During the war, Lehman served in the General Staff Corps in Washington, D.C., as a captain and was responsible for purchase and traffic.
After the war, Lehman entered Democratic politics as a friend and associate of Alfred E. Smith and had various roles in Smith’s election campaigns in 1924 and 1928. Lehman became Franklin D. Roosevelt’s lieutenant governor in 1928, a position he held until 1932. In 1932, he was elected governor in his own right and was reelected in 1934 and 1936. In 1938, he was elected to the first four-year term in the same capacity. Under his direction, New York established a “little New Deal” of relief and recovery programs to alleviate the impact of the Great Depression, including unemployment insurance, minimum wages, and public housing. He resigned as governor in 1942 to become head of the Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations in the State Department. In 1943, the office became the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, and Lehman was chosen as director general. He held the position until his resignation in 1946.
Unsuccessful in his bid for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1946, Lehman was elected in 1950, where he fought for liberal causes and opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy. He retired from the Senate in 1956.
LEMKE, WILLIAM FREDERICK (1878–1950). Born in Albany, Minnesota, William Lemke moved with his family to North Dakota and studied at the University of North Dakota, Georgetown University, and Yale University. After gaining his law degree in 1905, he set up practice in Fargo, North Dakota, and also published the monthly The Common Good. Associated with farmers and farmers’ movements, Lemke became attorney for the Nonpartisan League in 1916. The league captured control of the state’s Republican Party, and Lemke became party chairman. In 1920, he was elected state attorney general. However, he was defeated in a recall election in 1921. He retired to his law practice for the remainder of the decade.
In 1932, Lemke was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he sponsored legislation to ease bankruptcy proceedings against farmers and a proposal for the federal government to assist farmers in paying off their mortgages. When Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration opposed this last measure, Lemke turned against the New Deal and joined Charles Coughlin, Francis Townsend, and Gerald K. Smith in the National Union. He was nominated as the union’s presidential candidate in 1936 but secured less than 2 percent of the national vote. He failed to win election to the U.S. Senate in 1940 but remained in Congress as a representative from 1942 until his death.
LEND-LEASE ACT, 1941. Approved by Congress in March 1941, the Lend-Lease Act gave the president the power to transfer the title, lend, or lease any equipment to any nation whose defense was considered vital to the security of the United States. Initially intended to allow aid to Great Britain, during the course of World War II the United States provided $50 billion in aid to Great Britain, China, France, and the Soviet Union (USSR). Almost 60 percent went to Great Britain. The Lend-Lease program was ended abruptly in September 1945.
The British finally completed repayment for Lend-Lease in December 2006, and not all loans were repaid by the USSR, which was an issue in the growing postwar confrontation that led to the Cold War.
LEROY, MERVYN (1900–1987). Born in San Francisco, California, film director and producer Mervyn LeRoy first appeared in vaudeville as an actor/singer in 1906. He began working in the film industry in 1919, and his first work as a director was No Place to Go in 1927. LeRoy’s first big success was with the classic gangster film starring Edward G. Robinson, Little Caesar in 1931. In 1932, his critique of the southern convict labor system, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, starring Paul Muni, also won critical acclaim. In addition to gangster or social issues movies, LeRoy made a string of successful musicals, including 42nd Street (1932), Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), and Sweet Adeline (1935). In 1939, he produced both the comedy At the Circus, starring the Marx Brothers, and The Wizard of Oz, the musical starring Judy Garland. During World War II, he made a number of educational films for the government, and in 1945 he won an Oscar for The House We Live In, a condemnation of racial prejudice starring Frank Sinatra. LeRoy continued to make films throughout the 1950s and 1960s but did not have the success of his earlier work. He codirected The Green Berets, the Vietnam war film starring John Wayne, in 1968. See also CINEMA.
LEVITT, WILLIAM JAIRD (1907–1994). Born in Brooklyn, New York, William Levitt became president of his father’s building company in 1939 at the age of 22. After the war, he was responsible for building the mass-produced, identical, affordable single-family homes in Levittowns in several northeastern states. The rapid-assembly homes could be built at the rate of 36 a day. Levitt sold his company to International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) in 1968 for $492 million. He attempted to develop similar schemes overseas but was unsuccessful and retired in 1982.
LEVITTOWN. Levittown was the name of the first town of mass-produced, affordable single-family homes built by William J. Levitt on Long Island, New York, with a population of more than 10,000 between 1947 and 1951. Similar towns were established outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1951 through 1955 and in New Jersey in 1958. The New Jersey Levittown is now called Willingboro.
LEWIS, JOHN LLEWELLYN (1880–1969). The son of a Welsh immigrant, John L. Lewis was born in Iowa, where he began work in the coal mines in the 1890s. In 1907, he moved to Illinois, and he was elected president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) local in 1910. In 1911, Lewis was appointed as a field representative for the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and in 1917 he became vice president of the UMWA. He was elected president in 1920 and held the position until his retirement in 1960.
UMWA membership declined during the 1920s as the coal industry shrank in the face of foreign competition and the increased use of oil. The drop in membership increased with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Lewis, however, capitalized on the change in political climate with the advent of the New Deal and began to mobilize trade union membership. Lewis argued for the AFL to take a more militant approach and focus on organizing workers on an industrywide basis rather than by craft. As differences within the AFL exploded into physical conflict in 1935, he joined with Sidney Hillman and David Dubinsky to establish a Committee for Industrial Organization. The committee became the leading force in increasing union membership during the 1930s, and Lewis played an active role in these developments. In 1938, the Committee for Industrial Organizations became an autonomous labor organization, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
Lewis became increasingly critical of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and in 1940 openly supported the Republican candidate, Wendell Willkie. In 1940, he also stepped down as president of the CIO. Lewis’s growing opposition to Roosevelt’s war administration caused differences within the CIO leadership, and in 1942 Lewis took the UMWA out of the organization. His conflict with Roosevelt heightened when he led the miners in a series of strikes at the height of World War II in 1943. He continued his confrontational methods after the war, and strikes in the face of a federal injunction in 1946 resulted in massive fines for the union. In the 1950s, Lewis collaborated more with mine owners in return for pension and health care programs for the miners. After his retirement in 1960, he was director of the union retirement and welfare funds and some of his decisions with regard to investments were detrimental to the funds’ viability
LEYTE GULF. Between 22 and 27 October 1944, the U.S. Navy and the Japanese navy fought one of the greatest naval battles in history when they met in four confrontations in Leyte Gulf in the Philippine Sea during World War II. The outnumbered Japanese fleet suffered such huge losses that it was no longer a force in the war. The U.S. Navy, under Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, lost 27 ships, and the Japanese lost more than 60 vessels, including five aircraft carriers.
LIBERTY SHIPS. “Liberty ships” were mass-produced cargo ships made as part of the emergency construction program to supply Great Britain and the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II. The ships were quick and easy to build using prefabricated parts put together in an assembly-line method in 18 different shipyards, mainly the Kaiser yards. Construction initially took 230 days, but eventually a ship was produced in 42 days, and one was constructed in just under five days. A total of 2,751 “liberty ships” were built. They were given the name “liberty ships” when Franklin D. Roosevelt quoted Patrick Henry’s words, “Give me liberty or give me death” in launching them. A faster, stronger version appeared in the later years of the war known as “victory ships.”
LILIENTHAL, DAVID ELI (1899–1981). The son of Czech immigrants, David Lilienthal was born in Morton, Illinois. He attended DePauw University and Harvard Law School. After graduating in 1923, he practiced law in Chicago. His expertise in utility law led to his appointment to the Wisconsin State Utility Commission in 1931, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1933 with responsibility for the power program. Lilienthal clashed with one of the codirectors, Harcourt Morgan, over charging lower rates than existing power companies. Although Roosevelt removed Morgan from office, Lilienthal was also publicly attacked by Wendell Willkie, who headed a major utility company in the Tennessee Valley. Lilienthal survived, and the TVA eventually purchased Willkie’s company. In 1941, Lilienthal became chair of the TVA. His outspoken defense of the authority often led to clashes with members of Congress. Lilienthal’s position is summed up in his book, TVA: Democracy on the March (1944).
Reappointed chair by President Harry S. Truman in 1945, in January 1946 Lilienthal moved to become chair of an advisory committee on atomic energy and then head of the new Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Despite some congressional opposition, he was confirmed in the post in April 1947. He expanded the production of atomic weapons and the use of atomic energy in private industry. His term was extended for another two years in 1948. After resigning in 1950, Lilienthal became an industrial consultant and then head of an industrial minerals producing company. In 1955, he was appointed chief executive of an international resource development organization.
Although a controversial figure, Lilienthal received many public awards, including the Public Welfare Medal of the National Academy of Sciences and commendations from the governments of Brazil and Peru. See also ATOMIC BOMB.
LINDBERGH, CHARLES AUGUSTUS (1902–1974). Charles A. Lindbergh became a national hero after making the first single-handed, nonstop transatlantic flight from New York to Paris in his airplane, The Spirit of St Louis, on 20 May 1927. He had previously flown in the Army Air Service and as an airmail pilot between Chicago and St. Louis. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his flight, and Time magazine made him its first “Man of the Year.” He subsequently worked to promote aviation and was employed by various airline companies. Lindbergh was in the headlines again in 1932 when his 20-month-old son was abducted and found dead two months later. A German-born carpenter, Bruno Hauptmann, was tried and executed for the murder in April 1936.
The Lindbergh’s left the United States in 1935 to live first in England and then France. Lindbergh visited Germany in 1936, 1937, and 1938 on behalf of the U.S. Army to inspect the air forces in that country, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. He became convinced that Germany had a superior air force and that any war could destroy Western civilization. He had a number of meetings with the German air minister, Hermann Goering, and in 1938 was awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle at a state dinner. He returned to the United States in 1939 and became a leading noninterventionist and a member of the America First Committee. He was highly criticized for comments that appeared anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi, particularly in a speech in September 1941 accusing the Jews of controlling the media.
Upon U.S. entry into World War II in 1941, Lindbergh tested aircraft as a civilian. Nonetheless he flew combat missions in the Pacific in 1944. After the war, he continued to work for the U.S. air force and the Defense Department, and in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower promoted him to brigadier general. His autobiography, The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1954.
LIPPMANN, WALTER (1889–1974). Born to wealthy German Jewish parents in New York City, Walter Lippmann made a name as a brilliant student at Harvard. He left the university in 1910 to become a journalist at the socialist newspaper Boston Common. Part of the radical Greenwich Village set, Lippmann produced a call for reform in his Preface to Politics in 1912. In 1914, he published Drift and Mastery, which captured much of the progressive ethos in advocating government run scientifically by a public-minded elite. The same year, Lippmann joined the staff of the New Republic magazine. He supported U.S. entry into World War I and joined a team of planners to draw up plans for the postwar world. He was one of the U.S. advisers at the Versailles Peace Conference but was disillusioned by the terms of the peace treaty and became a critic of it and the League of Nations. His wartime experience also made him skeptical of the democratic process, and his Liberty and the News (1920) and Public Opinion (1922) suggested that government was best left to the experts.
In 1922, Lippmann joined the newspaper New York World, where he established a reputation as one of the leading journalists of his day. His book examining the “lost generation,” A Preface to Morals (1929), had a wide readership. Lippmann became a contributor to the conservative newspaper New York Herald Tribune in 1931, and his columns were nationally and internationally syndicated. While he was initially enthusiastic about the New Deal, Lippmann became increasingly critical. In criticizing what he saw as excessive collectivism and centralization, it appeared that he was defending laissez faire, but in fact he owed a great deal to the influence of John Maynard Keynes.
In the late 1930s, Lippmann advocated U.S. support for Great Britain against Nazi Germany, and during the war he wrote a best seller entitled United States Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943), advocating a continuation of the Grand Alliance with Great Britain and the Soviet Union (USSR). When the alliance broke up after the war, Lippmann wrote a critical study of containment, The Cold War (1947), and he was probably the originator of the phrase used to describe postwar relations with the USSR.
Lippmann was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and worked for the CBS television network for a number of years. However, he became increasingly critical of Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, and he retired from journalism in 1967.
LITERATURE AND THEATER. While the literature of the 1920s is mostly remembered for the “lost generation” of writers who were disaffected, alienated, and often out of the country, the 1930s in particular are remembered for the novels of social protest and social realism, some often having a “proletarian” emphasis. Chief among these is John Steinbeck’s depiction of the rural poor in Grapes of Wrath (1939), but also significant was James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932–1935) and Erskine Caldwell’s depiction of southern poverty in Tobacco Road (1932). The southern emphasis was also evident in the body of writing by William Faulkner. Politics too seemed important, as indicated in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1933) or Ernest Hemingway’s novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). One of the most powerful books of racial protest, Native Son by African American author Richard Wright, also appeared in 1940. But not all writing was intent on grim realism. Children’s author Laura Ingalls Wilder had enormous success with her Little House novels, especially Little House on the Prairie (1935), looking back on pioneer days, and Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War romance Gone with the Wind (1936) was a great hit both as a book and film.
Some of the social themes examined by novelists were also explored by established playwright Eugene O’Neill in Ah, Wilderness! in 1933 and The Iceman Cometh, written in 1939 but staged in 1946. In 1936, O’Neill received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his work during the 1920s. Political comments can be found in Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935). Also significant is Lillian Hellman’s Children’s Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939). The latter was made into a film in 1941 starring Bette Davis. Hellman was among those blacklisted during the period of McCarthyism in the 1950s, a theme that itself lay behind Arthur Miller’s postwar masterpiece The Crucible (1953). Miller had already established himself with earlier plays, especially Death of a Salesman (1949). The other major playwright of the period was Tennessee Williams, whose depiction of southern society in The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Street Car Named Desire (1947) reflected similar concerns of Faulkner, of Eudora Welty in Delta Wedding (1946), and of Carson McCullers in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940), Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941), and The Member of the Wedding (1946).
A number of new literary figures emerged during World War II. War poets Randall Jarrell and Karl Shapiro, novelist John Hersey with the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Bell for Adano (1944), Irwin Shaw with The Young Lions (1948), Norman Mailer with The Naked and the Dead (1948), and James Jones with From Here to Eternity (1951) all dealt with the subject of war, while issues of Jewishness and general alienation were central concerns of Saul Bellow first in Dangling Man (1944) and then in The Victim (1947). Bellow became a major writer from the 1950s through the 1970s. Alienated youth began to appear in novels such as J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), while Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s literary masterpiece dealing with the alienation of African Americans, was published in 1952. More popular literature included the religious novels of Lloyd C. Douglas, like The Robe (1943), and the historical romance by Kathryn Winsor, Forever Amber (1944). Both of these were made into films. See also BUCK, PEARL SYDENSTRICKER; FEDERAL THEATER PROJECT; FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT; FROST, ROBERT LEE; HURSTON, ZORA NEALE; POUND, EZRA (WESTON) LOOMIS; WILDER, THORNTON NIVEN.
“LITTLE STEEL” FORMULA. The “Little Steel” formula was a method worked out by the National War Labor Board in July 1942 to control wage increases. In response to a demand by the steel workers in the Bethlehem, Republic, Youngstown, and Inland steel companies, for a dollar-a-day increase, the board agreed on a 15 percent increase to cover the period beginning in January 1941 until May 1942. This formula became the general principle applied after the passage of the Economic Stabilization Act in October 1942.
LOMBARD, CAROLE (1908–1942). Born Jane Alice Peters in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Carole Lombard had her first role in motion pictures in 1920. Fox Studios employed her when she was 16 years old. Despite facial scarring from an automobile accident, she was able to sign a contract with Mack Sennett in 1927 and appeared in a number of comic roles before leaving the company in 1928. In 1930, Lombard joined Paramount Pictures and made several minor movies prior to making a name for herself in 20th Century (1934), Hands across the Table (1935), My Man Godfrey (1936), True Confession (1937), and Nothing Sacred (1937). Her “screwball” comic roles reflected the mood of the 1930s. During World War II, Lombard campaigned across the country to help sell war bonds. She died when her flight back from one of these appearances crashed near Las Vegas. See also CINEMA.
LONDON ECONOMIC CONFERENCE, 1933. The World Monetary and Economic Conference, better known as the London Economic Conference, met in June and July 1933 in response to the growing crisis of the Great Depression. Attempts to reach an agreement on tariff reduction and currency stabilization failed, and the United States refused to discuss war debt. Before the conference ended, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the U.S. delegation home, effectively undermining the conference.
LONDON NAVAL CONFERENCE, 1935–1936. The London Naval Conference was a conference held in London, England, between the United States, Great Britain, and Japan that met between December 1935 and March 1936 to consider Japanese protests against the earlier Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 that limited the building of battleships by each nation to a ratio of 5:5:3, respectively. When the Japanese demand for parity was rejected, they withdrew, and Great Britain and the United States cemented an agreement to exchange information on naval construction programs and limit the building of certain warships in peacetime.
LONG, HUEY PIERCE (1893–1935). Huey Long was born in Winnfield, Louisiana. Despite winning a scholarship to Louisiana State University, he was unable to afford student life and worked in a variety of jobs while studying law in his own time. Long entered Louisiana politics as a member of the Railroad Commission that existed from 1918 to 1921, which then became the Public Service Commission, which stayed in place from 1921 to 1928. After failing to win election in 1924, he was elected governor of Louisiana for the Democratic Party in 1928 and built a reputation as a populist reformer. He raised taxes to pay for school books, started a program for bridge and road construction, and improved the University of Louisiana at Baton Rouge. He largely ran the state as a one-party state using patronage and intimidation to maintain control.
Having survived an impeachment trial because of his taxation policies, Long was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1930 and adopted the nickname “Kingfish.” He continued as governor until one of his supporters could replace him in 1932. Initially sympathetic, he became increasingly critical of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1934, Long outlined his “Share Our Wealth” program in a manifesto entitled Every Man a King, which promised each family a guaranteed cash income, old-age pensions, and reduced work hours financed by placing a ceiling on incomes and property ownership. In 1935, he announced his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, and it appeared likely that he could attract as much as 10 percent of the vote. Roosevelt, who described him as one of the “two most dangerous men in America,” regarded him as a serious threat, and the revenue bill he submitted to Congress was in part a response to Long’s challenge. However, Long died on 10 September 1935 after being gunned down on the steps of the state capitol in Baton Rouge by Dr. Carl Weiss, the son-in-law of a political opponent.
LORENTZ, PARE (1905–1992). Born Leonard McTaggart Lorentz in West Virginia and educated at West Virginia Wesleyan College and the University of West Virginia, Lorentz moved to New York City in 1924. After working as an editor for General Electric, he became a film reviewer and critic and adopted his father’s name, Pare. In addition to reviewing for the New York Evening Journal, Vanity Fair, Town & Country, and McCall’s, Lorentz wrote two books, Censored: The Private Life of the Movies (1930) and The Roosevelt Years (1934). A supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, he joined the Resettlement Administration in 1935 to produce “films of merit.” His first film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, a study of soil erosion and the Dust Bowl, was well-received by critics and the public. He then made The River (1938), a study of the Mississippi River and Ohio River and the problems of flooding for the Farm Security Administration. Impressed by the film, Roosevelt created the U.S. Film Service with Lorentz as its head in 1938. His study on the impact of poverty on infant mortality, The Fight for Life, was made in 1940. However, congressional opposition to such work, viewed by some as New Deal propaganda, led to the cessation of funding.
After briefly but unsuccessfully working in Hollywood, during the war Lorentz served as a major in the Army Air Corps and made 200 briefing films. He was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1944. In 1946, he became head of the Film Section of the War Department’s Civil Affairs Division and in 1946 made The Nuremberg Trials. He resigned his position in 1947 and established his own production company but mainly worked as a consultant and film reviewer. Lorentz’s documentaries from the 1930s received several awards from the film industry, and in 1963 he was awarded a gold medal for The River by the secretary of agriculture. See also CINEMA.
LOS ANGELES RIOT, 1943. Like many cities during World War II, Los Angeles, California, experienced an enormous increase in population as workers flocked to the wartime aircraft industry and shipyards. The city saw a massive influx of Hispanic Americans and African Americans. Of the 2.8 million inhabitants in Los Angeles County in 1945, 250,000 were Mexican American, many recent arrivals. A total of 60,000 African Americans also entered the city in search of work. Some 50,000 service personnel from nearby bases and ports also entered the city on weekends. Tensions over jobs, housing, and recreational areas were inflamed by racial prejudices, and Mexican youths (pachucos), who demonstrated their rebellion by wearing “zoot suits” (baggy trousers tight at the ankle and long loose draped jackets), were often the target of attacks by white servicemen. In June, the conflict led to a series of violent clashes that turned into four days of rioting between 3 and 7 June, primarily white soldiers and sailors attacking Mexican Americans and some African Americans. Most of the 600 people arrested were, however, Mexican Americans. The fighting ended when the city was declared off-limits to servicemen. The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance banning “zoot suits.” See also DETROIT RACE RIOT; HARLEM RACE RIOT, 1943.
LOUIS, JOE (1914–1981). Born Joe Louis Barrow, the son of sharecroppers and grandson of slaves in Alabama in 1914, the future heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis was one of eight children. When Louis was about two, his father, Monroe Barrow, was committed to a state mental institution suffering from schizophrenia and his mother later re-married and the family moved to Detroit in 1926. Having dropped out of school Louis worked in a number of laboring jobs and began boxing in his early teens. He fought his first amateur fight in 1932. Having mistakenly omitted the name “Barrow” from his registration forms, he became known thereafter as Joe Louis. After winning 50 of his 54 contests, in 1933 he won the National American Athletic Union light heavyweight title. Before turning professional in 1934, Louis fought 58 amateur bouts, lost four, won 54, 43 of which were by knock out.
Carefully coached by his manager and trainer on how to behave as an African American competing in a sport dominated by whites, Louis successfully fought 18 opponents before meeting the former heavyweight champion, Primo Carnera, in 1935. Louis knocked the giant Italian out in the sixth round. He went on to fight and knock out three other contenders for the heavyweight title: King Levinsky, Paulino Uzcudun, and then another former heavyweight champion, Max Baer. His ferocious punches won Louis the nickname of “Brown Bomber.”
On 19 June 1936, Louis faced another former heavyweight champion, the German Max Schmeling. Perhaps underestimating his opponent, Louis did not train properly for the bout and was knocked out in the twelfth round. He made his comeback on August 18 when he knocked out Jack Starkey in the third round. After a number of relatively easy fights, he was matched against James Braddock (known as the “Cinderella Man” due to his come back) for the world heavyweight championship ahead of Schmeling in 1937 and on June 22, 1937 in front of a crowd of 45,000 at Comiskey Park, Chicago, he came back from an early knock down to k.o. Braddock in the eighth round and win the heavyweight title. At the age of 22, Louis became the youngest heavyweight champion in history. After fighting several defenses of his title, Louis finally got his rematch with Max Schmeling in 1938. The fight on 22 June 1938 assumed enormous significance as it was presented in terms of competing nations, ideologies, and races. Schmeling was portrayed as the representative of Nazi Germany while and Louis now symbolized liberal democracy and racial equality. Louis knocked out Schmeling within the first three minutes of round one.
Louis successfully defended his title in 14 fights—often against insignificant challengers—before he faced Billy Conn on June 18 1941. In what is regarded as one of the greatest fights of the twentieth century Louis knocked out Conn in the thirteenth round. The champion went on to defeat Buddy Baer in January 1942 and then gave most of his purse to the Navy Relief fund. Shortly afterward, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private. He fought several bouts while in the army, and again in 1942 donated his winnings to the Army Emergency Relief Fund as well as paying to provide seats for servicemen. Made sergeant in August 1942 and staff sergeant 1944, Louis’s role in the army was largely public relations, boosting morale by fighting exhibition bouts for service personnel. He also featured in war posters, army publications, and in a film This Is the Army, with future-president Ronald Reagan in 1943. In recognition of his patriotic work, Louis was awarded the Legion of Merit by the army in 1945.
Louis returned to the ring for an eagerly awaited rematch against Billy Conn on 19 June 1946. Before the fight, Conn indicated that he would outrun the champion, to which Louis replied with the famous remark, “He can run but he can’t hide.” Louis won with a knockout in the eighth. Faced with huge tax demands from the IRS, Louis continued to fight beyond his prime, but after successfully knocking out “Jersey” Joe Walcott in a rematch in 1948, he retired from the ring in 1949. His debts forced him to make a comeback in 1951, but after being beaten by Rocky Marciano in 1951, he retired once more. In defending his title over a 12-year period and winning 23 of the 27 contests with knockouts, Louis had secured his place as one of the greatest fighters of all time.
However, his career after retiring was to be one of slow decline. He found employment for a while in advertising, but as his tax liabilities increased Louis became a professional wrestler to earn more. He also performed briefly in a circus. He stopped wrestling due to injury in 1957 and subsequently became a “greeter” in Caesar’s Palace, Las Vegas. In later years, he became addicted to alcohol and drugs and was briefly hospitalized in 1970. In 1977, he suffered a massive heart attack and was subsequently confined to a wheelchair. He was supported through illness and declining years by show business friends, including Frank Sinatra. Following his death in 1981 Louis was buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., on the special instructions of President Ronald Reagan. Louis was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1982.
LOVETT, ROBERT ABERCROMBIE (1895–1986). Born in Texas, Robert Lovett was a graduate of Yale in 1918 and Harvard University in 1921. He began a career in banking as a clerk and eventually became a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Co., working with Averell Harriman. In 1940, Lovett became special assistant to secretary of war Henry L. Stimson and then was appointed assistant secretary of war. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal for his work by President Harry S. Truman in 1945. From 1946 to 1949, he became assistant secretary of state to General George C. Marshall and then turned deputy when Marshall became secretary of defense in 1950. In 1951, Lovett became secretary of defense and oversaw the mobilization during the Korean War until he left office in 1953. He declined a cabinet appointment in John F. Kennedy’s administration in 1961 but did act as a policy adviser. In 1963, Lovett was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work in government.
LUCE, CLARE BOOTHE (1903–1987). Born to a poor family, Clare Boothe Luce rose to be a successful journalist, editor, playwright, socialite, politician, and, after her first marriage failed, wife to the media magnate Henry R. Luce. After briefly working as an actor, from 1930 to 1934 she worked as an editor at the fashion magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair. She wrote a number of plays that became even more successful as films, including The Woman (1936), Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1938), and Margin of Error (1939). A later screenplay, Come to the Stable (1949), was nominated for an Academy Award.
From 1939 to 1940, Luce was a war correspondent in Europe for Life magazine. A Republican, she served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1943 to 1947. During Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration, she was the U.S. ambassador to Italy from 1953 to 1956 and to Brazil in 1959. Having failed to win party support for her candidacy for the U.S. Senate in 1964, Luce joined her husband in retirement. However, she sat on Ronald Reagan’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1981 until 1983. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983 in recognition of her achievements. See also CINEMA; LITERATURE AND THEATER.
LUCE, HENRY ROBINSON (1898–1967). The son of a missionary, Henry Luce was born in China. He was a student at Yale University and became a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army in 1918. He returned to college in 1919 and graduated in 1920. After a brief period of study at Oxford University, Luce returned to the United States where, with Briton Hadden, he established Time magazine in 1923. In 1930, Luce founded Fortune, a journal aimed at businessmen. Time, Inc. expanded and in 1935 began a documentary newsreel series, The March of Time. In 1936, Luce began production of Life, a magazine of photojournalism. Time and Life were enormously influential journals and had a huge circulation until they were undermined by the advent of television.
In an editorial entitled “The American Century” in Life in 1941, Luce argued that the United States should abandon isolationism and take a lead in rebuilding a peaceful world after an Allied victory. Luce supported the presidential campaign of Republican Wendell Willkie in 1940 and Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. After the war, Luce became increasingly conservative and was an advocate of strong resistance to perceived Soviet expansion. A major figure in the “China Lobby” in 1949, he blamed Harry S. Truman’s administration for the loss of China to the communists. He became an ardent supporter of Nationalist China (see TAIWAN). Luce later supported groups involved in attacks on Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and he approved of U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. In the 1950s, he launched House & Home and Sports Illustrated magazines. He retired in 1964.
LUDLOW AMENDMENT. First proposed by the Democratic congressman from Indiana, Louis Ludlow, in 1935, the Ludlow Amendment was reintroduced following the Panay incident in December 1937. The amendment called for a popular referendum before any declaration of war unless there was an attack on the United States or its possessions. The resolution was narrowly rejected by a vote of 209 to 188 on 10 January 1938.