MACARTHUR, DOUGLAS (1880–1964). Douglas MacArthur graduated first in his class from West Point in 1903. He was a member of the General Staff in France during World War I and successfully commanded the 42nd Rainbow Division. After the war, MacArthur became superintendent at West Point from 1919 to 1922. He became a major general in 1928 and commander of the Philippines Department in 1928. From 1930 to 1935, he was general and chief of staff of the U.S. Army. In 1932, he led the troops who forcibly ejected the Bonus Army from Washington, D.C. MacArthur was director of organization of national defense for the Philippines from 1935 until 1937, when he retired. Recalled to active service in 1941 as a lieutenant general, he was placed in command of the U.S. Forces in the Far East. He was forced to flee the Philippines following the Japanese invasion in 1941 but announced “I shall return.”
MacArthur was made supreme commander of the Allied forces in the southwest Pacific in 1942. As promised, he led the forces in the “island hopping” campaign, bypassing major Japanese strongholds to retake the Philippines in 1944. MacArthur was made a general of the army in December 1944. He received the Japanese surrender in Tokyo in September 1945 and became supreme commander for the Allied powers in Japan and was effectively ruler of the country until 1951. In 1950, MacArthur became commander of the United Nations forces that responded to the attack of North Korea upon the South in what became the Korean War. When Chinese forces became involved, MacArthur called for all-out war and the use of atomic weapons. He was dismissed in 1951 because of his differences with President Harry S. Truman about atomic weapons and other issues but returned to the United States as a public hero. He made an emotional address to Congress on April 19, 1951, in which he said “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” He clearly had presidential ambitions, but after playing a key role at the Republican National Convention in 1952, he failed to get the nomination and faded from the political scene. His book, Reminiscences, was published in 1964.
MACLEISH, ARCHIBALD (1892–1982). Born to a wealthy family in Glencoe, Illinois, poet Archibald MacLeish was educated at Hotchkiss Preparatory School. He graduated from Yale University in 1915 and entered Harvard Law School. His first poetry was published as Tower of Ivory in 1917. His studies were interrupted by the war, and he served in the artillery, seeing action on the Marne. After World War I, MacLeish returned to Harvard and graduated in 1919. After working as a lawyer in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1923 he left for France and did not return to the United States until 1929. He published a number of poems, including “Ars Poetica” (1926) and the collections Pot of Earth (1925) and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928). From 1929 to 1938, MacLeish wrote for Henry R. Luce’s Fortune magazine. He wrote a number of successful plays, including Panic (1935), Fall of the City (1937), and Air Raid (1938), and produced a collection of photographs, Land of the Free (1938). His major achievements were the long poems, “Conquistador” (1932), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933, and his defense of democracy in “America Was Promises” (1939).
A strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, MacLeish was appointed to head the Library of Congress in 1939. He held the position for five years, and while also writing speeches for Roosevelt, he became head of the Office of Facts and Figures in 1941 and then assistant director of the Office of War Information from 1942 to 1943. In 1945, MacLeish was a delegate to the first meetings of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization.
After the war, MacLeish returned to poetry with Act Five and Other Poems (1948). He became professor of rhetoric at Harvard in 1949, a position he held until 1962, and in 1952 he won his second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Collected Poems, 1917–1952. He became president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1953. His play, J. B., won a third Pulitzer Prize in 1955. He continued to write poetry until his death, but he is remembered primarily as a writer of the 1930s. See also LITERATURE AND THEATER.
MAILER, NORMAN KINGSLEY (1923–2007). Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and brought up in Brooklyn, New York, Norman Mailer graduated with a B.S. from Harvard in 1943 and was drafted into the army during World War II. The experience he gained during the war in the Philippines provided the basis for his best-selling novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which established him as one of the leading postwar literary figures. He also developed a reputation for his outspoken and often outrageous celebration of pugnacious masculinity, reminiscent in some respects of Ernest Hemingway. Having failed to have his best seller made into a movie, Mailer next produced Barbary Shore (1951), a novel of Cold War politics and the film world.
He was a cofounder of the journal The Village Voice in 1955 and became one of the proponents of the “new journalism.” Among his work is a collection of essays, Advertisements for Myself (1959); a nonfiction study of the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, Armies of the Night (1968), which won him the Pulitzer Prize; and another nonfiction work, The Executioner’s Song (1979), which also won a Pulitzer. Mailer wrote a total of 39 books, including 11 novels. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest (2007), is a fictional account of Adolf Hitler’s childhood. See also LITERATURE AND THEATER.
MANHATTAN PROJECT. The Manhattan Project was the name given to the scheme to develop the atomic bomb in the United States during World War II. Initiated under the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1942, direction was placed in the hands of General Leslie R. Groves, and the project got its name from the location of the headquarters of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New York, where the top-secret endeavor was based. The development of the bomb cost more than $2 billion, and research was carried out by more than 600,000 scientists and technicians working in different locations, including Hanford, Washington; Stagg Field, Chicago; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. However, the main development of the bomb, under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer, centered in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The first successful test was conducted at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945, and the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August 1945.
MAO ZEDONG (MAO TSE-TUNG) (1893–1976). Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong was born into a peasant background and trained as a teacher. He helped establish the Chinese Communist Party in 1921 and led an uprising against the national government led by Chiang Kai-shek in 1927 and established the Soviet Republic of China. When his forces were surrounded in 1934, he led them on the “Long March” more than 6,000 miles from southeast China to the north, where they were able to regroup. When war began with Japan in 1937, the communists united with the national government against their common enemy in an uneasy alliance. After the Japanese were defeated, fighting with the nationalists resumed, and Mao was victorious in 1949, establishing the People’s Republic of China. Mao, known as Chairman Mao, was ruler of China until his death, taking the country through both the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1962 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966. Although a long-term opponent of the United States, in 1971 Mao invited President Richard M. Nixon to visit the following year and paved the way toward opening relations between the two nations.
MARCH ON WASHINGTON MOVEMENT (MOWM). In January 1941, black trade union leader A. Philip Randolph called upon African Americans to march on Washington on 1 July in protest against the continued discrimination against them in the armed forces and defense industries. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration failed to respond, other civil rights organizations, including the National Association for Advancement of Colored People, joined with Randolph to form MOWM. Faced with the threat of a protest numbering 10,000 or more, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on 27 June 1941 ordering an end to discrimination in defense industries and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee to investigate breaches of the order. MOWM held a series of rallies in New York City, Chicago, and St. Louis in 1942 but gradually declined in influence during World War II. It had, however, established an important precedent that was to be replicated in 1963.
MARSHALL, GEORGE CATLETT (1880–1959). Born in Union-town, Pennsylvania, George Marshall was a graduate of Virginia Military Institute. He was commissioned in 1902 and served in the Philippines and then in the American Expeditionary Force during World War I helping plan several major offensives. After the war, he was aide-de-camp to General John J. Pershing, served in China, and was head of Fort Benning Infantry School in Georgia. Marshall was appointed army chief of staff in 1929 and served throughout World War II as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s chief advisor. He was made a general of the army in December 1944 and oversaw the wartime expansion of the army before retiring in 1945. In November 1945, he was sent to China as ambassador in an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the conflict between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong.
In 1947, President Harry S. Truman appointed Marshall secretary of state, and he played a major role in the early Cold War, initiating the European Recovery Program, or Marshall Plan, to encourage economic recovery as a way of combating communism. He was secretary of defense from 1950 to 1951 and was involved in the dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. Marshall retired in 1951 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.
MARSHALL, THURGOOD (1908–1993). The first African American to serve as a Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall was born Thoroughgood in Baltimore, Maryland. He shortened his name at an early age. He graduated from Lincoln University in 1930. Denied entrance to the University of Maryland Law School because he was African American, Marshall went instead to Howard University Law School in Washington, D.C., where he graduated in 1933. At Howard, he was to be strongly influenced by Charles H. Houston, who he succeeded as chief counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1939. Marshall had already won a case in Baltimore (Murray v. Pearson) in 1936 that challenged segregation in the university system in Maryland. As NAACP counsel, he successfully led a long-term attack on segregation devised by Hamilton when he argued the cases Smith v. Allwright (1944), Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), Sweatt v. Painter (1950), and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), culminating with Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). Marshall also helped draft the constitutions of the newly independent states of Ghana and Tanzania.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the U.S. Court of Appeals, and in 1965 President Lyndon Johnson made him the first African American solicitor general. Two years later he was appointed to the Supreme Court, where he took a firm liberal position supporting abortion rights, opposing the death penalty, and supporting individual civil liberties. He retired in 1991.
MARSHALL PLAN. See EUROPEAN RECOVERY PROGRAM (ERP).
MARTIN, JOSEPH WILLIAM (1884–1968). Born in Massachusetts, Joseph Martin began working as a newspaper reporter after leaving high school. He became the owner of a small-town paper in 1908 and an insurance agency in 1918. A Republican, Martin served in the Massachusetts house of representatives from 1911 to 1914 and in the senate from 1915 to 1917. He was executive secretary of the State Republican Committee from 1922 to 1925 and was elected to the federal House of Representatives in 1924, serving from 1925 until 1967. By 1939, Martin was house minority leader, and as an opponent of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, he helped establish the coalition with conservative Democrats. Roosevelt included him with Bruce Barton and Hamilton Fish in the critical mantra “Barton, Martin, and Fish” during the 1940 election campaign. Following the Republican victories in 1946, Martin became speaker of the house in 1947. He supported the Taft-Hartley Act, the National Security Act, and the Marshall Plan. He continued as minority leader in 1949 and became speaker once more from 1953 to 1955. He lost his place as minority leader in 1959 and failed to regain the nomination in the 1966 election.
MARX BROTHERS. The comedy team the Marx brothers, born to German Jewish immigrants in New York City, consisted of Chico (Leonard, 1887–1961), Harpo (Adolph/Arthur, 1888–1964), Groucho (Julius Henry, 1890–1977), Gummo (Milton, 1892–1977), and Zeppo (Herbert, 1901–1979). They began appearing in vaudeville from 1905 onward, originally as the musical act “The Three (or Four) Nightingales,” but in 1912 they switched to comedy with a peculiar brand of slapstick and verbal humor. During World War I, they became “The Four Marx Brothers,” and by the mid-1920s had established themselves as one of the country’s funniest routines. Their Broadway shows, Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers, were made into films by Paramount Studios in 1929 and 1930. The shows followed by Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933), when they left Paramount and made A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937) with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). By this time, Gummo and Zeppo left to take up management. After Room Service, made for RKO in 1938, the Marx Brothers returned to MGM to make At the Circus (1939) and The Big Store (1941). They retired briefly but returned to show business to make A Night in Casablanca (1946) and Love Happy (1949) with United Artists. Afterward, the brothers went their separate ways and entered radio and theatrical management. Groucho had a very successful career hosting a quiz show on radio, You Bet Your Life, and then on television from 1947 to 1961. Several of the Marx Brothers’ films are now regarded as classics of zany humor, rich with puns and ad-libs drawing upon the American immigrant background. See also CINEMA.
MCCARRAN, PATRICK (PAT) ANTHONY (1876–1954). Born the son of Irish immigrants in Reno, Nevada, Patrick (“Pat”) McCarran attended the University of Nevada but did not complete his studies. He subsequently studied law part-time while farming and was admitted to the bar 1905. McCarran was elected to the Nevada state legislature as a Democrat in 1902 and was elected to the Nevada Supreme Court in 1913, where he served until 1918. He failed to win election to the U.S. Senate in 1916 and 1926 but was successful in 1932. He became increasingly conservative and opposed the National Recovery Administration, Tennessee Valley Authority, and National Youth Administration and the attempted “court packing” in 1937. Nonetheless, he was reelected three times and served until his death.
After World War II, McCarran was an outspoken critic of Harry S. Truman’s administration, and as a member of the “China lobby” he accused the president of selling out to the communists. In 1950, he cosponsored the Internal Security Act that contributed to the repressive atmosphere generated by Joseph McCarthy, and as chair of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, he was responsible for the attack on Owen Lattimore. He also supported the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that maintained ethnic and racial quotas and incorporated stronger clauses for the exclusion and deportation of “dangerous aliens.”
MCCARRAN-WALTER ACT. See IMMIGRATION AND NATIONALITY ACT.
MCCARRAN-WOOD ACT. See INTERNAL SECURITY ACT.
MCCARTHY, JOSEPH RAYMOND (1908–1957). Born on a farm near Appleton, Wisconsin, McCarthy left school at the age of 14 to raise poultry. When the business failed, he returned to high school, crammed four years of work into two terms, and entered Marquette University in Milwaukee. He gained a law degree in 1935 and established a legal practice in Wisconsin, but in 1937 he won election as a circuit judge. His victory was achieved partially by questioning the incumbent’s good name, a tactic that was to become a hallmark of his later political career.
The youngest judge in Wisconsin, McCarthy gained a reputation for efficiency by dealing with business speedily and providing “quickie divorces.” Although exempt from the draft as a judge, McCarthy enlisted in the marines in 1942 and spent World War II as an intelligence officer in the Pacific. He claimed to have suffered wounds as a “tail gunner” when his plane crash-landed under Japanese fire, but his only injury was a broken leg from falling onboard a ship. McCarthy also exaggerated the number of bombing missions he flew in. In 1946, he defeated incumbent Robert M. La Follette Jr. in the Republican senatorial primary election and then won the election.
McCarthy’s early career in the U.S. Senate was undistinguished. He was nicknamed “Pepsi Cola Kid” for efforts on behalf of the soft drink company. In need of an issue with which to gain attention, he decided on the threat posed by communists. On 7 February 1950, in a speech to a Republican women’s group in Wheeling, West Virginia, McCarthy announced that he had a list of names of known communists working in the State Department. The original number he gave was 205, but it later became 87. Elements of his speech came from an earlier speech by Richard M. Nixon, and the figures were based on government figures following the implementation of the Federal Loyalty Program. McCarthy was also given information by J. Edgar Hoover. He subsequently named Asian scholar Owen Lattimore as a “top Russian agent” but failed to produce a shred of evidence. McCarthy’s charges were dismissed by a Senate investigation headed by Millard Tydings as a “fraud and a hoax,” but it made little difference. The revelations in the Alger Hiss case gave McCarthy’s claims substance, while both the Soviet atomic bomb test and the “loss” of China to communism in 1949 smacked to many people of betrayal. The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 also added weight to his views. Fellow Republicans were also happy to benefit from his attacks on the Truman administration as he denounced Dean Acheson for complicity in communist victories and accused General George C. Marshall of being “soft on communism.”
Reelected in 1952, McCarthy became chair of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, and aided by his chief counsel, Roy Cohn, he held hearings in 1953 investigating several branches of government ranging from the Printing Office to the Foreign Service. However, in the fall of 1953, he began investigating the army, and his charges led to televised Senate hearings in 1954. In front of millions of viewers, McCarthy was revealed as a blustering bully by army counsel Joseph Welch. A documentary by respected television commentator Edward R. Murrow further discredited McCarthy. On 2 December 1954, the Senate passed a vote of censure against him for bringing the chamber “into dishonor and disrepute.” McCarthy quickly faded from the public eye and died an alcoholic. McCarthyism, however, had had an enormous impact, and its effects lingered for some time. See also FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION (FBI); HOUSE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES COMMITTEE (HUAC).
“MCCARTHYISM.” “McCarthyism” was the name given to campaigns led by the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy to root out communist sympathizers and agents in government, particularly the State Department. Although McCarthyism proper began with his infamous speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, in February 1950, in which he declared he had a list of names of known communist agents working in the State Department, the anticommunist hysteria had already begun in 1947 with the hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee in Hollywood, California, and in the case of Alger Hiss. McCarthyism provided easy answers to such questions as why America “lost” China to the communists and how the Soviet Union was able to develop its own atomic bomb. The mood was sustained by the outbreak of the Korean War and McCarthy’s own adept use of the media. The McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950 was intended to identify subversives, and McCarran’s investigation of people like John Stewart Service in 1951 also was aimed at identifying “loyalty risks.” The publication of Red Channels (1950) and the blacklisting of people named as communist sympathizers, ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Aaron Copland to Edward G. Robinson to Orson Welles merely added to the hysteria. However, the army hearings in which McCarthy was exposed before huge television audiences and the conclusion of the Korean War brought an end to the more extreme aspects of what many described as a “witch hunt”—the inspiration for Arthur Miller’s play about the Salem witch hunts, The Crucible in 1953. See also BLACKLIST; CINEMA; FEDERAL LOYALTY PROGRAM; HOLLYWOOD TEN; LATTIMORE, OWEN.
MCCLOY, JOHN JAY (1895–1989). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, John McCloy graduated from Amherst College in 1919 and Harvard Law School in 1921. He became a successful corporation lawyer and was counsel for Schechter Poultry Corp. in Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States in 1935. He also traveled widely in Europe and acted as legal counsel for the German company I. G. Farben in the 1930s. He shared a box with Adolf Hitler and Herman Goering at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. From 1941 to 1945, McCloy was assistant secretary of war, where he worked with Robert Lovett. He was involved in a number of controversial decisions, supporting the internment of Japanese Americans and ruling out the bombing of railway lines and gas chambers in and around concentration camps. After the war, he became president of the World Bank from 1947 to 1949 and from 1949 to 1952 was the U.S. commissioner for Germany. He was implicated in protecting wanted Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and then criticized for reducing the sentences of jailed Nazis, including the arms manufacturer Alfred Krupp. McCloy was chair of Chase Manhattan Bank from 1953 to 1960, the Ford Foundation from 1958 to 1965, and the Council for Foreign Relations from 1954 to 1970. He acted as an adviser to presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan.
MCGRANERY, JAMES PATRICK (1895–1962). Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, James McGranery left school early and worked in the printing business before serving in the army during World War I. After the war, he went to Temple University Law School and graduated in 1928. After practicing law, McGranery, a Democrat, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1936 and held his seat for Pennsylvania until 1943, when he became assistant U.S. attorney general. In 1946, he was appointed federal judge in the Eastern Division of Pennsylvania. In 1952, McGranery was appointed to succeed J. Howard McGrath as attorney general, and he began the process of reviving the Justice Department before being replaced following the Republican election victory. He practiced law in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., until his death.
MCGRATH, J. (JAMES) HOWARD (1903–1966). Born in Rhode Island and a graduate of Providence College in 1926 and Boston University in 1929, J. Howard McGrath passed the bar and practiced law in Rhode Island, where he became city solicitor in Central Falls. A Democrat, McGrath was U.S. attorney general for Rhode Island from 1935 to 1940 and was elected governor in 1940. He was reelected in 1942 and 1944, was U.S. solicitor general from 1945 to 1946, and was elected to the U.S. Senate for Rhode Island in 1946. From 1947 to 1949, he was chair of the Democratic National Committee. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman appointed him U.S. attorney general, but his undistinguished leadership and failure to deal with issues of corruption and general incompetence led to his forced resignation in 1952. He subsequently practiced law and made an unsuccessful attempt to be reelected to the Senate in 1960.
MCLAURIN V. OKLAHOMA STATE REGENTS (339 U.S. 637 1950). George W. McLaurin was an African American student initially denied admission to the all-white University of Oklahoma but later admitted to study for his Ph.D. in education after suing to gain admission in 1948. He was kept segregated in classrooms, the library, and the cafeteria and filed another lawsuit claiming that he was denied his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. His case was upheld by the Supreme Court on 5 June 1950. See also MISSOURI EX REL. GAINES V. CANADA; SIPUEL V. OKLAHOMA BOARD OF REGENTS; SWEATT V. PAINTER.
MCNUTT, PAUL VORIES (1891–1955). Paul McNutt was born in Franklin, Indiana, and studied at Indian University and later Harvard Law School in 1913. He gained his law degree in 1916. During World War I, McNutt entered the army and served in the artillery in the United States. After the war, he became a member of the Indiana University Law School. A Democrat, McNutt was elected state governor in 1932. He introduced a series of reforms, including income tax, welfare reform, and state pensions. However, he was criticized because state employees were required to donate 2 percent of their wages to the Democratic Club, and he also sanctioned the use of state troops during labor disputes.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed McNutt high commissioner to the Philippines in 1937. He resigned in 1939 and became director of the Federal Security Agency. McNutt considered running for the presidential and then vice presidential nomination in 1940 but decided to remain at the agency and then became chair of the War Manpower Commission. After the war, he returned to the Philippines as high commissioner, where he helped see through the transition to independence. He then became ambassador to the country until 1947, when he returned to legal practice for eight years.
MCREYNOLDS, JAMES CLARK (1862–1946). James McReynolds graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1882 and the University of Virginia Law School in 1884. He established a law practice in Nashville, Tennessee, where he became a leading member of the legal, political, and social establishment. In 1903, McReynolds was hired by the Justice Department and was the chief prosecutor of the American Tobacco Trust. He resigned in 1911 but in 1913 was appointed attorney general by President Woodrow Wilson. He was again responsible for filing several major antitrust suits. In 1914, Wilson nominated McReynolds to serve on the Supreme Court. McReynolds did not play a particularly significant role on the court until the 1930s when he became a persistent critic of Franklin D. Roosevelt and an opponent of the extension of federal power under the New Deal. He spoke out angrily against the president following the attempted “court packing” in 1937 but increasingly found himself in a minority as the nature of the court changed. Critics regarded McReynolds as one of the worst and most conservative justices to serve on the court. In 1941, he retired in despair following Roosevelt’s third election victory.
MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE, 1937. During the steel strike of 1937 organized by the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee, some 300 pickets outside Republic Steel Corporation in South Chicago, Indiana, were fired on by police and company guards. A total of 10 strikers were killed and more than 100 were injured, and 22 policemen were also hurt. Many of those killed were shot in the back as they attempted to flee the violence. The incident did much to win public sympathy for the strikers and further added to the discreditability of businessmen. See also CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (CIO); TRADE UNIONS.
MERCER, LUCY PAGE (1891–1948). Lucy Mercer was born in Washington, D.C., and had returned from a convent school in Austria when she became Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal secretary in 1914. In 1918, Eleanor discovered that Franklin D. Roosevelt was having an affair with Mercer. They agreed to maintain their marriage rather than divorce, and FDR agreed not see Mercer again. Mercer married Winthrop Rutherford in 1920. However, it seems likely that the relationship with FDR did continue, and after Rutherford’s death in 1944, the president began to see Mercer once more. She was with him when he died.
MERCHANT MARINE ACT, 1936. The Merchant Marine Act of 29 June 1936 was intended to further national defense by providing for the development of an adequate and well-balanced merchant marine and granting federal funding to enable the building or chartering of vessels, provide subsidies for ship owners, and establish a training program for merchant seamen. A U.S. Merchant Marine Cadet Corps, which led to the Merchant Marine Academy in 1938, was established.
MERRIAM, CHARLES EDWARD (1874–1953). Political scientist Charles Merriam was born in Iowa. He earned his first degree from Lenox College in Hopkinton, Iowa, and then taught for a year, studied law at the State University of Iowa, and went to Columbia University, where he completed his M.A. in 1897 and his Ph.D. in 1900. Beginning in 1900 Merriam taught at the University of Chicago. He was active in Chicago’s reform politics and was elected as Republican alderman to the city council in 1909 and served until 1917. Merriam ran for mayor in 1911 as a progressive Republican but was narrowly defeated. With Harold Ickes, he established the Illinois Progressive Party and backed first Robert M. La Follette Sr. and then Theodore Roosevelt.
Merriam worked as an examiner for the Chicago Aviation Board and later the Committee of Public Information during World War I. In 1918, he acted as a high commissioner of information in Rome. In the 1920s, Merriam built the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago into one of the leading schools of its kind. In 1923, he was one of the founders of the Social Science Research Council, and in 1925 he was elected president of the American Political Science Association. From 1929 to 1933, Merriam served on President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, which issued its report in 1933.
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Merriam to the National Planning Board (later the National Resources Planning Board) established under the National Industrial Recovery Act, and he remained one of the team of planners throughout the New Deal. He argued for reorganization of the executive branch and from 1936 to 1937 served on the President’s Committee on Administrative Management that brought about restructuring in the Reorganization Act of 1939. Merriam continued to serve on the National Planning Board until it was abolished in 1943. His many publications include American Political Ideas (1920), The American Political System (1922), and New Aspects of Politics (1925), and in his roles in government he provided an important link between academia and public policy.
MIDWAY ISLANDS. The Midway Islands, in the north Pacific northwest of Hawaii, were the scene of the crucial naval battle between the United States and Japan during World War II. Lasting from 4 June to 7 June 1942 and coming a month after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the battle was a major victory for the U.S. Navy, as the Japanese lost four aircraft carriers and a heavy cruiser in addition to countless aircraft, while the United States lost only one carrier. From this point onward, the U.S. fleet was at least equal in strength to the Japanese and after the battle could take the offensive.
MILLER, (ALTON) GLENN (1904–1944). Born in Clarinda, Iowa, Glenn Miller learned to play the trombone at school, and after two years at the University of Colorado, he left in 1924 to join a band. After playing with a variety of different bands, he organized his own band in 1937. When this failed, Miller formed a second band in 1938 that began to achieve national success with weekly radio broadcasts and appearances in films. Their hit songs include “In the Mood,” “Tuxedo Junction,” “Pennsylvania 6-500,” “Little Brown Jug,” “Moonlight Serenade,” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” In 1942 the band broke up to contribute to the war effort, and Miller joined the Army Air Corps, where he formed a band to entertain the troops. In June 1944, the band went to England, where they performed and were broadcast on the Armed Forces Network. In December 1944, a plane carrying Miller to France disappeared without trace in bad weather and was assumed to have crashed at sea. The film The Glenn Miller Story, starring James Stewart, was a popular success in 1953. See also MUSIC.
MILLER, ARTHUR ASHER (1915–2005). Playwright Arthur Miller was born to German Jewish parents in New York City. He graduated from high school in 1933 and attended University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he abandoned the study of journalism for English literature. He wrote his first play, No Villain, in 1936, and his second, Honors at Dawn, in 1937 while still a student. Both were awarded prizes. Miller graduated in 1938 and joined the Federal Theater Project. When the project was halted by Congress, Miller found work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and continued writing plays. His first Broadway play was The Man Who Had All the Luck in 1944, but it soon closed. In 1947, he produced the award-winning All My Sons, which was very successful. He built his own studio in Roxbury, Connecticut, and it was there that Death of a Salesman was first performed in 1949. With Lee J. Cobb playing the role of Willie Loman, the play became an instant classic and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
In 1953, Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about the Salem witchcraft trials in the 17th century but that was clearly relevant to the United States during the period of McCarthyism. Miller was himself denied a passport in 1954, and following his marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956, he was called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller refused to name names and was fined and jailed for contempt of Congress. The conviction was overturned in 1958. In 1964, Miller produced After the Fall, based on the life of Monroe. They were divorced in 1961, and Monroe committed suicide in 1962. His most successful play after Death of a Salesman was The Price in 1968. His autobiography, Time Bends, was also well-received. See also LITERATURE AND THEATER.
MILLER, DORIE (1919–1943). Born in Waco, Texas, the son of black sharecroppers, Dorie Miller joined the navy as a mess attendant—one of the few positions in the navy open to African Americans at the time—in 1939. He was aboard the battleship USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked on 7 December 1941. Miller carried his wounded captain to safety and then, although not trained, manned a gun, which he kept firing until ordered to stop. When the black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, heard the story in March 1942, it began to press for Miller to be awarded the Medal of Honor. Despite public and congressional support, the request was denied by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. However, President Franklin D. Roosevelt intervened, and he was awarded the Navy Cross. After spending some time in public relations for the navy, Miller returned to active service at sea. He was among the crew of the escort carrier Liscombe Bay lost when the ship was sunk in the Battle of Makin on 24 November 1943.
MILLER-TYDINGS ACT, 1937. Passed after the National Recovery Administration was been declared unconstitutional, the Miller-Tydings Act legalized price-maintenance agreements between manufacturers and retailers as a way of curbing competition and stabilizing prices where state fair trade laws existed. In 1951, the Supreme Court declared all such state laws unconstitutional.
MINTON, SHERMAN (1890–1965). Born in Georgetown, Indiana, Sherman Minton graduated from Indiana University in 1915 and Yale Law School in 1916 and established a law practice in Albany, Indiana. He served in the infantry in France during World War I and afterward returned to Albany. In 1933, he joined the Indiana Public Service Commission and in 1934 was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. Senate. A supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Minton backed the president during the “court packing” controversy. He also supported Roosevelt’s foreign policy initiatives. As a result he was defeated in the elections of 1940 and in 1941 was appointed to the Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman appointed Minton to the Supreme Court following the death of Justice Wiley B. Rutledge. Minton did not prove as liberal a justice as had been anticipated. He generally voted to uphold federal initiatives like the Federal Loyalty Program and elected to sustain the convictions in Dennis v. United States in 1951. He also supported the administration in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer in 1952. Minton did, however, back measures against racial discrimination in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948, Sweatt v. Painter in 1950, and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka declaring segregation in schools unconstitutional in 1954. He retired due to ill-health in 1956.
MISSOURI EX REL. GAINES V. CANADA (305 U.S. 337, 1938). The state of Missouri provided separate educational facilities for white and black Americans. However, it did not have a separate law school. When an African American Lloyd Gaines applied for entry to the Missouri Law School in 1936, he was denied. Gaines sued the school (Canada was the name of the registrar), and on 12 December 1938 the Supreme Court ruled six to two that he had been denied his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and that the state had to provide equal in-state education. See also MCLAURIN V. OKLAHOMA STATE REGENTS; MORGAN V. COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA; SIPUEL V. OKLAHOMA BOARD OF REGENTS; SWEATT V. PAINTER.
MITCHELL, ARTHUR WERGS (1883–1968). Born in Lafayette, Alabama, Arthur Mitchell worked his way through Tuskegee Institute and qualified as a teacher. He established Armstrong Agricultural School in West Butler, Alabama, in 1908 and served in the infantry during World War I. He studied briefly at Columbia University and was admitted to the bar. He began to practice law in Washington, D.C., in 1927 but moved to Chicago in 1929. A lifelong Republican, Mitchell switched to the Democratic Party and in 1935 became the first African American Democratic congressman when, supported by Mayor Edward Kelly, he defeated Oscar De Priest. His most notable action came in 1937 after he was forced to give up a first-class seat in a train crossing into Arkansas and move to the segregated “Jim Crow” car. In 1941, Mitchell took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that he had been denied equal treatment. A number of rail companies abandoned segregation for first-class customers, but segregated coaches remained for other passengers until 1956. After he chose not to stand for reelection in 1942, Mitchell was succeeded by William L. Dawson.
MITCHELL, MARGARET MUNNERLY (1900–1949). Author Margaret Mitchell was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She attended Smith College in 1918 but left the following year after the death of her mother. From 1922 to 1926, Mitchell wrote for the Atlanta Journal Sunday magazine. In 1936, she wrote the romantic epic novel of the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Gone with the Wind. An enormous best seller, the book won her the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. The 1939 film based on the book produced by David O. Selznick and starring English actress Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler won eight Oscars. Before she had the opportunity to publish more, Mitchell was struck and killed by an automobile in Atlanta. See also CINEMA; LITERATURE AND THEATER.
MITCHELL, WESLEY CLAIR (1874–1948). After obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1899, Wesley Mitchell taught at the University of California, Columbia University, and the New School for Social Research. During World War I, he served as head of the Price Section of the War Industries Board. Mitchell founded the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1920 to undertake quantitative studies of the U.S. business cycle. He published a number of key texts, including two works entitled Business Cycles (1913, 1927). In 1921, he took part in the President’s Unemployment Conference. He succeeded Charles Merriam as chair of the Social Science Research Council in 1927, led the group that produced the president’s Report on Recent Economic Changes (1929), and chaired President Herbert Hoover’s Research Committee on Social Trends, which reported in 1933. That year Mitchell was appointed to the National Planning Board created to serve the Public Works Administration. He resigned in 1935 to concentrate on his work with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was the author of several books, including Business Cycles (1913); The Art of Spending Money (1927); and with Arthur Burns, Reassessing Business Cycles (1946). Mitchell was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1938 and the Academy of Political Science from 1940 to 1941. Alongside Merriam, he showed the element of continuity in thinking about planning between World War I and the New Deal.
MOLEY, RAYMOND (1886–1975). Raymond Moley was born in Ohio, and after graduating from Baldwin-Wallace College in 1906, he became superintendent of schools in Olmstead Falls, Ohio. After gaining a master’s degree from Oberlin College in 1913, Moley taught at Western Reserve University from 1916 to 1919. He was awarded a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1918, and he taught government there beginning in 1923 and then public law from 1928 to 1954. He wrote a number of books, including Lessons in American Citizenship (1917), The State Movement for Efficiency and Economy (1918), and Parties, Politics, and People (1921). His work as research director of the New York State Crime Commission in 1926 and 1927 and for the New York State Commission on the Administration of Justice from 1931 to 1933 brought him to the attention of Samuel I. Rosenman, who asked him to form the group of advisers in 1932 that became known as the “Brain Trust” in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Moley was made assistant secretary of state in 1933.
Moley made a significant contribution to the New Deal as a presidential speechwriter, shaping early legislation, bringing talented individuals into the administration, and acting as a publicist for the New Deal through his role as editor of the magazine Today. However, Moley’s relationship with the president deteriorated after Roosevelt undermined the commitments he made at the London Economic Conference on currency stabilization. Furthermore, he disagreed with the Wealth Tax Act of 1935 and the apparent shift to the left in the “Second New Deal.” Critical of the attempt at “court packing” in 1937, Moley joined the Republican Party and campaigned on behalf of Wendell Willkie in 1940. He then returned to Columbia University and wrote several more books on government and politics.
MORGAN, ARTHUR ERNEST (1878–1975). Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Arthur Morgan was raised in Minnesota. After leaving high school, he learned engineering from his father and became head of a successful engineering company by 1915. He became a specialist in flood control and advised state governments on drainage and irrigation projects. From 1920 to 1936, Morgan was president of Antioch College, although he was on leave for the last three years there after being appointed chair of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, conflicts with other directors of the TVA, particularly Harcourt Morgan and David E. Lilienthal, led Morgan to publicly criticize the TVA for not doing enough in terms of regional planning. In 1938, he was fired and replaced by Harcourt Morgan. Arthur Morgan subsequently became president of Community Service, Inc., and of a housing corporation in Ohio. In 1950, he served as temporary chair of the Conciliation and Arbitration Board for U.S. Steel and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Morgan also wrote several books, including The Small Community (1942), Small Community Economics (1945), Edward Bellamy (1945), The Community of the Future (1956), and The Making of the TVA (1974).
MORGAN V. COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA (328 U.S. 373 1946). In 1946, an African American woman, Irene Morgan, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat and move to the segregated area on a bus traveling from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. She was fined for failing to obey the segregation laws, which she denied, and for resisting arrest, to which she pleaded guilty. Backed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the association’s lawyer, Thurgood Marshall, Morgan appealed the issue of segregation on the grounds that her journey involved interstate travel. The Supreme Court ruled by 7–1 in her favor on the grounds that no state law “can reach beyond its border” and therefore that segregation in interstate transportation was unconstitutional. In 1947, 16 members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) rode into the South on buses on a “journey of reconciliation” to test the law. Twelve of them were arrested, although in most cases no charges were brought against them and little attention was given to the events. However, in 1961 CORE launched “Freedom Rides” into the South that received national and international coverage and challenged the persistence of segregation in interstate transportation. See also MCLAURIN V. OKLAHOMA STATE REGENTS; MISSOURI EX REL. GAINES V. CANADA; SIPUEL V. OKLAHOMA BOARD OF REGENTS; SWEATT V. PAINTER.
MORGENTHAU, HENRY, JR. (1891–1967). Henry Morgenthau was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York City and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Sachs Collegiate Institute, and Cornell University, but he left the university after three years in 1913 without graduating. During World War I, Morgenthau worked in the Food Administration. Having studied agriculture and purchased farmland in New York, from 1922 onward he published the farm journal American Agriculturalist. A personal friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Morgenthau was appointed chair of the New York Agricultural Advisory Commission in 1928 and commissioner on conservation in 1930. When Roosevelt became president, Morgenthau became chair of the Federal Farm Board (which had been created in 1929) and helped create the Farm Credit Administration. At the start of 1934 he became secretary of the treasury, a post he held until 1945.
As secretary of the treasury, Morgenthau defended the dollar by buying and selling foreign currencies, gold, and dollars. In this way, he helped establish the dollar as the strongest currency by 1938. Although a fiscal conservative, he accepted deficit spending and managed by a double-budget system, a normal budget and emergency budget that provided for various New Deal agencies. During World War II, he worked to finance the war effort through the sale of war bonds that raised more than $200 billion. Morgenthau was also involved in planning for the postwar settlement. He proposed, in what became known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” that Germany be stripped of industrial resources and turned solely into an agricultural producer, a plan that was never adopted. Morgenthau resigned shortly after Roosevelt’s death and devoted himself to fundraising for Jewish causes. He became chair of the United Jewish Appeal from 1947 to 1950 and chair of the American Financial and Development Corporation for Israel from 1951 to 1954.
MOSCOW CONFERENCE, 1943. The Moscow Conference was a meeting of the foreign ministers of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union in 1943 where it was agreed that an international organization should be established to maintain peace in the postwar world. Attended by Cordell Hull, the conference also secured Joseph Stalin’s agreement to enter the war against Japan once the Nazis were defeated in Europe.
MUNDT, KARL EARL (1900–1974). Karl Mundt was born in South Dakota. He obtained a B.A. from Carleton College in 1923 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1927. After several years as a teacher, he joined his father in the family loan and investment company from 1927 to 1936. A Republican, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for South Dakota in 1938. A firm isolationist, Mundt opposed Selective Service and Lend-Lease. In 1948, he was appointed to fill the vacant U.S. Senate seat left by the resignation of Vera Bushfield. He was elected in his own right and held the seat until shortly before his death. As a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Mundt played a leading role in the case of Alger Hiss. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to get HUAC to investigate the Ku Klux Klan. With Richard M. Nixon, Mundt drafted a version of what was to become the McCarran Act, or the Internal Security Act of 1950. In 1954, he chaired the Army-McCarthy hearings that eventually led to Joseph McCarthy’s downfall. See also MCCARTHY, JOSEPH RAYMOND.
MUNI, PAUL (1895–1967). Actor Paul Muni was born Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund in Galicia (now Ukraine). His family immigrated to the United States in 1902, and Muni first appeared on stage in Yiddish theater in 1907. His first Broadway appearance was in We Americans in 1924. He received an Oscar nomination for his role in The Valiant (1929) and returned to Broadway before starring in the role of the gangster Scarface in 1932. That same year, he appeared in Mervyn Leroy’s powerful study of the southern convict system set against the harsh backdrop of the Great Depression, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Muni made several biographical films, including The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), and Juarez (1939). His portrayal of Pasteur won him an Oscar. In 1937, Muni played a Chinese farmer in the film version of Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth. Muni only made six more films, his final one being The Last Angry Man in 1959. He did, however, continue to work on the stage and won a Tony Award in 1955 for his role in Inherit the Wind. See also CINEMA.
MURPHY, FRANK (FRANCIS) WILLIAM (1890–1949). Born in Harbor Beach, Michigan, Frank Murphy was a graduate of the University of Michigan in 1912 and the University of Michigan Law School in 1914. He served in the army in France during World War I and after the war was appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. He returned to private practice in 1920, taught law at the University of Detroit, and became a judge in the recorder’s court in Detroit in 1923. A member of the Democratic Party, in 1930 Murphy was elected mayor of Detroit. He introduced work relief programs to combat the high unemployment rate in the city and was reelected in 1932. In 1933, he was appointed governor-general of the Philippines, where he supported moves toward independence but left the post to become governor of Michigan in 1936.
A supporter of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Murphy introduced a “Little New Deal” in Michigan, reforming the civil service, improving workmen’s compensation, and increasing spending on education. He refused to use state troops to intervene in the “sit-down strikes” in the automobile industry in 1937. Murphy was defeated in the 1938 election. In 1939, he was appointed U.S. attorney general, and he led the investigation that destroyed the Pendergast machine in Kansas City. In 1940, Roosevelt appointed Murphy to the Supreme Court, where he became one of the more liberal justices, particularly on civil rights issues. He was critical of the internment of Japanese Americans and dissented in the cases of Hirabayashi v. United States and Korematsu v. United States. Murphy’s career was cut short by heart disease, and he died of a coronary thrombosis.
MURRAY, PHILIP (1886–1952). Philip Murray was born the son of a miner in Scotland and came to the United States with his family in 1902. He became a naturalized citizen in 1911. He worked as a miner near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and became president of the local district of the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) in 1916. By 1920 he was vice president of the union under John L. Lewis. Murray sat on the National War Labor Board and National Coal Production Committee during World War I. In the 1930s, he supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal and was a member of the board of the National Recovery Administration (NRA). In 1935, Murray, Lewis, and Sidney Hillman were the leading forces in the formation of the Committee for Industrial Organizations within the American Federation of Labor. Murray became president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1940.
In 1936, Murray took charge of leading the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee that secured recognition from “Big Steel,” including the U.S. Steel Corporation, in 1937. “Little Steel” held out until 1941. From 1942 to 1952, Murray was president of United Steel Workers of America (USWA). By then, differences with Lewis, particularly with regard to the “no-strike pledge” during World War II, had led to his expulsion from the UMW. During the war, Murray supported the Fair Employment Practices Committee and called for the integration of black workers in trade unions and employment. After the war, he opposed the Taft-Hartley Act and worked to redefine some of its applications. Although a close adviser to Harry S. Truman, Murray was involved in a confrontation with the president in 1952 when Truman threatened to nationalize the steel industry to prevent a strike. When the Supreme Court ruled against the president in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, Murray led the USWA on strike. Although he was forced to end the strike after 51 days, agreement was reached in 1952 recognizing some of the union’s demands. It was the last major event in Murray’s life.
MURROW, EDWARD ROSCOE (R.) (1908–1965). Famous radio and television broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow was born Egbert Roscoe Murrow in Greensboro, North Carolina. Murrow’s family later moved to Washington, where he attended the Washington State University. He joined the CBS network as director of talks and education in 1935 and in 1937 became director of the CBS European Bureau. It was at the bureau that Murrow began to establish his reputation for clear, accurate, on-the-spot reporting marked by a sense of integrity and social responsibility. He appointed William L. Shirer to join the bureau, and together they broadcast radio reports on events in Europe leading up to the outbreak of World War II, including the Anschluss of 1938, the Sudeten crisis, and the invasion of Poland. Murrow became famous for his reports from London during the Blitz, which began “This is London” and ended with the catch-phrase “Goodnight and good luck” that became his hallmark.
After the war, Murrow returned to the United States, where he briefly served as vice president of CBS and director of public affairs. However, he returned to broadcasting on radio and television in 1947, and from 1950 to 1951 he hosted Hear It Now and from 1952 to 1958 the award-winning television program See It Now. In March and April 1954, Murrow was responsible for a series of programs exposing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s methods to the viewing public. Although it is not clear what effect the programs had, coupled with the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, they contributed to McCarthy’s downfall. The programs later became the subject of the Hollywood movie Good Night and Good Luck (2006). See It Now lost its advertising sponsorship and was taken off the air in 1958.
In addition to programs with political content, Murrow also hosted the lighter Person to Person series of conversations with celebrities from 1953 to 1959. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him director of the U.S. Information Agency, a position he held until 1964. Murrow was awarded the presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and given a posthumous knighthood by the British government in 1965.
MUSIC. Music of the 1930s often directly reflected the impact of the Great Depression, as best summed up by Yip Harburg’s song “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” (1932) and recorded by a number of singers, including Bing Crosby. Folk singer Woody Guthrie captured the experience of the “Okies” in his many “Dust Bowl ballads” but also provided reaffirmation with “This Land Is Our Land” (1940). Songs from film and Broadway musicals were also successful and provided a vehicle for several of Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, and Cole Porter’s compositions. Musicals continued to be successful during World War II, and in Oklahoma and Carousel, popular songwriters Rodgers and Hammerstein captured the joyful aspects of America’s rural experience in the same way that serious composer Aaron Copland looked to the past for inspiration in his celebration of American values. The 1944 hit musical Meet Me in St. Louis, starring Judy Garland, also presented a nostalgic image of bygone America.
The big band sound continued with Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Glenn Miller, who’s “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me)” captured the hopes of many departing servicemen during World War II. The big hit of the war years was Berlin’s nostalgic “White Christmas” from the movie Holiday Inn (1942), sung by Crosby. Berlin’s “God Bless America” also became widely known during the war years. The precursors of the screaming fans of later years were the “bobby-soxers,” who mobbed Frank Sinatra during his performances in the early 1940s. The Andrews Sisters (Patty, Maxene, and Laverne) attracted a more sedate audience, but like many other stars, they entertained troops on United Service Organizations tours during the war and had huge hits with “I’ll Be With You in Apple Blossom Time” (1940) and “I Can Dream Can’t I?” (1945).
Other forms of music, particularly jazz, were developing in new directions. Led by African American musicians like Louis Armstrong, in the late 1930s there was a revival of the “Dixieland” jazz of the 1920s, while during the 1940s more avant-garde black musicians, most notably Charlie Parker, Thelonius Monk, Dizzie Gillespie, and Miles Davis, were developing bepop and “cool” jazz. Blues was emerging as the urban, electrified rhythm ‘n’ blues and establishing the foundations on which rock ‘n’ roll would be built in the 1950s. See also ANDERSON, MARIAN; CANTOR, EDDIE; CINEMA; FEDERAL MUSIC PROJECT; HART, LORENZ MILTON; HAYES, ROLAND; IVES, CHARLES EDWARD; ROBESON, PAUL LEROY BUSTILL; VALLEE, RUDY.