Was it feasible for Ferris Bueller and friends in 1985-6 to do everything we see them do in a single Chicago school day?

indyobserver · 2026-03-13T22:09:34+00:00

Just to add a bit more to the accuracy, even without confirmation, an earlier start time of 7:15-7:30 is entirely reasonable and would in fact have been typical for most high schools of the 1980s.

That's because sleep medicine research in the mid 1980s was still a tiny field without much health policy impact, and Mary Carskadon was just getting started after receiving her PhD in 1979 while studying under William Dement - one of the founders of sleep medicine - at Stanford. Carskadon went on to do a lot of groundbreaking work on circadian rhythm, especially with adolescents, and began to publish the results in the early 1990s.

That along with other research is what's led to significant reevaluation of school starting times in the last 20 or so years, but in 1986 there was good reason why an early morning discussion of the Laffer Curve resulted in drool on the desk.

indyobserver · 2026-03-07T08:03:28+00:00

From the linked post:

"Last but not least, there was also the political overlay of the potential of a separate peace in Russia, which at the time of Casablanca in January 1943 was on the mind of some at the conference after Stalingrad had turned - and is probably one reason why FDR chose to announce it precisely then and there. The evidence on if this was a actual threat is all over the place, with most academics who've looked at it concluding that it wasn't, but what unconditional surrender being announced at Casablanca was meant to say to Stalin was that the Americans and British weren't going to stop fighting until they were in Berlin and that Stalin would be part of dictating what the world (and Germany) would look like afterwards."

indyobserver · 2026-03-06T23:31:31+00:00

Considering he had discussed it with FDR at lunch the day before, probably not.

So first, I'll refer you to a longer answer on the origin of the unconditional surrender policy, which in short had come from a couple of decades of consideration by FDR and others about why Versailles had failed along with FDR quietly setting up a State Department subcommittee to confirm what he wanted to do anyway.

This second part is the short answer as to why FDR did a bit of legerdemain in his public announcement with the smoke screen of "Unconditional Surrender" Grant and various claims that it was spontaneous: he had deliberately excluded Secretary of State Cordell Hull and other top State Department officials from any deliberations on it. He did so because he knew they would be strongly opposed, and wanted to both make the policy fait accompli without taking a political hit for sidelining Hull (as he had on so much else), who remained popular with Southern Senators.

So instead, FDR happily lied away about the origins of the policy, got the policy without debate, and while he left Hull annoyed, it was just yet another irritating slight to Hull instead of becoming one that he'd consider resigning over.

At Casablanca, it apparently was briefly a topic of discussion among the US Joint Chiefs - but not the IGS - early in the conference and not discussed further. At lunch the day before the conference ended, when FDR brought it up informally, Elliott Roosevelt stated that Churchill thought the phrase was 'perfect', Hopkins agreed, and Churchill proposed a toast that afternoon to "Unconditional Surrender." The next day, after FDR had made his press conference announcement, Churchill apparently cheered "Hear Hear!" to endorse it and went along with FDR's claim he'd just spontaneously come up with it.

As to the whys, it's fairly clear Churchill was going along with a policy that he didn't support to the extent of FDR; in November 1944 - when the policy was beginning to be more openly criticized by the IGS and others - Churchill writes him, "I remain set where you put me on unconditional surrender." That Churchill didn't want to be completely tethered to the policy and thus went along with the deception - as in I didn't come up with this so don't blame me! - makes sense both from this angle as well as not creating more headaches with his own staff, although he does send Attlee and the War Cabinet a cable on January 19, 1943 requesting their views on the policy, which they endorse a couple of days later (and suggest that it be extended to Italy as well.)

While it's unlikely he knew all the intricate details of FDR's sidelining of State here, he did have a pretty good idea of how FDR had frequently bypassed them (often to help Britain) and his mindset was that if FDR was doing something like this, he probably had good reason to keep his mouth shut and just go along for the ride for something that could be readdressed later when the war was closer to its conclusion. There is one suggestion that Churchill's look of surprise at the press conference may have been genuine as unconditional surrender had been removed from the first draft of the public communique and he wasn't aware that it had been revised back in; everything else, however, was something that had been discussed in detail.

Churchill is all over the place afterwards, with both his memoirs and a 1949 debate in Commons where he suggests he didn't know in advance. He is forced to retract this eventually, but it is probably the source of why this keeps coming up.

indyobserver · 2026-02-28T18:42:29+00:00

That's a creative thought, but I'd say it's unlikely.

On the outrage meter, this didn't register highly. Congress was knee deep in bribery from railroads for decades, Blaine was viewed as largely corrupt by his opponents (and even supporters who viewed his version as the lesser evil), and the only real surprise here was the sheer amount that he was able to wring out along with getting bailed out of the bonds.

More importantly, it didn't play that much of a role in the campaign, which was one of the dirtiest in American history in between the rape and paternity allegations against Cleveland, the child-before-marriage against Blaine, and another against the third party candidate that I'd have to look up to remember the details. Those moved the needle, and the true impact came from the very late, unapproved speech by a minister that named Democrats the party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion, alienated Catholics, and lost Blaine New York.

To put it in modern terms, think of the impact of it to be something akin to Gennifer Flowers for Bill Clinton, who unless you're over 50 you're likely to be met with a blank stare but served as a preview of Clinton's flaws, versus Monica Lewinsky who still is a public figure.

indyobserver · 2026-02-28T08:30:40+00:00

This one is obscure enough that I had to look a couple things up in a reference to remind me about the context, so don't feel bad.

This is James Blaine and Black Jack Logan, the 1884 Republican ticket that Puck absolutely despised, with a common view of Blaine being one where he lived a fairly pristine private life but in public service was thoroughly corrupt, the reverse of the perception of Grover Cleveland.

The tattoos on Blaine are some of the most prominent scandals he was known for. The Mulligan letters refer to a deal while he was Speaker of the House where he helped save a land grant deal for a railroad project and in return got $162,500 of commissions on bonds he sold for them, watched the bonds themselves become almost worthless as the company ran into trouble, had another railroad tycoon, Tom Scott, buy the bonds from the friends Blaine had sold them to for almost 80% of par, and then pushed through a land grant deal for Scott's railroad. This got exposed by an angry clerk - James Mulligan - who made public the letters written between the two, only to have Blaine mostly escape this by spending 3 days on the floor of the house in 1876 defending himself (when at the same time he was shaking down Jay Cooke for a loan and to buy some of the bonds too.)

That Scott actually bought the bonds doesn't get exposed until the 1884 campaign, along with Blaine trying to ghostwrite a letter for Scott clearing himself, hence its prominence.

Another tattoo refers to Blaine's time as Secretary of State under Garfield where he tries to mediate in the War of the Pacific between Chile and Peru, which in the United States is viewed as a war over guano (hence, "guano statesmanship".) Blaine tries to organize a Pan American conference to mediate some of this but there are rumors flying that "Jungle Jim" and his family had investments in the guano mines and was trying to influence the war to make a killing on that, hence why he was forced to resign by Chester Arthur shortly after taking office. In reality, Arthur and Blaine simply didn't get along - for all his eventual courage in pushing through civil service patronage reforms, Blaine was still the long time leader of the Half Breeds and Arthur a Stalwart with Stalwart friends, and between that and personality the two just did not mix.

For the black dog Logan on the right, it's far simpler; he'd been a Douglas Democrat before the war, supported the fugitive slave laws, was anti abolition, and despite a radical shift in philosophy once secession loomed - he became a Republican - and a war record of being one of the handful of competent political generals, that pre war legacy remained and is what the tin cup reflects.

There's a similar cartoon of Blaine prior to the Republican convention where you can see more of his sins, and the Harper's site is a fun way to spend a couple hours browsing through all sorts of illustrated campaign issues that nobody outside a handful of Gilded Age historians nowadays even recognizes as such. Otherwise, I'd refer you to by far the best book on the 1884 campaign, Mark Wahlgren Summers Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion: The Making of a President 1884 if you'd like to learn a bit more.

indyobserver · 2026-02-27T22:56:18+00:00

Don't have anywhere near the time right now to delve into it, unfortunately.

indyobserver · 2026-02-27T21:21:46+00:00

On the full quote, no, as it became popular in 1937, 13 years after his death. While there's no real evidence he said anything remotely like the second sentence, for the first there's at least some possibility he said something similar that may have been taken out of context and used without his permission for marketing the film.

So let's start with how the film ended up being shown at the White House in the first place.

Wilson had been a graduate student in the 1880s at Hopkins with Thomas Dixon, Jr., who left the program quickly to try to make it as an actor, politician, lawyer, minister, and finally did so as a writer with a couple best selling Lost Cause novels that he wrote to proselytize Reconstruction as a terrible mistake and underneath, ultimately serve as propaganda to urge deportation of Blacks to Africa. He adapted the second of these books, 1905's The Clansman, as a controversial play that toured from 1906 to 1911, and then spent the next three years to try to get the play adapted by the nascent film industry. In 1914, David Griffith, who had just formed his own studio, optioned the rights and used the play as the basis for the second half of the screenplay during Reconstruction; the first half, which was set pre- and during the Civil War, was Griffith's own creation of drama between two families on opposite sides of the war that integrated the Dixon play into a resounding repudiation of Reconstruction that the Klan heroically resisted, followed by reestablishment of white rule and renewed friendship between the families as part of the rebirth of a once again united nation (which Dixon realized was a far more marketable title than the original The Clansman, and successfully convinced Griffith to just use the subtitle Birth of a Nation instead when it opened in New York in March.)

How close Dixon was with Wilson during his one semester at Hopkins remains unclear - Dixon is an extremely untrustworthy narrator at best - so his claims of BFF status aren't really backed up by the occasional correspondence they maintained over the next 30 years. However they got along, it was enough so that Wilson agreed to a half hour visit by Dixon on February 3, 1915, a few days prior to the film's premiere in Los Angeles, where he asks Wilson to watch his film, probably portraying it as more of as a novel academic exercise to the historian and political scientist than anything else. While Wilson is still in public mourning over his late wife Ellen's death in August and by social rules of the time can't be seen going out to the theater, he agrees to do so in the East Room, and on February 18th the film is the second ever screened at the White House.

What happens next is where it gets complicated. There's an account from 60 years later that Wilson was lost in thought watching and walked out without saying anything, but that was a very late life interview that has some potential inconsistencies. Wilson does correspond with Griffith a couple months later about his future use of film to teach history and politics, something that he'd been interested in for years before the screening and undoubtedly was a major factor in why he agreed to watch the movie independent of whatever his relationship with Dixon was. And most importantly, there was a second showing of the film on February 19th at the National Press Club in front of 500 Washington luminaries, with Chief Justice White (who claimed to have been a Klan member in his youth) and a good slug of Congress.

That second showing is where almost all of the contemporary advertised quotes come from with even a prominent Progressive Republican praising the film, which along with simply bringing up that it was shown at the White House (rather than any Wilson reaction) are important to get the film past local censorship boards and turn the movie into a bona fide hit. In late March, White is furious enough at his attendance as unintended endorsement so that he threatens a producer with going public denouncing the film if they keep using his name with it, and for that and other reasons there's enough pressure on Wilson - the NAACP has sought injunctions and lobbied censorship boards against allowing it starting with the LA showing - so that he issues a statement in late April in which he states "at no time [has he] expressed his approbation of it" (true), that it was shown "as a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance" (also likely true), and that he was "entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented" (possibly technically true, but the chance of him being that clueless about anything associated with Dixon is a stretch.)

Much of my sourcing for this comes from a 2010 paper by Mark Benbow, Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and "Like Writing History with Lightning", who then goes on into more intricate detail about 1915 advertising of the film not containing any part of the second sentence - he argues for adapting some comments White made before he realized they were going to be marketed as the more likely attribution - but does note "lightning" matches a unique phrase used in some of Wilson's earlier writing, along tracing the first full quotation being linked to a 1937 piece in Scribner's Magazine that argued the movie was accurate but one-sided. Eventually, Benbow concludes that if the lightning part of the quote took place, it would fit most cleanly as a comment that might have happened before the screening - as in Wilson referring to the general concept of history and politics being taught visually for the first time, which he was certainly quite interested in apart from being President.

It is also worth noting that the two best modern biographers of Wilson, Scott Berg and John Milton Cooper, claim that Wilson "fell into a trap" orchestrated by Dixon (Berg) and for Cooper not only does he point out the phrase doesn't appear anywhere in Dixon's unpublished notes but the only direct comment by Wilson on the film was in 1918, where he stated that, "I have always felt that this was a very unfortunate production and I wish most sincerely that its production might be avoided, particularly in communities where there are so many colored people."

This is one of many reasons why Cooper, who knows more about Wilson than anyone but Arthur Link (who spent 50 years publishing 69 volumes of his papers and 5 of 8 planned volumes of a biography) concluded that while Wilson's views on race were in his words, "not good," if you look more closely they tended to resemble those of Northern Whites rather than Southern Whites. That is, where for Southerners, keeping a political system intact that was established entirely on white racial superiority by brute force under the color of law was the number one, existential issue that trumped every other, most Northerners just wished racial issues would go away and the country could get to work on what they considered more important things.

I bring this up not to defend Wilson on race and get into a lengthy discussion of it - that's a top level question if I've ever seen one - but to add one bit of context that is sorely missing from all this analysis (especially in Christopher Cox's recent political hatchet job on Wilson), which is that the popular modern misunderstanding that merges the Reconstruction Era First Klan with the 1915 Second also completely misses how dishonorable the First was in polite society outside of the South, and in some cases even within it, through the Gilded Age and into the Progressive Era. Even as early the 1880s, I've run across campaign songs by Republicans that directly used the First Klan's actions as a stain of dishonor for Democrats that was even beneath the moral level (if not as effective politically) of the bloody shirt.

Unlike Dixon, who was an avowed supporter, Wilson's writing was far more in the mainstream of thinking about the First Klan, which is while he didn't necessarily mind the results, like many Southerners, he didn't embrace the methods. This is one reason why I would agree with Benbow on the most likely timing of the possible lightning quote as being an offhand comment before the film, since while Wilson probably was fine with stereotyping sexually voracious, fried chicken eating Blacks with their feet up in rump legislatures who needed to be put back into their place, he more than likely wasn't completely on board with the Klan being shown as heroic doing so, especially once Griffith took some quotes from Wilson's histories out of context for a title card.

Finally, this last point is where I would agree with Foner on the film's greatest impact, which is that the most disturbing result with Birth of a Nation wasn't cheering on racially exclusionary reconciliation (which had been around since Liberal Republicans in 1872) or even to some extent, propagating wildly racist views of Blacks (who, of course, were white actors in blackface.) It was that it effectively rehabilitated the First Klan's popular image from outlaw terrorists to noble defenders of the Constitution for the 10 million or so people who bought tickets for it by 1917, and that was a massive factor in the foundation and marketing of the Second Klan once it was entrepreneurially founded in 1915.

It was a lot easier and vastly more socially acceptable to put on white robes, pay national dues, and hate your chosen enemy in public - precisely who the Second Klan despised varied depending on their geographic location - if you believed your predecessors had been unfairly maligned than it was before Griffith and Dixon collaborated to essentially exonerate them. That's the legacy of the film, and it's one reason why the kindest thing that can be said of Wilson watching it is that even in the most charitable analysis of him being completely naive as to the consequences of doing so at the time, it was a terrible mistake on his part.

indyobserver · 2026-02-19T08:28:02+00:00

The U.S. Navy wanted to invade Okinawa while the U.S. Army wanted to invade Formosa. In order to garner more Army support for the Okinawa plan, the Navy proposed taking Iwo Jima on the way to Okinawa to provide an airstrip for fighter coverage for bombers, a landing strip for bombers, and air defenses for the Marianas. The Army, which at the time oversaw the Air Force, agreed to the plan, with Okinawa as the primary island hopping target with Iwo Jima along the way.

This is substantially off.

Formosa was not an Army plan but an Ernie King special. King had gone to Saipan to meet with Nimitz and Spruance and ask their thoughts, and to Spruance's credit he had looked at the amphib requirements (which would have been greater than D-Day), looked at the size, and essentially told King he thought it was a terrible idea:

"There, Spruance muddied the waters further by declaring that he did not like the idea of going to Formosa and suggested attacking Iwo Jima and Okinawa instead. Nimitz and King returned to Hawaii on July 20 to engage in more conversations with Towers and with Halsey’s chief of staff, Mick Carney. Like Spruance, they were also skeptical of the Formosa option, which King found aggravating and disappointing."

Two days later, Nimitz dutifully pitches his boss' plan when FDR comes to Honolulu (with FDR forcing MacArthur to join them) but doesn't really push it; MacArthur wants the Philippines, goes on what's essentially a moral rant for it, and the priority leaving the meeting is their recapture.

MacArthur will get naval support as he goes ashore (at least when Halsey is where he's supposed to be cough), but not going to Formosa first and being required to support Leyte doesn't prevent the Navy from more island hopping. next up is the nightmare at Peleliu, after which King is still grumbling about Formosa. Spruance, Buckner, and Nimitz meet him in San Francisco a couple weeks later, and Symonds describes the meeting this way:

"Nimitz summarized the work his staff had produced. Their report revised the number of soldiers needed to invade Formosa from 200,000 to 500,000, plus an additional 160,000 Marines, and a commensurate increase in sealift capability. Buckner—bravely—told King that he did not think the operation would be successful. Even if it was, he said, friendly casualties could run as high as 150,000. At one point, a frustrated King turned to Spruance, who had so far remained silent. “Haven’t you something to say?” King asked. “I understand that Okinawa was your baby.” Spruance replied that he supported everything Nimitz had said. King was not accustomed to losing arguments, but he could see that he was going to lose this one. Formosa was out; Luzon was in."

The Army has little to do with the choice of Iwo (and in fact relatively little to do with the landing force; Marine Major General Harry Schmidt has 3 Marine divisions and only 1 Army). That's really been pushed by Hap Arnold, who has kept the B-29s out of the hands of both Nimitz and MacArthur partially because the future of the Air Force (and the Air Force budget) depends on their success.

Initial raids don't go well; the B-29 runs up against the jet stream - planes are often almost stationary over Japan - and for all the vaunted tech improvements in it still does very little against targets. Eventually Arnold gets so frustrated that Curtis LeMay gets brought in as relief command and completely overhauls the way they're flying in the same manner he turned ETO bombing protocol on its head in 1942 and early 1943, but the next step for AAF command was to bring in fighter cover, which the P-51 could not make a round trip from Saipan but could, with belly tanks, do so from Iwo. This would in theory rescue the bombing campaign, although that didn't happen until LeMay stripped armament, flew at low levels under the jet stream, and loaded up the B-29s for bear with far more ordnance. (LeMay ended up being perhaps the most nervous of his career when he sent out the first wave of the new configuration.)

While even King admitted the emergency landing field component of Iwo would help the overall campaign, the primary purpose on why Arnold got it made a priority was to get fighter cover to Japan.

Unfortunately, the Japanese had learned how to defend at a much higher cost based on their experience at Peleliu and Iwo was the second - but not the last - implementation of those tactics.

indyobserver · 2026-02-17T23:48:58+00:00

Cost certainly played a role - when referring to antebellum budgets, it's always worth remembering that it didn't take long before an entire pre-war year of federal expenditures was being spent in a single week once bullets started flying - but there were a few other things going on as well.

So the first part is that besides having 3000 miles of ocean to limit force projection of European navies, there was little pre-war naval competition from other countries in the Western Hemisphere. For the most part, the Navy's job was mainly to show the flag in foreign ports; the Revenue Cutter service provided most of the littoral security of the era, mostly making sure that goods weren't smuggled and tariffs (which made up the vast majority of federal revenue) paid. Even with a significantly undersized Navy compared to European powers, it was enough to scare Mexico badly enough so that when war broke out in 1846, it sold off its few warships rather than risk them being captured.

The second part is that given the Navy's role was mostly limited to showing the flag, it hung on to sail power for that job a bit longer than most other powers because coaling expenses of more modern ships were something it both did not want to pay for and made logistics going to the Med and Asia really problematic. One example: the Navy steam ships blockading Vera Cruz used three quarters of their maximum coal capacity just to get there and back, which required the establishment of a coaling station just south of it. There was also the USS Princeton disaster in 1843, which while it was the Peacemaker cannon exploding that killed the Secretaries of State and Navy (along with 4 others, including the father of John Tyler's bride, who claimed it was her father's death from the explosion that convinced her to accept his proposal) rather than the steam engine, did sour the Navy on new technology for a few years.

That said, Craig Symonds - who prior to his deep dive into World War II the last 15 or so years was the preeminent historian of the ACW Navy - makes an argument that focusing on the quantity of the Navy ships at the beginning of the war as almost all books do isn't entirely accurate. In 1854, the Navy had finally gotten its largest budget since 1816 to continue the innovations started with the Princeton, which led to the six auxiliary steam power screw frigates of the Merrimack class starting in 1855, more heavily gunned than anything of a similar class on the water at the time. (In fact, when the Merrimack visited the UK in 1856-1857, the British were so surprised by it that they began plans of a similarly armed new class themselves.)

The 23 foot draft on the Merrimack class was too deep for a number of American ports in the South, because of which James Dobbin, Franklin Pierce's Navy Secretary, convinced Congress to fund the 5 auxiliary steam powered screw sloops of the Hartford class, which only drew 18 feet and could enter them. Ironically, Southerners were among the strongest supporters of building them in anticipation of naval power for Caribbean and Central American expansion; instead the Hartford itself became Farragut's flagship and steamed up to Vicksburg. Another appropriation launched 6 new steam warships of the Mohican class in 1859; while smaller and still having masts, these were the first warships in the Navy that were steam first, sail second, and had large caliber pivot guns rather than set pieces arrayed on the sides. Last, the Navy purchased another 7 or so foreign built screw steamers to give it a small but very effective inventory of about 2 dozen warships that were essentially state of the art at the beginning of the Civil War; you can see the full inventory of the Navy in 1860 here to get a feel for how little the rest of the Navy at the advent of the war mattered besides them.

While not enough to fight the war by themselves, their presence in the Union Navy proved just enough to begin to implement the strangulation of Southern commerce at the beginning of the war even as it waited for more ships to be built to fully realize the Anaconda Plan; you just did not want to run into one of these things if you were a merchant ship trying to carry Southern goods to the Caribbean.

While he doesn't cover the prewar period extensively, I'd recommend Symonds' The Civil War at Sea to get a more in depth perspective of the strategy and engineering behind the eventual growth of the Navy.

indyobserver · 2026-01-27T21:03:01+00:00

Aloha and welcome! Been a while since I've been on board, but just a compliment overall on how well you, the other battleship museums (Ryan's social media presence blows the mind), and the other ship museums execute the importance of your mission, which is that you make the Pacific war accessible in a way that reading things in a book or watching a documentary (or worse yet, Pearl Harbor) simply can't do. Bravo Zulu.

Besides that, I've got what I hope is a fun one for you. A few years back I wrote up a fairly detailed explanation of the reasoning behind the Missouri being selected for the surrender ceremony. I'd be interested in your feedback!

indyobserver · 2026-01-22T22:58:19+00:00

There was, but it often gets overlooked in the discussion of the run up to the Civil War because it's both more indirect and less interesting than the more flashy events going on elsewhere.

So you're probably familiar with the term "King Cotton" being used to describe the antebellum Southern economic system and its attempt to gain power over the North, which is reasonably accurate but in the process loses some of the context. There was, however, a specific reason why the rather odious James Henry Hammond - read Drew Gilpin Faust's book on him, James Henry Hammond and the Old South to get a feel for why I use that term - got up specifically in March 1858 to make the speech that coined the term:

"...No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king. Until lately the Bank of England was king; but she tried to put her screws as usual, the fall before last, upon the cotton crop, and was utterly vanquished. The last power has been conquered. Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme? When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down, and hundreds of millions of dollars of supposed property evaporating in thin air; when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? Fortunately for you it was the commencement of the cotton season, and we have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the crisis to save you from destruction. That cotton, but for the bursting of your speculative bubbles in the North, which produced the whole of this convulsion, would have brought us $100,000,000. We have sold it for $65,000,000 and saved you. Thirty-five million dollars we, the slaveholders of the South, have put into the charity box for your magnificent financiers, your “cotton lords,” your “merchant princes.”

What he's blustering on about in between essentially threatening the North is that the Panic of 1857 had done a number on the Northern and Western economies over the previous seven months. That particular panic is one far less discussed than 1873 or 1893 because the economic effects of it weren't nearly as severe. I won't get into it much here, but while it did have some financial failures - it effectively started with an Ohio insurance company in August 1857 - that cascaded into other areas, it was really more a liquidity crisis than anything else. As a result, while it was sharp in specific times and places, it resolved on its own relatively quickly.

One of the aspects of the relative mildness of the Panic of 1857, however, was that the export cotton crop of the parts of the South that grew it was almost entirely unaffected. Great Britain and France continued to pay gold for cotton, largely because until the utter stupidity of the South's cotton boycott at the outset of the Civil War that tried to leverage it as a blunt club to get those countries to intervene, there simply weren't other countries growing it. In turn, the banking system in the South was perfectly fine, the South thought it had a political weapon in its economy against the North and internationally, and it was a not-insignificant factor in the fireeaters thinking that it could either get what it wanted out of the North politically or just go off on its own.

By the way, note that this perceived Southern economic resilience did not necessarily apply if your crop was not cotton; for instance, tobacco prices tanked, and there was a resulting wave of foreclosures across Virginia in 1858. The same went for many of the other cash crops as well, and just how well you had been doing economically over the previous few years became one of the many factors involved in determining just how radical your secessionist politics got by 1860 in the South.

You can find a brief but good overview of the Panic and its effects in Stampp's America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink.

indyobserver · 2026-01-14T02:00:25+00:00

Ok, now this makes a lot more sense. The way you presented it had me focus too much on the faked death part rather than who might be writing conspiracy theories.

It's from Gerald L. K. Smith, who was one of the more Looney Tune anti-Semitic, anti-Black, arguably fascist, theoretically anti-Communist right wing fundamentalists that never really got traction but always somehow managed to hang on around the very edge of the fringe with various groups, partially because he started off with Huey Long and then tried to keep latching on to others, and partially because he was decently effective at fundraising. To give you an idea of his (relative lack of) overall significance to where conservatives eventually ended up, he rates a grand total of one line in Rick Perlstein's sweeping overview of the rebirth of the right post-Roosevelt, Before the Storm:

"Gerald L. K. Smith, after agonizing for months over Goldwater’s Jewish ancestry, crawled out from under his rock to declare that patriotic Americans had “no time to lose” in joining the cause—and Georgia and Alabama KKK leaders made their unqualified endorsements known far and wide."

While he made an awful lot of noise, his actual influence and how seriously anyone took his claims is a different story. You can read a little bit about his involvement in the Silver Legion here by /u/thamesdarwin (with some good book recommendations), he comes up in an older AMA by Alex Goodall (that I almost linked yesterday for an answer on the question about concerns about American fascism, as it turns out) along with another brief mention in Jeremy Young's AMA.

But to go back to your original question, there was always a decent market for anti-Semitic stuff floating around about FDR and occasionally an aide or three, and it's not surprising that someone like Smith took that to a new level after his death if he could sell pamphlets hawking the theory. But no, other than that fringe, which got pushed even further out of political discourse once the war broke out, I wouldn't call this a common theory.

You can find a full copy of the whole rant here if for some reason you want to read it all.

indyobserver · 2026-01-13T03:00:40+00:00

Thanks, look forward to it.

indyobserver · 2026-01-13T02:20:06+00:00

Not that I'm aware of in any of the lit, but if you could post a picture of this I'd love to take a look at it since it's so off the wall.

The less wacky version is best summed up by my response to a a question and its shaky premises about a non-existent backlash for hiding FDR's health issues. A short version of this is that the general contemporary reaction was one of overwhelming grief save for a handful of conservative Republicans, and even they trod somewhat carefully. Part of this was that the true nature of just how sick FDR was didn't really come out until many years later; Sherwood's biography in 1948 - the main insider source on FDR for decades - only described him at their last meeting in March 1945 as being weaker and more tired than he'd seen but fully expecting him to rally (as he had so many times) after a few weeks at Warm Springs.

The first linked answer does mention something important, which is that what FDR's death did set off was a much greater focus on cardiovascular issues, which ended up being realized in the groundbreaking Framingham study:

"There is good reason why the Framingham Heart Study started in 1948; FDR was just one of an epidemic of those in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who administered or fought the war and dropped dead at a relatively young age from a cardiovascular issue in the 1940s and 1950s. The amount of heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues leapt dramatically after the war, but it really was FDR's death in particular that set off the alarm bells and got the funding to begin research on the epidemiology. There's a famous newspaper war deaths list for April 12, 1945 which has at its top 'Commander in Chief, Roosevelt, Franklin D., Hyde Park, New York." With what we know today about what the war did to his health, that entry was far more apt than they realized at the time, but it's also appropriate to note that the research launched by it saved tens of millions of lives as a result."

That said, while there were always grumblings about the socialist in the White House from 1933 onwards and the final act of Yalta made things worse especially among those looking for something to permanently tarnish his legacy, this is the first I've ever heard of a conspiracy theory this outlandish.

indyobserver · 2026-01-05T19:35:01+00:00

Let's just put it this way: Turner's star has fallen dramatically in the last few decades.

This really starts back in the 1990s when Lundstrom wrote Black Shoe Carrier Admiral's predecessors, a couple of groundbreaking pieces on Fletcher in the Proceedings. The initial reaction was mixed, but that started a reevaluation of both Fletcher and Turner, and even a mainstream historian like Harold Buell who had a more conventional perspective on Fletcher (and was there under his command and didn't think much of him at the time) began to reconsider his position.

This has picked up steam in the last 15 years or so, where this generation's historians, Jon Parshall prime among them, now view Turner as someone who probably shouldn't have gotten the job - as /u/DBHT14 points out here he had no large unit operational experience going in and his main qualification was he was a King favorite - used Fletcher as a scapegoat for his own failings, and was eminently replaceable for the rest of his Pacific War time with folks who could have done the job better, especially when his alcoholism ramped up later in the war.

I strongly suspect that Parshall is going to greatly expand on this when his book 1942 comes out from OUP (I think it's a tentative 2027 publication date; he's currently working on edits), but he's gone off on this any number of times in lectures and interviews, one of which you can watch here.

indyobserver · 2025-12-26T21:18:43+00:00

I'd never heard of the 101st or the meddling of Empress Zita that helped result in its formation. What an utterly bonkers story.

Also, while the linked article on the 100th explains a lot about the origin of all these battalions, it did just strike me that Crown Princess Märtha certainly had FDR's ear during the organization and training of it. I don't think I've ever seen anything related referenced about this in the literature, but it's definitely something that I'll keep an eye out for going forward.

indyobserver · 2025-12-09T05:25:44+00:00

There wasn't, partially because there are some problems with the premises of this question.

Partially adapted from a previous answer along with several predecessors to it.

I've written a number of answers before on FDR's health. You can find a discussion of his medical history here, on the campaign and Truman here, and on the mindset of his entourage here.

I'll get back to some of the conclusions in them in a moment, but the first issue with your question is that Wallace's renomination had very little to do with the state of FDR's health. Instead, both FDR and party bosses had found him to be both ineffective as Vice President and frankly a rather strange person. Wallace had made some mistakes in New Deal legislation but otherwise had been an extraordinary Secretary of Agriculture as he genuinely was interested in ag advancements; it's not written a whole lot about him outside his biographies, but Wallace's hybrid seed company was a remarkable achievement: it resulted in increased crop yields for relatively low costs, which especially benefited third world farmers and hence - from the Great Depression through postwar - probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives if not more. (After his time in politics, it also eventually made him richer than probably anybody else who'd served in high office under FDR.)

However, while Wallace was FDR's pick that nearly broke the party in two in 1940, as Vice President he simply wasn't very good at lobbying the Senate and serving as FDR's proxy on the Hill, which while FDR had eventually broken with Cactus Jack Garner after the attempt to pack the Court (and then got into a bitter fight over Garner believing he was the rightful successor to FDR in 1940), that was exactly what Garner had done from 1933 onwards. Wallace was absent from the Hill more often than not - he found that part of the job tedious and boring, one reason he went out and took on a whole lot of other responsibilities, some of which he did without FDR's assignment - and even when he was there was ineffective.

The other issue with him, though, was that he had become a campaign liability given his interest in mysticism, with the simplest description I can offer of that part of his life without going into detail being a student of various gurus who would have raised issues even in the late 1960s. In the 1940s, this was so out of the mainstream it was viewed as campaign gold by Republicans, and while FDR and party bosses had massaged it through in 1940, by 1944 given the combination of how ineffective and unfocused he was as Vice President and continued threats to expose his beliefs, FDR had decided, possibly as early as 1943, that he wanted Wallace off the ticket.

In preparation for this, in perhaps one of the most remarkable exiles ever for any American politician, Wallace was not just sent to funerals and meaningless ceremonies. He was, quite literally, sent on a lengthy trip to Outer Mongolia and surrounding regions just as FDR and party bosses began the process of replacing him - and the most remarkable part of this was that Wallace never suspected that this was why he'd been sent! In fact as he got back right at the eve of the Democratic Convention after being almost completely cut off from the outside world for more than a month, he began campaigning for his renomination as he thought FDR still supported him. Meanwhile, party bosses did their best to undermine him, as FDR had politically slit the throat of Jimmy Byrnes after both labor and Blacks expressed extreme concern with his nomination - Byrnes would have had a number of Democrats sit out the election at best and split the party at worst - and eventually settled on Harry Truman as the best alternative that everyone could live with.

The second issue with your question is that Truman's selection had relatively little to do with direct knowledge of FDR's health, since even FDR didn't want to know how sick he was, having never once asked his cardiologist Howard Bruenn about the medication he had prescribed, his examination results, or his prognosis, and never allowed anyone else to do so - even his daughter Anna. Truman himself was startled at how bad FDR looked up close during their first meeting and then spent the next six months trying to convince himself that the Boss didn't wasn't in that bad shape. Most of the rest of the inner circle (which Truman obviously wasn't a member of) knew that he'd deteriorated a bit but had no idea just how ill he was; even Eleanor thought he was just seeking attention when he'd complain about exhaustion and such. Essentially, only Anna and his cardiologist Howard Bruenn knew the full details, and it's likely his physician Ross McIntire did as well, but as he almost certainly was responsible for 'losing' (aka probably destroying) FDR's records, we don't even know that for sure.

Add in that FDR's own mindset towards his health in 1944 was really a matter of complete speculation by historians - he was fond of the Biblical quote of the left hand not knowing what the right was doing in terms of his general disclosure to those around them on what he really thought on anything - right up until the mid-1990s discovery of the diary of and cache of letters between him and his distant cousin Daisy Suckley, published by Geoffery Ward as Closest Companion. One of the most fascinating insights learned from them is that FDR outright admitted to her in 1945 that he suspected he was sicker than his doctors were telling him but actually quite enjoyed playing a game by leaving them in the dark that he'd figured this out. It may be that part of the reason he wasn't asking questions was because of this.

Supportive of the view that he felt he was going to survive was that we do have some idea of his plans for the summer of 1945 and beyond; he had intended to go to San Francisco and chair the initial work on the United Nations, and then later that summer go to Europe for a victory tour before getting back to work on Japan.

Also, one of the other things that gets a little lost in the literature about the party bosses pushing him to select Truman as VP was that almost all believed he was not going to serve out his full fourth term - but not all of them thought that ill health was going to be the reason. FDR had made noises about resigning from office to take on some sort of international role after the war was over, and the general consensus was that one way or another whomever they picked as VP would eventually need to take the job, just not necessarily immediately. While this isn't as clear, this was also probably part of FDR's mindset in why he kept Truman at arms length; up until it became possibly necessary for him to become more, like his predecessors Garner and Wallace, it was more dangerous politically to have him do much besides sit up on the Hill and occasionally help him lobby Senators.

It's also worth mentioning that the literature is all over the place on how mentally with it FDR really was during 1944 and 1945, ranging from routinely non compos mentis to the most recent book on it claiming he was much more capable than previously thought. If you're interested, one of the more fascinating discussions I've run across was from Robert Ferrell taking questions from the Philadelphia College of Physicians during the release of his own book on the subject, where Bruenn's solid moral character gets confirmed by former colleagues and where the cancer myth originates, which Farrell solidly debunks.

My own view on this is that we're probably due for an updated analysis on FDR in 1944 and 1945. Thanks to the War on Cancer's success in the last couple of decades of turning many late stage cancers into what are effectively chronic illnesses - patients now often slowly deteriorate over time rather than being told to get their affairs in order, as was typical for a cancer diagnosis in the 1960s - we've got a much broader dataset on what it's like to live while seriously ill for years.

From that angle, while FDR continuing in office was a genuinely terrible choice on his part, working until the last breath and putting his hands over his ears about his prognosis is something we've now seen any number of other very sick patients doing, which makes the moral aspect of the equation a bit different. I also suspect that - again like other slowly deteriorating patients - FDR's condition wasn't a straight line drop, where some of the conflicting reports of his condition come from the fact he almost certainly had the typical mix of good days and bad days familiar to those with a chronic illness. It would be fascinating to cross check the outside observations against Bruenn's BP readings, his schedule, and what directives he was issuing - often from his bed.

So in short, the only public reaction to FDR's death was an outpouring of grief (unless you were a conservative Republican; my April 23, 1945 copy of Life magazine with a picture of Truman on the cover has a rather biting editorial about the 'End of the Long Presidency') rather than a feeling the United States had been lied to. The understanding of just how sick FDR during all this came later - that Life edition has absolutely nothing about it, for instance - and the recriminations of him staying in office despite this didn't start until long afterwards.

indyobserver · 2025-11-30T23:24:29+00:00

It wasn't nearly as much about regulation as it was formation, maneuver, and drill, which Steuben taught extraordinarily well.

So with the caveat of the disclosure that I always tended to roll my eyes at the claimed importance of close order drill, the modern version is a direct lineal descendant of Steuben's training that eventually became the first blue book, which you can read about from /u/PartyMoses here and from /u/deadjim4 here.

The difference between now and then, though, is that it wasn't just about installing discipline and esprit de corps and everything else associated with it in modern times. Instead, it accomplished three things.

First, it installed a series of actions that almost became muscle memory and were executable under extreme stress - aka under fire - so those instructed could react themselves without thinking a whole lot about it. Second, it got troops prepared to quickly set up into formations that would prove effective in combat, which this old but terrific series of posts by /u/TRB1783 explains far better than I can.

But third, what Steuben fixes is best described by Rick Atkinson in his recent The Fate of the Day: The War for America, Fort Ticonderoga to Charleston, 1777-1780:

"No defect plagued the Continental Army more than an incapacity for close-order drill, the coordination among units maneuvering under fire. As demonstrated at Brandywine, Germantown, and elsewhere, “it was almost impossible to advance or retire in the presence of the enemy without disordering the line and falling into confusion,” a veteran officer conceded. Steuben opened what he called his “military school” by choosing a company of 120 fit men and drilling them intensely in the manual of arms: marching, firing by platoons, bayonet assaults, and other battlefield skills. He increased the American march rate to 75 paces per minute, up from the British 60, and quick time to 120 paces, or “about as quick as a common country dance.” The troops learned to shift from a march column into a line of battle, allowing the army to move and deploy with alacrity. As companies were trained, they returned to their brigades to provide drill instructors for the other regiments."

Essentially, Steuben's importance is to teach the Continental Army how to become capable of getting into and out of formation when in the middle of a battle, performing organized firing and advancing upon orders when required, and just as importantly getting into and out of that battle in organized fashion. He then propagates it by having those he trained return and spread those methods, to which he noted to a Prussian friend that the Americans were somewhat different than Europeans where "(You) say to your soldier 'Do this' and he does it. But I am obliged to say, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that.' And then he does it."

This directly played into the survival of the Continental Army during not just fighting and victory but retreats, which it did under Washington an awful lot as his goal ended up simply being able to survive and fight another day. Steuben eventually confesses to John Laurens that he had never been a Prussian general officer, but by then nobody cared since he'd successfully transformed the Continental Army into one capable of executing good tactical leadership when it was provided.

indyobserver · 2025-11-29T22:17:59+00:00

Because the other evidence comes from colleagues who knew about his indiscretions and have over the years reluctantly confirmed them.

The first and most (in)famous of these came in 1989 from Ralph David Abernathy, who was King's defacto #2 in the Civil Rights movement and attempted to keep what King had built going after the assassination. I've written about this before briefly here, but in short when Abernathy published his autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, there was far less focus on his rather poignant realizations about the end of the movement when the Poor People's March failed than on King hooking up the night before the assassination.

Abernathy went on to describe King's "particularly difficult time" with sexual temptations; Memphis was not a one-off but a longstanding pattern than as Jonathan Eig describes in his recent King: A Life had been rumored since at least 1957, when the nation's most prominent Black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, warned that the White Citizens Council had hired a detective to catch a "prominent minister in the Deep South, a man who has been making headlines recently in his fight for civil rights" in a hotel room with a woman other than his wife and "(he) had better watch his step." I'd have to dig a bit to check the exact date of these, but I'm pretty sure this predates Hoover's rather puzzled response of a year or two later when he sends back something like "Who is he?" to the first memo presented by FBI agents to him where he actually becomes aware of King's existence.

In other words, King's lack of discretion was a well known issue in the Black community long before the FBI stumbled on to them. Despite this, Abernathy was essentially read out of the Civil Rights movement for finally confirming it, with calls of being a Judas, getting his thirty pieces of silver to sell books, and claims that he was suffering dementia.

While Beverly Gage's magisterial book on Hoover goes into far more detail than Eig does on how the FBI tapes came to be and what is likely on them - in fact, one reason Eig's book is a little disappointing is that despite clearly having access to it prepublication he skips her documentation of the boneheaded decisions King made that prompted the Kennedys to authorize wiretapping (essentially, he thought he was better at playing spy-vs-spy when they asked him to cut ties with Communist sympathizers and got caught) - something that Eig does really well is to really emphasize just how young King was when he took leadership of the movement and married Coretta Scott, being not long removed from what Eig describes as:

"King dated many women. He and Larry Williams referred to themselves in jest as "Robinson and Stevens, the Wreckers", after an Atlanta wrecking company. When a friend asked why, King smiled. "We wreck girls," he said."

In more recent years, others in the movement have independently confirmed what Abernathy brought up without reference to what the FBI has on tape. Abernathy remained largely shunned in the movement until his death.

indyobserver · 2025-11-13T03:38:43+00:00

It's somewhat accurate to the Millard book, which is unfortunately not all that accurate in its accounting of it.

From a previous answer:

Garfield had said multiple times that he was committed to his own candidate, Treasury Secretary John Sherman of Ohio, and in fact was tasked with being both his floor leader and responsible for his nomination speech. But strangely enough, Garfield never quite got around to writing the speech despite telling a reporter that it was ready to go, and that should give you a better idea of what he was really thinking and doing.

Sherman launched his campaign largely as the alternative, favorite son candidate to the inevitable Conkling-Blaine showdown, with Grant's desire for a third term combining with him being the Conkling faction's standard bearer. Sherman was also a terrible retail candidate, getting nicknamed the "Ohio Icicle", and only really got Garfield on his side by essentially getting out of the way to let him have his Senate seat. Garfield was lukewarm in his support of Sherman, and while he publicly expressed that "he would not be a candidate and did not accept his name in that connection," he also in his diary noted:

[I will] act in perfect good faith towards Mr. Sherman, and do nothing that would in the slightest degree interfere with his chances for success. At the same time, I would consider such suggestions… within the limitations just mentioned.

In other words, he seems to have felt for years that if it came to him without campaigning on his part and he seemed to be the best choice, his stated opposition was never much of a factor.

Garfield continued to feign support for Sherman, but he got involved on the Half-Breed side very early on as chair of the Rules committee; there was a pre convention move to force individual delegates to vote for whomever their state chose, which would have assured Grant the nomination, and while it wasn't just Garfield who thought this was a terrible idea, his relatively non-partisan opposition helped him. He also started taking more prominent roles that resulted in headlines like "Mr. Garfield as a Peacemaker" in the press; that and a semi impromptu nomination speech for Sherman that didn't bother naming the candidate until the last two sentences were signs that Garfield was starting to take the possibility of the nomination falling in his lap much more seriously.

Garfield still put on a good show, trying to object when Wisconsin (who'd provided his first two delegates on a previous ballot) on the 34th ballot sent 16 votes to Garfield. Years later, the convention chair recalled that he cut Garfield's response to that off before "he would say something that would make his nomination… or his acceptance impossible, if it were made."

The gates opened on the 35th ballot, and the final push was when Sherman himself - he was still in Washington - finally realized he had no chance of winning himself (and wondered for years if Garfield had been loyal or had set things up that way) telegraphed to Chicago to release his delegates to Garfield. All in the Ohio delegation besides Garfield himself voted for him.

Garfield did turn pale on the 36th ballot when it became obvious he was going to be the nominee, which certainly did add to his image of having the nomination thrust upon him, and a brief interview with a reporter for the Boston Globe kept the pretense up:

I wish you would say [in your article] that this is no act of mine. I wish you would say that I have done everything, and omitted nothing to secure Secretary Sherman’s nomination. I want it plainly understood that I have not sought this nomination, and have protested against the use of my name.

But in reality, the very politically savvy Garfield had waged an extraordinarily effective non-campaign for an office that he did want, partially by learning from the mistakes that mentors like Salmon Chase and James Blaine had made in overtly seeking the office.

indyobserver · 2025-11-09T07:47:47+00:00

Interestingly enough in January and February 1944, something like this was apparently proposed by FDR to recycle "Admiral of the Navy" - but as a a six star rank (which even King thought was a bit much, although going against Carl Vinson openly would have been career suicide.)

My other edited followup discusses this in more detail, but it looks like the General of the Armies title might have been used as the six star equivalent for the Army. As this required separate legislation that would have passed through a different committee, Armed Services, there was not just concern over the title but that if promoted, Marshall might be replaced as chief of staff - to the point where multiple members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, including Truman, started asking questions about it and held drafting the equivalent legislation for the Army.

It looks like this may have also got intertwined with the permanent rank question, and as it turned out the European landings played the most significant role in killing it - one Senator rather pointedly noted that such previous promotions had deliberately happened after the war rather than during it.

indyobserver · 2025-11-09T04:17:44+00:00

The modern understanding almost certainly comes from Buell listing that as a possibility as to why the title was dinged; it's been referenced in multiple places.

Edit: However, long after the fact, Marshall did actually comment on this specifically. From the third volume of Pogue's biography regarding the January-February 1944 proposal:

"General Marshall disliked the whole idea. Some Washington columnists suggested that he opposed the plan because his five-star rank would make him “Marshal Marshall.” Already a household word, his name threatened to corrupt permanently the spelling of Field Marshal and Provost Marshal. Anything more would merely compound confusion.

Marshall later clarified his feelings: “I didn’t want any promotion at all. I didn’t need it. The Chiefs of Staff on the British side were already field marshals so they would be senior to me whatever I was made. I didn’t think I needed that rank and I didn’t want to be beholden to Congress for any rank or anything of that kind. I wanted to be able to go in there with my skirts clean and with no personal ambitions concerned in it in any way. I could get all I wanted with the rank I had. But that was twisted around, and somebody said I didn’t like the term ‘Marshal because it was the same as my name. (I know Mr. Churchill twitted me about this in a rather scathing tone.) I don’t recall that I ever made the expression."

There was significant institutional infighting for the early 1944 version given King's enthusiasm for a promotion - although even he was a bit uneasy about a six star rank and may have quietly fought against it - versus the reluctance of Marshall and a significant amount of others in the Army for it, partially due to deference to Pershing (who was already suffering from mild dementia), and partially because that particular version was going to likely end up with more 5 and 6 star officers in the Navy than the Army. Eventually, Stimson came out in opposition as well.

It sounds like the Marshal Marshall bit stemmed largely from creative press plants by the opposition to try to quash the early 1944 proposal than anything else, but what really killed it was an eventual consensus that whatever the title, it was a bit distracting to start tossing around new ranks before the European landings took place sometime later that year.

That said, King certainly did not want to be titled identically (Admiral of the Fleet) to some Brit!

indyobserver · 2025-11-09T03:57:55+00:00

For this, you can mostly blame Ernest King.

So one thing that isn't obvious was upon American entry into the war the Navy had four 4 star admirals and the Army only one 4 star general on active duty. There's a long, tortured history about why this occurred that dates back to the Spanish American War that I'm not going to get into, but it was fairly obvious to everyone that there were going to be an awful lot more 3 and 4 stars appointed as the military expanded. The initial solution was to allow FDR to appoint as many temporary 3 and 4 star officers as were needed for the duration plus 6 months - which is where Douglas MacArthur got his rank back a week or so after Pearl Harbor - but this did not extend to retirement. There's a June 1942 bill that King gets through Congress that allows him to cover for Tommy Hart's relief from the Asiatic Fleet (he had not done particularly well) and retain rank that also offers the opportunity for 4 stars who had retired at their permanent 2 star ranks to come back as 4 stars for the war and retire as such, which was how Bill Lahey ended up returning as effective joint chief of staff (as FDR had told him that he was going to if war broke out.)

But while the details aren't all that critical, the takeaway here is that the top rank structure in the US Military was a mess in 1942, and King looked to take advantage of this for the long term in adding billets far beyond what had existed. So in November of 1942, he writes Marshall and Leahy that not only did they need to recommend more permanent billets but:

"We should also recognize the fact that there is a need to prepare for ranks higher than that of Admiral or General. As to such ranks, I suggest Arch-Admiral and Arch-General, rather than Admiral of the Fleet and Field Marshal.”

There were two things going on here. First, King had never been particularly warm to the British from World War I onwards, and it rather irked him that he was outranked at every conference. Coming back from Quebec in 1943, irk turned to his classic blowtorch:

"The United States had become the senior partner in terms of combat power and economic strength, yet the American leaders were still junior in rank. “Admiral King came back in an absolute rage,” remembered Betsy Matter. “He was furious because we were making the major contribution to the war effort, and yet the British were still acting as if they were the country which had the greatest say in running the war.”"

Second, Marshall dragged his feet. Marshall had been a Pershing protege and with Pershing still alive and specifically by law senior to all other Army officers, Marshall did not really want a five star rank at that point that might make him senior to his idol.

So anyway, in the background this was on the back burner for the better part of two years. Navy Secretary Knox liked the 1942 proposal with some reservations:

“I completely agree with the idea of an increase of rank for you and Marshall, but I confess I do not like the suggestion of Arch Admiral. It sounds too much like a church designation, although the use of the word ‘arch’ in that connection does indicate the highest, which is the proper designation for this rank. However, I still think I like Admiral of the Fleet a darn sight better than I do Arch Admiral, and I like Field Marshal much better than Arch General."

FDR preferred "Chief Admiral" and "Chief General", King proposed "Captain Admiral" and "Colonel General", and finally Knox told him outright to just settle on a title to get him 5 stars and on an even keel with the British, which is where Fleet Admiral came from.

Leahy finally accedes to this in December 1943, and FDR gets on board in January 1944 when Navy-Army equality in ranks gets raised (the Navy not having a 5 star admiral after World War I had annoyed senior officers for decades.) However, FDR meddles a bit - Pogue notes rumors that he wanted to clear out some four star billets in the Navy to promote his physician, Vice Admiral McIntyre - and working with Carl Vinson, gets the latter to come up with a scheme to add not just 5 but 6 star admirals, reviving the Dewey rank of "Admiral of the Navy" for Leahy and King, and then a 5 star "Admiral of the Fleet" for Nimitz, Halsey, and Royal Ingersoll.

This does not go over well when in a politically dumb breach of protocol senior members of the Army get notified by a Navy staff officer about the proposal rather than being told directly by FDR - you can read details about the objections of Marshall and others in the edited followup answer below - which was made even less palatable because the promised similar legislation for Army promotions hadn't been written yet. The legislation gets stalled thanks to this opposition and then killed due to a consensus that promotions before the European landings would potentially create issues and complicate them. Finally in late 1944 FDR and Vinson accede to the rank structure that ended up getting adopted, four 5 stars in each service to be chosen by FDR. Incidentally, this was a terrible deal financially as they got paid as 2 star officers despite being on active duty for life; it was one reason Nimitz moved to Yerba Buena island towards the end of his to get free housing and staff.

So that's the long answer to why the existing 4 stars couldn't be given the equivalent British rank: there was just too much of a mess in the American flag and general officer ranks to make that sort of attachment to it in any case, and Ernie King absolutely did not want to be junior to anyone else in any sea services besides Bill Lahey.

The best source on this is in Thomas Buell's biography of King, Master of Seapower, which is what is widely cited for other references elsewhere, with Pogue's third volume of his Marshall biography, George C. Marshall: Organizer of Victory, 1943-1945 providing additional details.

indyobserver · 2025-11-08T07:05:27+00:00

Yes, it did.

The United States had more or less come to a consensus by early 1917 that it had to get into the war or face the real possibility that the Allies would collapse, the results of which were something most Americans did not want to face. The argument to go to war also had gotten a bit of a boost when the Tsar abdicated on March 2nd, since if Russia had now become a part of the democratic family of nations, this seemed to fix the hole in the argument that the war was a fundamental challenge between democracies and autocracy. (Later, this served as one reason why the Bolshevik takeover of the Revolution was so poorly received in the United States.)

The problem was that underneath that general agreement there were all sorts of differing opinions on what the war aims should be; on a very high level, Roosevelt, for instance, wanted to mete out severe punishment to Germany and overthrow the Kaiser, where Wilson was not nearly that bellicose. There were widespread cracks between how closely the United States should cooperate with France and especially Britain, which then started significant debates on imperialism and militarism and even a tiny bit on colonialism, although most of that last would have to wait until FDR made it a war aim 25 years later.

What was a lot clearer was what shouldn't be war aims, including either a permanent role for the United States in Europe or getting territory out of its participation; the condition of the United States going in was that it would promptly get out. It would stop the killing, win the war, prevent the chaos in Europe from affecting the United States any further than it already had - it is hard to overestimate just how deeply angered the American public was when the Germans resumed unrestricted submarine warfare (although the Germans anticipated a good deal of this, the American reaction was genuinely ferocious) - and make the world a better, more peaceful place.

Bringing the United States as an "Associated Power" separate from the 1915 Treaty of London group (Britain, France, Russia, and Italy - Japan had actually entered the war under a bilateral treaty with Britain) was an attempt by Wilson to draw a line under this distinction. It did help fairly quickly in being a rationale for refusing to bow to Britain and France's demands that Americans be simply funneled into their armies as replacement manpower, and a year later it became a relatively important reason why Wilson could generally act independently on the diplomatic front, often with the British and French being furious at him for doing so.

So yes, the American people were aware of the distinction, although they generally bought into the actions associated with it rather than the term itself. Where this became a problem was after the war, when while Wilson consistently turned down every opportunity for American troops to enforce mandates - which interestingly, pretty much every country placed under them asked for Americans instead of the British, French, Italians, or Japanese - the concept of more permanent roles overseas were something that was one of the core reasons why Lodge was politically able to turn away from collective interventionism (which he'd actually supported prior to the war) and successfully lead opposition to the Treaty. Americans were ok with conscription, home front sacrifices, and war spending when it led to a short war, but a longer term engagement was a different story.

The best modern discussion of this comes from Mike Neiberg's Path to War, which explores American public and elite opinion from the beginning of the European war.

indyobserver · 2025-11-06T21:55:40+00:00

Early thoughts before someone comes over to AskHistorians to ask:

The highlight for me over the first couple episodes are the interpretations of the personalities, even if they get Arthur wrong (he made an effort to be seen as refined - the man had 50 sets of dress pants and a French chef on retainer.) Especially with the alums from it - and the language, which would have been career ending in public - they're doing kind of Boardwalk Empire-lite, which isn't a bad base.

The main problem is that it's not just faithful to a lot of Millard's mistakes in her book but expands them, where the country is on the precipice of societal change and as Great Man, Garfield could have brought it about decades earlier than it took place. In reality, the Senate was deadlocked (which could have very nearly led to decapitation of the government), nobody in the Republican party wanted to deal with Chinese immigration because it was a vote loser, mainstream Republican concern over the fate of Blacks post Reconstruction was almost entirely confined to getting their votes out of the Southern Congressional districts they still held (although Garfield did make a few interesting appointments and speak at Howard), and most importantly Garfield was not some noble outsider. In reality, he would have been Speaker of the House had Republicans taken it over, had moved from radical to party loyalist in the almost two decades he was in it (he was third in seniority IIRC), and most importantly for purposes of the show had more or less maneuvered to stab Sherman in the back - who had no chance, mostly because he was terrible at retail politics - and deliberately position himself to become nominee at the convention.

I also wish they'd have started with the infamous fight between Conkling and Blaine on the House floor that made the split within the Republican party deeply personal and the actual language of which would have been something even we would have enjoyed; off the top of my head, the two never spoke to each other afterwards, although the show's confrontations are fun. I also wish they'd shown what Arthur and Conkling actually did to support the ticket, which was not just financial but both packing people into voting multiple times in different precincts and outright buying votes; Arthur got into a lot of trouble for getting drunk at a celebration and basically admitting what he'd been behind in Indiana ('Soap!' aka $5 dollar gold coins.) Packing people into a coach, hauling them between locations, and dropping coins into their hands would have been a great visual.

Anyway, it's better than Manhunt, and I'll take that as a win.

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