Month: March 2018
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Where Boys Learn to Farm and Be Soldiers
Although this 1918 article about a program to teach urban children and teenagers about agriculture and farming is interesting, the main cause of the program’s creation was based on a profound misunderstanding of the future to come: “We are going to need more and more boys on the farms, now and after the war; it […]
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System In Our War
The War Department underwent a substantial change at the beginning of World War I, transforming from a largely combat-based agency to a manufacturing- and business-based one. Assistant Secretary of War Benedict Crowell explained in this 1918 interview: The War Department [has] become a business affair. He cited the aircraft work of the army as an example. […]
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Need of Federal Budget in Wartime
In this 1918 interview, newly-chosen House Appropriations Committee Chair J. Swagar Sherley of Kentucky proposed the formation of a Budget Committee. It would be created the next year 1919 as a “special committee” for that session only, later becoming a permanent committee in 1974. The current chair is Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR3). He has served […]
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Business World’s Grievance Against Germany
President Trump spent the past few weeks ratcheting up his trade wars, which he claims would be “easy to win.” He has implemented tariffs on steel and uranium, in a move that even many or most of his own party’s Congress members oppose, not to mention most other world leaders. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong, and […]
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File of ‘La Libre Belgique’ Now in New York
The daring, revolutionary, and anti-authoritarian Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique [The Free Belgium] was published during World War I — its authors and location a state of almost complete mystery. As this 1918 article details: “Since the beginning of 1915 this small four-page sheet has been published, almost weekly, ‘somewhere in Belgium,’ in defiance of the Germans […]
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France’s Airman-Artist Tells How He Works
Henri Farré was the official painter of the French government during World War I, whose job was to paint battles as he observed them from airplanes. While this may seem like a strange occupation to be funded at taxpayer expense after the invention of the photograph, WWI was also the first major military conflict to feature aviation. […]
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