It is December 31, 1939.
And, to the two million gathered in a windy, twenty-two-degree chill in New York’s Times Square, it looks pretty good.
And they roar their approval when the illuminated ball drops and “1940” lights up each side of the Times Building marque.
And why shouldn’t they?
The Depression, Prohibition, the drought, Hoovervilles, long ladies’ skirts — all those miseries of the 1930s were gone.
People had jobs and money again.
And the 1940s looked good.
The Nazi onslaught of the prior September had stalled along the Maginot Line.
Paris had escaped the bombing that had seemed sure to come just four months before.
Hitler’s hyperbole and empty threats were getting tiresome and no longer provoked much anxiety.
While Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States had been crushed, that struggle was over now.
Most people couldn’t find them on a map anyway.
And Japan’s slow swallowing of China was a foreign struggle of alien cultures happening on the other side of the world.
Both President Roosevelt and his Republican presidential challengers said a strong defense of the western hemisphere would keep America safe and out of any war.
And that was good enough for almost everybody.
Hotels and restaurants in New York, in Paris and even in blacked-out London were booked solid with New Year’s revelers.
But not everyone was cheerful that New Year’s Eve.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, had just returned home from a tour of Europe.
He is convinced that another European war is inevitable.
‘It will surely embroil America,’ Sulzberger says.
And has called for a new European system — perhaps a European union — to break the cycle of endless European conflict.
But no one will listen.
His idea was an old one which French author and pacifist Victor Hugo had advocated ninety years before.
A European union was an idea Winston Churchill would eventually advocate, too.
But only after the coming world war has ended and much of Europe has been destroyed.
And in the hundred years separating Hugo and Churchill, dozens of conflicts occurred on the European continent which claimed millions of European and American lives.
One of them was William J. McGowan, a twenty-three-year-old Air Force pilot from Benson, Minnesota, whose P-47 Thunderbolt was shot out of the sky over Bayeux, France, on D-Day afternoon.
On New Year’s Eve 1939, few would have believed it possible that, before the next year was out, Paris would fall, Britain would suffer the Blitz and America would institute its first peace-time draft.
And the world would plunge “once more, unto the breach.”1
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Share this post