A Week in New York April 1946

The Sunday Times and Herald Tribune Book Reviews

2012-02-15T23:56:00.002-05:00

I have added new and revised pages on my April 1946 website on The New York Times Book Review and The Herald Tribune Book Review. Among the books reviewed that week were Eudora Welty's debut novel, Delta Wedding, and Albert Camus' The Stranger. Many bookish New Yorkers subscribed to both of these newspapers on Sunday.

Gosta Larsson's "Ships in the River"

2012-02-15T00:37:00.000-05:00

I have been working on updating a section on books of the week on my April 1946 website. In my research I came across an interesting but long-forgotten novel, "Ships on the River," by Gosta Larrson about life on the New York waterfront. The "Books-Authors" column of brief publishing items in the April 17 New York Times mentioned that Warner Brothers had purchased the film rights.

Larsson had immigrated as a young man to New York from Sweden and had published several novels in the proletarian fiction vein. This novel, however, was his first to be set in New York. It was the story of a Swedish longshoreman, the emotionally disturbed Norwegian girl he falls in love with and his struggles to make a living on the corrupt docks of the city. I found positive reviews of the book from Kirkus and The Saturday Review of Books that praised the writer's depiction of the Chelsea waterfront where the hero worked and the bohemian haunts of Greenwich Village where the heroine hung out. The New York Times unsigned review, while favorably disposed to the novel, pointed out some jarring anachronisms and inaccuracies, leading the reviewer to suspect that Larsson had less first-hand experience than the book's publicity proclaimed. Still, it seems like it would be an interesting read, if I could ever find a copy.

Warner bought the film rights to create a vehicle for Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors, who had recently arrived in the United States to great fanfare, promoted as the next Bergman or Garbo. A later item said that Ronald Reagan was to play the book's hero. The film was never made. A Swedish website I found said that the book may have been one of the sources for the classic fim "On the Waterfront," although the plot was different and a series of a newspaper articles from The Sun was the primary source for the film.

Larsson was one of the many writers whose politics came under scrutiny in the McCarthy era. His Swedish publisher also dropped him. None of his books are in print today and he died alone in a garage in Connecticut in 1955.

The Singapore atop the Winter Garden

2012-01-20T00:09:00.000-05:00

An ad for the Singapore written in phony, sing-song pidgin English ran in the business pages of The New York Times on April 16. It purported to be from "Singapore Sal," the restaurant's hostess, who advised out-of-town buyers that they could find many of their suppliers eating "Hong Suee Yee Singapore" at the restaurant/nightclub atop the Winter Garden Theatre at 50th Street and Broadway. Some of the clients were listed by name and affiliation, which must have stroked the egos of these Garment District executives.

"Why should buyers wear down feet running to show rooms?" the ad asked. "Could sit in pleasant atmosphere of Singapore, listen to singing of birds, hear soft music, see just as many fellows from garment trade." According to the ad, the restaurant offered "exotic Chinese and Island foods" and was open for dinner and after theatre.

The Singapore was a new restaurant, the latest in a string of establishments that had occupied this three-level venue. In his column in the Sunday Mirror, Lee Mortimer wrote that the woman introduced to him originally as Singapore Sal, for all her chatter in a "Chinee" accent about Singapore and the Raffles Hotel, was actually a model named Jane Bishop. After her true identity had been revealed by the press, she lost her job and proprietor/publicist Carl Erbe was looking for a new "slant-eyed doll" to replace her. Erbe and his partners were involved in a number of Manhattan clubs, most notable the Zanzibar which featured Black jazz musicians and a chorus line a la the Cotton Club.

To the dismay of the legit theater fans, the venerable Winter Garden at this time was being used as a movie house. The weepie "Tomorrow is Forever," starring Claudette Colbert, Orson Welles and George Brent, was wrapping up its run this week.

Eva Zeisel: A Giant of Mid-Twentieth Century Modern Desgn

2012-01-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

Noted ceramic designer Eva Zeisel died December 30, 2011 at 105, one of the last of the Jazz Age generation. As noted in an earlier post, on this week in April 1946, when she was 39, an exhibition of the chinaware she had designed was on display at the Museum of Modern Art. She was the first woman artist to have a solo show at the museum. Her focus on practicality and her softening of the harsh simplicity of earlier Bauhaus design had enormous influence on mid-century modern product design. Her credo was that a product first had to be useful and then beautiful.

Zeisel was born in Hungary in 1906. In 1935. at Stalin's invitation, she moved to the Soviet Union to serve as artistic director of the nation's ceramic industry. A year later, she fell victim to the ruthless, calculating and paranoid dictator's purges and spent 16 months in prison on the trumped up charge of participating in an assassination plot. She was deported to Austria, arriving just as the Nazis took control. She and her husband escaped to the United States with $64 between them.

Zeisel was much honored in her career and her work can be found in the collections of many major museums as well as on store shelves. In 2010, she released new designs for a lounge chair and salt and pepper shakers.

Six Day Work Week at the New York Stock Exchange

2011-12-24T00:20:00.001-05:00

The New York Times on April 16, 1946, reported that an informal poll of the St. Louis conference of the Association of Stock Exchange Firms showed the majority of governors were opposed to ending Saturday trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The governors said that they were aware that the six-day work week, pretty much a thing of the past in most businesses, was a problem from the personnel point of view but they noted that Saturday was an active day for trading in most of the nation's cities. The Exchange was a culturally conservative institution that only allowed women on the trading floor for the first time in 1943, during the war. The governors said that the poll was not binding and the issue would be raised again in the future. The Stock Exchange was open on Saturday until 1952.

Billy Graham vs. Pat Scanlon at St. Nicholas Arena

2011-12-22T10:16:00.000-05:00

UPDATED FROM THE ORIGINAL POST

Billy Graham fought Pat Scanlon at St. Nicholas Arena on Monday night, April 15. The bout was carried on the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports on WHN radio. Boxing was a major sport back in 1946. Gillette advertised the bout and its blades in The New York Times of April 15 with the familiar slogan "LOOK sharp! FEEL sharp! BE sharp!"

This Billy Graham was not the evangelist who became famous in the 1950s but a scrappy 23 year-old Irish-American welterweight, the son of a Manhattan bar owner. He was a fighter on his way up who had won 60 of his 61 previous professional fights, 57 of them in a row. Scanlon was also a New York Irishman, from Ozone Park in Queens. Although Scanlon had defeated Tony Pellone, the one fighter who had bested Graham, Graham was the favorite.

The referee stopped the fight at the beginning of the sixth round after inspecting Scanlon's badly damaged left eye. Graham had been in control from the beginning, having knocked Scanlon down for a count of two in the first round. The bout attracted 3,101 fight fans.

One of Graham's claims to fame was that he never was knocked off his feet at any time in his career. But he lacked a powerful knockout punch and most of his victories came on decisions. He was known for his agility, the speed of his punches, his footwork and stylish moves. While he was a serious contender in the postwar years, scoring victories over top fighters in his class, the title evaded him. He still became a local postwar sports celebrity, even though he never had the big earnings of a titleholder or a heavyweight contender. By the end of the decade, he was drawing large crowds to his Madison Square Garden bouts. In 1951 when he lost a title match-up by decision to Kid Gavilan, it caused a near riot in the Garden. It is a highly controversial outcome to this day. Historians of the sport have attributed the defeat to Graham's refusal to cut mobster Frankie Carbo in on 20 percent of his winnings; boxing in the postwar decade was a very dirty sport. To many New Yorkers, Graham was the welterweight champion no matter what the judges said.

Graham retired from the sport in 1955. He was elected to the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 1987.

Scanlon, who worked as a teamster, gave up boxing in 1948. He told the LA Times in a 1989 interview when he was a Zen disciple who called himself Dogo, that his life spun out of control after he stopped fighting. He started using drugs and his wife got into some sort of trouble because of him and left him and their baby. In 1967, after three failed years of psychoanalysis, he turned to Zen for peace, better, I guess, than being socked in the eye by Billy Graham.

The Week's Best Selling Fiction

2011-12-11T00:42:00.001-05:00

I have created a new page at my website listing the best selling books of the week according to The Sunday Times and Sunday Herald Tribune of April 14.

Erich Maria Remarque's tale of refugees in Paris just before the start of the Second World War, Arch of Triumph, and Daphne Du Maurier's historical romance, The King's General, headed the list. Historical romances dominated but more literary fiction from Evelyn Waugh, Theodore Dreiser and Edmund Wilson also made the list. The Herald Trib showed continued strong sales in some markets for Ayn Rand's word-of-mouth hit, The Fountainhead. Other genres represented were the social issue novel (e.g.Ann Petry's The Street), sultry potboilers (e,g. Written on the Wind) and humor (The Zebra Diary). Missing are the crime, police procedurals and contemporary romances that dominate present day best seller lists. These kinds of books were popular but seldom made the best seller list. They were, however, the mainstays of the book rental business which were the Blockbuster Video of the day, renting out light fiction titles to members. Paperbacks, which were introduced a decade earlier, were also increasingly concentrating on mysteries, westerns and stories of career girls in love with their boss.

See the site for a complete list of best sellers with brief descriptions. I have also indicated which of the books are still in print. Some of these books fo in and out of print periodically.

The US Government Takes on the A&P, an American Icon

2011-11-29T08:57:00.000-05:00

In 1946, the New York-based grocery chain the A&P was such a major presence across the country that the United States Justice Department was prosecuting it as a trust. Charges had been brought in 1943 and on September 1946 the company and the two elderly brothers who headed the closely held firm were found guilty of a conspiracy to keep consumer food prices too low, hurting the many mom & pop corner groceries and the long chain of suppliers, wholesalers and jobbers that supplied the independent stores. The judge who found against the A&P declared that the company had behaved responsibly but that the law did not allow him to differentiate between a good trust and a bad one. The A&P, he decided had too much control of the food industry.

The trial was a culmination of decades of political attacks against chain stores by independent merchants and their allies. A&P was the principal target because it was far and away the largest retailer in the nation with sales well in excess of its nearest rival, Sears & Roebuck. Radio agitators of the day flamed the controversy. They claimed that the American Way of Life was under attack by the chain stores. Real Americans were losing their livelihoods thanks to big city corporate powers. The dream of being your own boss was being crushed by Wall Street. We were becoming a nation of employees.

The anti-chain store sentiment was weaker in New York and other large cities. For one, A&P was a New York institution, It had begun before the Civil War as a tea distributor operating out of a leather tanning office on Gold Street near the South Street Seaport in a commercial district known as the Swamp where tanners and other noxious businesses were concentrated. By 1946, the company, which by then operated thousands of stores across the US, had its corporate headquarters in the Graybar Building on Lexington Avenue over Grand Central Station. It had 486 stores in the metropolitan area.

Another factor diminishing anti-chain-store fever in New York was the strong consumer movement in the city which largely supported the chain stores for bringing down the cost of food and other merchandise. Several unions in the food trade also supported the A&P. New York PR wiz Carl Byoir had helped orchestrate consumer and union opposition to earlier anti-chain store legislation introduced by Texas congressman Wright Patman in the 1930s and had been so successful that initially the Justice Department had charged him as a defendant in the suit.

The grocery business had gone through a lot of changes since the day when grocers sold flour, coffee and sugar from vermin-infested bins. stale crackers and pickles from barrels and a small selection of seasonal produce in baskets. Packaged goods and canned food become commonplace at the end of the 19th century, stacked on shelves behind the counter manned by the store owner, manager or clerk. In the 1920s the A&P replaced its conventional grocery stores with what were called combination stores which added meat departments and self-service aisles. The supermarket had been introduced in Jamaica Queens in 1930 when King Kullen opened as a barebones store in a warehouse. The concept quickly swept the country but it was the independents and smaller chains that were the pioneers. In the late 1930s, the A&P replaced most of its combination stores with supermarkets. The supermarkets of 1946, while much larger than their predecessors, were a fraction of the size of today's suburban stores.

While to many New Yorkers, the A&P was almost synonymous with grocery store, New Yorkers had other options. It competed with other large chains like Grand Union and local chains like Gristedes, as well as many small corner groceries that served niche markets. In immigrant neighborhoods, for instance, some customers preferred dealing with a store owner who spoke their language rather than navigating the aisles of supermarkets. Corner grocers thrived in neighborhoods ignored by the larger stores. Small grocers in working class neighborhoods often allowed customers to run tabs while the A&P did not. Independents also often delivered, a useful service in areas where few people had cars. Some stores took telephone orders. And the city had a population large and diverse enough to support speciality markets offering ethnic foods or gourmet items.

While the opponents to chain stores railed that they destroyed small businesses, during the Depression the number of independent grocery stores actually increased as some who had lost their jobs sunk their savings into opening small stores. After the war, some returning veterans used low-interest government loans to finance ventures into retailing. However, while it was relatively easy to enter the grocery business, it was difficult to make a profit. Neighborhood stores usually served a small base of regular customers, often little more than a few dozen families. Customers who charged groceries at the corner stores when money was tight, often patronized the chain stores, which had lower prices, when they had money in their pockets. Because of low sales volumes, the neighborhood grocers depended on a sizable markup while the A&P made its money on high volume and could sell for lower markups. Also the A&P could charge lower prices because they paid less at wholesale and demanded advertising concessions from manufacturers and wholesalers. The company dealt directly with some manufacturers, eliminating the middlemen who serviced the independents. The company also manufactured its own products like Eight O'Clock Coffee and Jane Parker baked goods. The A&P could afford to advertise heavily and even had its own magazine, Womans Day. Consequently independent grocery stores had a high failure rate and even those grocers who managed to keep their businesses going often worked very long hours for a modest living.

The anti-trust case shined a spotlight on the two elderly brothers who ran the A&P, the very private, cautious George I. Hartford, 81, and risk-taking John A. Hartford, 74, who lived in the Plaza and was active in civic affairs. Company control was in the hands of family members although many employees held non-voting shares. The case also made public some of the inner workings of the secretive, paternalistic company. In some ways, for all its business efficiency and immense size, the company's corporate structure harkened back to an earlier era. Most of its senior executives had worked their way up from the ranks; they were not Ivy Leaguers with MBAs. Some did not even have high school diplomas. Both George I. and John Hartford had dropped out of high school to work as clerks for their father, George H. Hartford. The senior Hartford had also started as a clerk, eventually taking over the company when George Francis Gilman, the flamboyant promoter who had started it, retired to his Connecticut estate, worried that his relatives wanted to kill him because of a bitter dispute over his father's estate.
The history of the A&P and its legal battles are detailed in a new book, "The Great A&P and the Struggle For Small Business in America." The author, Mark Levinson, provides glimpses into the personal lives of the Gilmans and Hartfords, as well as of the grocery business in the 19th and 20th centuries. The book addresses the company's decline in the postwar era after the death of the Hartfords when management passed out of family hands. The A&P was slow to move into the suburbs and to expand in California, the areas that would have the greatest growth. It balked at carrying non-food items that provided its competitors with much of their profit. It no longer offered the lowest prices and the increasingly dowdy stores located largely in older urban neighborhoods lost the luster that the company had long enjoyed as America's premier retailer and grocer. After a century of successes. the company became yesterday's news. It is now a shell of what it once was, a regional chain that includes Pathmark, Waldbaum's, the Food Emporium, Super Fresh and a handful of grocery stores that still bear the A&P name. At its peak, there were 16,000 A&Ps. Now the chain has a little over 300 locations. In 2010 the company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy

"The Great A&P" is available online in print and as an e-book at Amazon and Barnes & Noble and as an e-book from Google Books It can also be found at many book stores..

Racing at Jamaica

2011-11-18T08:30:00.000-05:00

Jamaica Racetrack was up and running this week in April 1946. Racing was the major spectator sport of the postwar years, drawing bigger crowds than baseball. On Memorial Day 1945, almost 65,000 customers crammed into Jamaica Racetrack which had been designed to hold only a fraction of that crowd. On April 15, 1946, more than 32,000 spectators, about twice the official capacity, were on hand on a Monday afternoon, for the St. Albans Handicap, won by nose by Let's Dance ridden by Basil James, who had recently returned from the service. Let's Dance paid out $9.50 to $2. The favorite, Doctader, ridden by Eddie Arcaro, finished third. New Yorkers followed the races with great attention, as did the city newspapers. The fans laid out $2,695,962 at the mutuel windows for the seven races that day and millions more passed through the hands of the city's bookies despite the police crackdown on illegal gambling that had just gone into effect, an effort that turned out to be largely for show since the police and the bigtime bookies had their arrangement.

Jamaica Racetrack opened in 1903. Horse racing on the flat plains of Long Island dates back to the 17th century. In 1946, there were three racetracks in operation on the plains -- Belmont, Aqueduct and Jamaica. They rotated meetings. April belonged to Jamaica which was located where Rochedale Village now stands. Belmont was the most prestigious venue but Jamaica Racetrack was the most popular despite being derided as "Foot Sore Downs" and the "Meat Grinder" for its overcrowding. Some of the most famous horses of the day like Man O'War ran there and it was home to major races like The Wood Memorial. Jamaica was where the crowd that frequented Lindy's spent their early spring and late fall afternoons. It was a noted hangout for the Tammany bigwigs. In earlier years, Arnold Rothstein and Babe Ruth were regular visitors. Fans could reach the track by Long Island Railroad directly to the track or take the Sixth or Eighth Avenue subways to Parsons Boulevard or the Jamaica El to 160th Street where they boarded shuttle buses to the track.

Despite the track's enormous popularity, real estate developers had long been lobbying to get their hands on the land where Jamaica Racetrack sat. They found sympathizers in master planner Robert Moses and the sometimes prudish Fiorello La Guardia but the war had put a damper on their plans. And in 1946, Tammany had taken back control of City Hall so Jamaica was safe for the moment.

When it had been built, the track was in a relatively bucolic setting but by 1946 it was surrounded by modest housing. Nearby South Jamaica was largely African American and Italian. A study in 1943 noted a "better class Negro community" of private homes to the west of the track near Merrick Boulevard. After the war, the neighborhoods closest to the track became predominantly African American.

Jamaica Racetrack lasted until 1959 when it was torn down to make way for Rochedale Village, the largest development of cooperative housing at the time.

The Much Anticipated 1946 Baseball Season Opens

2011-11-14T09:30:00.000-05:00

On April 16, the 1946 official baseball season began. The star players were back from military service and the fans, many themselves newly returned vets, were filled with excited anticipation. Spring exhibition games had drawn record crowds.

"All during the war the spectators sat in the stands with their minds distracted. Their eyes may have been drawn to the ersatz performers on the diamonds but their thoughts wandered off to the absent stars," Arthur Daley wrote that day in his "Sports of the Times" column for The New York Times. That is what made this day no routine opener in the opinion of Daley but "virtually the beginning of a new era, one that is likely to rank as the greatest the game ever has had." The excitement was greatest in the American League where the Yankees, with the return of superstars like Joe DiMaggio, were the consensus choice to win a hard-fought pennant.

Mel Ott's Giants were opening at home at the Polo Grounds against the Phillies. Governor Thomas Dewey was set to throw out the first ball, an honor usually reserved for the mayor. Mayor O'Dwyer's office said that O'Dwyer would not be attending the Giant's opening, but dismissed any political implication. He was also bypassing the home opener of the Yankees which was under fire from the Holy Name Society of the Catholic church for taking place on Good Friday. The Yankees were playing the Athletics in Philadelphia on opening day. O'Dwyer, a resident of Bay Ridge, would, however, be on hand for the opening home game of the Dodgers, although it had not yet been announced who would be tossing out the first ball. Leo Durocher's Dodgers were playing the Braves in Boston on opening day. In skipping two home openings, O'Dwyer was breaking with longstanding tradition.

Jacqueline Susann at the Hotel Navarro

2011-11-12T12:26:00.000-05:00

In her biography, "Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann," Barbara Seaman painted a vivid picture of Susann's life in 1946 when Susann was living in a suite at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South with her husband, press agent and radio producer Irving Mansfield. An inveterate publicity hound, Susann was also yenta and mother confessor to a circle of glamorous show girls and show biz wives who gathered at her suite and gossiped over cold cuts, room service meals and tea or met at '21' or other fashionable lunch spots. Many in her group, like Susann herself, were regular clients of midtown doctors who obligingly wrote prescriptions for uppers and downers. This was the milieu of her later bestseller "Valley of the Dolls." Lovely Me" is available as an e-book from Google Books.

Susann had come to New York in 1936, straight out of high school, determined like many attractive young women, to become an actress and model. She had no training and little talent but believed that willpower would make her dreams come true. It was a belief system that got many pretty things into a lot of trouble. Susann, however married Mansfield, a hustler with connections, in 1939 when she was 21. He kept her name in print while she took on mostly minor roles on Broadway and on the road. Susann did not reciprocate with fidelity. An affair with Eddie Cantor landed her a role in the road company of "Banjo Eyes" until Cantor's wife discovered what was going on.

Deciding that Mansfield was of little use to her during his wartime military service when she had to move back in with her family in Philadelphia, she ditched him for comedian Joe E. Lewis, who promptly signed up for a USO position that took him to New Guinea, safely away from her clutches, She reconciled with Mansfield. Fidelity again was not part of the arrangement. According to Seaman, but disputed by others, she had an affair with actress movie actress Carole Landis, after appearing with her on Broadway in a short-lived musical, "The Lady Says Yes" in 1945.

The Hotel Navarro was a show biz haven. It catered to both long-term residents like Susann and Mansfield, who stayed 26 years, and performers in town for an engagement or publicity tour. The building now houses the Ritz-Carlton. The Navarro was expensive. Susann's suite had three rooms-- a living room, bedroom and small study-- with a view of Central Park. She loved it. She would set her 1946 play "Lovely Me" in a similar setting. The kitchen was crammed into a closet-sized space okay for frying eggs or boiling water for tea but Susann did not need a kitchen when the hotel had excellent room service and a steakhouse on the premises. Free evenings were for nightclubbing, not whipping up a home cooked meal. Residential hotels like this were popular back then with New York celebrities. Seaman wrote that Susann furnished the living room with a bar, "a long black couch set off by lipstick-red pillows and chairs, black lamp bases shaped like human torsos topped with red and gold shades, a vermilion upholstered swivel chair and a spinet piano over which hung a large Robert Susan nude." Robert Susan was her father, a portrait painter in Philadelphia. Jacqueline and her mother had added the extra "n" to their name so it would be pronounced correctly. The family was descended from Spanish Jews who had fled to Holland during the Inquisition.

Susann was a notorious clothes horse. She had "a daytime collection of Rosalind Russell-style suits and dresses to suit her playwright image" and an after-dark assortment of "sireen" dresses, including some to which she had sown sequins. Like any fashionable Manhattan lady of the time, she had a stock of stylish hats from the top name designers and also made her own turbans.

Ar the beginning of the year, while waiting for her own play to get off the ground, she took the lead role in a play as a stripper modeled after Gypsy Rose Lee. The play, "Between the Covers," hit the road in February. She went on a strict diet, in which scotch played a major role. to fit into the skintight costumes. The play was a bomb. The playwright blamed Susann's over-the-top, attention-grabbing, upstaging performance in large part and after a few weeks, during which she drummed up considerable personal publicity, she was out of the show, which never made it to Broadway. She was back at the Hotel Navarro and pregnant in April 1946 as plans for the production of her play were taking shape.

Playwright Jacqueline Susann

2011-11-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

In 1946, Susann was a highly ambitious 28-year old actress best known for getting her name in the columns, sort of a Kardashian of her era. That year she tried her hand at play writing.

This week it was announced that Luba Malina would star in "The Temporary Mrs. Smith," the show business comedy penned by Susann and Beatrice Cole, another would-be actress. It was headed for Broadway. She had appeared in several plays on Broadway and on the road, mostly in minor roles. It would be another two decades before she became a famous writer of sorts. She had met Beatrice Cole when they both played lingerie models in "The Women." Malina was in the Cole Porter musical "Mexican Hayride" on Broadway and in the screen version and was most recently seen on stage in the musical "Marinka."

The play had a lot of pre-opening publicity, but it had a bumpy road on its way to Broadway. The show received bad reviews out of town and changed directors three times. Malina dropped out several times before she finally opened in the play on Broadway on Christmas day 1946. By then it had been retitled "Lovely Me." Thomas Mitchell, who had won an Oscar for "Stagecoach" and was Scarlett O'Hara's father in "Gone with the Wind," briefly had a role and served as director of the production, prompting one of Malina's walkouts. Billy Gilbert, who had staged one of Broadway's biggest hits of the moment, the revival of Victor Herbert's "The Red Mill," also came and went as actor/director. During one of Malina's walkouts, silent film and former Broadway star Francine Larrimore was engaged in the title role which would have been a comeback after several years absence. Film actor Mischa Auer was engaged in a supporting role and stayed with the play.

By the time it reached Broadway, the actress Jessie Royce Landis, was at the helm as director. Landis was best known then for having played teenage Corliss Archer's mother in the hit play "Kiss and Tell." Corliss Archer was a popular character of the 1940s, first introduced in a magazine story. She was later played by Shirley Temple in the screen adaptation of the play and was the central figure in a popular radio series that transferred to television in the 1950s. Readers may know Landis from her maternal screen roles in the 1950s; she was Cary Grant's mother in "North by Northwest," although they were the same age.

The play opened on Broadway at the Adelphi. The theater had become available when "Three to Make Ready" closed early because of Ray Bolger's illness. But the Adelphi was only free until January 9. "Lovely Me" would need to scramble to find a new theater which made press and audience reaction critical. Susann's husband, the press agent and radio producer Irving Mansfield, was confident his contacts in the press would help make the play a hit even if it wasn't every critic's cup of tea. He had been getting his wife in the newspapers regularly since their marriage in 1939.

The critics savaged the show. Even Mansfield's good pal, Douglas Watt of The Daily News, panned it. However, audiences laughed at the trite jokes, whether because Mansfield packed the house with friends or because Susann knew how to please the masses. The production did find a second home at the Coronet, but this too was temporary; Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" was scheduled to bow at the theater on January 29. "Lovely Me" was doing good business at the box office, or so the publicity claimed, but the producers could not find a third theater and "Lovely Me" closed on January 25 after 37 performances.

During this sturm and drang, Susann gave birth to her only child, a son she named Guy. She asked the glamorous chanteuse Hildegarde, the toast of Cafe Society and one of Susann's closest friends, to be the baby's godmother, When he was three, Guy was diagnosed as autistic and sent permanently to an institution. Susann would claim he was in Arizona because of his asthma.

Katharine Cornell's "Antigone" and "Candida" to Close May 4

2011-11-08T12:12:00.003-05:00

Katharine Cornell was one of the first ladies of the Broadway stage in 1946. On February 18, she had opened at the Cort Theatre in an English-language version of Jean Anouilh's "Antigone." The play had electrified audiences in Nazi-occupied Paris where it was seen as allegorically addressing the political situation but was met with a mixed critical response and tepid audience interest in New York. To boost business, Miss Cornell and her producers added a revival of George Bernard Shaw's "Candida," one of the actress's signature roles, to the stand, alternating the two productions in repertory. Cornell had first appeared in "Candida" on Broadway in 1924 and most recently in an abbreviated run in 1942. Her most famous role to date had been as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in "The Barretts of Wimpole Street," which she first played on Broadway in 1931.

This week, the actress announced that the run of both plays would end May 4. As of April 16, "Antigone" had played 64 performances on Broadway and "Candida" had played 24. Sir Cedric Hardwicke was her co-star in both plays. The company also included Mildred Natwick, Marlon Brando and Wesley Addy. Brando, who had made his Broadway debut in "I Remember Mama," would garner mostly pans for his performance, being compared unfavorably to Burgess Meredith who had played the same role in the 1942 production. The play would be moving immediately to Chicago for a three-week limited engagement. Miss Cornell toured extensively.

Cornell was 53 in 1946. She would have some critical and box office successes over the next few years but good roles would be harder to come by as the postwar years rolled on. Marlon Brando would become one of the biggest stars of the postwar years.

The Many Bus Terminals of Manhattan

2011-11-07T08:46:00.000-05:00

In 1946 the Port Authority bus terminal on 40th Street and Eighth Avenue was four years from completion. It had been first proposed in 1945. The proposed facility was intended to do away with the more than half-dozen bus terminals in midtown Manhattan, most located in the lower levels of office buildings or hotels.

Greyhound, which was actually a consortium rather than a single operator, used the Capitol Terminal on West 54th Street, the Midtown Bus Terminal on West 43rd Street and the Pennsylvania Greyhound Terminal on West 34th Street (pictured here in 1936), directly across the street from Pennsylvania Station. The latter was home to a Greyhound affiliate half-owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad which served as a feeder to the railroad line as well as a long distance carrier. Built in 1935 in the streamlined modern style, the terminal had a utilitarian interior.

Among the other larger Manhattan terminals listed in the 1939 WPA Guide to New York City, were the All American Bus Depot on West 42nd St, the Consolidated Bus Terminal on West 41st Street, the Dixie Bus Center in the Dixie Hotel on West 42nd St, the Gray Line Terminal on West 36th Street and the Hotel Astor Bus terminal on West 45th. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had a coach service to its Jersey City train station that ran from an elegant bus terminal with a revolving bus platform in the Chanin Building at Lexington and 42nd, allowing easy transfer from Grand Central Station. The B&O had other, smaller bus stations in the city as well.

Christopher Gray wrote about the Pennsylvania Terminal, which was demolished in 1963, in his "Streetscapes" feature in The Sunday New York Times on November 6, 2011. He notes that Greyhound resisted moving into the Port Authority Terminal for more than a decade but finally gave in after the city repeatedly thwarted its efforts to build a large new terminal of its own.

Yiddish Theater Celebrates Passover

2011-11-05T10:44:00.000-04:00

Four new plays were opening in New York's Yiddish theaters on Passover week. They were:

Menasha Skulnik's musical comedy "My Wedding Night" at the Parkway Theatre in Brooklyn.
Louis Freiman's "A Thousand Wives" at the Hopkinson Theatre in Brooklyn.
Maurice Schwartz' Yiddish Art production of "Yoshe Kalb" at the Windsor Theatre in the Bronx.
"Laugh, Clown, Laugh," starring Michal Machalesko at the Bronx Art Theatre.

The Yiddish theater, which had been a major force in the cultural life of first-generation Eastern European Jews, was in decline by 1946 and would continue to lose its audience in the postwar period. Second Avenue on the Lower East Side had been its center in its heyday. All of the above productions were in the outer boroughs where a Yiddish-speaking remnant clung on.

First TV Network

2011-11-04T09:09:00.000-04:00

It wasn't much, just a hookup between a studio at the Mayflower Hotel in DC and one in Wanamaker's department store in downtown Manhattan but on April 15, 1946 the first permanent television network debuted. It was also the opening of the new Dumont television studio in Wanamaker's. An assembly of politicians and dignitaries were on hand to witness the event. Dumont expected shortly to add Cleveland, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh to its fledgling network as next steps to a national network. The sites were linked by coaxial cable.

Mayor O'Dwyer addressed the guests, foreseeing the day when TV would bring the great museums and galleries into homes and classrooms. Senator Hawkins of New Jersey, speaking from Washington, predicted that the new medium would bring the daily proceedings of Congress to the average American. Senator McMahon of Connecticut revealed that television would be used to monitor the upcoming atom bomb tests at Bikini. He also predicted that it would make the world aware of the advantages of American democracy.

In addition to the speechifying, two short entertainment programs were broadcast. "Experience," broadcast from DC, was described in The New York Times as a "dramatic fantasy." "Let's Have Fun" was a sketch presented from New York. The whole event lasted two hours and the close quarters and hot TV lights made for an uncomfortable audience as the night wore on. But hey, it was a start. There were very few TV sets in homes yet and only a skeletal program lineup from Dumont and NBC was available. It was still a novelty rather than a viable medium but things would change quickly. As noted in an earlier post, CBS was betting that the thing would not catch on until color broadcasts had become feasible; the network saw more immediate promise in FM radio.

Concerts for Russian Relief

2011-11-02T09:57:00.000-04:00

The April 16 New York Times noted that the Russian Relief benefit folk music concert at Carnegie Hall Saturday April 20 had almost sold out with only standing room tickets still available. It was one of three concerts scheduled this spring to benefit the Greater New York Committee for Russian Relief, a broad-based relief effort that was especially popular with the city's many leftists.

The news brief also gave further information about the May 2 Carnegie Hall event. Composer Marc Blitzstein was scheduled to present excerpts from a work in progress based on the theme of Soviet-US friendship, a proposal rapidly losing popularity in the postwar world as the two superpowers increasingly jockeyed for dominance. The American Youth Orchestra, an assemblage of African-American classical musicians led by conductor Dean Dixon, was performing Aaron Copland's musical score for the motion picture "Our Town." The concert would also include works by Leonard Bernstein and George Gershwin. Violinist Isaac Stern and Muriel Smith from "Carmen Jones" were among the scheduled performers.

See other posts for more on the Committee for Russian Relief, a group that included many notable politicians and business leaders during the wartime period, but which was becoming more controversial as ideological lines hardened again on both sides.

Freelance Airlines Proliferate

2011-11-01T08:21:00.000-04:00

According to The New York Times of April 16,1946, forty non-scheduled airlines were operating out of La Guardia and Newark airports. These upstart outfits were flying more passengers on Florida routes than the combined traffic of Eastern Airlines and National Airlines, the two airlines certified by the Civil Aeronautics Board to operate flights to and from Florida. At this time, there was relatively little oversight of these freelance operations.

Most of these unofficial airlines were operated by veterans flying surplus military planes. Some were nothing more than a single pilot with a plane. They had rapidly proliferated over the past few months. The CAB and the major airlines were not happy with this development.

The Times reported that an organization formed by some of the freelance operators, the Institute of Air Transportation, met on April 15 at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. Twenty companies were represented. The Institute's legal counsel urged the members to accept some CAB oversight to differentiate themselves from fly-by-night operators but he opposed proposed regulations that seemed designed largely to drive the small companies out of business.

Italian Harlem: The Beginning of the End

2011-10-29T10:26:00.000-04:00

In 1946 while Spanish Harlem was growing rapidly, Italian Harlem was still a thriving enclave with a sizable population. But in the postwar era the Italian population would rapidly dwindle as the earlier Jewish, German and Irish population had earlier in the century.

Italians first began arriving in East Harlem in 1878 when a group from Salerno settled near 115th Street. By 1930, 81 percent of the residents of Italian Harlem were first or second generation Italians. Often people from the same village or region clustered together. There were enclaves from Sicily, Bari, Naples, Calabria and even from northern Italy. The Irish and German communities of East Harlem had almost disappeared while the Jewish community had also shrunk. Many of the former residents, including some of the Italians, had moved northward into the Bronx or cross town to Washington Heights and Inwood.

Living conditions in much of Italian Harlem were pretty bad. A survey in 1939 found that in the most heavily Italian census tract, 84 percent of the dwellings lacked central heat. 67 percent had no tub or shower and 55 percent had no private toilet. The political leaders of East Harlem, including its congressman Vito Marcantonio, lobbied hard for an improvement of the situation. In 1941 a new housing project, the East River Houses, opened between 102nd and 105th Street, First Avenue and the East River. It was hailed at the time as a first step in the revitalization of Italian Harlem. Ironically the rash of housing projects that followed in the late 1940s and 1950s played a role in the demise of the community. Residential buildings, stores and churches fell to the bulldozer in the postwar decade displacing thousands of residents. Often there was a gap of several years between demolition of the old housing and the completion of construction of the new. Most of the displaced population did not return. By 1960 the area had lost almost 75 percent of its Italian population. By the 1990s only a small, mostly elderly, remnant remained.

The housing projects accelerated the migration of Italians out of East Harlem, but other factors were at work as well. One was the loss of the Second Avenue El before the war and the Third Avenue El later, making the neighborhood a less convenient place to live. Meanwhile Italian Americans were moving up the economic ladder.

Social advancement on a large scale had taken longer for the Italians than for the Eastern European Jews who had arrived in New York around the same time. The Jewish immigrants had help from institutions and charities that had been set up by the German Jews who had preceded them. Although most of the Jews were poor, their number included educated professionals. Most of the younger arrivals were eager to assimilate. Culturally, the Jews put a high value on education as a way to get ahead. On the other hand, most of the Italian immigrants had been rural laborers with little or no education. While there were some craftsmen in the mix, most had no skills. Many in the first wave had intended to stay only long enough to accumulate enough money to start a business or buy a farm back home. After they established families, they tended to cling closely to their language and customs. Many were suspicious of efforts to "Americanize" them. In the early decades of the twentieth century, most Italian teenagers did not go to high school. Truancy was a major problem with the younger children in East Harlem and was sometimes condoned by their parents.

At the dawn of the Depression, new Italian neighborhoods were growing in the Bronx and Brooklyn, which drew the more upwardly mobile. The majority of Italians who remained in East Harlem worked in blue collar occupations, often holding jobs that were transient or seasonal. Most were poor. The Depression hit very hard. But in the postwar years, even the residents of Italian Harlem moved up the economic ladder, joining the exodus from the old tenement neighborhoods into the outer boroughs and then to the suburbs.

W&J Sloane and the Sloane Family

2011-10-21T09:23:00.000-04:00

In 1946 the place for New York's wealthy to buy their carpets and furniture was W&J Sloane on Fifth Avenue. The firm had been founded as a carpet store in 1843 by a Scottish immigrant, who was later joined by his brother. At that time, the Scots were major players in dry goods, a role later taken over by the German Jewish merchant princes. According to Wikipedia, W&J Sloane was the first company to import oriental carpets into the US. It later added antiques, reproductions and other fine furniture. It served upscale clients across the United States and was considered a taste maker in home decor. In the mid-1950s, after the Sloane family lost control of the company, it expanded into lower price merchandise and opened up a chain of stores, losing its exclusive cachet in the process. The chain went bankrupt in 1985.

By 1946, the Sloanes had become pillars of New York society, known for their philanthropy, staunch support of the Presbyterian church and progressive politics. John Sloane, chairman of the board of W&J Sloane, was named chairman of the Union Settlement in East Harlem in October 1946 after serving 40 years on the board of directors of the charitable institution. Other prominent family members included the late William Sloane Coffin, Sr., who had been president of the Metropolitan Museum; John H. Hammond, whose mother was both a Sloane and a Vanderbilt, who had become a leading recording industry producer; and Henry Sloane Coffin, who was president of Union Theological Seminary from 1926 to 1945. In 1946, William Sloane Coffin Jr. was still serving in the Army. That year he was assigned to a team whose duty was to facilitate the forcible repatriation of Soviet citizens who had been held by the Germans as prisoners of war. Their fate after they returned to their homeland filled him with guilt and he would serve three years in the early 1950s with the CIA to combat Stalin as a result. He later became a noted liberal clergyman and activist who supported civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam, preaching from the pulpit of Riverside Church in Morningside Heights and as chaplain at Yale. He was among the first prominent churchmen to support gay rights.

The City's Puerto Rican Population Swells

2011-10-10T09:23:00.000-04:00

While the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to New York City is often depicted as occurring after 1950, the city actually had a large and rapidly growing Puerto Rican community in 1946. A New York Times story on February 23, 1947 put the Puerto Rican population of the city at about 350,000, large enough to be seen as a problem by both the city and the Puerto Rican territorial government. The strict immigration laws of the 1920s had sharply curtailed European immigration, but the laws did not apply to Puerto Ricans who were US citizens because of the island's territorial status. As the earlier immigrant groups left the tenement neighborhoods, they were replaced increasingly by African American migrants from the South and Puerto Ricans.

The city had a small Puerto Rican population early in the twentieth century but the numbers swelled during the Depression and war years. Extreme poverty was common on the island but the immigrants discovered that New York did not offer the opportunity they imagined. As a result, there was a steady back migration as well. Still the numbers showed an estimated monthly net gain of 2,500.

According to the Times article, the women had an easier time finding employment. Many had worked in the garment trade back home and could find work in the garment industry in New York replacing the Jewish and Italian needle trade workers who were increasingly able to find better jobs elsewhere. Most of the men who arrived spoke little English and had no skills. If they found work at all, it was generally as low paid dishwashers, bus boys or unskilled factory workers. This was a problem that had been faced by generations of earlier immigrants and had the same consequences: severe overcrowding in abysmal conditions. Clyde E. Murray, director of the Union Settlement Association in East Harlem, reported that he had found 23 Puerto Ricans sharing four small rooms in one apartment and another 15 in a two and a half room apartment. However, the city Department of Welfare reported that less than eight percent of the Puerto Rican population had applied for relief. The actor Jose Ferrer, a Puerto Rican himself and political activist, attempted to draw attention to the plight of the city's Puerto Rican community, asserting that it was even worse than that of the city's African Americans.

The greatest concentration of Puerto Ricans was in East Harlem where the blocks west of the Italian section already had become known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio. Other concentrations could be found on the Upper West Side along Central Park West from 100th to 110th Streets and along Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, also in Washington Heights, along Jackson Avenue in the Bronx and in the Atlantic Avenue area of Brooklyn. The changing demographics in these neighborhoods brought ethnic conflict sometimes played out in the streets.

Most Puerto Ricans arrived by plane. It was an expensive journey. Many sold everything they had to pay the fare. Pan American and Trans Caribbean Air Cargo Lines flew daily scheduled flights between New York and San Juan. More of the migrants took lower fare charter flights. Small airlines, many operated by former Army Air Force pilots, flew as many as 20 flights daily between San Juan and Miami with an average charge of $55 (about $600 in today's dollars). Most of these passengers would eventually find their way north to New York, the principal place of settlement.

East Harlem's Burt Lancaster Has a Breakout Year

2011-10-09T10:17:00.000-04:00

Burt Lancaster, a son of East Harlem, was poised to have a breakout year this week in April 1946. He had been appeared in a short-lived Broadway play, "The Sound of Hunting," in December 1945, straight out of wartime service in the Army Special Services. Supposedly he was discovered in an elevator and was cast in the play despite having had no prior professional experience. While the play was a flop, Lancaster was noticed and was soon off to Hollywood under contract to Hal Wallis. His performance as a murder victim in "The Killers" in 1946 would make him an overnight movie star.

While East Harlem was considered an Italian enclave already transitioning into a Puerto Rican one in 1946, the early population was mixed. Lancaster was born in 1913, one of five children in an Anglo-Irish Protestant family. His father was a postman. His paternal grandfather was a cooper who immigrated from Ireland and settled on the Lower East Side in the 1860s. His mother's working class family was from Ulster.

The Lancasters were active members of the interdenominational Church of the Son of Man whose austere chapel was in a townhouse next door to the Union Settlement house. The church was in the modernist mainstream tradition and, like the settlement house, was affiliated with Union Theological Seminary on Morningside Heights, sometimes referred to as the Protestant Vatican for its influence on mainline theology. He made his acting debut in the Sunday School Christmas pageant where he stopped the show with his struggle to get a piece of gum off his shoe, bringing down the house when he blurted out "How did this damn gum get on my shoe?"

The Lancasters appear to have been marginally better off than most of their neighbors but were charitable and open-minded and free of the ethnic, racial and religious prejudices that were commonplace in their day. Their son was a dedicated liberal throughout his life, values he attributed to his parents, his church and the Union Settlement where he took classes and participated in clubs, athletic activities, summer camp and the theater group. He later attended NYU before quitting to join the circus as an acrobat. He wasn't exactly the street tough of popular myth, although East Harlem was a rough neighborhood even in his day.

Union Settlement of East Harlem in 1946

2011-10-08T10:18:00.000-04:00

The Union Settlement celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1945. Headquartered at 237 East 104th Street, it is still an active force in East Harlem today. According to a New York Times article of April 16, in 1946 Union Settlement was facing new challenges from the steadily changing ethnic composition of the neighborhood.

When a group of alumni of Union Theological Seminary first established the settlement house in 1895, the East Harlem neighborhood was fairly new and had few social services. Harlem to the west was being developed as a middle class neighborhood at the time, but East Harlem was being filled with tenement buildings. The construction of the Second Avenue and Third Avenue Els had attracted a flood of migrants from the overcrowded Lower East Side. East Harlem was an instant slum. Most of the buildings were in the prevailing barbell configuration: railroad flats with small rooms and windows that opened on to air shafts. Even in 1946, most of the apartments in these buildings still lacked central heating, showers or bathtubs or private toilets. It was one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the city. A scattering of townhouses on and near East 116th Street were the exceptions, provided housing for the neighborhood's doctors, lawyers and politicians.

The initial tenants of East Harlem were a polyglot lot: Irish and German construction workers arrived first followed soon by Italians, Yiddish-speaking Jews and East Europeans. By the early twentieth century, East Harlem had become the city's largest Italian enclave. Italian Harlem stretched from Lexington Avenue and the East River, from 96th Street to 125th Streets. The 1930 census showed that more than 80 percent of the residents in this district were Italian. The area west of Lexington to Fifth Avenue had been largely Jewish at the beginning of the century, a poorer relative of neighboring Harlem which at that time had a sizable Jewish middle income population. East Harlem also was home to smaller communities of Finns and Greeks as well as a remnant of the earlier Irish and German residents. You could even find a few native born Protestants. By 1946, most of the Jews and some of the Italians had moved out, many to the Bronx, and been replaced by African Americans and a rapidly growing Puerto Rican community. East Harlem was still home to more than 50,000 first, second and third generation Italian-Americans.

Time had not been kind to the housing stock. The Depression had hit East Harlem very hard economically. Most residents at the depths of the downturn in the 1930s were unemployed or held work relief jobs. Meanwhile those who were doing alright began moving out. The Times quoted Clyde E. Murray, who headed the Union Settlement, as saying that the African Americans and Puerto Ricans were less likely to leave the neighborhood because they had no housing options available to them. The war had somewhat ameliorated the unemployment problem but surveys in the immediate postwar years showed that unemployment in this neighborhood was on the rise as defense-related employment diminished and returning veterans found it difficult to find jobs. Juvenile delinquency also was on the rise as it was in other poor neighborhoods of the city after a steep decline in the war years when most young men were in the service or employed. Guns, many of which had been brought home as war souvenirs, were finding their way to teenage thugs. East Harlem was not benefiting from the postwar boom. The neighborhood had a reputation in the city as a center of organized crime which ran drugs and operated gambling operations in neighboring Harlem. According to a survey of neighborhood junior high school students in 1947, about a quarter of the residents of East Harlem were involved to some degree in organized crime, mostly, the kids said, because employers didn't want to hire people from East Harlem because of the neighborhood's bad reputation.

Union Settlement was one of a number of settlement houses that sprang up in the city at the end of the 19th century as an outgrowth of the Social Gospel and Institutional Church movements. They represented a departure in the way that charitable work was conducted. Traditional charitable and social welfare organizations maintained a distance between the benefactors and those who received assistance. It was often Lady Bountiful come to distribute turkeys to the “deserving poor,” a group that included widows, orphans, the elderly, the infirm and handicapped, especially those who came from respectable backgrounds. Some of these benefactors held a disapproving attitude toward the residents of the big city slums, particularly immigrants and racial minorities who were often seen as largely personally responsible for their failure to thrive in the land of opportunity. While charity was a Christian duty, it often was dispensed begrudgingly and accompanied with opprobrium. The recipients were expected to acknowledge and address the error of their ways. The agencies compiled dossiers on the families and individuals who received assistance. Social workers monitored their behavior. It is not an attitude that has vanished today.

The staff of the settlement houses, on the other hand, “settled” in and become part of the community they served in order to understand the needs, culture and situation of the people they helped. As political progressives, they believed that poverty was often the result of social forces. They believed it was their Christian duty to identify and address barriers to success. They condemned the arguments of conservatives who claimed that poverty and the threat of starvation would force people to take more responsibility for their own lives. They saw with their own eyes how it often crushed the spirit and led to paralyzing despair. The settlement houses believed it their duty to go beyond providing the occasional warm meal and castoff clothing. They hoped to provide the tools the immigrant poor needed to succeed as individuals and as a community. They offered English language, literacy and citizenship classes. They taught skills. They attempted to foster a sense of community. They helped residents organize politically. In 1932, Union Settlement became home to one of the first birth control clinics in the city. This was the beginning of the community organizer movement and it often brought the settlement workers in contact with political radicals. However, the settlement workers could go only so far in their political activism. The organizations depended on contributions from the social and political elite, whose members served on their board of directors. While the progressive philanthropists supported efforts to improve the lot of the poor, they were not keen on solutions that threatened the social order.

Another highly influential settlement house in East Harlem was Haarlem House (now known as La Guardia Memorial House), founded as Home Garden in 1896. It was located on East 116th Street between First and Second Avenue. This establishment served as a base for Fiorello LaGuardia when he represented the district in Congress and for his protege and successor, Vito Marcantonio. Marcantonio had taught a naturalization class at Haarlem House, married the head social worker there and lived for awhile with his wife in an apartment on the top floor. The political and economic establishment in 1946 regarded Marcantonio as a dangerous radical with ties to the Communists.

Many of the settlement houses were affiliated with mainline Protestant denominations although they offered their services to all comers regardless of their race, ethnicity or creed. The settlement workers were doing their Christian duty rather than seeking converts. Union Settlement had ties to Union Theological Seminary, a bastion of theologically liberal Protestantism. Home Garden had been started by a Presbyterian missionary. Many of the mainline Protestant seminaries required their students to spend time doing social work in inner city communities. This extensive web of Protestant charitable and social service organizations that developed at the turn of the century gave the mainline Protestant churches a continued major role in the city through the twentieth century even as their membership dwindled. At the end of the 19th century, Protestants, after the annexation of Brooklyn and Queens, held a slim plurality in the city but the ranks of Catholic and Jewish immigrants continued to swell while Protestant New Yorkers increasingly migrated to the suburbs and other parts of the country and had a lower birth rate than most immigrant groups. Many working and lower middle class Protestants assimilated into the culturally dominant Catholic community through intermarriage. By the 1920s, only about one in seven New Yorkers was a native born white Protestant.

In 1946, Union Settlement started a drive to organize the surrounding blocks into block associations. The target neighborhood had 26,000 residents including African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italians and Russians. In 1947, Union Settlement reported mixed results for this effort. Four block organizations were in operation by then. The most successful, on East 102nd Street, was publishing a Spanish-language newspaper. The one on 103rd Street had run into a problem with neighborhood Communists. A party member had attempted to use the group for propaganda and recruitment but the block group reported that she had subsequently been persuaded to halt her efforts for the good of the block association, which feared being branded as a Communist front.

An interdenominational Protestant church, the Church of the Son of Man, had operated out of a house adjacent to Union Settlement for many years. Like the settlement house, it had ties to Union Theological Seminary. It was an austere sanctuary with a small congregation drawn largely from German and Irish Protestants who lived in the neighborhood. It was still operating in the late 1930s and reopened in 1948 as part of a new religious outreach, the East Harlem Protestant Parish, which also opened several storefront churches. This time around the religious outreach was aimed at the African- American and Puerto Rican residents who became the predominate ethnic groups in East Harlem in the postwar years.

The Cold Wave at Hudson Terminal

2011-09-27T09:21:00.000-04:00

On April 16, 1946, The New York Times carried an ad for cold waves at the terribly named Terminal Salons, a chain with six Manhattan locations, including the Empire State and Chrysler buildings, as well as the Hudson Terminal Building, most likely the source of the name. From the locations, it appeared that this chain mostly went after the working women of the day.

Permanent waves had been the thing for middle class women for a couple of decades. Until the invention in 1938 of the cold wave, which used chemicals to break down the bonds of the hair, permanents involved the use of heat, often supplied through complicated electrical machinery. The cold wave was considered safer.

A cold wave at the Terminal Salon was not cheap at $15, or about $165 in current dollars. And it only lasted a few months. (Wikipedia has an article on the history of the permanent wave._ Of course, permanent waves remained popular through the 1980s and have not completely disappeared. In the postwar era, home permanent kits became increasingly popular as a less expensive alternative, although women who could afford it preferred the salon treatment.

The Hudson Terminal included two 22-story twin tower office buildings over a station that serviced the PATH trains that carried commuters from New Jersey railroad and streetcar terminals to lower Manhattan.The concourse was designed to carry heavier passenger traffic than Pennsylvania Station. Built in 1908, the Hudson Terminal was sold to the Port Authority in 1962 and later demolished to make way for the World Trade Center. Part of the concourse was still extant and even survived the 9/11 attack but was finally demolished in 2008 during the new construction at the site.

Clothes for Tenderfoots at Hearn's Department Store

2011-09-25T09:39:00.000-04:00

The New York Times gave a plug for the new Frontier Shop at Hearn's Department store on April 16, 1946. Hearn's was a venerable institution, the oldest department store still in operation in the city. It dated back to 1827 and had moved to Fifth Avenue and 14th Street in 1879 when that was the upscale retail center of the city. It had remained there but most of its peers had long since made several successive moves uptown. In its earliest days, it catered. like most department stores of the day, to the carriage trade. In 1946 Hearn's was a traditional full-service department store along the lines of a Macy's or Gimbel's, perhaps a step or two up the retail ladder. It was struggling in a shopping location which had largely been given over to discount merchandisers. It folded, along with Wanamaker's downtown Manhattan department store and McCreery's in the 1950s.

The new shop at Hearn's sold "riding apparel in the formal English manner or with a Western flavor." The accompanying photo showed a young woman decked out in full cowgirl regalia including "blue denim dungarees" (which was what jeans were called back then), a plaid shirt, boots and ten gallon hat which The Times said was just the thing for dude ranches, a popular vacation choice of the day.

Frozen Fruit Versus Canned

2011-09-24T10:37:00.000-04:00

In her April 16 New York Times food column, Jane Nickerson reported on a letter from Mrs. Pauline Leader of New York City complaining about the scarcity of canned fruit in the grocery stores. Mrs. Leader suspected that it was because much of the fruit was being frozen, and she did not like frozen fruit. Nickerson assured her that this was not the case. Very little fruit being produced was being frozen. However, Leader was correct in noticing the absence of canned product. Nickerson herself could only fine glassed prunes in one supermarket. The problem was the all too familiar one of the day. Because of high demand, most of last year's stock had been cleared out by the time new stock hit the production line. She speculated that the returning servicemen, many of whom had acquired a taste for canned fruit during the war, was at least in part responsible, along with higher incomes. In any case, supply was flying off the shelves as fast as it could be delivered.

Nickerson did not share her reader's aversion to frozen fruit. She noted two new frozen products at Macy's. One was sliced apples, a fruit that was scarce in its fresh form in the markets. The other was a fruit salad of peaches and pears. Freezers were not commonly found in New York households in 1946 and refrigerators usually had a small freezer compartment that could only hold a tray of ice cubes and a couple of small items.

Paddy's Market and Hell's Kitchen

2011-09-19T09:15:00.000-04:00

In 1946 the strip of small food stores along Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen was often called Paddy's Market in remembrance of the pushcart produce market that operated Saturday evenings along the street until the city evicted the peddlers in 1938. Italian, Greek and Middle Eastern merchants still sold specialty ethnic foods from small shops along the street. Many had outdoor stands that sold produce. Hell's Kitchen, with a largely Irish working class population, had a reputation as one of the city's toughest, crime-ridden neighborhoods.

In her food column of April 16, 1946 in The New York Times, Jane Nickerson recommended a visit to an inconspicuous Italian bakery called Trubia on Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen for their Easter bread and cookies, both baked with hard-boiled eggs inside. The bread would not be available until Friday but the cookie dough creations such as Easter baskets were available now. She also recommended the cannoli and cassata. She described Ninth Avenue from Thirty-eighth to Forty-third Street as a place "where those of Italian heritage shop for their cheese and fish and vegetables in all sorts of fascinating stores."

Some New Yorkers called the whole Hell's Kitchen or Clinton neighborhood Paddy's Market. The street market had operated for fifty years until the peddlers were evicted to make way for the widening of the street to accomodate the traffic for the new Lincoln Tunnel. The market took place under the shadow of the Ninth Avenue El which was dismantled in 1940. Several cities around the world with large Irish immigrant populations, such as Sydney and Glasgow, also had "Paddy's Markets."

The peddlers serviced the residents of Hell's Kitchen tenements. Saturday was payday for many workers back when the six-day work week was the norm. The common perception of many New Yorkers was that this was the night that the Irish men of Hell's Kitchen headed to the taverns while their wives headed for Paddy's Market to buy the week's provisions before the money was gone. Like most of their customers, many of the peddlers in the earliest years were Irish, but Jews, Italians and Greeks came to predominate. During Prohibition, the street was filled on Saturday nights in October with grapes for home wine making, which was legal. By 1946, some of those who had begun by peddling in the outdoor markets had shops or had moved into the wholesale produce business in Washington Market on the lower West Side.

Accounts of the market and its wares differ widely. It was generally agreed that it was noisy and boisterous, the din of voices drowned out when the el trains rumbled above. Many of the carts were illuminated with torches. at least in the early years, so that the street resembled an old-fashioned parade. The goods, which also included fish and meat, housewares and clothing were sold at a steep discount. Much of it was overage, some well past its prime, and rejects. In 1912, the trade magazine The National Provisioner referred to that "famous and evil crowd that infest the sidewalks and gutters in a continuous line on Ninth Avenue, from 39th to 42nd streets, every Saturday night," implying that they cheated customers with doctored scales. This reflected the attitude of many established businesses toward their freelance competition who had no rent to pay and little overhead and could undersell the retailers. The fastidious complained of unsanitary conditions. However, Markets For the People, published in 1913 claimed that the produce offered was of better quality than at most of the other outdoor markets in the city and that the customers included "well-paid wageworkers, boarding house keepers, and other persons comfortably situated." Many immigrants were used to buying food at outdoor markets in their homelands. It was a more familiar milieu than the A&P.

In 1946, the pushcarts were gone but still a vivid memory. Ninth Avenue was still lined with small shops, largely Italian, Greek or Middle Eastern, that offered ethnic specialties, produce, fish and other foodstuff. Hell's Kitchen's population had become more diverse by then. The Irish still claimed it as their turf but the Germans who had lived beside them in the middle of the 19th-century were mostly gone, replaced by Italians, Greeks, Poles, Serbs and Croats. There was a French community in the Forties and Fifties, much of it employed in the restaurant business, and an African-American community on the North near Columbus Circle that shrank earlier in the century after Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant became the centers of Black New York but increased during the migration of Black Southerners to the North during and after the Second World War. Puerto Ricans also were among the postwar residents.

Hell's Kitchen had a reputation dating to the middle of the 19th century for being one the most dangerous neighborhoods of the city. It was situated in an industrial area with railroad yards and docks. Irish gangs ruled and street crime was rife. The street violence had been somewhat tamed by 1946 but ethnic conflicts periodically flared and the remaining gangs were among the most vicious in the city.

The Church of the Holy Cross on 42nd Street, popularly known as Father Duffy's church, for the priest who was renowned as the chaplain of the Fighting 69th in the First World War, was the neighborhood religious landmark. It was founded in 1852. Duffy died in 1932. His successor, Father Joe McCaffrey, who served the parish until 1973, was dubbed the "Bishop of Times Square."

Japanese Silk Returning to Market

2011-09-13T09:38:00.000-04:00

According to The New York Times of April 16, it looked like Japanese silk would soon return to the market. The return of this pricier alternative for women's hosiery would help alleviate the continued shortage of nylon stockings. Nylon stockings were back in stores by 1946 after a wartime absence but long lines met the arrival of each shipment at department stores. According to the story, Americans consumed an average of 40-million pounds of Japanese silk a year before the war. Negotiations were underway to allow 16-million pounds into the US over the next year. Of course, some of that silk would go into the manufacture of other clothing and objects.

Japanese businesses were subject to the authority of the American occupation forces in 1946. Silk had been one of Japan's major exports before the war.

Only Four Pounds of Margarine a Year

2011-09-09T09:26:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reported that according to industry sources the average consumer would only be able to get four pounds of margarine this year. Worldwide demand for margarine and the vegetable oils from which is made was high in the postwar world. The US government had imposed a quota on the principal ingredients: cottonseed, soy bean and corn oils. Meanwhile butter producers estimated that they would only be able to supply about ten pounds of butter per consumer this year due to the government ceiling prices. It is unclear from this report whether these figures are per capita or per family. If per capita, the total supply of butter and margarine was about 60 percent of normal consumption.

Margarine had been around since the late 19th century. The dairy industry had lobbied state legislatures to pass laws to discourage its consumption and many were still in effect in 1946. In Canada, margarine was banned outright until 1948, although it was smuggled in from Newfoundland which was still a separate British colony. In 1946 in most states, including New York, stores could not sell yellow margarine. Earlier in the century, several states had required that all margarine be colored pink to make it unpalatable to most consumers but the Supreme Court found these laws unconstitutional. It is interesting how powerful special interests like the dairy industry complain about government regulations, such as the ceiling prices then in effect, in the name of the free market system but then aggressively lobby legislators to limit competition or provide subsidies, tax breaks and special advantages.

The consumption of butter was considerably higher than that of margarine until the second half of the twentieth century when margarine use skyrocketed.

Tennessee Williams at the Shelton Hotel

2011-08-26T05:55:00.000-04:00

The Shelton Hotel on Lexington at 49th Street ran an ad in The New York Times on April 16, 1946,requesting that the hotel be considered for banquets, dances, weddings and other social and business functions. A few months earlier, it had been the scene of the wild sexual escapades of one of its most famous tenants, the playwright Tennessee Williams. The building now houses the New York Marriott East Side.

The Shelton created quite a sensation when it opened in 1924, billing itself as the world's tallest residence. It was not yet in the shadow of the office skyscrapers that now surround it. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's grandfather, James T. Lee, was the developer. Lee's initial idea was that it would be run as a residential hotel for men with club amenities like lounges, dining hall, swimming pool and squash courts. A third of the rooms did not have private baths. With a flood of unmarried people of both sexes arriving in the city to pursue careers and sample the excitement of Jazz Age Manhattan, Lee thought that proper young men and women new to the city would be more comfortable in lodgings that were segregated by gender. It was a widespread thought at the time but while some of the the women's hotels started at this time, like the Barbizon, were a success and still going strong in 1946, the all male hotel did not catch on. After a year of high vacancy rates, the Shelton was open to all.

Architectural critics praised the look of the building, one of the first skyscraper hotels to include the setbacks dictated by the 1916 zoning law. The building won several awards, Skyscraper apartments were quite the rage in the 1920s among modern New Yorkers and residential hotels also were popular, particularly among the mobile smart set who were not quite ready to set down roots. The opening of the Shelton set off a hotel boom along Lexington Avenue.

Among the building's early tenants were photographer and gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz and his new wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. They had a two-room suite on the 28th floor, later moving two floors higher. They found the high-rise a welcome retreat from the bustle of the city below. And its panoramic views were an inspiration. Stieglitz photographed the RCA Building, then under construction, from his window and O'Keeffe included the hotel among her paintings of skyscrapers. "We feel as if we are mid-ocean," Stieglitz wrote of their home in the sky. "All is so quiet, except the wind-- & the terrible shaking hulk of steel in which we live--It's a wonderful place." His friend and neighbor, architect Claude Bragdon, described the Shelton as an "escape from the the dirt, ugliness, noise, promiscuity of the city."

In the fall of 1945, Tennessee Williams moved into a suite on the 18th floor with a view of the East River. He was working at the time on the Broadway opening of "You Touched Me," a play he had written a few years earlier with Donald Windham. It would not be a great success. In his memoir, Williams wrote that he lived at the hotel while working on the play in 1946 but his letters show that it actually was 1945 and "You Touched Me" opened in December of that year.

While Williams was in residence, a schoolgirl, the future novelist Mary Higgins Clark, was working the hotel switchboard after school three days a week and on weekends. She had discovered how to listen to calls without being detected. Her favorite victim was Ginger Bates, "a lady of easy virtue who was a permanent resident of the Shelton." In her autobiography, Kitchen Pleasures, she called Williams "that would-be playwright with a crazy name" who, she wrote "had the cheapest room in the hotel--thirty dollars a month." But by the fall of 1945, Williams was hardly an unknown playwright. His first big success, "The Glass Menagerie," had opened on Broadway (it was still playing in April 1946). Perhaps Clark was remembering some earlier Williams stay or perhaps her memory was tainted by hurt feelings over a later slight when Williams dismissed her writing as something most anyone he knew could have done.

During his stay at the Shelton, Williams and his friends prowled the hotel pool and steam room, which apparently saw a good deal of action on the secretive gay circuit of the day. They would often bring back handsome young men encountered in the steam room to Williams' room. This did not escape the attention of the hotel detective or management. In November, Williams received a letter stating "It has been called to our attention that you have been in the habit of doing considerable entertaining in your room...We wish to call attention to the fact that under no consideration do we allow any entertaining in the rooms after twelve midnight." Did the same rules apply to Miss Ginger Bates? In December, Williams moved out of the hotel and returned to New Orleans. He attributed the move in his memoir to failing health, asserting that the fish eye and comments of the hotel management did not bother him much. He was used to it. When he later heard that there had been a change in management at the Shelton, he wrote a friend, "Any change in the Shelton management must be an improvement! When I'm coming back I will wire you in the hope you can get me another suite there, however. I had a good time in spite of the bitches at the desk! --and that old white-headed bull-dog-- is he still patrolling the lobby?"

Travel Ads in The New York Times April 16, 1946

2011-08-22T13:17:00.001-04:00

Greyhound advertised bus service from New York to Los Angeles or San Francisco for the stiff tariff of $45.25 (about $500 in today's money). The buses left from the Capitol Greyhound Terminal on West 5Oth Street and the Pennsylvania Greyhound Terminal on West 34th. Train was still the preferred way to travel between coasts although air travel was becoming more popular.

KLM offered flights to Venezuela, Colombia, the Netherlands West Indies, Jamaica, Trinidad, Port-au-Prince and Camaguey. Flights to Amsterdam were coming soon. Europe, still reeling from the war, had not yet resumed its allure as a travel destination.

PCA, "the capital airline," advertised that there now were no restrictions, many more seats, new low fares and faster flights. PCA stood for Pennsylvania Central Airlines which had been headquartered in Pittsburgh but moved to Washington DC in 1941. It had hubs in both cities. In 1948, PCA was renamed Capital Airlines. In 1961, it merged with United Airlines.

Let's Go Dutch: The Holland House Taverne

2011-08-13T10:07:00.000-04:00

The Holland House Taverne was a Dutch-themed restaurant at 10 Rockefeller Plaza at 48th Street. It opened in 1940 and remained in business until the mid-1960s when it gave way to a Charley O's. When Rockefeller Center was first built it was intended to be a center of international commerce. The Netherlands had a building as had the British. The latter housed a center for British intelligence operations before America's entry into the war and afterward.

The Holland House had oak interiors, a crescent bar and fireplaces lined with Delft tiles depicting life in old Holland. The cuisine was a mix of Dutch, American and Indonesian cuisine. Indonesia was still a Dutch colony in 1946 and Indonesian food is still as popular in the Netherlands today as Indian food is in Great Britain and Mexican food in the United States. According to the ad that ran this week in the NYT, the restaurant featured "Dutch maidens to serve you." It offered cocktails, lunch and dinner.

William Jay Schieffelin: Old Guard Reformer in the News

2011-08-08T12:03:00.001-04:00

The New York Times of April 16, 1946, carried a story about William Jay Schieffelin, a Park Avenue socialite active in city reform politics since the Progressive era. He had celebrated his 80th birthday on Sunday, retiring at the same time as chairman of the board of trustees of Tuskegee University. Schieffelin had impeccable social credentials with ties both to old Knickerbocker New York and the Gilded Age tycoons. His family business, Schieffelin & Co., was one of the oldest in the city. He was a descendant of Chief Justice John Jay. His wife was the granddaughter of railroad tycoon William H. Vanderbilt.

Schieffelin was a prominent member of the Progressive wing of the city's Old Guard which had been active in charity and social and political reform since the advent of the Social Gospel movement in the Episcopal church in the mid-19th century. This elite group believed that the battle for civic improvement was an obligation of their social rank. They formed the backbone of the liberal wing of the Republican Party, liberal on most social issues but pro-business and fiscally conservative.

Racial equality and educational opportunities for African Americans was among Schieffelin's passions. He was active in the NAACP and had served as chairman of the Defense Committee for the Scottsboro Boys, a cause celebre for the civil rights movement and the left in the 1930s. He was also a trustee of the Hampton Institute in Virginia. The Times article quoted Schieffelin as praising our nation's "Negro population who have shown during the war patience and self-respect in industrial and civil life." He saw steady progress in social conditions for Blacks, expressed optimism about the future of race relations, even in the South, and felt that antipathy to people of mixed race was steadily dissipating.

Schieffelin had been chairman of the board of Schieffelin & Co., founded as a wholesale drug company in New York in 1793 by the son of a wealthy German immigrant. The family originally settled in Philadelphia but after imprisonment as a Loyalist during the Revolution and a sojourn in Canada after the war, Jacob Schieffelin, the firm's founder, came to New York City where many of the leading citizens had been Tories. The pharmaceutical industry was in its infancy at the time; most apothecaries ground their own potions in their shops. Initially the Schieffelin company also dealt in luxury goods and shipping. It was one of the city's early business success stories.

William Jay Schieffelin had been a prominent member of the political reform movement since the beginning of the century. Later he served as chairman of the Citizens Union of New York, which was instrumental in driving Mayor Jimmy Walker from office. As a reformer, Schieffelin also supported woman's suffrage, opposed sweatshops and served as an officer of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. But he also advocated the availability of cocaine by prescription early in the century when the move to ban it completely was gaining steam. His company was charged with restraint of trade in the Progressive era. During Prohibition, it got into the "medicinal" liquor business legally supplying Moet & Chandon champagne and Hennessy Cognac to those affluent sufferers who were able to obtain prescriptions. By mid-century, liquor and wine was the company's chief business and by the 1960s it dropped its drug business.

Schieffelin lived well. In 1898, his mother-in-law commissioned an elegant townhouse in the Parisian style for him and his wife on 66th Street just east of Fifth Avenue. The couple lived there until 1925 when they joined the social set who were colonizing the high-rise apartment houses on Park Avenue. In 1947, their former townhouse became the elegant home to the Lotos Club, which it still is today.

A less well-regarded member of the family was Eugene Schieffelin, cursed to this day by American farmers for his ill-considered decision to import a flock of starlings to the US which he released in Central Park in 1890. He also had attempted to introduce skylarks, nightingales and other European birds with less success, if being responsible for a population of some 200-million birds widely seen as invasive pests can be counted a success. In his defense, introducing new species was thought to be desirable at the time. There was a society, of which he was a member, set up for that purpose.

Little Lost Girls from Bank Street

2011-07-16T10:22:00.000-04:00

Two students from the Harriet Johnson Nursery School on Bank Street in the Village went missing at nap time on April 15, setting off a city wide search. This story had a happy ending. The two girls, aged 5 and 6, were found tearful but safe at Manhattan Square Park at 81st Street and Columbus Avenue. They were taken to the West 68th Street Precinct where they were met by a throng of newspaper reporters and photographers as well as the school director.

The school was started in 1916 as a demonstration school by the Bank Street College of Education to promote the progressive educational theories of John Dewey and his disciples. In 1930 it moved into a building on Bank Street formerly occupied by Fleischman's Yeast. The nursery school, along with an elementary and middle school which opened later, has been on 112th Street in Morningside Heights since 1970 and is one of the most expensive pre-schools in the country with annual tuition of more than $30,000.

The college and school was highly influential in developing the modern pre-school curriculum and its writing program has produced many children's books.

In 1946 Bank Street College began offering special night and weekend classes for students who did not have the requirements for college admission.

New Bride Dies in Fall From Roof

2011-07-13T13:11:00.000-04:00

On April 16, The New York Times carried a brief story about a 24 year-old woman who fell or jumped from the rooftop of her apartment house on West 177th Street in Manhattan. She had married a former Naval officer in February, a week after his discharge. They had met three years earlier, a few months before he entered the service.

The Times story was short on details. Like many families of recent veterans in 1946, the couple had no place of their own. They were living with the woman's parents. The woman had gone to the roof at 10:30 am with her mother and their dog.

At this point the death had not been determined accidental or a suicide. There was no indication in the story of any cause for suicide. Perhaps the marriage had not brought the happiness anticipated. Or maybe it was just a tragic accident.

"Topics of the Times" on April 16, 1946

2011-07-02T10:16:00.000-04:00

On April 16, 1946, the "Topics of the Times" column on The New York Times editorial page noted that the city's department stores increasingly were opening suburban branches. Briefly, the column considered than rejected the notion that this might have some parallel with the movement to decentralize industry as a preparation for the possibility of a future atomic war. Since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the horrifying specter of a nuclear war weighed heavily on the minds of many Americans. But, as the Times pointed out, The department stores had been opening branches in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey "long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki." This move to the suburbs of both stores and people would rapidly accelerate over the next decade, although New York was better able to maintain its central shopping district, minus a number of establishments that were thriving in 1946, than most American cities.

The column also ridiculed a recent speech by Henry Wallace in which he declared "We may compete with Russia for oil, just as we will compete ideologically, but in our competition we must demonstrate that we can raise the standard of living of all our people faster and to higher levels than can Russia." The columnist wondered if Wallace felt it necessary for Toscanini "to prove that he is a better musician than one of the boys in senior high school" or Eisenhower "to prove he is a better military commander than the man who runs the dry-goods store across the street." Russia, the column pointed out, had the lowest standard of living outside Asia and Africa.

It seems to me what Wallace was clumsily trying to say was that America had to compete to raise the minimum standard of living in the country. The poorest Americans then, as now, were not so obviously better off than the poorest Soviets.

More of The New York Times Editorial Page of 4/16/1946

2011-06-24T10:45:00.002-04:00

In addition to the Iran issue before the UN Security Council and the controversy over the fate of Halloran Hospital in Staten Island, discussed in earlier posts, The New York Times on its editorial page of April 16, 1946:

Praised the "spiritual stature" of Leon Blum, the Socialist president of France, who was visiting New York on a goodwill mission. Blum and his wife had been incarcerated by the Nazis.
Urged Congress to establish a Board of Price Appeals to evaluate the validity of complaints against OPA price controls.
Welcomed the news that the Captree State Parkway will be constructed in 1947 linking the eastern end of Jones Beach to the Southern State Parkway.
Congratulated the Guggenheim Fellowship winners.
Supported raising the subway fare to finance the ambitious program of public works laid out by Robert Moses.
Opposed extending the wartime subsidies of the non-ferrous metal industries.

The Battle Over Halloran Hospital

2011-06-17T09:43:00.001-04:00

In 1942, construction of a state facility for mentally disabled children was completed in the Willowbrook section of Staten Island, but it was immediately converted into an Army hospital known as Halloran. In 1946, its future use was a subject of immense controversy.

On April 16, The New York Times, in an editorial, commended Governor Dewey for turning down two proposals for the facility. One would have had the Veterans Administration occupy part of the site for use as a hospital for disabled veterans and the state use the remainder to care for mentally disabled children. The other would have leased the entire complex to the Veterans Administration for an additional two years, which, as Dewey and The Times pointed out, would have only postponed and exacerbated the problem. Dewey's proposed alternative was to sell Halloran to the VA for an amount that would allow the state to begin immediate construction of a new facility for the children.

Both needs were undeniably enormous. Halloran had treated thousands of soldiers and veterans since 1942. With 3,000 beds, it was the largest Army hospital in the nation. The only other VA hospital in New York City was at Kingsbridge in Brooklyn which had 1900 beds and a 3200 patient waiting list. Meanwhile the two existing state institutions for mentally disabled children and infants in the downstate area, Wassaic in Dutchess County and Letchworth Village in Rockland County, were severely overcrowded. In his letter to General Omar Bradley, the director of the VA, printed this day in The Times, Dewey pointed out that hundreds of helpless children and infants were sleeping on mattresses on the floor at both institutions and there was a waiting list of between 800 and 900 infants. The overwhelming majority of the boys and girls at Letchworth Village were from New York City families. Dewey argued that a place in the city was needed so that families would be able to visit.

Both Dewey and The Times appeared to be more concerned about alleviating the burden on the families of these children than on offering much help to the children themselves. Both the governor's letter and the newspaper's editorial referred to the wards as "defective" and "feeble minded." The preponderance of public opinion appeared heavily weighted toward the veterans with veterans organizations and Staten Island residents lobbying in favor of keeping Halloran open as a VA hospital. The Times stated "The disabled veteran should rightfully have first choice, and the number of veterans who can be successfully rehabilitated is overwhelmingly larger than the group of unfortunate children."

In the end, in 1947 the shared arrangement won out. The VA occupied part of the hospital until 1951, when it was finally turned over completely to the state for its original purpose. As Willowbrook State School, it later became notorious for its terrible conditions and the abusive treatment of its residents. Attitudes toward the mentally disabled were still horrific in the postwar decades. Little effort was made to provide adequate care, training, basic education or recreation for the residents. By the 1960s, 6,000 mentally handicapped children were warehoused in an institution designed to house 4,000. Many of the residents had been abandoned by their families or guardians and had no one to speak for them. Most contracted hepatitis within six months of arriving. A horrific medical experiment was carried out in the 1960s in which the children were deliberately infected with hepatitis in order to test the effects of gamma globulin, a practice justified by the researchers on the grounds that the children would probably contract the disease in any case. Robert Kennedy, who was a US Senator at the time, toured the facility in 1965 and compared it unfavorably to a zoo. Geraldo Rivera won a Peabody in 1972 for his expose of the physical and sexual abuse of residents and the unsanitary conditions. Public outrage led to the eventual closing of Willowbrook in 1987.

New York Times Editorial on the Iran Question Before the Security Council

2011-06-14T08:44:00.000-04:00

In an April 16, 1946 editorial, The New York Times addressed the demand by Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko that the UN Security Council drop the Iran issue. Most members of the Security Council opposed this motion as did The New York Times.

Iran had brought the issue of the continued presence of Soviet troops in the north of the country in violation of treaty before the council. The Soviet Union had then set a new deadline of May 6 to remove its troops. The council had resolved that further consideration of the case be postponed until May 6 when both parties would report on the situation. Now Russia now was demanding that the case be dropped completely, Iran having withdrawn its complaint.

The opposition insisted that the initial resolution stood. To those many in New York who followed or were sympathetic to the Communist Party line, the opposition of the US and its allies to Gromyko's demands was evidence that the capitalist powers sought confrontation with the USSR. The opposing delegates, including the US, insisted that it had been the clear duty of the Council to listen to the initial complaint and, once the Council had assumed jurisdiction, it could not drop the case until a settlement had been reached. To do otherwise would grant powerful nations the right to intimidate their weaker neighbors into withdrawing complaints. It would undermine the whole function of the Security Council as an organ to resolve disagreements peacefully between nations.

Many of those who had initially proposed a United Nations after the war believed that the veto granted the Big Powers was a dangerous concession. In his diatribe, Gromyko took the concept a step further, insisting that the Security Council could not pass resolutions if one of the Big Powers chose to boycott a session as he had. This would, the newspaper and several council delegates declared, allow any of the Big Five to paralyze the UN through a boycott and "make the United Nations an instrument of any Big Power intent on using it, and entail the sacrifice of small nations to power politics."

The Times found "it difficult to fathom the purposes behind the Russian position." It hoped that the action was only for the sake of "home propaganda" and not a serious intent to undermine the UN.

The Times Reviews "I Chose Freedom" by Soviet Defector Victor Kravchenko

2011-06-07T11:44:00.000-04:00

On April 15, 1946, The New York Times ran a review by Orville Prescott of a controversial expose of the Soviet state, I Chose Freedom, by defector Victor Kravchenko. The book was one in a recent spate of similar books. Prescott pointed to One Who Survived, published in 1945 by another defector, Alexander Gregory Barmine. The Communists and many of their sympathizers vigorously denounced these books and engaged in character assassination of their authors. This was the standard procedure of these "civil libertarian" opponents of "red baiting" whenever any former party member or Soviet official dared to say that Russia was not a Utopia, the Communist Party USA not merely a force for social justice and Stalin not an unimpeachable hero. Despite the criticism, both books proved influential in hardening public opinion against Stalin's brutal regime, following a wartime honeymoon promoted by both governments.

Prescott stated that the book was an "appalling indictment of the Soviet state" that was certain to be "not only the subject of controversy, but the object of scurrilous abuse." Unlike the testimony of exiles from Nazi tyranny, Russian defectors were "sure to be attacked in many quarters, their motives questioned, their character maligned." It was not only Communists who joined in the attack. During the war years, this was in part an effort to maintain a necessary alliance as well as an appreciation of the role that the Soviet Union, at great sacrifice, played in the war. In the postwar years, it was in part a reflection of the desire for amicable relations and peace. But Prescott also blamed the "confused idealists" who were "so blinded by their desire to regard Russia as a socialist utopia that they have let their critical faculties atrophy for years." In his book, Barmine had written that many in the Soviet secret service had been astounded at how completely many American intellectuals accepted the official party line in the 1930s at a time when so many Soviet operatives, subsequently purged, assassinated or imprisoned, had become disillusioned with Stalin and the Soviet state.

This book was written as an autobiography. Prescott wrote that it was more a personal diatribe than an impartial assessment. but he found that Kravchenko spoke with more authority than the American correspondents in Moscow who were carefully insulated from reality by the Soviet government. It made, he wrote, "distressing, sickening reading."

In his book, Kravchenko also came down on those in the United States who accepted "Soviet window dressing as fact," naming as among them the darling of the left, Henry A. Wallace, former Republican presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie and former US Ambassador Joseph Davies, who had tried to get FDR to deport Kravchenko back to the USSR to stand trial as a traitor. He blasted the notion that the Soviet-German pact was a ploy by Stalin to buy time to arm Russia. No preparation for war had been made, he insisted; the subsequent Nazi invasion had taken Stalin completely by surprise. The purges were not, he wrote, an effort to eliminate a dangerous fifth column as Communist propaganda insisted but a massive attack on anyone suspected of not being an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin, meant not only to eliminate Stalin's critics but to terrorize Soviet citizens into silence.

Kravchenko concluded that the most important step that the world needed to take, even more than a world organization, was "the liberation of the Russian masses from their tyrants." Kravchenko's revelations and analyses were welcomed by the right in the US but he was not at home with them, being a social democrat rather than a fan of unadulterated capitalism.

The depths to which the Soviets and their supporters could sink was revealed in their subsequent treatment of Kravchenko and his family. During a famous libel trial in France in 1949, the Soviets brought in his former wife to testify that he was physically abusive and impotent and a KGB officer to testify that he was mentally defective. He was accused of being an embezzler and a draft dodger. Kravchenko won the case, in part because of the testimony of former Gulag prisoners in his support, most famously that of the widow of an assassinated German Communist leader, a woman who had been imprisoned both in a Nazi concentration camp and a Soviet gulag. Although he won the case, he was awarded only symbolic damages. The Soviets harassed his family members who remained in Russia. His son was sent to a gulag as an enemy of the state. Still US Communists refused to believe any of his accusations until the Kremlin itself revealed they were true in the 1950s, sending the heads of the True Believers spinning. It was as if the Vatican had announced that the Pope was not infallible after all.

Kravchenko died in 1966 in his New York apartment from a gunshot wound to his head, officially ruled a suicide but suspected of being an assassination by some members of his American family. Many Communists here and abroad who were purged or who left the party on their own had supposedly committed suicide, which might have reflected their dejection at losing their belief system or could have been, at least in some cases, the work of Soviet agents looking to silence those who had too much information. Kravchencko's book is often cited as a resource but is currently out of print.

Weber and Heilbroner

2011-06-05T09:04:00.001-04:00

Men's clothing retailer Weber & Heilbroner ran an ad for men's hats in the April 16 New York Times. In 1946 all middle class men wore hats most everywhere they went. Weber & Heilbroner was one of the city's best known haberdashers.

The store had been around for decades and had a number of locations in the city, although the ad did not note the addresses. It was a moderately priced alternative to Brooks Brothers, F.R. Tripler and Finchley for business clothes. It's main competitors were Rogers Peet, Broadstreet's and John David. The lower end was serviced by Bond's, Crawford's and Barney's, which was known back then as the place to go for a bargain. Men's clothing, however, was in short supply at this time everywhere.

Famous economic historian Robert Heilbroner was son and heir to the firm's founder, a member of the city's German-Jewish elite known as "Our Crowd." In 1946 he was 27, recently discharged from the service and working as a freelance writer. He had graduated from Harvard in 1940 but was attending a class taught by Adolph Lowe at the New School in the Village in 1946 that set him on his career path. Heilbroner would become well known for his 1953 book "The Wordly Philosophers," one of the best-selling books on economics ever published. Later he became a teacher at the New School. Despite his personal wealth, he was a Socialist, although not a dogmatist. Later in his career he asserted that capitalism had proven itself a superior system for the distribution of goods in society.

Another store catering to men at multiple locations that advertised this day in The Times was London Character Shoes, which featured English-style footwear at popular prices. It was particularly noted for the variety of shades offered. In this day's ad it touted the return of the popular spring shade London Tan available in custom lasts, British brogues and Continental toes with stitched, wing or medallion tips and single or double soles. They were priced from $6.45 (about $70) to $10.95 (about $120). The company had stores at Broadway and 43rd, 42nd near Madison, Seventh and 36th, Broadway near John Street, Delancey St., West 125th St. in Manhattan, East Fordham Road and Southern Boulevard in the Bronx, Pitkin Ave. and Fulton St. in Brooklyn and Jamaica Ave. in Jamaica, Queens, as well as in Newark and Jersey City. Most stores were open late.

Priest Looks to Block the Move of the UN to Lake Success

2011-06-03T10:00:00.001-04:00

The New York Times of April 16, 1946, reported that the Rev. C.T. Molloy was spearheading opposition to the recently announced decision to house the headquarters of the United Nations temporarily at the Sperry Gyroscope Plant in Lake Success, a suburban community in Nassau County on Long Island. The site had been chosen after an extensive search. The UN had chosen the City Building at Flushing Meadows, the site of the 1939 World's Fair, in Queens for future meetings of the General Assembly. Molloy was priest of the Church of Our Lady of Mercy in Forest Hills in Queens but was speaking as head of the Civic Association of Lake Success, where his family lived. "We'd like Lake Success to stay the way it is," he said.

In contrast, the business representative of Local 450, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, a CIO-affiliated union, sent a telegram to Secretary General Trgve Lie, welcoming the UN to the plant on behalf of the 6,000 union members employed at Sperry. The UN Security Council had been holding meetings at Hunter College but the General Assembly was yet to convene.

The level of interest in the UN was fairly high in the city. Radio stations carried the discussions. On April 16, The Times ran a verbatim transcript of the previous day's session as well as a summary and several page one stories on the topic under consideration: whether or not the body should consider the Iranian question now that Iran had withdrawn its complaint over the continued presence of Soviet troops in its country. Several earlier posts discuss this issue, over which the Soviet Union and its ally, Poland, stood against the US and Britain and their allies. Conservatives in the US pointed to this transgression as further proof of Soviet intention to dominate the postwar world while leftists insisted the controversy was manufactured to justify imperialist aggression against the USSR. Some seasoned observers saw it as a typical Big Power confrontation that had more to do with oil than with Iran's sovereignty and a signal that the postwar world was not going to be all that different despite the dreams of the idealists.

It was not as if the UN would be a major imposition on Lake Success. The Sperry plant had been a huge defense contractor during the war, employing 22,000 workers at its peak. Father Molloy said that the village, somewhat begrudgingly, had accepted the plant "because it was a war plant--and war plants had to be somewhere. But now the war's over... and now we'd like to remain a quiet village." He suggested that the plant be turned over to the Veteran's Administration to be used as a convalescent center.

At this time, the offices of the five permanent members of the Security Council were on the 15th floor of the Henry Hudson Hotel on W. 57th St. The space was inadequate. Hunter College was looking forward to getting the buildings now occupied by the UN back by August, allowing it to resume classes there a few weeks after the start of the fall term. The college also hoped to launch a program for veterans in the second semester, although this might mean adopting a six-day a week schedule with morning classes for its regular students and afternoon classes for veterans.

The Rev. Molloy's church in the middle-class community of Forest Hills had been established in 1927 as a chapel of the neighboring Our Lady Queen of Martyr's Church to serve a growing population. In the years between the world wars, the semi-rural parts of eastern Queens were being rapidly developed and settled by middle class Anglo-Saxon and German Protestants and Irish and German Catholics, many fleeing Brooklyn, followed by the Jews and Italians they were fleeing from who would become the most populous groups in the postwar years. Our Lady of Mercy moved into a new building in 1937. It was largely an Irish-American congregation.

American Cuisine, Chop Houses and Sea Food Restaurants

2011-06-01T10:27:00.001-04:00

Most of the upscale restaurants in New York in 1946 served French or Continental cuisine in an elegant atmosphere. Most restaurants billing themselves as "American" were either steak and chops places or moderate to inexpensive places geared to the family crowd or the office worker lunch trade. Among the exceptions were the three White Turkey restaurants in Manhattan and Town & Country on Park Avenue. These places offered regional dishes in an upscale environment.

The White Turkey restaurants were offspring of an inn in Danbury, CT, that had been bought and restored by sporting goods tycoon Harry Davega and his wife. Davega's sporting goods chain had many locations throughout the city and also carried radios. His Manhattan restaurants were at 1 University Place in the Village, Madison and 37th St. and on East 49th St. off Fifth Avenue. The places had a New England theme; the Village establishment had white painted woodwork and flowery chintz on the furniture. The cuisine was less regionally specific, featuring dishes like chicken Maryland with corn fritters, roast White Holland turkey, pot pies, onion soup and chops. The ad for the White Turkeys in the April 16, 1946 New York Times invited readers to celebrate Easter with a traditional holiday dinner "served in an atmosphere of Early Americana."

Town & Country was on Park Avenue between 48th and 49th Streets. It also specialized in American regional cuisine but the setting was more traditionally swank with chandeliers and mirrors. It had three dining rooms: the Town Room, the Men's Country Room and the Regional Room, which its New York Times ad boasted was famous for hot popovers as well as American Regional dishes.

Food critics of the time hailed these places for serving authentic dishes unlike the grub served up at the many popular-priced and inexpensive chain restaurants in the city that claimed to serve American food. In his history of New York restaurants, Appetite City, William Grimes quoted the president of the New York Stewards' and Caterers' Association who complained in the 1930s that the lower end places mostly served "faked food camouflaged with cornstarch sauce, burnt flour gravy, nujol mayonnaise, creamed pork shredded to look like chicken, cream of chicken soup which cries out the name of Pillsbury, and marshmallow in place of whipped cream."

While restaurant historians focus largely on the celebrated places where the affluent and famous supped and the well-known chains of the day, New York also had many run-of-the-mill establishments, the kind of places where an average New Yorker might have a bite with friends before a movie, co-workers might lunch together or have a drink after work or a tourist watching his wallet might take a meal. The New York Times of April 16,1946 carried an ad for the Malester restaurants "where quality food is served 7 days a week." I haven't located much information about these places but they appear to have been standard, everyday kind of places, mostly in the Times Square area. Some appear to have been around for decades. They included Crossroads on 42nd Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, Paddells sea food restaurant on Seventh Avenue between 41st and 42nd, Cadillac on Broadway between 41st and 42nd, Oyster Bay on 8th Avenue between 42nd and 43rd and Riggs on 33rd St., east of Broadway.

The same edition of the Times carried an ad for the King of the Sea restaurant, one of the best known of the city's many seafood restaurants. It was located on Third Avenue, under the El, near 53rd St. The ad touted the Dungeness Bay crabs. "air-expressed from Washington State."

Vincent Lopez at the Taft Grill

2011-05-23T08:45:00.001-04:00

Bandleader Vincent Lopez was at the Taft Grill this week as he was most weeks since 1941. His orchestra would be the house band for 20 years.

The Taft Grill was the ballroom of the Taft Hotel at Seventh Avenue and 50th Street. With more than 2,000 rooms, the Taft was the largest of the midtown hotels. Prices were reasonable, starting at less than $30 a night in 2011 dollars, hard to believe considering the astronomical price of a hotel room in today's Manhattan. The Broadway legitimate theaters and movie palaces were close by. In fact, the lobby of the Roxy, one of the largest and most opulent of the movie palaces, was in the hotel building. "Dragonwyck" with Gene Tierney and Vincent Price was the feature attraction this week at the Roxy and jazz singer Connee Boswell was appearing live along with a lavish, Gay Nineties-themed stage show. Madison Square Garden, where the Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus, was performing this week, was one block to the west in 1946. The Taft heavily advertised in newspapers across the country and was a favorite with middle-income tourists, businessmen and conference and convention goers. Tourism was coming back to the city after travel restrictions and a city housing shortage brought a wartime lull. Hotel space was still hard to find in 1946 but price controls kept the tariffs down.

Lopez, who was the Brooklyn-born son of Portuguese immigrants, had been around since the First World War. His dance band was one of the most popular of the 1920s. Among the many big names who got their start playing with Lopez were Rudy Vallee, Artie Shaw, Xavier Cugat, the Dorsey brothers, Betty Hutton and Glenn Miller. He was a radio pioneer. His theme song was "Nola."

In 1946, the Taft Grill did not draw a hip crowd. Lopez played at lunch and dinner and the band had finished their sets by 9 PM or so. His fans were not night owls. Many of them were tourists, some of whom were staying at the hotel. This was also the kind of place where office mates or groups of friends from the outer boroughs or suburbs went to celebrate a birthday or anniversary. My parents went there after their wartime wedding. They were from Queens. Like many at the time, their wedding was hastily arranged around my father's leave. They married at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration which specialized in GI weddings. It was a simple affair, just the immediate family. After the ceremony, they celebrated at lunch with their parents at the Taft Grill and spent their honeymoon night at the hotel. It was that kind of place and as close to a nightclub as my parents ever got.

The Taft Hotel opened as the Manger Hotel in 1925, became the Taft in 1931 and closed in the early 1980s. The upscale Michelangelo Hotel now occupies part of the building and the rest is condominium apartments. A T.G.I. Friday's is in what had been the lobby of the Roxy, which was torn down in 1960.

Vicente Gomez and Imogene Coca at Cafe Society Uptown

2011-05-21T09:05:00.001-04:00

Cafe Society Uptown took an ad in The New York Times on April 15 announcing the opening of their new show. Spanish-born guitarist Vicente Gomez was the headliner on a bill that also included comedian Imogene Coca, jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams and gospel singers the Coleman Brothers Quartette. The special added attraction, direct from Paris, was Moune. The entertainment included Edmund Hall and his orchestra and Dave Martin's Trio. Shows were at 8:30, 12:00 and 2:30. Dinner was served from 6:30 to 9:00. It was located at 128 East 58th Street,

Cafe Society Uptown was the politically correct destination for left-leaning celebrities and socialites. Unlike most other clubs of the era, it was fully integrated. African-American patrons were not only welcome, as they were not at places like the Stork Club and El Morocco, they were not automatically shunted off to the worst tables as they were at places like the Cafe Zanzibar. It was a spinoff of Cafe Society Downtown in the Village which had cultivated a proletarian air that some uptown socialites found tres chic. The uptown venue was more traditionally elegant and carried one of the stiffest minimums in the city; this was no working class hangout. During the McCarthy era, the clubs would be denounced by the Right Wing as Communist fronts. No direct proof of this was ever produced but the critics accumulated circumstantial evidence: The owner, Barney Josephson, was the brother of a Party functionary, he had definitely had some contact with the Party and was clearly a sympathizer if not actual Party member, the source of his initial funding was murky, many of his performers had Party ties and he was a talent wrangler for Party-supported events. The charge was that the clubs had the same purpose as the Mafia-linked clubs, which were the majority in the city: they provided a way to move money around and a place to mix and mingle with the people who were power brokers in the city. Faced with congressional inquiries in the Fifties, some of Josephson's stable of talent would blame him for their involvement in causes and events linked to the Party. No subversive activities were ever proven. However attendance plummeted as the columnists attacked and the clubs closed.

The show's headliner, Vicente Gomez, had fled Spain during the Civil War. Settling first in Mexico, he had come to New York in 1937 and soon was appearing on radio, in clubs, on the concert stage, on Broadway and in movies as well as releasing recordings. Guitar music was popular during this era. Gomez had become an American citizen in 1943 and he had recently been released from military service at the time of this engagement. In 1948, he opened his own club, La Zambra, on West 52nd St.

The rubber-faced comedienne Imogene Coca is well-remembered by many older boomers and their elders as Sid Caesar's television co-star in the 1950s but she had been appearing in clubs, vaudeville and the stage since she was 15. She was a regular at Cafe Society Uptown.

Mary Lou Williams had begun performing as a child. A composer and arranger as well as pianist, she was playing in the popular be-bop style in 1946. She was also a regular at both Cafe Society venues. That year the New York Philharmonic played one of her compostions, "Zodiac Suite," at Carnegie Hall. She had a long, successful career.

The Coleman Brothers were one of the first gospel crossover acts. They had been around for awhile before Josephson added them to his stable of regulars. They had a radio show and recorded, singing a varied repertoire of spirituals, folk songs, pop tunes and jazz.

The fly in the ointment was Moune, a black Parisian brought into town with great fanfare by Josephson. A photo spread was set in Life magazine. A movie newsreel crew filmed the preparations for her debut. According to Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People," his memoir, Josephson soon regretted booking her. Moune, who sang songs from her mother's homeland of Guadeloupe, may have been a sensation among the intellectuals of the Left Bank but Josephson found her "a flop, talentless." He wrote that he tried to pull the Life story, feeling that he had given the magazine a bum steer, but the editors found the glamor photographs too good to kill the story. Reading between the lines, I get a suspicion part of the problem was that Josephson might have found the high-spirited Parisian hard to handle. Most of his stable of talent found him a fair employer who treated them better than most nightclub owners and managers. However, he often told them what to wear and what to perform. He sought to manage their careers as well as dictate their politics. Moune refused to shave her legs or do anything about the hair above her lip as he insisted. She didn't follow his stage direction. At the end of her gig, according to Josephson, she offered herself to him sexually, telling him this was her standard practice. She married a jazz musician to stay in New York but finding no bookings, she returned to Paris.

De Pinna and Other Fifth Avenue Stores

2011-05-18T20:57:00.000-04:00

Fifth Avenue in 1946 was lined with high-end department stores catering to the carriage trade. The Park Avenue crowd made regular visits but residents of the affluent suburbs were also among the patrons and the strip was a must stop for many well-off out-of-towners. New Yorkers and tourists of more modest income shopped the windows or gaped at the stores and the crowds on the street from the double-decker buses that traveled the avenue. Some New Yorkers who could not afford the usual tariffs looked for the sales when at least some of the merchandise might become affordable. With the post-war clothing shortage, sales were rare events in 1946. A skit in the musical revue "Call Me Mister," which opened this week on Broadway, featured a Park Avenue family singing a Christmas madrigal that contained a litany of the city's toniest retailers.

On April 16, one of the most elite of the Avenue establishments, De Pinna, at 52nd Street, ran ads for its fur department where prices were very high and for gold metal jewelry at a more affordable price. De Pinna had been founded in 1885 by a Sephardic Jew from London. It sold men's and women's wear but is especially remembered as the place where a young boy from the Social Register got his first gray flannel suit and where his mother outfitted him for prep school. It was an austere store patronized by those who did not need to flaunt their wealth with flamboyant clothing. It had a "double height main floor with wooden floors, pendulum lighting and wood slatted escalators" according to an article by Jeffrey Felner at examiner.com. Brooklyn born Norman Podhoretz wrote of the physical dread he felt when a mentor took him inside to buy him a proper suit for his Harvard interview. This store was enemy territory and allowing this woman to buy him a suit there was a "fantastic act of aggression" and a betrayal of his parents. Alger Hiss's son, Tony, remembered in his memoir, The View From Alger's Window. how the durable, classic boys clothing from De Pinna would be handed down several times within his family.

In an article published originally in Real Estate Weekly, Faith Hope Consolo delineated the pecking order of the Fifth Avenue department stores. At the top of the heap was Bergdorf Goodman. Tailored Woman was best known for furs. De Pinna's was the place for boys clothing. Best & Co. offered conservative, preppy clothing and was known for children's clothing, much of it sold by catalog. Saks was chic and known for its sales. Arnold Constable and Franklin Simon were less expensive but acceptable alternatives. Russeks was best known for coats. B. Altman's was a full service department store where one could find most anything, but was somewhat staid. Lord & Taylor was somewhat similar but had a little more "pizzazz" and not as many departments as Altman's.

The Sixties was a rough decade for these stores. Tastes were changing, malls were stealing customers and real estate was growing more valuable. Many of these stores, which had been around for decades and had survived the Depression, went under, including De Pinna, which closed in 1969.

Mayor O'Dwyer Claims to Foil a Gangster Invasion

2011-05-17T15:11:00.000-04:00

The New York Times on April 16 reported that Mayor O'Dwyer claimed that the police had thwarted the attempt of an "underworld empire" to take over the bookmaking business in Bay Ridge and Bath Beach in Brooklyn. The city police department had been taking a lot of flak for their crackdown on petty gambling operations, taken to the point of arresting people for reading the racing tip sheets.To some newspapers, the heavily publicized crusade appeared to be aimed at penny ante operators and small time gamblers.

The Times reporter wrote that the "Mayor declared that within a month after he took office word reached him that organized gangsters were planning to invade the city."' The first evidence was the murder of racketeer Louis Surato at 16th Avenue and 63rd St. in Brooklyn. The mayor had put his friend and protege, Captain Frank C. Bals, in charge of the police drive against this new crime ring. An arrest had been made in the Surato case, thanks to Bals' efforts, O'Dwyer proclaimed.

In related news, police had raided the International Mutoscope Company facility in Long Island City where they found 300 pinball machines and horse racing and target games. This was announced as if it were a major discovery. It shouldn't have been. The company long had been a major supplier of games to penny arcades. It began by making mutoscopes, those flip card movie machines that operated by hand crank and were the earliest form of movies. Penny arcades dotted the city, particularly in Coney Island and around Times Square where they were major sources of amusement for the working class. These machines were not illegal. The raid was justified on the basis that the machines could possibly be used for gambling. The Queens assistant DA said that his office was investigating whether the company had any ties to this alleged new crime ring moving in on the city.

The Times also reported in the April 16 story on O'Dwyer's speech before a Police Athletic Club luncheon when he vowed that he would not allow organized crime to gain a foothold in the city. He praised the PAL for its efforts to combat the baneful influence that flashy gangsters had on the city's vulnerable youth so easily seduced into a life of crime.

To critics of O'Dwyer and Tammany Hall, this crimebusting stance was a charade. O'Dwyer had made his reputation as a crime buster when he went after Murder Inc, as Brooklyn DA. Bals had been his chief police aide. Critics charged that O'Dwyer's investigation had steered clear of the Mafia kingpins in the city, some of whom had intimate ties to the contract killing organization known as Murder Inc. Bals own behavior was particularly suspect after key witness Abe Reles plunged to his death in 1941 from a window at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. Reles' testimony had been instrumental in obtaining murder convictions for several lowly soldiers of Murder Inc. He was set to finger Albert Anastasia, a Mob boss, at the time of his death. Bals was in charge of a six man police detail, handpicked from the DA's squad, who were supposed to be guarding the songbird. Somehow, under their watch, Reles went out the window. O'Dwyer claimed Reles died while trying to escape on a makeshift rope of bedsheets. Forensics strongly suggested he had been pushed or hurled out the window. In any case, newspapers wondered how this could have happened under the noses of the police watch. The speculation was that Reles was eliminated under orders of mob boss Frank Costello, who had a hand in most of the top nightspots in the city.

Organized crime flourished in New York during O'Dwyer's administration. Bets were openly placed at a restaurant across the street from Lindy's in midtown Manhattan. The place was run by Champ Segal. a racketeer and former boxer who was heavily involved in the corrupt fight scene. Shortly after O'Dwyer won election in 1949, the Kings County District Attorney opened an investigation into police corruption in Brooklyn. As the investigation drew closer to O'Dwyer and his inner circle, the mayor resigned to accept an appointment from President Truman to serve as Ambassador to Mexico. In 1952, Harry Gross, one of the top bookies in the city, alleged that Bals was among the many Brooklyn cops who were on his payroll.

In other crime news reported in the May 16 New York Times:

Four armed men robbed the bar and restaurant at the Madison Square Hotel at 37 Madison Avenue. They fled in a taxi. Twenty patrons watched.
The Bianco brothers of Brooklyn were held in $10,000 bail, charged with mugging two victims near the 18th Avenue subway station in Brooklyn.

Edmund Wilson: Left Wing Libertarian

2011-05-16T09:21:00.001-04:00

I was interested to read a couple of weeks ago in The New York Times that writer Edmund Wilson, considered by many to have been the dean of mid-twentieth century literary criticism, decided in 1946 to stop paying income tax. According to the article by Jennifer Schuessler, The New Yorker withheld taxes from his salary but he refused to pay taxes on his freelance work, including his controversial 1946 best-seller, Memoirs of Hecate County. He took a libertarian stance on the issue but from a left wing perspective. While the followers of Ayn Rand, who were just beginning to gather behind her banner in 1946, objected to the use of their money to pay for anything that did not personally benefit themselves, the libertarians on the left like Wilson objected to the fruits of their labor being used to fight imperialist wars and to increase the wealth of plutocrats. Both sides accused the government of being totalitarian although they had radically different ideas about who was running the show and to what ends and who should be in charge.

Like many of the American and English intellectuals who were middle-aged in 1946 and had been raised in the upper reaches of the middle class, Wilson had been drawn to Marxism. It was a rejection of the bourgeois way of life and belief system of their affluent, Victorian parents. Others of their class and age chose instead to become Catholics. Some joined both the Communist Party and the Catholic church, either consecutively or simultaneously, perhaps because both world views, for all their differences, appeared to appreciate men of culture over the money-grubbing middle class. This lot was not particularly egalitarian, seeing themselves as members of an elite, privileged class by virtue of their intellect rather than their wealth. They did not think they should be expected to live by the same rules as the ordinary sort.

Those who aligned with the Communists hoped that the Russian Revolution would usher in a new social order, not run by bankers and industrialists, that eventually would lead to a withering away of the state and total freedom for all. Intellectuals and artists naturally would rise to the top. They were encouraged by what they thought was happening in the Soviet Union in the 1920s when people like themselves were freed from the restrictions of the Czarist autocracy. Many became severely disillusioned by Stalin's repressions in the 1930s. Some, like Wilson's friend, John Dos Passos, became allied with the conservatives. although with reservations. Some became supporters of Stalin's arch-enemy, Trotsky. Some, like Wilson, rejected Stalin and the state he ran, but continued to support left-wing causes as long as the causes did not require the payment of income taxes. Gore Vidal, just beginning his literary career in 1946, was a young disciple of sorts and one of the last influential proponents of this world view. Wilson and Vidal both shared an odd sympathy for the antebellum South with its sharp social divisions and an animosity toward Abraham Lincoln, who they believed had turned the US into a tyranny. These were the brandy-snifting radicals who hung out only in the best circles.

Yiddish Theater in Brownsville

2011-05-09T14:43:00.000-04:00

Menasha Skulnik, comic star of the Yiddish stage, was appearing in "My Wedding Night" at the Parkway Theater at Eastern Parkway and St. John's Place in the Brownsville area of Brooklyn. The musical comedy opened on Tuesday, April 16, and had performances every evening and four matinees a week.

In 1946, Brownsville was a densely populated working-class Jewish tenement neighborhood as it had been since the late 19th century when it took in a spillover population from the Lower East Side. It was known for political radicalism and cultural conservatism, religious orthodoxy and violent gangs, including the notorious Murder, Inc., a contract killing service run by Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Pitkin Avenue was the bustling main shopping thoroughfare.Yiddish was still widely spoken by the older generation. The district also had a growing black population as well as Italian and Arab enclaves and a small colony of North Africans on Livonia Avenue. Many of the residents worked in the building trades, some as day laborers.

Skulnik was a major figure in Yiddish theater who also had appeared on Broadway and in movies and was known to radio audiences as Uncle David on the popular series "The Goldbergs." He was small man with a high nasal voice who usually played the schlemiel and was often compared to Charlie Chaplin. His co-star in "My Wedding Night" was Miriam Kressyn, one of the leading actresses of Yiddish theater. The play was written by Abe Ellstein, a Julliard-trained composer, best known for the classic Yiddish movie "Yidl Mitn Fidl," shot in Poland in 1936 and starring American actress Molly Picon. Most of the people and shtetl culture portrayed were wiped out a few years later by the Nazis. In the standard lists of works by Ellstein, I have found no mention of "My Wedding Night, adevertised as his "new tuneful comedy hit." Perhaps it had an alternate title?

Yiddish theater came to New York in the 19th century with the Eastern European Jewish immigrants for whom Yiddish was the first language . In its early years, many Yiddish productions were of a serious plays, including translations of major European playwrights not yet well-known to English-speaking American theatergoers. By the twentieth century, it was more about music and comedy, often warmly satirizing Jewish tradition in both the old and new country. Second Avenue, the "Jewish Rialto" on the Lower East Side, was its epicenter in New York even though most of the city's Jews no longer lived there.

Yiddish was in decline in the city in 1946, no longer spoken by the younger generation, except for a few words that had spread across ethnic and religious lines. The Zionists looked down on Yiddish, preferring Hebrew to be the Jewish language, although, like Latin for Catholics, to most New York Jews Hebrew was a language they heard only at religious services. A postwar influx of Holocaust survivors brought more Yiddish speakers to the city after the war, many of them ultra-Orthodox.

The Parkway Theater, a three-story concrete and steel building from 1928 with brick facing and a Moorish interior, became the Holy House of Prayer for All People, a black Pentecostal church, in 1952. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010. In the 1950s, Brownsville underwent a rapid transition from a predominantly Jewish neighborhood into an overwhelmingly African-American one, known for intense poverty and a high rate of violent crime, a reputation it still sadly maintains.

"On Strivers Row" at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem

2011-05-08T14:07:00.000-04:00

"On Strivers Row" was nearing the end of a revival run this week at the American Negro Theatre at 15 West 125th Street in Harlem. The play had opened in February.

The American Negro Theatre, ANT or "the ants" as it was sometimes affectionately called, had been founded in 1940 by playwright Abram Hill and actor Frederick O'Neal, veterans of the recently defunct Federal Arts Project. Their mission was to create a community-based theater that spoke to the black experience. The group found a home in the 150-seat basement theater at the Schomburg Library, a Harlem branch of the New York Public Library on West 135th St. The first production was Hill's "On Strivers Row." It ran for five months. A musical version played the Apollo for a week in 1941.

ANT steadily built a subscription base; its members hitting the streets to drum up interest. At first much of its audience came from outside the neighborhood but three years into its existence about 90 percent was from Harlem. In 1944. with the help of grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, ANT opened an acting school on West 11th Street in the Village. Among the actors who appeared in ANT plays or attended its classes were Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, Alice Childress, Rosetta LeNoire, Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

By 1946, the group was becoming a victim of its own success. In 1944, Hill adapted a play. "Anna Lucasta," that screenwriter Philip Yordan had been trying to get produced. Yordan had written the play about a prostitute's stormy relationship with her Polish-American family. Hill made the characters African-Americans. It was a big hit and soon transferred to Broadway where it played over 900 performances. It was still on Broadway this week in 1946. It was made into a movie in 1949 with a white cast headed by Paulette Goddard and in 1959 with a black cast headed by Eartha Kitt and Sammy Davis Jr. ANT got a small royalty from the Broadway production but also a lot of attention. In 1945 they began a weekly radio show that could be heard this week in WNEW at 5 PM Sunday evening. On the show an African- American cast performed half-hour adaptations of classic and contemporary plays and operas.

Success changed the organization. The actor members, especially the new ones, now saw ANT primarily as a stepping stone for downtown success rather than as one meant primarily to serve Harlem. Hill complained that most of the members who did win mainstream recognition lost interest in ANT while the remaining members wanted the group to produce plays that would duplicate the success of "Anna Lucasta" and open the door to Broadway for them. ANT turned to white playwrights like Arthur Laurents to find springboard material but its productions were not artistic or commercial hits. Hill complained that the group was wandering too far from its mission and that he was spending too much of his time in committee meetings. But he also questioned whether the African-American community had the financial resources to support the organization that he had envisioned. He had intended that ANT be self-sustaining but had to go looking for grants to keep it going. Meanwhile some of the more ambitious members doubted that Hill had the administrative skills or artistic abilities to meet their expectations. Bitter fights broke out. Then the library kicked them out. It had become tired of reviewers writing that its theater was cramped, hot and uncomfortable. And for four years ANT had not paid its rent or utility bills. Hill talked about building a new theater but ANT lacked the funds and they could not find a suitable existing place that they could afford. In 1946, they were performing on the second floor of an Elks hall.

Reviving "On Strivers Row" could be seen as an effort to return to its roots. This play was written for Harlem audiences. It satirized the social ambitions and pretensions of the affluent inhabitants of the elegant townhouses on West 139th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and adjacent blocks. Hill had grown up nearby and would walk down the well-manicured block on his way to school. The residents of Strivers Row back in the day, like those who lived in Sugar Hill, another affluent Harlem enclave, emulated the lifestyle of the Park Avenue crowd with soirees, tea and cocktail parties and summer cottages. They had little social contact with the neighborhood that surrounded them. In the 1940s Strivers Row was in decline. Some of the townhouses were sold and converted into SROs.

In the 1946 production of the play, the role of the sassy maid who delivered the zingers to her snooty employer was played by Isabel Sanford, who would become well-known to TV audiences decades later from "The Jeffersons." The New York Times reviewer wrote that the "featherweight farce" was a departure from the serious theatrical fare with which ANT had become associated. While it showed that Harlem could laugh at itself, the play suffered from a "general lack of cohesiveness in the plot," stock characters and the absence of the "shrewd, sharp-cutting wit that usually is associated with successful satire." He had praise only for the "imposing settings" by Charles Sebree. Sebree had been an important member of the Chicago black arts scene and gay community in the 1930s. After his wartime service, he moved to New York. He also was a playwright.

In 1947, ANT ended its theater training program due to lack of funds. It raised ticket prices to meet its expenses. In 1948, Hill resigned. The theater group faded away, ending its existence in 1951. A number of its members, but not Hill, subsequently found a new home with the Committee for the Negro in the Arts, an organization with ties to the Communist Party. The Communist, not a particularly imaginative bunch, tended to call their front groups The Committee for one thing or another, usually a dead giveaway of party affiliation. The CNA had success in the broader community as one of its stated purposes.

Bob Olin's Restaurant

2011-05-07T09:16:00.001-04:00

A new restaurant in town in 1946 was Bob Olin's at 128 West 58th Street. It advertised on the sports page of the April 15 New York Times, already claiming its steaks were "famous." According to Esquire in 1947, the place was "jammed noons and evenings" with the same sort of sportswriters, theater and radio personalities who frequented other similar midtown joints. Time described it a few years later, when it had moved to Central Park West and 61st Street, as a "cheesecake and cocktail oasis."

Olin, a native New Yorker, was the latest boxer to try the restaurant business. Although he was dismissed by many as a so-so pugilist, he had held the light-heavyweight championship for a few months in 1934 after defeating "Slapsie" Maxie Rosenbloom in a fight said by some to have been so boring the crowd booed both contenders. Olin and Rosenbloom were Jewish. By 1946 the days of the Jewish prizefighter had pretty much come to an end. Rosenbloom had become a character actor in the movies. Olin lost his title to an African American, John Henry Lewis. He retired from the ring in 1939 and died of a heart attack in 1956, when he was 48.

Colonial Airlines

2011-05-05T12:55:00.000-04:00

Colonial Airlines ran an ad in the April 15, 1946 New York Times advertising its service to Ottawa, Montreal, Burlington and Albany. This Canadian airline was absorbed by Eastern Airlines, now also long gone, ten years later. According to the ad, it had "frequent daily departures on 21-passenger Douglas Skycruisers." Its New York offices were at 51 Vanderbilt Avenue.

The Telephone in 1946

2011-05-05T08:57:00.006-04:00

The dial tone and busy signal had only recently been introduced in 1946. New York Telephone felt it advisable to run ads in New York newspapers this week to explain to customers that you had to wait for the dial tone before you dialed a number and that a busy signal meant hang up and try again later. The system had not yet been introduced in much of the country. Direct dialing of long distance calls was years away. Businesses had switchboard operators to connect callers with extensions. Telephone numbers began with the first two letters of an exchange. For instance, as made popular in a Glenn Miller song from 1940. the phone number of Manhattan's Pennsylvania Hotel, home of the Cafe Rouge ballroom, was PEnnsylvania 6-5000.

The Baseball Report on April 15, 1946

2011-05-03T20:10:00.001-04:00

The Yankees clobbered the Dodgers 12-2 before 33,187 fans in their final exhibition game on April 14. It was a record turnout for an exhibition game at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, reflecting the excitement that baseball fans felt over the first postwar season when almost all of the players were home from the service. The total attendance for the three-game stand at Ebbets Field was 73,438.

The Dodgers ended their spring season with 15 victories, 12 losses and a tie. The Yankees, favored to win the American League pennant race, had 28 victories, 13 defeats and a tie. In seven meetings this spring between the two teams, the Yankees won 4 and the Dodgers 3. Joe DiMaggio scored 19 homers in exhibition play, including one in the game on Palm Sunday.

The Yankees were scheduled to have their home opener on Good Friday. The Catholic War Veterans had lodged a protest, asking that the game be postponed.

The New York Giants defeated the Indians in Cleveland, 7 to 5, after scoring six runs in the last two innings of the game. A sparse crowd of 9,734 witnessed the home team defeat. The Giants won 13 exhibition games, lost 13 and tied two.

In an AP poll, baseball writers were virtually unanimous in choosing the St. Louis Cardinals to win the National League pennant race. The consensus was that Chicago would come in second with Brooklyn and Pittsburgh following behind. The New York Giants were expected to be somewhere in mid-pack. The Yankees were the consensus choice to win the American League race this year, but a minority picked either Detroit or Boston. In the end it was Boston, led by Ted Williams, that faced St. Louis in the 1946 World Series. The Yankees were in third place in the American League. The Dodgers had been the surprise contenders last year, chosen to be dead last but holding the lead in mid-season and ending up in third. The baseball writers underestimated them again in 1946. They finished the season in second place in the National League, only two games behind the Cards, while the Giants were in the cellar.

The National Lawyers Guild Wants UN to Drop the Iranian Question

2011-05-01T16:13:00.000-04:00

According to The New York Times of April 15, 1946, the UN Committee of the National Lawyers Guild recommended that the Iranian question be dropped by the UN Security Council in light of a declared resolution of the issue by the Premier of Iran and Stalin. Iran had brought the issue before the Council after the Soviets had not met the deadline to withdraw its troops from the north of Iran. Since then, Ahmad Gavam, the Iranian premier, had negotiated a settlement with the USSR tentatively granting them oil rights in return for their withdrawal. This did not sit well with British and American oil companies. In the end, after the Soviets had withdrawn, the Iranian parliament voted against the Soviet oil concession.

The National Lawyers Guild, still in existence today, was formed in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association which barred blacks, was perceived as discriminating against Jews and largely opposed the New Deal. Like many organizations in the Popular Front era, it initially was a broad umbrella group that included New Deal liberals, union militants, civil libertarians and civil rights supporters. While the liberals were in the majority among the 5,000 members in 1937, Communist Party members had a significant role in its leadership. Disputes between the Communists and non-Communists led in 1940 to the resignation of two-thirds of the organization's membership who felt that the Party was setting the priorities. They also opposed the Nazi-Soviet pact. This put the Communists and their sympathizers more firmly in control.

Like many left wing groups after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the NLG put its efforts strongly behind the war effort and proclaimed itself an FDR backer. Now that the war was over, following the new Soviet line, foreign policy was in the forefront as it was with all the Communist-dominated groups. The NLG supported Stalin's foreign policy and opposed Truman's. It was affiliated with the Soviet-led International Association of Democratic Lawyers. This led to a call from conservatives to have the group listed as a subversive organization, This effort failed. However membership dwindled during the late 1940s and 1950s. The NLG had a resurgence with the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the rise in radicalism among the young.

The Turmoil at St. Nicholas Collegiate Reformed Church

2011-04-26T17:16:00.000-04:00

The history of the churches of New York City are, at least to me, a fascinating record of the changing face of New York City neighborhoods. Churches not only come and go as the demographics shift but often they change hands from one denomination to another.

On this week in April 1946, the Collegiate Reformed Church of St. Nicholas was much in the news (I mention it in several earlier blog posts). This Gothic church with a towering steeple stood then on Fifth Avenue at 48th Street, among the lineup of elite congregations with imposing sanctuaries that lined Manhattan's toniest thoroughfare. All the mainline churches had their Fifth Avenue churches. St. Nicholas was one of five churches in the Dutch Reformed Collegium of New York, which dated back to the city's days as New Amsterdam. Although the churches in the Collegium were Reformed in tradition, they stood somewhat apart from the national denomination. But St. Nicholas stood on prime real estate and recently the Collegium had decided to sell the land to neighboring Rockefeller Center. This was a controversial decision. St. Nicholas was, after all, the church where Teddy Roosevelt had worshiped, it carried the name of the patron saint of New Amsterdam, the congregation dated back to 1847 and the present church had been erected in 1872. It was a city landmark.

The April 15 New York Times reported that the church's minister, elders and deacons had written to the parishioners requesting that each of them formally declare in writing whether or not they were in favor of moving the congregation to the East 89th Street Reformed Church, between Park and Madison. The letter, which also announced a meeting on the issue to take place on April 23, stated that "without our knowledge or consent arrangements have already begun" to move the congregation.

The sandstone church on 89th Street, although a Dutch Reformed congregation, was not a member of the Collegium. The Episcopalians had built the church in 1870 as the Church of the Beloved Disciple, a place of worship largely for the residents of St. Luke's Home for Indigent Females which had recently moved to 89th and Madison from its original location near St. Luke's in the Village. By the 1920s, the Upper East Side had seen rapid development as an affluent enclave. Luxury high rises stood beside townhouses. The elite Church of the Heavenly Rest moved to East 90th, just off Fifth Avenue, from its former location on Fifth Avenue and 45th Street, now the center of the midtown business district. St. Luke's Home had moved earlier in the century to Morningside Heights, near the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Columbia University. The Church of the Beloved Disciple was merged with the Church of the Heavenly Rest.

In 1929, the 89th Street church was sold to a Dutch Reformed congregation that was fleeing Harlem. The new congregation had ancient roots, having spun off from a congregation established in 1660 when Harlem was a small Dutch village. The congregation had split in the 1880s. The first church on East 121st Street ministered to a largely working class congregation while a second church was built on West 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue for its more affluent parishioners. In the 1920s, as the neighborhood around Mt. Morris Park became increasingly African American, the affluent white congregants of the 123rd Street church decided to move, leasing their building to an African-American Seventh Day Adventist congregation.

By 1946, the Adventist congregation had purchased the building on 123rd Street and had a congregation of over 1,000 members. The East 89th Dutch Reformed Church, however, was struggling. The Dutch Reformed church was in decline by mid-century in Manhattan, although some congregations, most notably Marble Collegiate, were booming. In 1950, the 89th Street church was sold again, this time to the Roman Catholic church. It is now the Church of St. Thomas More, where Jacqueline Onassis worshiped. It had been designed as an English country church but tall apartment buildings now shut much of the light from its windows. The high rises began to surround the church in the 1920s and continued to sprout through the postwar years.

St. Nicholas church was torn down in 1949. Ephesus Seventh Day Adventist Church still thrives on West 123rd, although the interior and part of the exterior were rebuilt after a major fire in 1969. The original Harlem Dutch Reformed Church, now called Elmendorf Reformed Church, became integrated in the 1950s and appointed it first African-American minister in 1978. It now occupies its former parish house on East 121st Street, ministering to a largely Caribbean congregation.

The Socialists Name Their 1946 State Ticket

2011-04-25T00:26:00.000-04:00

On April 14, 1946, the Socialist party of New York nominated its slate for the governorship and the U.S Senate at a convention in Schenectady. New York City hosted several parties that considered themselves Socialist in one form or another in the first half of the twentieth century. Originally these parties drew much of their support from German and Jewish immigrants and labor union members. The Socialist Party had spun off from the older Socialist Labor Party in 1899. The various Socialist parties and factions battled each other ideologically through the twentieth century: Social Democrats versus Communists, followers of Henry George versus Marxists, Stalinists versus anti-Stalinists, pro-Soviets versus anti-Soviets, radicals and anarchists who urged revolution versus moderates who pursued gradual reform through democratic elections. Some Socialists and Communists won elections in the city but they never were able to succeed in a city or statewide election.

Many Socialist party members defected to the Communists after the Russian Revolution, leading to conflict over control of the educational and social welfare organizations that the Socialists had founded. In the 1930s, the Socialists had a resurgence as a Marxist alternative to the Soviet-dominated Communist Party, but this effort to form a broad umbrella group soon fell victim to the machinations of feuding factions. The more radical Marxists expelled the moderate Old Guard leadership from the party. The Old Guard took with them control of the publications the Jewish Daily Forward and New Leader, the Rand School of Social Sciences and the Pocono summer camp and much of the party's financial support. In an effort to restore order to the party, the hard-line Trotskyists were in turn expelled, taking with them much of the younger membership. They formed the Socialist Workers Party. By the end of the decade, the New Deal had drawn some of the moderate Socialists into the Democratic Party. Others worked with the Communists in the the union-supported American Labor Party. Some of these left the ALP to form the anti-Communist Liberal Party. By the 1940s, electoral support for the Socialist party had faded to insignificance.

In 1946, the Socialists nominated perennial candidate Coleman B. Cheney, its state chairman, for governor. In 1942, as soon as he was nominated for governor, Cheney, an economics professor at Skidmore, had received a draft notice, despite being 42 and a World War One veteran. The party's national leader, the former New York clergyman Norman Thomas, denounced this as a deliberately vindictive act by FDR. Walter O'Hagan, a labor leader from Auburn, received the Socialist nomination for Senate in 1946. He had unsuccessfully run as an American Labor Party candidate for Congress in 1944.

Because the Socialist party had failed to garner 50,000 gubernatorial votes in the 1942 state election, it had lost its place on the 1946 ballot. In order to regain it, the party had to submit 12,000 signatures gathered from all over the state. In a highly controversial decision, the New York Supreme Court ruled the Socialist party petitions invalid because a witness had listed his own election district erroneously. The court also threw the Industrial Government and Socialist Workers parties off the ballot. The Industrial Government Party was an affiliate of the Socialist Labor Party. which had a brief resurgence in the 1940s as an alternative for anti-Stalinist Marxists. But in New York at this time most of the left voted either the ALP or Communist lines.

The Appeals Court judges split 4-3 on upholding the original State Supreme Court ruling in the case of both the Socialist and Industrial Government parties, whose petition had been thrown out for the same error. The judges voted unanimously to uphold the disqualification of the Socialist Workers petition on the grounds that all 13 pages of signatures from Steuben County had not been notarized. Despite their political rivalry, the three disqualified parties issued a joint statement denouncing the court's decision.

This decision left only the Democrats, Republicans and Communist Party candidates on the ballot. Both the ALP and the Liberals had endorsed the Democratic ticket. Most of the Communist Party candidates withdrew in September asking their supporters to vote for the Democrats, an embrace not welcome by the Democrats in the political climate that developed that fall. Despite the lack of challenge from the left and a reasonably strong slate headed by Senator James Mead, who had chosen to run for governor this year, and former governor Herbert H. Lehman, who was running for Mead's Senate seat, the Democratic ticket lost decisively to the Republican slate headed by incumbent governor Thomas Dewey and Assembly Majority Leader Irving Ives as the Senate candidate.This was part of a nationwide Republican sweep that year that has often been compared to the 2010 election. The pendulum swung strongly back to the Democrats two years later when the Republicans attempted to undo the New Deal.

Reports From the Clothing Markets

2011-04-22T11:34:00.000-04:00

High demand and continued shortages was the story in the clothing markets, particularly for menswear. According to a survey by the National Association of Retail Clothiers and Furnishers reported in The New York Times on April 15, 1946, men wanted silk ties, despite their high price and the availability of less costly, "attractive" rayon patterns . Grey flannel suits were expected to be back in style, perhaps at above prewar levels, once they finally became available. At this time, they were practically impossible to find. In some parts of the country, particularly the north central region, retailers reported that peg-leg trousers were the rage among college students but not in other areas, notably the South. The Army short jacket was seen as "having possibilities in the civilian sports coat field" and half-hose with elastic tops were much in demand.

A survey of buying firms in the city. which handled orders for retailers across the country, showed the wholesale clothing market relatively quiet with much of the activity centered on restocking Easter orders and orders for summer clothing. Most Fall ready-to-wear lines were not expected to be widely available until late Spring. Delivery was a major problem with most manufacturers falling behind on promised delivery dates, particularly on reorders. Stores were canceling orders for women's coats that could not be delivered in time for Easter.

Men's sports shirts continued to be in short supply. The demand for men's better hats continued strong with wool and plastic hats appearing in the market at a lower price point. There was an unusually strong demand for men's Argyle slack hose but not enough supply to meet the demand. Men's rayon hose was also scarce. There had been an upsurge in orders for boys' wear but these orders were unlikely to reach the stores before Easter.

In the better dress market, one firm reported an uptick in orders for bridal gowns and graduation dresses and another said prom dresses of crepe, marquisette, net and jersey were in demand. Pastel and prints in crepes and sheers were popular and scarce. Sweater lines had opened and orders were brisk for July and August delivery. Orders for infant and children's coats were large.

The CIO, the Red Cross and Basil O'Connor

2011-04-21T12:35:00.000-04:00

The CIO announced this week that it was terminating its fundraising agreement with the American Red Cross. In a letter to Basil O'Connor, chairman of the American Red Cross, Irving Abramson, national chairman of the CIO Community Services Committee, expressed hope that O'Connor would address the concerns of the unions and allow the agreement to be renewed. Before the war, both the AFL and the CIO had issues with the Red Cross whose leadership they felt was dominated by the social elite and conservative businessmen. The unions had threatened to set up their own war relief organizations rather than participate in a unified effort under the Red Cross aegis as desired by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In the end, they agreed to raise money for the Red Cross instead.

Abramson charged that the American Red Cross had "isolated itself too long from the people and the community." In particular, he pointed to the organization's repeated refusal to allow union volunteers to participate directly on the community level, limiting the role of the unions to fundraising. He noted that the CIO had helped raise $50,000,000 during three campaigns. He insisted that the Red Cross would have to allow the CIO union members to have a broader role if the agreement was to be renewed. Abramson was no wild-eyed radical. A social democrat, he opposed a number of initiatives championed by the union organization's left wing and as result the ardent Stalinists among them denounced him as a red baiter, not being above a little baiting of their own.

Basil O'Connor was FDR's former law partner and his personal attorney, as well as his choice to head the Red Cross. After Roosevelt contracted polio, O'Connor headed the March of Dimes, formed to raise money for the battle against polio. Its innovative 1938 campaign, which targeted small donors rather than relying on large contributors, changed the way that charitable fundraising was conducted. O'Connor became chairman of the American Red Cross in 1944. His conservative opponents within the organization charged that he was too close to the unions and wanted him replaced. Some alleged that under his leadership the unions received secret kickbacks for their fundraising. O'Connor reported that in the 1945 fundraising campaign the unions had raised between $30,000,000 and $35,000,000 for the Red Cross and were only reimbursed for their actual expenses of $238,308, less than one percent of the amount raised. There was, he asserted, nothing secret about the arrangement.

Basil O'Connor was an example of the Irish Catholics who had moved into the city's white shoe establishment. He lived on Park Avenue. On the other hand, his brother, John J. O'Connor, who despite degrees from Brown and Harvard Law, took a more traditional route to power as an old school, pugnacious Tammany politician. He represented the Gashouse District in Congress for 15 years. This was the tenement neighborhood that occupied the blocks where Stuyvesant Town now stands. In the 1930s, the congressional district also included some recently gentrified neighborhoods along the East River and the Gramercy Park area. It was consolidated in the 1943 redistricting, when Manhattan lost four congressional districts, with other East Side districts, a move that put four Democratic Lower East Side incumbents into the same district. While O'Connor voted in favor of most New Deal legislation when they came up for a floor vote, he frequently used his position as chairman of the House Rules Committee to bottle up measures supported by Roosevelt, particularly after FDR backed Sam Rayburn over him for the majority leader position in 1936. O'Connor became one of the targets in FDR's largely unsuccessful effort in 1938 to purge the Democratic party of New Deal opponents. O'Connor lost the Democratic primary in a squeaker in which he alternately positioned himself as a New Dealer and as an FDR opponent. He also ran in the Republican primary where he defeated the GOP organization candidate, Allen Dulles, who later headed the CIA. Until the state legislature passed a law making it harder for candidates to run in primaries of other parties, the Republican primaries in city districts where Republicans had relatively low registration, were sometimes hijacked by Democrats or American Labor Party candidates. He lost the general election to the Democrat. Despite the contretemps, his brother Basil remained a close FDR confidant.

The Carmelites Mark Their 57th Year in New York City

2011-04-20T13:57:00.000-04:00

The April 15, 1946 New York Times noted the 57th anniversary of the Carmelite priests in New York. Known as the White Friars, the order was best known for ministering to patients at Bellevue Hospital, which lay in their East Side parish. The order had ten priests in Manhattan then, who lived in a priory at East 28th Street. While their actual anniversary was this week, it would be celebrated with a fundraiser featuring Irish folklore and music at the Manhattan Center on May 3. Mayor O'Dwyer was the honorary chairman.

The Irish order of the Carmelites came to the city in 1889. According to a story that appeared in The Times in 2007, the New York archdiocese had invited the Carmelites to the city at least in part to help quiet an uproar among Irish working class immigrants after a popular priest, Dr. Edward McGlynn, was excommunicated. He had been admonished for openly supporting Henry George, the Socialist candidate for mayor, and then excommunicated for failing to obey Vatican orders. He would later be reinstated to the priesthood. McGynn was well-known in the city in the decades after the Civil War for his charitable work, his large and prosperous congregation and, at a time of religious hostilities, for his cordial relationships with the city's Protestant clergy. His church, St. Stephen's, a Romanesque Revival edifice on 29th Street near Lexington, had been designed by James Renwick Jr., architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral. and was in the mid-19th century, before the cathedral was opened, the most prominent Catholic church in Manhattan with a mostly Irish congregation that included both affluent and working class members.

The Carmelites held their first mass in a tobacco factory near 28th Street and First Avenue but soon were given a church in the Country Gothic style, Our Lady of the Scapular, at 338 East 28th Street between First and Second Avenue, not far from St. Stephen's. The Carmelite parish ran from 24th to 32nd Streets and from Second Avenue to the East River, while St. Stephen's retained the more prosperous neighborhood to the west. Second Avenue long was the dividing line between the working and middle class on the East Side of Manhattan. According to The Times, in 1946 Our Lady of the Scapular was one of the smallest and poorest parishes in the city but it also encompassed Bellevue Hospital, which became the order's primary mission. Our Lady of the Scapular was also the only Carmelite church in Manhattan.

The Times story in 2007 noted the active role the Carmelites in New York took in sheltering Irish revolutionaries. including Eamon de Valera, early in the 20th century. They also stored a cache of submachine guns in the priory. The weapons, wrapped in burlap bags, were seized by federal authorities after being smuggled to a steamship in Hoboken in 1921 for shipment to Ireland.

Our Lady of the Scapular was torn down in the 1980s when the parish was merged with St. Stephen's. The Carmelites were put in charge of the merged parish. In 2007, Cardinal Egan evicted them from their church and priory, which meant the loss of their chaplaincy at Bellevue. It was not an entirely amicable parting At the same time, the Archdiocese also closed the nearby Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary church on East 33rd Street, merging it with St. Stephen's, maintaining a chapel at the 33rd Street site. Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary had been established in 1915 to minister to the largely Italian neighborhood above 32nd Street on the East Side.

Two of the five Carmelites who lived at the 28th Street priory were reassigned in 2007 to St. John the Martyr parish on East 72nd Street. That congregation had moved into a former Presbyterian church in 1904 and served a predominantly Bohemian congregation until the postwar period. In 1946, this neighborhood still was mostly tenement buildings and part of the ethnic melange of Yorkville.

The First Inflight Movie: April 14, 1946

2011-04-19T09:47:00.003-04:00

On Sunday, April 14, 1946, "So Goes My Love," starring Don Ameche and Myrna Loy, became the first feature length motion picture to have its world premiere on an airplane. According to The New York Times of April 15, the movie was shown on a Pan American Clipper carrying 34 passengers from La Guardia to Shannon, Ireland. Pan American announced that all of its transatlantic flights soon would be equipped to show 16 mm movies. However, inflight movies did not become a regular feature of air travel until the 1960s.

Governor Dewey's Credentials as a Reformer Put in Question

2011-04-18T09:28:00.000-04:00

The New York Times reported on April 15 that the Civil Service Reform Association had issued a letter criticizing the administration of New York State Governor Thomas Dewey for the number of state jobs that had been handed out as political patronage during his first three years in office. The non-partisan group had been instrumental in instituting civil service exams as a prerequisite for civil service jobs decades earlier. According to the Association, the current state administration had made 140 more civil service appointments without a qualifying exam than Dewey's predecessor, Democrat Herbert H. Lehman, had in his first three years in office. In fact, the group said, Dewey's record on appointments was worse than any of his four immediate predecessors. In the letter, the group made a number of specific recommendations for improvement.

This finding was contrary to the image Dewey, a Republican, projected as a crusading reformer. Dewey was a political superstar in the 1940s. He unsuccessfully attempted to leap from his highly publicized stint as a gang-busting Manhattan District Attorney, which was the inspiration for a number of popular radio crime shows of the day, to the 1940 Republican presidential nomination. He became governor of New York in 1943, lost the 1944 presidential race to FDR, won reelection as governor in a landslide in 1946 and then lost to Truman in the 1948 presidential race, despite a three-way split in the Democratic Party. He served as New York governor until 1954. His critics on both sides of the political spectrum saw him more as a highly ambitious, pompous opportunist than a leader.

Housing For Vets, Palestine and a Bigoted School Teacher the Topics for Discussion for the Jewish War Veterans

2011-04-17T09:28:00.002-04:00

On Sunday, Manhattan Borough President Hugo Rogers addressed the annual convention of the New York County Council of the Jewish War Veterans at the Hotel Astor. Five hundred delegates, representing the 2500 members of the 29 posts in the borough attended.

Rogers told the assembly that a survey of Manhattan was underway to identify possible sites to house as many as 3,000 to 4,000 veterans and their families in four-room steel cottages to be supplied by the Federal government. He said several spots in Upper Manhattan had been identified as possibilities and he hoped that "the owners will be patriotic enough to make them available to veterans on a reasonable basis."

Rogers had been elected in a Democratic city sweep in 1945, defeating the Republican incumbent. He went on to be top honcho briefly at Tammany Hall. In an internecine conflict within city politics, Mayor O'Dwyer relieved him of both positions. Rogers allegedly had ties to both mob boss Frank Costello and radical congressman Vito Marcantonio and O'Dwyer wanted to at least give the appearance of cleaning house after his administration came under fire for being too close to both the mob and the Communists, strange allies in city politics mostly through the American Labor Party. Tammany's success in 1945 was in part due to swinging the support of these groups to the Democratic line; they had been part of the LaGuardia Republican coalition. A good soldier, Rogers went quietly but continued to have influence behind the scenes.

At the meeting, The JWV adopted a resolution calling for Congress to pass the Patman bill and restore the provisions for price ceilings on existing housing and subsidies for the purchase of materials for veterans housing. They also passed a resolution demanding that the British allow free entry to all Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine.

The veterans group also demanded that teacher Mae Quinn be dismissed from the city schools. The Quinn affair was a hot potato at this time. Miss Quinn was either brainlessly naive or a bigoted piece of work. She taught social studies in an ethnically mixed junior high school. One day she wrote a list of outstanding Irish Americans on the classroom blackboard, a list taken from an anti-Semitic pamphlet put out by a right wing Irish Catholic organization. Allegedly she also made disparaging remarks against Jews and Italian immigrants, echoing the derogatory words of the pamphlet. Parents complained. Jewish groups demanded her dismissal. The left took up the issue as well, contrasting the lenient treatment allegedly being given to her in contrast to the dismissal of teachers accused of Communist membership or sympathies, even when they had never been accused of introducing political propaganda into the classroom. In fact, many of the Communist or alleged Communist teachers who had been dismissed taught science or math. The Brooklyn Catholic archdiocese and the Knights of Columbus came to Quinn's defense, charging that the whole affair was a Communist plot against Irish Catholics. Miss Quinn said that she had no idea that the material she had quoted from was offensive and that she merely intended to salute the contributions of the Irish. In the end, she kept her job but was transferred to another school. A few years later, she was in hot water again, this time for allegedly telling her students that blacks had been content with their lot until agitators had stirred them up. Again, she claimed she had no intent to offend.

A Balmy Palm Sunday Draws Crowds Outdoors This Week in 1946

2011-04-16T09:04:00.004-04:00

The Times reported that, after a chilly week, the thermometer had reached 64 degrees by mid-afternoon on Palm Sunday, April 14, 1946. The major churches of the city drew overflow crowds. Worshipers at the Fifth Avenue churches strolled the avenue after services in a prelude to the Easter Parade that would take place the following week. Many on this Sunday carried the palms they had received at church.

The parks also were packed that afternoon. In Central Park, the newspaper reported nearly every bench was occupied, the zoo was crowded and long lines had formed at the rowboat concession at the lake. The Bronx Zoo, where the Children's Zoo had just opened for the season, reported 48,000 visitors and the Botanical Gardens had 40,000. About 300,000 visitors thronged Coney Island this day where about 85 percent of the attractions had opened for the season. A few hardy souls had even ventured into the still frigid surf. Another 75,000 were at the Rockaways and 25,000 at Jones Beach. The Jersey beach resorts of Asbury Park and Atlantic City also reported crowds. These numbers, although sizable, were a fraction of what the beaches would see on a hot summer holiday.

One of the major attractions that day, as reported in a separate story on April 15, was FDR's former home at nearby Hyde Park, which had been dedicated by President Truman in a special ceremony two days earlier. This was the first weekend it was open to the public and a crowd of 6,000 showed up on Sunday to pay respects. Mrs. Roosevelt and some former members of the household were among the visitors. The Times reported that it was the personal items. like a book of Christmas carols in the big room where family and staff gathered at holidays, that drew the most attention. The newspaper said that "visitors blandly told each other wrong facts about the histories of rooms and the design of the furniture, and some of them turned startled looks behind them as Mrs. Roosevelt made gentle corrections."

Wartime Proxy Marriages Vex the Veterans Administration

2011-04-15T09:31:00.001-04:00

A UP (later UPI) wire story carried in the April 15 New York Times reported that wartime proxy marriages presented a problem for the Veterans Administration in determining spousal benefits. During the war and in its immediate aftermath, proxy marriages had caught on. A number of brides said their marriage vows over the phone while their GI grooms recited theirs from wherever they were stationed. The problem was that the only state that recognized proxy marriages as legal was Minnesota and then only if the bride were pregnant at the time of the ceremony.

In a compromise, the VA decided to recognize the proxy marriages in the 19 states that allowed common law marriages but not elsewhere. The example given was of a woman in Washington State who married a GI by proxy. When he was killed in action, she was denied a pension because Washington State did not recognize common law marriages.

Amos Sulka, Haberdasher to the Upper Crust, Dies

2011-04-12T09:35:00.005-04:00

The April 15 New York Times carried the obituary of Amos Sulka, founder of the men's clothing store whose Manhattan flagship had been located at 661 Fifth Avenue since the First World War. It was a well-known institution among the city's affluent, known mostly for its ties and high-priced custom shirts. It also carried other luxury garments, such as silk smoking jackets in classic styles, and lasted for more than a century. Sulka, who was 84 when he died, had retired from the business ten years earlier. The obit gave his address as 353 West 57th Street, which would have been the Henry Hudson Hotel (see earlier post on the hotel). As noted in other posts, living in hotels was fairly commonplace in the 1940s at all income levels.

According to a New York Times story of December 21, 2001, when the last of the seven Sulka stores in Manhattan was about to close its doors, the firm had catered to men with a husky build, many of them police officers or fireman, when Sulka, a former traveling salesman from Johnstown, PA, opened his first store on lower Broadway in 1895. He soon saw the wisdom of cultivating a higher level of clientele and went after them by first accommodating their butlers. In 1904, he opened a store in Paris. In 1917 the New York store began offering laundry services to customers who did not wish to risk damaging their expensive garments at the neighborhood cleaner. According to the Times, that laundry service helped the firm weather the business downturn during the Depression.

The company expanded to other Manhattan locations and other cities after Sulka's death and was sold in the 1980s. It went through several hands before folding twenty years later, done in by the growing popularity of designer brands like Gucci and Zegna. Sulka seemed a dated name to the new crop of masters of the universe.

1946 Shortages in Perspective

2011-04-11T08:48:00.001-04:00

While stories on shortages, particularly of meat, were front page news this week in 1946, buried deep in The New York Times of April 15 was an article on a report from the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion that claimed production was at a peacetime record level. However, the data showed the recovery was uneven and that in many areas it fell well short of pent-up consumer demand.

Among the report's findings:

The production of automobiles, refrigerators, sewing machines, electric ranges and alarm clocks, among other consumer goods, was well below peak 1941 levels. All of these items were in enormous demand. Newspapers were full of ads to buy or sell used sewing machines this week.
The production of tires and washing machines was above 1941 levels. Radios, although not yet at prewar levels, were rising rapidly. Demand was so high, however, that these items still were considered scarce.
Vacuum cleaners, electric irons and bicycles were at about two-thirds of 1941 levels.
Farm production was expected to be about 13 to 15 percent higher than 1941 if the weather was average. Per capita food consumption was about four percent above the 1944 record. Much of the perceived shortages here were due to higher demand rather than production shortages.
Transportation of goods by air, highway, rail and pipeline was well above 1941 levels, Only water-borne shipping lagged.
The production of power, gas, oil and coal (until the current strike) were well above 1941 levels.
Some metal production was behind because of recent strikes but steel was bouncing back and aluminum and magnesium were well above pre-war levels.
The most noticeable laggards were textiles and hard goods.
Some of the optimistic figures were due to increases in service industries like barber shops and trucking that made up for the shortfalls in manufactured goods.
Some of the biggest problem areas were low-priced shirts, men's suits and hosiery.
Although meat was scarce at the retail level, Federally inspected plants turned out 22 percent more dressed meat in the first quarter and milk sales were up 5 percent.

WNYC in Jeopardy in 1946

2011-04-10T12:17:00.000-04:00

The city-owned radio station WNYC appeared to be in jeopardy in April 1946. A letter to The New York Times from Bernard Friedman published on April 15 bemoaned the possible loss of "such an efficient agent of imparting knowledge and enlightenment."

This was, of course, long before the formation of National Public Radio or listener supported radio. In 1946, WNYC was owned, operated and financed by the city of New York. It produced all of its own programming, a mix of news, talk, public affairs, city service programs and recorded, in-studio and live concert music. The station's cost was the issue, although some questioned the propriety of a city-run radio station in the first place. The newly elected mayor, William O'Dwyer, asserted that his predecessor, Fiorello LaGuardia, had left the city with a fiscal crisis, a charge that LaGuardia's supporters denied. Earlier in the year, Mayor O'Dwyer had promised several public service organizations that he would keep funds for the station in his proposed budget but in the newest round of negotiations, WNYC looked vulnerable.

The idea of a city-owned radio station had been controversial since WNYC began broadcasting. In the 1920s, it was the Republicans who declared it inappropriate to use city revenue to fund a propaganda vehicle for the Tammany administration. After LaGuardia's election, it was Tammany Democrats on the City Council who wanted to shut down the station, while the ruling coalition of Republicans and unions were station supporters.

Reportedly, O'Dwyer had become more open in recent weeks to the idea of leasing airtime to another broadcaster in return for a guaranteed block of time for city broadcasts. A number of broadcasters were eager to buy the station outright. A leasing arrangement would have to pass FCC scrutiny and the commission had grown wary of arrangements in which entities other than the ones that had been granted FCC licenses to broadcast on the public airways were responsible for the programming. An alternate suggestion, that the city run the station as a business and sell ad time, met strong resistance from the city's other independent stations who felt they would be facing unfair competition for ad dollars.

Over the years, the station, which in early days broadcast chiefly police reports and city business, gradually developed a following, largely for its classical music and public affairs programming, although it also aired lighter fare like quiz shows. It was known for its erudite announcers who had to pass a rigid Civil Service exam before they were hired. In 1946, the station broadcast the full hearings of the UN Security Council. It also recently had started several shows devoted to folk music, including one hosted by Oscar Brand.

The FCC had allotted WNYC the same broadcast frequency as the powerful clear channel station WCCO in Minneapolis. This meant WNYC had to broadcast a relatively weak signal and had to end its broadcast day at 10 PM, which was an improvement over earlier years when it could only broadcast in the daytime. WNYC also had an FM station, but FM radio was in its infancy in the postwar years. The FCC recently had changed the FM frequencies, making existing FM radios essentially non-functional. FM radios were expensive and few New Yorkers had the newer models that could pick up the new FM channels. Major broadcasters were more interested in developing and promoting the newly emerging medium of television than in FM radio, although most had placeholder stations in the city.

In the end, the city budget announced in May allocated money for the continued operation of WNYC. The Mayor even spoke of expanding the station's public affairs programming, allowing other civic and business groups to produce shows. The station, however, still had vocal opponents, mostly old-line Tammany Democrats.

The CIO and the Communists: Letters to the Editor in the NYT of April 15, 1946

2011-04-09T11:06:00.001-04:00

The April 15, 1946 editorial page of The New York Times carried a letter from economist Alexander S. Lipsett commending the anti-Communist stance recently taken by the CIO's Utility Workers Union and warning other unions of the "dangers of associating with Communists and fellow-travelers." The Letters to the Editors section of The Times was unlike its counterparts in the tabloids. The latter preferred short, angry missives, much like the comment sections on the Internet today, slanted toward support of the newspapers' editorial positions. The Times ran longer pieces, often from regular contributors, and served in part as the equivalent of the Op Ed pages of today. Lipsett was among the frequent contributors, often commenting on labor or international affairs.

The Utility Workers Union's new constitution provided "for the expulsion of any member who joins Communist, Nazi or Fascist parties" and also prohibited anyone who had ever belonged to one of these parties from holding office in the union. This Lipsett applauded without a glimmer of compunction about the violation of freedom of speech or association. He noted that while a handful of CIO national leaders had taken stands against the Communists, these "isolated incidents" were insufficient "to make the organization a bulwark against Communist intrigues." Too many other CIO leaders "with fingers deep in the political and international pie prefer to straddle the issue," seeking Communist support while professing that they could maintain their independence from Moscow. Lipsett did not believe this was possible. To him, complete divorcement from the Communist Party was necessary if unionism were to survive. He deplored "the Communist nostrums" he said were being peddled by "so-called political action committees and labor parties."

In a related letter, A. De Richelieu, questioned the sense of the recent speech made by Emil Rieve, a CIO vice president and president of the Textile Workers Union of America, at a luncheon of the Foreign Policy Institute in which Rieve stated, "There must be no return to the balance of power diplomacy." At face value, De Richelieu wrote, this seemed a plausible wish. But a balance of power policy, he argued, functioned much like the two-party system in domestic politics. What was the alternative? A one-party dictatorship in international affairs? Chaos and anarchy? Constant bickering between multiple factions? A universal state where dissidence was outlawed?

Rieve was a barometer of the changes that would occur within the CIO in the postwar years. He had sided with the majority within the American Labor Party leadership who wanted to continue the party's association with the Communists, a policy that had come under attack by the anti-Communists within the ALP. The dissidents, many of whom were Socialists or New Deal Democrats, walked out of the ALP, charging that it had become dominated by Communists and fellow travelers. They formed the Liberal Party as a pro-union, non-Communist alternative. This was the beginning of the end for the ALP. The decision by the ALP to continue to work with the Communists was an example of CIO straddling that Lipsett deplored in his letter. This policy, he believed, had poisonous consequences

Underneath the platitudes, it would seem Rieve was echoing the Communist Party line in his speech. If the US was not supposed to attempt to seek a balance with the Soviets, was it then supposed to give Stalin a free hand? If Rieve looked like a fellow traveler at this point, he and his union soon would align themselves with the movement to purge Communists from the CIO. In that ultimately successful battle, it was the industrial trade unions, many of which had their greatest strength in the Rust Belt, that led the charge against the Communists, while it was mostly the white collar unions, largely centered in New York City, who were the staunch defenders of the Communists, many of whom held leadership positions within these unions.

Anne O'Hare McCormick on Soviet Plans for the Danube

2011-04-08T10:37:00.001-04:00

Pulitzer Prize winner Anne O'Hare McCormick wrote about the Soviet expansion into the Danube on the editorial page of the April 15, 1946 New York Times. Born in 1880, McCormick was one of the first women foreign correspondents and the second female journalist to win a Pulitzer. In 1936 she became the first woman on the Times editorial board. Among her claims to fame was her early recognition of Mussolini's rising star in Italy. She had represented the US at the UNESCO conference after the war.

Soviet actions in Central Europe were a matter of controversy in 1946. In her column on this day, McCormick explained the importance of the Danube to the politics and economics of Europe. The river passed through or served as a border for Austria, Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Bulgaria. Vienna, Budapest, Bratislava and Belgrade were all on the Danube. Many important secondary rivers of Central Europe flowed into it. Danubia, as she called it, had long been a tinderbox in European affairs. Most of the region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire before the First World War. While the region was home to many ethnic groups, German was the lingua franca of trade, commerce, education, science and the arts. Earlier in the century, the actions of Britain and czarist Russia to undermine the Austro-Hungarian empire to their own advantage conflicted with German moves to strengthen its own influence in the region. This was a prime cause of the First World War, essentially, for all the noble causes cited to justify the bloodshed, a battle between competing imperialistic ambitions. In more recent decades, Hitler treated the region as Germany's backyard. Now the Soviets sought total control.

According to McCormick, in the wartime days of Allied amity the Americans had hoped the region would be internationalized in the postwar period, not entirely an altruistic wish since the US expected that American business interests would be healthily represented in the region's economy. However, Stalin had other plans. Most of the area was occupied in 1946 by the Red Army. In McCormick's words, the Soviet Union now was "proceeding with dispatch and without consultation" to turn the nations of the region into Soviet satellites. The USSR recently had forced through trade agreements with the occupied countries, all of which were in desperate straits as a result of the war. Only the government of Austria, which was occupied by all four Allied nations, had balked, but McCormick believed "eventually she would have to submit." Russia was seeking in the final peace agreement to transfer the Danube delta from Rumania to Bessarabia, which the USSR had seized after signing its infamous pact with Hitler. The major concern for the western nations at this time was to keep the Danube open to free traffic and world trade or "Europe will be incurably crippled."

For all the talk at this time about "One World" and the need for international cooperation, to the dismay of many who hoped for a peaceful world, it was obvious that Big Power politics was back in play only months after the end of a devastating world war. The major difference now was that the war had weakened Britain and France and eliminated Germany from the equation. Only the US and the USSR were left standing. Foreign policy conservatives decried the Soviet action in this region and elsewhere, claiming that it was proof that Stalin, like Hitler, intended to dominate the world. Leftists defended Stalin saying that it was necessary for the USSR to surround itself with allied nations to serve as a buffer between them and the capitalist West which sought to destroy Russia. At this time, Americans whose roots were in the region were split on the issues. There were ethnic organizations that organized rallies and protests for and against Stalin. In short time, as the Communist hand in the region grew increasingly heavy, the balance among these groups tilted heavily toward the anti-Communists.

More New York Times Editorials on April 15, 1946

2011-04-07T09:19:00.001-04:00

In addition to the blast at the House for the Selective Service Bill it had proposed reported in yesterday's post, The New York Times editorials of April 15 also included:

Praise for Governor Dewey and the New York state legislature for allocating money to colleges and universities to allow them to deal with the influx of students under the GI Bill. The Times scolded the Federal government for not taking similar action. The GI Bill had sent a flood of veterans to schools that lacked adequate educational facilities or housing to accommodate them.
A blast at the Allies, and the United States in particular, for not adequately meeting the desperate need for food in the war-ravaged war. According to the editorial, food rations in Austria, for example, had fallen below the 800 calories a day provided at concentration camps and in some towns were half that. The situation was not much better elsewhere on the European Continent. Mass starvation was the consequence. Meanwhile the average food consumption in the US was about 3,000 calories. The Times saw the desperate situation in Europe as largely man made with its root cause being the shortsighted postwar bureaucratic policies that had done more damage to the production and distribution of food than the war had.
Support for the proposed National Science Foundation to promote and coordinate scientific and technological research and dismay over cuts to the budget of the subcommittee studying the issue.
Support for the passing of a proposal before the City Planning Commission to build a central bus terminal on the West Side of Manhattan. The proposal already had been approved by the New York and New Jersey legislatures. The only significant opposition was from Greyhound, which apparently worried that it would mean more competition for them. Funny how corporations talk about free market competition when opposing government regulations but fervently oppose any legislation that would open up their business to greater competition.
Opposition to a continuation of the wartime farm loan program which the newspaper considered "a mistake in the first instance" that threatened to continue indefinitely at a great cost to the US Treasury.

The New York Times Weighs In on Selective Service

2011-04-06T10:46:00.000-04:00

The lead editorial in The New York Times on April 15, 1946, was a castigation of the "emasculated Selective Service Act" up for a final vote that day in the House of Representative. The bill carried "so many exemptions that it is difficult to know who would be eligible for induction," the editorial claimed. The House bill called for a temporary suspension of the draft and raised the induction age to 20. The primary concern appeared to be the fall elections rather than the manpower needs of the occupation forces in Europe and Japan or for the future security of the United States. The crippling amendments were the work of "as odd a melange of so-called Democratic leaders and rank-and-file Republicans as the lower house ever has seen" who The Times noted were too cowardly to permit a roll call vote. In a clever bit of malicious electoral tricksterism, under the bill the decision whether or not the draft would be reinstated would fall to President Truman just before the November election. The Senate, less sensitive to the upcoming election, was expected to pass a version more to the liking of the military and political establishment. In summation, the newspaper called the House bill "a senseless, weasel-worded measure that would make desperate the present Army manpower crisis."

The Cafe Zanzibar: One of the Hottest Spots of 1946

2011-04-05T11:43:00.000-04:00

One of the most popular nightclubs in New York in 1946 was the Cafe Zanzibar. You don't hear much about it today unlike other famous hangouts of the day but it was blazing hot back in the day. In fact, when Billboard magazine surveyed newspaper and magazine reporters, columnists and editors in 1945, the Cafe Zanzibar came in at number one, beating out the Copa and Cafe Society. (Note: The respondents were not too keen on the elite-favored Stork Club which they rated high only in terms of the publicity it generated and ignored the other haunts of Cafe Society). The Billboard article quoted the editors and writers as saying the Zanzibar offered "unflagging cooperation" and gave the public their money's worth in terms of entertainment and management. It had, in their opinion, "the best colored show in town."

The Stork Club, "21" and El Morocco were where you went to see and be seen but the Zanzibar and Copa had the best floor shows and best dance bands. The Cafe Zanzibar opened in 1943 in a space over the Winter Garden theater on Broadway and 49th Street that had been occupied by a number of clubs, most recently the Benny Davis Follies. It filled the niche formerly occupied by the Cotton Club, which had closed in 1940. Like its more well-remembered predecessor, it featured the top African-American performers of the day and had a chorus line of scantily clad show girls known there as the Zanzibeauts. Sometimes radio shows were broadcast from the club. Among the big names who appeared were Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Louis Jordan, Cootie Williams, Louis Armstrong and Pearl Bailey. On this week in 1946 the headliners were the dance legend Bill "Bojangles" Robinson and boogie-woogie pianist Maurice Rocco along with the popular Mills Brothers.

In October 1945, Robert W. Dana reviewed the Cafe Zanzibar in his column "Tips on Tables" in the World-Telegram. (Some of these reviews are online). He described it as "a large attractive and well-proportioned cafe with deluxe fittings" and added that "it has one of the finest revues on Broadway." Dinner was $2 (about $22 in 2011 dollars) and the club had dancing as well as a show. Drink prices were "not appreciably more than at a neighborhood bar." Dana said it had an average turnover of 1500 customers on weekdays and 2300 on Saturdays and grossed about $2 million a year. Proprietor and publicist Carl Erbe attributed the club's booming business to the higher incomes of the war years and the shortage of things for the average Joe to buy with that extra dough. With money burning a hole in their pocket, many who had never before visited a nightclub were flooding the popular nightspots. It was this democratization of nightlife that made the El Morocco, "21" and Stork Club snobs look down on the huge clubs on or near Broadway like the Zanzibar, the Copa, Latin Quarter and Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe. although these clubs all offered far better entertainment than the ritzy joints where exclusivity was the main attraction.

Billboard reviewed the current show at the Cafe Zanzibar in its March 16 issue. The reviewer was particularly impressed with the mini-version of "H.M.S. Pinafore," featuring Robinson, singer Leon Christopher Warrick and a 14-member chorus done up in period sailor outfits. According to the review, Robinson "does more dancing than he has done in years." The floor show opened with the chorus line and four males who danced to "California, Sunshine," followed by a dance act, Tip, Tap and Toe. Singer Marie Ellington, whom the reviewer compared to a young Ethel Waters, then sang a few numbers, including "Personality," one of the popular tunes of the time. Marie Ellington had been a vocalist with Duke Ellington's band (but no relation). She married Nat King Cole in 1948 and was Natalie Cole's mother.

Besides appearing in the "H.M.S. Pinafore" number, Warrick sang "Old Man River" and "Shortenin' Bread." Maurice Rocco, a holdover, had added three bongo players to his routine, providing "a mad whirl of speed almost breathless to watch." The chorus line returned performing a samba filled with bumps and grinds as Rocco and the bongo players played "Tico-Tico." Mickey O'Daniel, "a gorgeous gal with a figure to match" performed a jitterbug routine. Then came the Mills Brothers, top names in their own right, who included their standards "You Always Hurt the One You Love," "Lazy River" and "Paper Doll" in their set. Bill Robinson was next with some gags and his hoofing but "he really went to town in the 'Pinafore' number" that followed. The reviewer wondered if Robinson, who was approaching his 68th birthday, could keep it up for three shows a night. Claude Hopkins led the club orchestra.

The club was popular with the better-off African Americans as well as with whites. Unlike the snooty clubs which barred blacks completely, like the Stork Club, or strongly discouraged their patronage, Cafe Zanzibar did admit African Americans. However, in a piece for the African American publication The Defender in 1944, the famous writer Langston Hughes wrote that blacks were not treated as well at the Zanzibar as they were at Cafe Society or the Downbeat jazz club. The treatment was so offensive to Hughes that if it were up to him he would never return but his friends visiting from Chicago or Detroit all seemed to want him to take them to the Zanzibar no matter how he tried to talk them out of it. What made him so angry? The seating policy. "Negro customers are usually led straight to the raised platform running around three sides. They are never put on the center-side facing the stage until the sides are full" when "a few dark folks spill over onto the main level." Even someone as famous as Hughes got the high hand although always with a polite smile. On his most recent visit, "the headwaiter led me and the girl I was with as far back in the corner behind the band as he could. So I said, 'Listen, man, I am not in the show! I came to see the show!" He was shown to a better seat but still on the "'colored' level." The upper side levels were not, however, exclusively populated by blacks. Some less-favored whites were seated there as well. Hughes thought the seating policy was ridiculous as well as offensive since "white and colored people dance all over the same dance-floor there, and jitterbug and bump all up against each other, and nobody seems to mind." Why then did the management put "that chocolate band of humanity all around the wall?" If the African-American patronage grew any bigger, he wrote, they were going to run out of wall space.

The New York Times Book Page of April 15, 1946

2011-04-02T09:53:00.001-04:00

In his New York Times column on April 15, book critic Orville Prescott reviewed Midwest at Noon, which had received a favorable review the day before in the Times Book Review. Prescott also liked this book by English journalist Graham Hutton which dissected and analyzed the American Midwest based on the five years the author had spent there during wartime. Well-regarded at the time, the book remains in print today and is considered an insightful look at the region as it was in the early 1940s.

The Times had a regular section of publishing news briefs called "Books-Authors." The most significant of the recently announced books mentioned in the section on April 15 was Northrop Fry's Fearful Symmetry. Fry's analysis of the language of William Blake's poetry was considered brilliant when it came out, enhancing Blake's literary reputation and creating Fry's. Fry would become one of the most influential literary critics of the postwar era.

The column reported that Fola La Follette was working on completing the biography of her father, the late Senator Robert M. La Follette Sr. The biography, which had been started by Fola's mother, was published in two volumes in 1953 and is still considered an authoritative source on this political giant of the Progressive Era. Before the First World War, Fola had been a stage actress as well as a contributor to Progressive magazines and was an activist in both the women's and labor movements in New York. She was a founding member of Actor's Equity. Although the Left in mid-century usurped the name Progressive, La Follette and his followers differed from the Socialist and Communist left, seeing a strong government as a necessary counter-balance to the excesses of corporate capitalism rather than as a substitution for capitalism. The column also noted that La Follette's husband, the playwright George Middleton, one of the founders of the Dramatists' Guild, had an autobiography, These Things Are Mine, coming out.

Also noted, Hermann Kesten, one of the leading literary figures of Wiemar Germany, had edited a collection of 46 short stories from the 19th century Romantic period. It was called The Blue Flower after a popular literary metaphor of the Romantic movement. Kesten was among the German exiles who had spent the war years in New York City. A critic, novelist, dramatist and book editor, he had close ties with many of the leading names in German literature. He was among the first of his crowd to flee Berlin, leaving in 1933, soon after the Nazis came to power. Like the desperate exiles in Erich Maria Remarque's 1946 novel, Arch of Triumph, Kesten moved from city to city as the Nazis advanced, living in Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, where he worked as an editor for a firm that published the work of German authors banned in their homeland. As a German, despite being also a Jew, he was interned as an enemy alien by the French when war with Germany broke out, the ironic fate that also awaited the refugees in Remarque's novel. In 1940, Kesten escaped to New York, where he served as an honorary adviser to the Emergency Rescue Committee, which sought to rescue other creative artists from the Nazis in the years before the US entered the war. In 1943, Kesten and Klaus Mann edited Hearts of Europe. a highly influential anthology of modernist European creative writing which familiarized Americans with many of the big names in European literature of the previous two decades. In 1946, an American edition of his 1936 novel, Ferdinand and Isabella, about Spain under the Inquisition, was published. Although he became an American citizen and never returned permanently to Germany, he was an important figure in the postwar German literary community.

The Times reported that Christine Weston, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, whose 1943 novel, Indigo, set in India where she had been born, had been well-received, had a new novel coming out. Called The Dark Wood, it was a romance about a war widow who falls in love with a soldier whose wife has left him. It was the September selection of the Literary Guild book club. As was often the practice, the novel had been serialized in a magazine prior to publication, in this case in The Ladies' Home Journal. The Times noted that film rights had been sold to Twentieth Century Fox. Although Maureen O'Hara and Tyrone Power were cast and Otto Preminger set to direct, the film was never made, perhaps because in the immediate postwar years the movie-going public seemed uninterested in movies that reminded them too much of the recent war. Weston continued a successful writing career but never made it to the top ranks with either the critics or the book buying public.

The book page carried a large ad for Eudora Welty's first full-length novel, Delta Wedding. It quoted liberally from the review by Charles Poore that had appeared the day before in The Times Book Review. The book, now considered a classic, received a generally but not universally positive reception at the time, the criticisms appearing largely due to the antipathy of many New York intellectuals of the day to the South depicted in Welty's novel. (See earlier post for more).

Another new novel being heavily promoted this day was Mary Jane Ward's The Snake Pit, a harrowing account of the experiences of a woman patient in a mental institution struggling to regain her sanity. Besides the big ad running that day, Ward was the guest that night on the NBC primetime radio show "Author Meets Critics." The novel was a hit with critics and the public. The ad quoted positive reviews from The Times Book Review, the Herald Tribune Book Review, The New Republic, the New York Sun. Chicago Tribune, and the daily Herald Tribune. The novel was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection for April and soon became a best seller. In 1948 it was the basis of an Oscar-nominated film in which Olivia de Havilland starred. The book and movie prompted debate about the treatment of mental patients. The Snake Pit was based on Ward's personal experience in a state-run mental institution in New York. She had suffered a breakdown soon after she and her husband had moved to Greenwich Village from the Midwest. Although initially she acknowledged her personal experience she backed away from the assertion for a time but then became a spokesperson for mental health awareness, She continued to battle her own illness, a struggle that led to further hospitalizations. Because of her occasional hallucinations, her condition was diagnosed at the time as schizophrenia but it might actually have been bipolar disorder, whose symptoms were not as widely recognized in the 1940s.

New Solo Shows at the Art Galleries : NYT 4/15/1946

2011-03-29T14:41:00.000-04:00

A number of one-man shows were announced in The New York Times on April 15. Those artists most remembered today include:

Arshile Gorky at the Julien Levy Gallery: Gorky only recently had emerged as a major figure in the New York art world after winning Andre Breton's stamp of approval. Breton was the dean of the surrealists who had taken refuge in New York from the Nazis. Gorky's first solo exhibition was in 1945 at the Julien Gallery but was not a success with critics or collectors. And his abstract expressionist colleagues felt that Gorky had aligned himself too much with the fading surrealism school, perhaps to please Breton or Levy. In his April 21 gallery review roundup in The Sunday Times, Edward Alden Jewell dismissed Gorky's 1946 show, finding the work on display as slight and rushed, perhaps, he speculated, due to the recent fire which had destroyed many of Gorky's paintings. although he wrote that the artist's "trend of late has been disconcerting meagerness of statement." Gorky has since become considered one of the giants of his time. Gorky committed suicide in 1948 after a tough two years during which, in addition to the fire in his studio, he had a colostomy for cancer, his neck was broken in a car accident leading to the temporary loss of use of his painting arm, and his wife left him taking the kids. He was no stranger to tragedy. Born in Turkish Armenia, in his childhood he lost his mother to starvation after they fled the Turkish genocide. Julien Levy's gallery on Madison at 57th Street was one of the top destinations for surrealist art in the 1930s and 1940s. Levy was one of a circle of Harvard classmates who were highly influential in promoting modern art during this period.

Matta at the Pierre Matisse Gallery. The Chilean born Roberto Matta had been living in New York since fleeing Paris in 1938 and was closely tied to the surrealist circle that had formed around Breton. He was among those who were moving toward abstract expressionism. His name later would be linked to Gorky's when Breton and his followers ostracized him, attributing Gorky's suicide at least partially to Matta's relationship with Gorky's wife. Jewell was more appreciative of this show than of Gorky's, although he wrote that Matta's approach and treatment changed radically from show to show. Jewell preferred his 1945 show. The art dealer Pierre Matisse was the youngest son of painter Henri Matisse. He opened his gallery at 41 East 57th Street in 1931 and mostly showed European modern art.

Alfredo Ramos Martinez at Lilienfeld's: Ramos Martinez was a Mexican-born painter who had moved to Los Angeles in 1929 where he became a favorite of the Hollywood set. He was particularly known in his later years for his murals. This exhibit featured paintings of Mexico. A roundup review signed H.D. in The Sunday Times on April 21, found the work "decorative rather than revolutionary," although "modern in both spirit and manner." The reviewer noted the similarity to murals. Ramos Martinez died in November 1946, three days short of his 75th birthday, while working on a mural at Scripps College. The Lilienfeld gallery had moved to New York from Germany well before the rise of Hitler. It handled old masters, impressionists and some modern art, mostly French and German.

Louise Nevelson at Nierendorf's: The show featured recent bronzes from this now famous sculptor whose work over a long career exhibited influences from a number of schools of abstract art. Jewell found her abstract bronzes "macilent and forced." "Macilent" is a pretentious, rarely used word meaning thin. Karl Nierendorf opened his Manhattan gallery in 1936 after following many of his German artists from Berlin. German expressionist art, in which Nierendorf originally specialized, was not widely shown in the war years even though most of the artists were refugees from the Nazis. Nevelson had several earlier solo shows at the gallery which in 1946 was at 18 East 57th Street. When Karl Nierendorf died suddenly without a will and only German heirs in 1947, the gallery was closed and his estate, including works by Paul Klee, Kandinsky and a number of German expressionists, was confiscated by New York state which appointed trustees who sold the works in 1948 to the Guggenheim with all proceeds going to administrative costs (i.e. the trustees) rather than Nierendorf's family in Germany.

Arbit Blatas at Bignou: Blatas, who had been born in Lithuania was noted before the war for his paintings and sculptures of the leading art figures of his adopted Paris home. H.D. wrote that the paintings on display in this show were "quick lyrical impressions" of familiar Paris subjects with a palette and mood that were "dominantly sober." Blatas had escaped to New York in 1941 but his parents were deported by the Nazis to concentration camps from Lithuania. His father survived Dachau. In his later career, Blatas created a number of works on the theme of the Holocaust. The Bignou Gallery was opened in 1935 with a Renoir show as the New York branch of a Paris gallery, particularly noted for handling impressionist and post-impressionist art.

Eva Zeisel at the Museum of Modern Art: Zeisel is a Hungarian-born industrial designer best known for her work in ceramics. As of this writing, she is 104 years old. MOMA had an exhibition this week in 1946 of her chinaware. This was the museum's first solo show devoted to a woman artist. In 1935 Stalin had invited Zeisel to be the artistic director of the Soviet ceramics industry. He then arrested her in his 1936 purges, charging she was involved in a plot to assassinate him. She spent 16 months in prison before being deported to Austria just before Hitler took control. She and her husband escaped to the USA with $64 between them.

Other artists whose names are less likely to be found in contemporary art texts, but who were considered worthy this week of solo shows were:

John Lavalle at the Feragril Gallery. "Picturesque" scenes of Africa and Europe. (H.D.)
Polygnotos Vagis at the Hugo Gallery. "A sculptor of real sensitiveness and power." (Jewell)
I. J. Belmont at the Belmont Gallery- An homage to the New York Philharmonic. "The complete sincerity of his own appreciation of music is unqualifiedly manifest." (Jewell)
Werner Philipp at the Bonestell Gallery. An "excellent introduction" to the San Francisco artist. (H.D.)
H.O. Hoffmann at the Marquie Gallery. "A vigorous expressionist vein is evident in this forceful work" (H.D.)
Souyee Gee at the Morton Gallery. The works with an "Oriental flavor" are "the most convincing of the artist's work." (H.D.)
Ehrilich at the Village Art Center (Greenwich House). Monotypes.
Sister Mary of the Compassion at the St. Paul's Guild Gallery. Before entering a cloistered Dominican convent in New Jersey in 1937, Sister Mary was the promising young British artist Constance Mary Rowe, the daughter of a music hall performer. She continued to produce art in the convent. "There is a profound conviction in the work, and a sound grounding in Renaissance painting is evident on the technical side." (H.D. on 4/28)
Wesley Lea at the Downtown Gallery. "Mrs. Halpert appears to have discovered a new talent not alone promising but also tethered to pretty substantial accomplishment." (Jewell). Edith Halpert opened her famed gallery in 1926. It retained its name although in 1946 it was on East 51st Street. It handled contemporary American artists. The profits from its folk art gallery subsidized the operation of the contemporary art gallery.

Modern American Art from the Neuberger Collection at the Koontz Gallery

2011-03-26T11:03:00.001-04:00

In its roundup of new shows opening this week in Manhattan galleries, The New York Times of April 15, 1946 noted a show of modern American art from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Roy Neuberger at the Kootz Gallery. This gallery and these collectors were emerging forces in the postwar art world. Since the fall of Paris to the Nazis, New York had become the default world art capital. Although the war was over and many of the refugee artists were returning to Europe, the art scene in New York remained vibrant.

Samuel Kootz took a middle position in the Paris versus New York debate. Although he was among the most active boosters of the abstract expressionists emerging as the New York School, he insisted that they had to be seen in the context of the modern European masters. He opened his gallery at 11 East 57th Street in April 1945 with a show devoted to the French artist Fernand Leger, one of the many who had found wartime refuge in New York. Kootz was somewhat of a hustler and perhaps the fact that in 1946 European contemporary art still carried a price tag several times what he could get for his American artists may have played a role in his continued courting of the European modernists. Kootz scored a big coup in 1947 when his gallery hosted Picasso's first postwar New York showing. Briefly he was Picasso's sole US representative and in 1948 he closed his gallery to concentrate on selling Picassos. He soon would reopen the gallery which became one of the premier spots to see or buy American contemporary art in the 1950s and 1960s. Kootz provided monthly stipends to some of his favored artists who in return were required to churn out canvases regularly, as much as 75 a year. One of his beneficiaries, Robert Motherwell, saw this as a mixed blessing. The stipend allowed the artists to concentrate on their art but the high volume demanded was not good for their creativity in Motherwell's opinion. He said that Kootz was always in a desperate need of money and worked himself and his artists very hard.

Kootz had been a lawyer and then an account executive handling entertainment clients before becoming an art dealer. in 1930 he wrote an art textbook. In 1942, he curated a store-wide exhibition of Abstract Expressionist art for Macy's and in 1943 published the attention getting New Frontiers in American Painting. The Neuberger show in 1946 was widely seen as an effort by Kootz to interest other major New York art collectors in the artists he represented as well as a way to to strengthen his connection to Neuberger, who was becoming known as a preeminent collector of modern American art. At this time, Neuberger, who had made his fortune on Wall Street, also bought from the other major Manhattan dealers in modern American art such as Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery, Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century and Betty Parsons.

In Shadows in Paradise, his posthumously published novel about emigre life in 1940s New York, Erich Maria Remarque painted a cynical view of the city's art dealers and collectors. Remarque was himself a collector, mostly of Impressionist art. He conceded that dealers like Kootz served a purpose in promoting and often supporting living artists, reserving his greatest scorn for those who dealt in the work of artists long dead. The novel's main character works for an art dealer. In the book, he visits the posh Park Avenue apartment of one of his firm's clients. The public rooms are impeccably decorated with the finest antiques and art, all chosen for the client by experts. The protagonist, however, has occasion to peek into the client's bedroom where his true personal taste is revealed as Victorian kitsch.

Roy Neuberger was a Wall Street tycoon who had made his reputation when he staked part of his personal fortune on short selling RCA stock just before the stock market crash of 1929. At the time he was working as a runner for a Wall Street firm. RCA was the hot tech stock of the 1920s, selling at its peak for about $500 a share. It fell precipitously in the crash, making Neuberger a bundle that mostly offset his losses in blue chips. He was promoted to stockbroker. He continued to succeed financially during the Depression and in 1939 founded the money management firm Neuberger Berman. He was a trader rather than a long-term investor. Some of the people who worked for him stood in awe of his supposed sixth sense about when to buy and sell stocks, although he claimed that he guessed wrong about thirty percent of the time. He is often credited for inventing the hedge fund and his firm started one of the first no-load mutual funds, the Guardian Fund. He died on December 24, 2010, at the age of 107, one of the very last of the generation who had been born around the turn of the century and were middle-aged in 1946.

Neuberger became one of the most noted patrons of modern art of the twentieth century, acquiring about 1,000 works over the years. In 1946 he was only about a decade into his collecting career, although he had built up a sizable store of modern American art during that time. He would briefly put his art buying on hold in 1946 when he put much of his personal funds into acquiring a country house.

In his autobiographical writings, Neuberger claimed that he had gone to work on Wall Street to be able to indulge in his passion for art. He avowed that he never bought art with the intention of making money on it and, unlike the stocks he owned, he never bought with the intention of selling for a profit. A between-the-lines reading of a May 1946 Art News article, suggests that his passion for collection was not entirely aesthetic or altruistic. In the article, he is quoted as saying that he thought of his art purchases as an intellectual investment. He received "dividends in the form of recognition by others in the art world. He 'gets a kick' out of having his judgment reinforced by reproductions in newspapers and art magazines, by acknowledgments from museum directors of his paintings' popularity on their frequent loan appearances, and by such a compliment as Fortune magazine's choice of his Ralston Crawford for its November 1944 cover."

Neuberger and his wife became friends as well as avid promoters of many of the artists they collected, He lent out or donated much of his collection, often as a way to make the artists he supported better known to the public, museums and other collectors. He also often gave museums funds to buy works by the artists he admired. He was a major supporter of the Whitney Museum. Much of his collection is housed today in the Neuberger Art Museum in Purchase, New York.

Neuberger was born to an affluent family of Jewish ancestry, although he rejected religion and like other affluent secular Jews of his time affiliated with the Ethical Culture humanist movement, sending his children to their Sunday school. He had spent his childhood mostly in Morningside Heights, was orphaned at 12 and subsequently brought up by his older sister. His parents had left him a modest inheritance, enough he later said to provide sufficient income to live well but not enough to indulge his desire to have a serious art collection. He dropped out of NYU after one year and took a job in the home decorating department of B. Altman and Company as a buyer of upholstery fabrics. Altman's, like other major city department stores, sold art along with furniture in the home department. His fellow employees broadened his cultural and aesthetic horizons and encouraged him to consider a career in art. He joined the Jazz Age expatriate community in Paris when he was 20, living the life of a playboy and dabbling in the arts. He became a close friend of Meyer Schapiro, who would become one of the century's most influential art historians. Neuberger gave up his dream of becoming an artist when it dawned on him that most artists were poor and that he was not exceptionally talented. He sailed back to New York and got a job on Wall Street, resolved that he would become a patron of struggling artists rather than becoming a struggling artist himself.

In his column for The Sunday Times on April 21, critic Edward Alden Jewell wrote briefly of the show at the Kootz Gallery. He noted that most of the paintings on exhibit had been seen before but "the collectors have acquired characteristic, in several cases notably good canvases" of a number of artists. He included a list of the artists represented in the 1946 show. Among them was Milton Avery, with whom Neuberger was closely associated over the years. He acquired about 100 works by Avery which he frequently lent out to museums. Other leaders of the 1940s New York art scene represented in the collection were William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, Jack Levine and Rufino Tamayo. The show also had works by the well-regarded African-American painters Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Horace Pippin and by established modernist pioneers like Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, Marsden Hartley, Carl Holty, Max Weber and Ben Shahn. Among the artists in the collection not as well-remembered today were Darrel Austin, Byron Browne, Karl Knaths, C.S. Price, Abraham Rattner, Nahum Tschacbasov and George L.K. Morris, better known for his art criticism.

China Relief Luncheon at the Henry Hudson Hotel in 1946

2011-03-20T14:04:00.000-04:00

In its April 15 coverage of the day's organizational events, The New York Times noted a luncheon scheduled at the Henry Hudson Hotel in honor of Dr. W. Carlson Ryan sponsored by the China Aid Council and the United China Relief Advisory Committee on Child Care and Development. United China Relief was a coalition formed by several charitable organizations in 1941 when China was under attack by Japan. The coalition included several Christian organizations. Time publisher Henry Luce, an ardent backer of the Chinese Nationalists, was among its fervent supporters. The China Aid Council, on the other hand, was allied with the China Defense League, formed by Sun Yat-Sen's widow, which was allied with the Chinese Communists. Much of its humanitarian aid was conducted in areas under Communist control, including medical supplies to Red guerrilla forces fighting the Japanese. The two organizations cooperated during the war and the China Aid Council was part of United China Relief. With the Japanese routed, the decades long conflict between the two sides in China was intensifying. During the Cold War, the spirit of cooperation diminished as both the US and the Soviet Union increasingly saw humanitarian aid as a tool to advance their political agendas. HUAC labeled the China Aid Council a Communist front.

In 1946, The Henry Hudson, now the Hudson, one of Ian Schrager's chic boutique hotels, was only 17 years old, a 24-story gray slab running from West 57th Street to West 58th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, a decidedly unfashionable location. During the war, it had served as a residence for officers stationed in the city and also housed military offices and training facilities.

It became a hotel in 1941 but it had opened in 1929 as the American Woman's Association Clubhouse, a residence and social center for unmarried businesswomen. J.P. Morgan's daughter bought the site for her association, when a new building for the Metropolitan Opera was planned across the street. But the Opera board decided to remain at the aging venue at Broadway and 39th Streets until a more suitable location could be found and the Clubhouse became an almost solitary outpost in a sketchy neighborhood of tenements and industrial buildings. Hell's Kitchen to the west was long notorious for street crime, drugs, prostitution, gin joints, gambling dens and other unsavory pursuits. The blocks to the hotel's immediate northwest, where Lincoln Center now stands, had been known until very recent years as San Juan Hill, the home to Manhattan's largest concentration of African Americans. San Juan Hill had been racially mixed at the beginning of the century with some blocks and buildings overwhelmingly black and others mostly Irish. Its streets had been the scene of battles between the two groups. It was overcrowded. having the highest population density in the city. It was also known then as a center of jazz and black intellectual culture. The musical legacy lived on in the many jazz clubs that lined West 57th Street in 1946 but by then most of the borough's African-American population lived in or near Harlem, formerly a middle class white neighborhood that had been marketed to the city's burgeoning black population as a clean, modern, safe alternative to the older tenement neighborhoods after rampant speculation and overbuilding led to a collapse in Harlem's real estate values.

Anne Morgan had only recently opened a residence for working women on West 23rd but now poured her efforts and money into the new place. The club was meant to serve the interest of women in the professions and business. White collar working women had become very much part of the scene in Manhattan by the 1920s, although most had clerical, secretarial or retail sales positions or worked in professions like health, education, social services or home economics which were felt to benefit from the woman's touch. Miss Morgan predicted that the day would come when women held top positions in the nation's corporations. Her club was to be a place for them to build a network to advance their careers. The new club building had 1250 rooms, and amenities like a ballroom, swimming pool and gym, restaurant and meeting rooms. It was utilitarian and some writers at the time compared its exterior to a factory, although not necessarily disparagingly. Plain facades were preferred by many to the ornate rococo flourishes that lingered on from earlier decades.

The face of the city had changed tremendously during the boom time of the Twenties. Many of Manhattan's tenement districts came down or emptied out and skyscrapers sprouted all over midtown. Some of the most ambitious projects, like the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, were begun at a time of optimism but had opened after the stock market crash and Depression had begun. Plans for other new hotels near the Henry Hudson fell through and the American Woman's Association Clubhouse struggled. In 1941, the place was renamed the Henry Hudson Hotel and opened to both sexes. The ballroom was used for fashion shows and special theatrical presentations, as well as a rehearsal hall for Broadway and a venue for social events. But it would be the hotel's wartime service that would make its reputation.

In its seventh annual survey of hotels and nightclubs, published on July 31, 1945, Billboard announced that, somewhat surprisingly, the 30 editors and writers asked to rank the city's hotels in terms of value given had placed the Henry Hudson at the top of the hotel list, beating out the Waldorf, Astor, Commodore and Plaza. The reason respondents had given for their high ranking was the benefits provided to servicemen and their families. The article noted that the hotel offered overnight dormitory stays for servicemen at $1 a night, which included use of the facilities. It had a playground on the 24th floor for servicemen's children, held dances for servicemen twice a month with free food and entertainment as well as regular officers' club parties. The rooms, however, were small and spartan. During the war, the Army had used several floors of the hotel to quarter troops waiting to be shipped overseas. Civilians employed by the Office of War Information also were housed temporarily while they were being trained or working at the OWI offices on West 57th Street. The Navy held its Advanced Naval Intelligence School there. The servicemen intermingled with women residents who had been living at the hotel since its original incarnation as well as other civilian hotel visitors.

In the immediate postwar period, the United Nations used the hotel for meetings of the Security Council, the World Health Organization and other UN bodies. It was a first stop for many recently discharged servicemen and a place where their spouses came to meet them. On September 1, 1945, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made the first move in a chess game played by US masters against their Soviet counterparts by radio telegraph, the first international sports match since the end of the war. The Russians slaughtered the Americans in the competition. The hotel would serve as home for these games during the Cold War era.

The hotel played a tangential role in the famous Rosenberg spy case. Harry Gold, the spy courier whose arrest and confession led eventually to the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, and his Soviet handler had violated spy protocol. Rather than sticking to furtive rendezvous at subway platforms or movie theaters, they met for drinks several time at the Ferris Wheel Bar in the hotel basement. They were supposed to remain anonymous to each other but after a few drinks at the bar, the homesick Soviet spoke about his wish to return home to his wife and children, divulging enough personal information to Gold for the FBI later to identify him by name as a clerk at the Consulate General of the USSR in New York.

NYT and the Union For Democratic Action on Cutting Down On Wheat and Fats

2011-03-17T10:12:00.006-04:00

Jane Nickerson devoted her April 15, 1946 food column in The New York Times to the call for Americans to cut down on their consumption of wheat and fats to allow the US to meet its food commitment to those parts of the world suffering from famine.

The earnest Ms. Nickerson cited a bulletin from the Union for Democratic Action, the forerunner of Americans for Democratic Action, the leading postwar coalition of the non-Communist left, headed by theologian Reinhold Neibuhr and sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt among other notables. According to the bulletin, about 100,000,000 Europeans were living on less than 1500 calories a day and millions in Asia were doing with even less. In contrast, for all the complaints about shortages, food supplies in the US allowed a hefty 3,400 calories a day. Much of postwar Europe was subsisting largely on bread, which was rationed in Italy, Holland, France, Russia and Sweden. Malnutrition was a serious problem. The Union urged Americans to cut their wheat consumption by 40 percent and to make direct food contributions to relief organizations or to mail food to individuals abroad as well as to write to their congressmen to urge support of the President's food relief program.

Nickerson included two simple examples of ways to cut back, drawn from recommendations from the Department of Agriculture. One was to give up three-layer cakes, replacing them with plain loaf cakes, cupcakes or cakes of two thin layers with a jam filling and meringue topping, as illustrated in the article. Even these should be saved for special occasions while everyday desserts should be fruit, gelatin or custards. Also banished was the two-crusted pie. If you had to have pie, then a deep dish version topped with pastry cut-outs or a pie like a meringue that had crust only on the bottom were the preferred choices. It apparently was unthinkable to consider a meal without a dessert

Of course, coming off a war that followed the Depression, a lot of Americans did not like being lectured about what to eat. Even some who were sympathetic in principal ignored the call in practice. On the hard right, newspapers like the Daily News and Journal-American sometimes wondered in print why we were feeding our former enemies and asserted that all the talk about famine in Europe was an exaggeration.

Hungarian Pastor Addresses Manhattan Congregation on the World Situation

2011-03-15T10:02:00.001-04:00

Prominent Hungarian theologian Dr. Bela Vassady addressed the First Magyar Presbyterian Church at 233 East 116th Street on Palm Sunday. Vassady was a professor of theology at the University of Debrecen, the four hundred year old academic center of the Hungarian Reformed Church, and a member of the Provisional Committee of the World Council of Churches. He was on a speaking tour sponsored by the World Council of Churches. He told the congregation that those with faith had been able to endure the hardships of the war in Hungary. Many, he said, had attended hidden Bible circles during the bombings in Budapest and other cities.

After the service, Vassady was asked about the religious situation in his homeland since its occupation by the Soviet Army. He answered that there was complete freedom to teach and practice religion in Hungary. At this time, the country had a Communist-led coalition government. Also in response to a question, he asserted that the recent land reforms had been fairly handled. Those on the religious and political right often accused the the World Council of Churches and its spokesmen of serving as instruments of Soviet propaganda. The accepted line on the right was that religion in the Iron Curtain countries was under severe assault. After the Communists took firmer control of Hungary, the theological faculty at Debrecen was separated from the university, although it was allowed to continue operation as a separate institution. Dr. Vassaly emigrated to the United States not long after completing his tour.

The city's Hungarians were divided as they were in their homeland into a Catholic majority with sizable minorities belonging to the Reformed, Lutheran and Jewish faiths. In New York, the Presbyterians, Reformed, Baptists and Lutherans all had churches that catered to Protestant Hungarians. The First Magyar Presbyterian Church congregation met at the East Harlem Presbyterian Church, a Gothic church built in 1868 when Harlem was a middle-class white neighborhood. The church also hosted Italian and Spanish congregations. The Presbyterians had two other Italian congregations in East Harlem. Norman Thomas, who would become famous as a leader of the Socialist Party and a founder of the ACLU, was the minister of East Harlem Presbyterian from 1911 to 1918 and headed the Presbyterian outreach to the diverse ethnic communities of East Harlem before he left to devote his time to political causes. One of the neighborhood Italian congregations, the Presbyterian Church of the Ascension at 106th Street, was particularly successful, with 700 members at one time. First Sharon Baptist Church now occupies the former East Harlem Presbyterian Church site. A Spanish Pentecostal Church occupies the Church of the Ascension.

Vassady got caught up in the factionalism of American Protestantism after he came to the United States. In 1947 he was recruited to join the faculty of the newly formed Fuller Theological Seminary which had been established in Pasadena by radio evangelist Charles Fuller, who hosted the popular "Old Fashioned Revival Hour." Fuller's goal was to create an academically respected center of scholarship for evangelicals. Landing Vassady, who had an international reputation, was a coup. Vassady was considered a theological conservative but, as he soon found out, a European theological conservative and an American fundamentalist were different creatures. He had trouble when he attempted to have his ministerial credentials accepted by the Los Angeles Presbytery, which would have been glad to accept him except for his association with Fuller. Then he had trouble at Fuller. The faculty and student body had largely been drawn from the conservative wings of mainline denominations and was under vehement attack by the fundamentalist separatists for not being sufficiently militant against the modernist heretics. The school took a tack to the theological right to assert its evangelical bona fides. This was problematic for Vassady.

Vassady's admiration for the writings of neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth, his support for the World Council of Churches and his reservation about the inerrancy of the Bible made him anathema to the more militant evangelicals. While American evangelicals sometimes lauded Barth's criticism of theological liberalism, they found his neo-orthodox theology teetering on the slippery slope to modernism. When Vassady published an article calling for one church in one world, he truly cooked his goose. While One World was a popular position in the United States in the immediate postwar period, endorsed enthusiastically by much of the media, many politicians of both parties and many Protestant clergymen as the antidote to another world war, to the rigid, apocalyptic fundamentalists, it was the work of the Antichrist foretold in Revelations. Vassady refused to sign a creedal declaration subsequently required of all faculty members asserting that they held certain core beliefs without any mental reservations. Vassady was a European intellectual. Dialectics were part of his tradition. He retorted that only God could hold beliefs without any mental reservations.

He left Fuller in 1949 to its embarrassment and subsequently joined the faculty at Lancaster Theological Seminary, associated with the Evangelical and Reformed Church, in Pennsylvania. This proved to be a far more congenial home.

Pastor of Fort Washington Collegiate Announces He Is Resigning to Become Minister of Flatbush Reformed; NYT 4/15/1946

2011-03-11T09:49:00.001-05:00

The Rev. Dr. Henry A. Vruwink announced on Palm Sunday 1946 that he was leaving the pulpit of Fort Washington Collegiate Reformed Church on West 181st Street in Manhattan to become minister of the 292-year old Reformed Protestant Church of Flatbush in Brooklyn. The Washington Heights church was founded in 1907 when Upper Manhattan was experiencing a surge in population. A survey by the Collegiate church body had found that many of the area's Protestant residents were not members of any church. See recent post for more about Washington Heights in 1946 and before, when it was a very different community than it is today.

The Collegiate churches of New York City dated back to the founding of New Amsterdam and were the churches of many city residents who traced their ancestry back to the early Dutch settlers as well as of descendants of 19th- century immigrants from the Netherlands. It also had members who were not of Dutch stock. It is historically Calvinist but theologically liberal. In 1946 there were five churches in the consistory, the most prominent of which was Marble Collegiate, home in 1946 of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The Fort Washington Church is one of the four Collegiate churches remaining. The city had other Reformed churches that were not members of the consistory, most of them, like the Flatbush Reformed Church, affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, a mainline Protestant denomination that included congregations that had roots in the Calvinist churches of Germany, France, Switzerland and the Austro-Hungarian empire as well as the Netherlands.

The Flatbush Reformed church is one of the oldest churches in the city. It was organized in 1654 under the supervision of Governor Peter Stuyvesant. The present church, a historical landmark, was erected in 1699 and remodeled in 1755. The church bell had tolled at the death of every US president, including George Washington.

The New York Times story on April 15 reported that Dr. Vruwink had given no reason for his departure, amid speculation that it might have had something to do with his opposition to the recent decision to sell the Collegiate Reformed Church of St. Nicholas, a Gothic landmark at Fifth Avenue and 48th Street where Teddy Roosevelt had worshiped.

New York Ministers Endorse Peace on Palm Sunday: NYT April 15,1946

2011-03-10T00:56:00.000-05:00

In its coverage of Palm Sunday sermons in prominent Manhattan churches in 1946, The New York Times took note of several pleas from the pulpit that Sunday for world peace.

Among the voices raised was that of the Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick of the massive megachurch Riverside Church in Morningside Heights. Both the church and Fosdick have been discussed in multiple earlier posts (see the index for more). Riverside Church had been called the Vatican of liberal Protestantism, which had largely taken a pacifist position before the Second World War but now largely supported the efforts at achieving peace in the world through the United Nations. In his sermon, Fosdick told his congregation that neutrality on the issue was not an option. "American isolationism was escapism," he said, "wanting to sidestep the whole disturbing business of international interdependence and world government." But now the reality of the world situation had left no way "for any great nation to avoid decision between world government and war." In April 1946 public opinion supported the need for international cooperation but nationalism, big power politics and the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States over who should be the dominant world power already were undermining the effort.

The Reverend Ralph S. Meadowcroft of All Angels Episcopal Church on West End and 81st Street, stressed the need for Christian people to measure up to their responsibility if a just and peaceful world was to be established. As noted in an earlier post, the congregation dated back to the 1830s as a mission outreach by St. Michael's on 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. St Michael's served an affluent congregation who had summer homes in the then largely rural area. All Angels was established to serve the poor of Seneca Village, a shanty town of African-American, mixed race, Irish and German working poor which lay just to the east of fashionable Bloomingdale area. Seneca Village was later torn down to make way for Central Park and the Upper West Side soon became urban. In the 20th century, All Angels became a prominent, fashionable church with an impressive sanctuary, an affluent membership and a noted choir. As its website notes, it went into sharp decline, like most of the Protestant churches of the Upper West Side, in the postwar years and eventually sold its buildings, including its church, maintaining only its former parish hall.

Broadway Temple Methodist and Washington Heights

2011-03-03T12:49:00.000-05:00

In 1946, Washington Heights was a very different neighborhood from what it is today. It was mostly Jewish and Irish with sizable historic white Protestant and growing African American minorities. On April 15, 1946, The New York Times reported on the Palm Sunday sermon delivered by the Reverend Dr. Allen E. Claxton at the Broadway Temple-Washington Heights Methodist Church on Broadway and West 174th Street. Washington Heights was also a very different place than it had been in 1907 when the church's predecessor, Chelsea Methodist, had left West 30th Street to join the middle class Protestant march uptown to the formerly rural tip of Manhattan Island. The congregation's first church in Washington Heights was at Fort Washington Avenue and 174th Street.

Dr. Claxton had been the minister at Broadway Temple since 1940. His sermons were widely covered by the press back when Sunday sermon topics were a regular feature of The New York Times. On this Palm Sunday, he preached that Jesus's triumphant entry into Jerusalem was not meant to gather the hosannas of his supporters but "to demonstrate brotherhood, humility, forgiveness and sacrifice." Claxton was actively involved in city, national and neighborhood interfaith efforts. He had been hailed in Time magazine in 1944 for organizing an interfaith community response to the wave of anti-Semitism that had swept Washington Heights that year. Claxton was also known as being among the Christian friends of Vedanta, which was based on Hindu philosophy, and was attracting the attention of a number of notables like Christopher Isherwood and the Broadway playwright John Van Druten in the 1940s.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Chelsea Methodist first made the move, urban development in South Washington Heights was underway but the northernmost reaches were still largely suburban and rural. Most of the residents were Protestants. As the century progressed, the area rapidly filled in with Protestant migrants soon joined by upwardly mobile Jews and then by working and middle class Irish Catholics.

In 1920, Protestants still were in the majority in Washington Heights but barely. That year Chelsea Methodist appointed a flamboyant evangelist, the Reverend Christian F. Reisner, as its minister. Three years earlier, the church had been the venue for a 13-week crusade by Billy Sunday, a former professional baseball player turned fundamentalist preacher, the most famous evangelist of the early 20th century. His crusade drew thousands to the church almost daily. Taking a leaf out of Sunday's playbook, Reisner became a master of evangelical publicity. He wrote articles and books on the topic of publicizing Christianity. His Snow Sermons, delivered from a mound of crushed ice in July, were an annual event. He made himself one of the most well-known preachers in the city and the church became one of the centers of conservative Protestantism in the city at a time when liberal Protestant preachers were drawing much of the crowds and attention. Billy Sunday came back to the church in its new Broadway location in 1930 but his brand of Protestantism was on the wane in the city by then. This time it was only a one night stand. It drew one thousand attendees, a decent crowd but far fewer than he used to have in his heyday and less than the average Sunday attendance at some of the city's largest congregations.

In 1946, the congregation was worshiping in a basement social hall underneath an apartment building. In 1923 the congregation learned that it would have to give up its new church to make way for the construction of the George Washington Bridge. Reisner announced grandiose plans for a skyscraper on Broadway that would be topped with a revolving electric cross soaring 725 feet in the air. The complex was to include a huge auditorium, a social hall, a gymnasium and 400 hotel rooms and apartments. The apartment building opened in 1927 but the Depression brought a halt to the rest of the project. One of Claxton's initial missions when he became minister after Reisner's death was to retire the church's huge debt. In 1942 the church merged with the Washington Heights Methodist church which had been located in South Washington Heights, which was becoming increasingly African-American. In 1947, the church paid off its debt and began construction of a modest sanctuary, sandwiched between the two large office towers. The new church was completed in 1952. It had no electric cross.

Washington Heights went through considerable change in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1920s was a boom time for apartment construction in the city. All of the empty spaces in Manhattan filled in. Most of the new residents in Washington Heights were Jewish or Irish Catholic. Many were blue collar or lower middle class. Many were leaving tenement neighborhoods for bigger, better apartments with central heating in a safe neighborhood with lots of parkland. As the Lower East Side steadily emptied out, Washington Heights became Manhattan's leading Jewish neighborhood, sometimes called the Jewish Alps. Much of the Catholic institutions and churches were located in neighboring Inwood, which became thought of as an Irish enclave. Actually both Washington Heights and Inwood were ethnically mixed at this time although some blocks were predominantly Irish and other mostly Jewish. Some of the long-established Protestant middle class residents of the neighborhood moved to the suburbs or outer boroughs. By the end of the 1930s, white Protestants made up only ten percent of the population of upper Manhattan.

In the 1930s, an estimated 20,000 Jewish refugees, mostly from Germany, settled in Washington Heights. They clustered largely in the hilly Fort Tryon area, near the Hudson River, which became known as Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson and the Fourth Reich for its German character. Meanwhile Harlem steadily encroached on South Washington Heights where by 1946 African Americans were a sizable and growing minority, mostly moving into the older, more dilapidated buildings of the neighborhood.

These demographic changes brought communal strife. At the heart of the conflict was the competition for housing. Washington Heights was one of the few places in Manhattan where you could find decent, affordable housing in a neighborhood that offered considerable amenities like ample parkland and easy transportation to the business district. The competition would become especially acute in the war years when the city had a severe housing shortage. As South Washington Heights gradually became a black enclave, the white former residents, many of them long-settled Protestants and Jews, looked for new places to live. As a result, a number of Jews and Protestants moved into predominantly Irish neighborhoods. Then came the flood of Jewish refugees. Some of the Irish residents felt they were being pushed out of their neighborhoods by the newcomers.

The competition was cast largely in ethnic rather than class terms but perceived economic differences fueled the resentment. There were social and economic differences between the ethnic groups. According to a study on prejudice published in 1947, of 400 families living in four contiguous Washington Heights neighborhoods where African Americans had come to constitute a quarter of the population, the Jews and Protestants were twice as likely as Catholics to work in business or the professions. However, the perception of the economic disparity was greater than the reality, in part because of cultural differences between the groups. Most of the Jews and Protestants in Washington Heights were not wealthy. This was not the Park Avenue crowd. In fact, the study's Jewish and white Protestant participants were just as likely as Catholics to be in the neighborhood's bottom economic strata, people making less than $1600 a year (about $18,000 in today's money). However, Catholics tended to have larger families so they had less expendable income than non-Catholics with the same income and often saw themselves as poorer. There also was a sharp difference in housing choices between the groups. Jews and Protestants were willing to pay more for housing than Catholics from the same economic level. All of the lower income Jews who were part of the study lived in better, higher rent buildings but none of the lower income Catholics. Even many of the middle income Catholics lived in buildings with low rent. Add to this the fact that many of the neighborhood's retail establishments were owned by Jews (most of the more affluent members of the Protestant community worked in office jobs outside the neighborhood) and the perception arose that the Jews had all the money. Protestants had long been the target of tribal animosity, blamed for mistreating the Irish in their homeland and in the city.

Jews were also challenging Irish political and civic dominance in the city. Over the course of a century, the Irish had battled and eventually vanquished the city's Protestant political establishment but now the Jews, who had become the largest ethnic group in the city, seemed to be taking over. To the most tribal element of the Irish, this was war. Add to this the economic hardships of the Depression and you had a ripe environment for the anti-Semitic radio ravings of Father Coughlin. In the 1930s, the Christian Front, an organization affiliated with Coughlin, drew throngs to street corner rallies in Washington Heights protesting the arrival of the Jewish refugees to the neighborhood. Some neighborhood politicians joined in the rabble rousing. Jewish places of worship were vandalized and Jews were attacked on the streets. Of course, most Irish did not take part in these atrocities.

Somewhat astoundingly, in 1944, in the middle of the war against Hitler and the Nazis, Washington Heights saw a resurgence of anti-Semitism. Gangs of Irish-American kids, mostly between the ages of 10 and 14, terrorized the street and desecrated nearly every Jewish temple and synagogue in Washington Heights. Swastikas and pornographic graffiti had been scrawled on walls, At one synagogue, vandals had written "Jew boys" over the honor role of members serving in the armed forces. Mezuzahs had been smeared with excrement and prayer books tossed into toilets. According to the Time magazine article, at least two Protestant churches also had been vandalized. The little thugs approached other kids in the street and demanded to know their religion, The Anti-Defamation League claimed Jewish boys had been beaten and knifed; some had been hospitalized. Jewish girls had been threatened and pushed around. Similar outrages were happening in Irish neighborhoods in Boston at this time.

The number of individuals taking part in these acts were a very small part of the Irish Catholic community but Jewish leaders were dismayed when the neighborhood Catholic churches appeared to have little interest in addressing the problem. The police were not much help either. The city police commissioner insisted the situation was being exaggerated and that the streets of Washington Height were "calm and collected." According to the Time article, it was Dr. Claxton who organized an interfaith community response. Ninety percent of the neighborhood's Protestant ministers agreed to preach against anti-Semitism in their Sunday sermons. A joint committee of ministers and rabbis led a campaign to promote religious and racial tolerance in Washington Heights.

During his 26 years in the Broadway Temple pulpit, Claxton became widely known as a radio and television preacher as well as an ecumenical leader. His obituary, which appeared in The Times in 1966, just short of Claxton's 65th birthday, described him as a "tall scholarly looking man, warm and witty in manner" who did much marriage and personal counseling. The obituary included a long list of civic and religious organizations in which he was involved.

Washington Heights saw radical changes in the postwar years. Both the Irish and the Jewish population were already in decline by 1946. To some extent they were being replaced by Greeks as well as African Americans. The competing white ethnic communities achieved a degree of cooperation in the fifties when they united in an effort to keep the neighborhood from being swallowed up by Harlem. Washington Heights retained its distinctiveness but lost its white identity as an influx of Puerto Ricans and Cubans in the 1950s again changed the neighborhood. The white population steadily diminished. By the 1980s, Washington Heights was overwhelmingly Dominican and notorious as a high crime area with drug dealing particularly rampant. It still has not been gentrified and is largely Latino, but no longer exclusively Dominican. The Broadway Temple-Washington Heights Methodist church is still there.

Palm Sunday at Broadway Tabernacle Congregational Church

2011-02-27T10:18:00.014-05:00

The April 15 New York Times reported that on Palm Sunday at Broadway Tabernacle Congregational Church at Broadway and 56th Street, the Reverend Dr. Allan Knight Chalmers "urged the members of his congregation to reconsider the 'disciplined life" if they were to be useful in the 'new world that is coming.'"

Broadway Tabernacle had a storied life in the city. Originally a Presbyterian congregation formed in 1832, it was an early center of the abolitionist movement. When the founding minister left to take up a position at Oberlin College, a dispute broke out between many members of the congregation and the new minister who did not support abolition. As a result, the congregation reorganized and joined the Congregationalists, who were more staunchly antislavery than the Presbyterians. Among the renowned abolitionists who addressed the congregation during this period were William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. The church founded a leading abolitionist newspaper, The Independent, which published the works of Emily Dickinson. During the Civil War, a Confederate sympathizer attempted to assassinate the minister during a Sunday service.

Broadway Tabernacle was also an early supporter of women's right to vote and for the Temperance movement, which initially was part of the agenda for many political reformers. In 1928, it became one of the first churches to ordain a woman minister. It also was among the first to allow women members to vote on church affairs and to serve as church officers. It was also in the cultural vanguard; the church choir performed the US concert debut of Mendelssohn's oratorio "Elijah." In the 1940s it was known for the Tower League, formed as a social ministry to young adults who had come to the city to pursue careers. According to the church website, the Tower League had thousands of members in its 35 year existence and led to almost 300 marriages.

Dr. Chalmers had been minister there since 1930. He was a strong proponent of the Social Gospel and an ardent pacifist. In 1932, the church's young men's group issued the Broadway Declaration which stated that service in the Armed Forces was inconsistent with Christianity. Several church members became conscientious objectors during the war but the church operated a canteen for servicemen. Chalmers resigned from the church ministry in 1947 to take up a position at Boston University Divinity School.

Chalmers was active in the battle for civil rights. He served as national chairman of the Scottsboro Defense Committee formed by the NAACP to provide legal assistance for the nine black men in Tennessee sentenced to death for allegedly raping two white women. In the 1930s, the "Scottsboro Boys" were widely seen by liberals, African Americans and leftists in the north as victims of racism. The NAACP asked Chalmers to take control of the case from the Communist Party which had used the situation for propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising purposes but had been ineffective in securing the men's release. Some questioned whether the Communist Party was much interested in their release since they were very useful as martyrs. Chalmers successful efforts led to his appointment as treasurer of the NAACP.

The church building on Broadway and 56th Street was constructed between 1903 and 1905. It was one of the city's "skyscraper churches" with a ten-story tower holding church offices and meeting rooms. In the 1969, faced with mounting costs for repair and maintenance, the congregation narrowly voted to sell the building and use the proceeds for its charitable missions. Since then, without a building of its own, the congregation has used other churches on the Upper West Side for its services. Since 2000, it holds Sunday evening services at Advent Lutheran Church on Broadway and 93rd Street and since 2006 has been led by an openly gay minister.

Palm Sunday Services At St. Patrick's and St. John the Divine Draw 4,000 Worshipers Each

2011-02-25T14:07:00.000-05:00

According to The New York Times of April 15, more than 4,000 worshipers attended the special Palm Sunday services at both St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the two preeminent churches of the city in 1946. At St. Patrick's, this was Cardinal Spellman's first Palm Sunday since his elevation to cardinal in February. At St. John the Divine, this was Bishop Manning's last Palm Sunday service before his announced retirement in December. Both services were "highlighted by elaborate musical programs and impressive liturgical processions" according to The Times.

The choir at St. Patrick's sang the antiphon from St. Matthew, "Hosanna to the Son of David," as Cardinal Spellman blessed the palms, sprinkling them with holy water. After the 45-minute ceremony he walked in the Procession of Palms and presided at the chanting of the Passion of Christ and the solemn mass, in Latin, of course. The choir sang "Pueri Henraeorum" as ushers distributed the palms to the congregation. Msgr. Joseph F, Flannelly was the celebrant.

Palm-bedecked crosses were covered in veils of purple, "symbolic of the veil of sin between God and man," on the altar of the mammoth Episcopal Cathedral of St. John the Divine up in Morningside Heights. The high church service also included a procession of clergymen, torch and cross bearers, acolytes and the men and boys of the choir, all carrying palms. Bishop Manning delivered a message but no sermon was preached as "the scriptures which are read from the altar preach the sermon." Communion followed.

Spellman, who had spent several years in Rome early in his career, had close ties to Cardinal Pacelli who appointed him Archbishop of New York in 1939 soon after becoming Pope Pius XII. During the war, Spellman also served as Apostolic Vicar to the Armed Services. In 1946, he was named recipient of the Gold Medal Award for outstanding contribution to New York City by the Hundred Year Association, an exclusive group made up of businesses and associations that had been in operation in the city for 100 years or more.

As head of the largest religious denomination in New York City, Spellman wielded considerable power, particularly after Tammany retook City Hall in 1946. In previous administrations, the city government had taken pains to give equal representation to Catholic, Jewish and Protestant religious leaders and organizations. Protestant leaders complained that Mayor O'Dwyer, who had studied for the priesthood, all but ignored them, designating Spellman and Catholic organizations as the representative of the city's Christians in interfaith activities. While in 1946 the media was full of news from the city's Protestant churches, in coming years this would become far more sporadic.

Because of the importance of New York City in national affairs, as well as Spellman's close relationship with the Vatican, he also was a major figure in US politics. He was not, however, universally admired. The late Cardinal O'Connell, head of the Boston archdiocese and a formidable figure in his own right, had frequently disparaged him, calling him a "popinjay" among other things, when Spellman served as auxiliary bishop in Boston. Spellman's theological arch-conservatism put him at odds with more liberal Catholic clergy and layman. His strong ties to the city's business establishment were criticized by members of the Social Justice wing of Catholicism. His moral crusades against "objectionable" movies, books and theater did not sit well with the city's secularists. He got into fights with Eleanor Roosevelt and others over government funding for parochial schools, labeling his opponents anti-Catholic. His rabid anti-Communism- he was a strong supporter of McCarthy's witch hunts- made him unpopular with the city's many political liberals. He opposed the introduction of English into the mass and other innovations of Vatican II and was dismissive of Pope John XXIII. He called the war in Vietnam "Christ's War," as if he were a medieval pope calling for a crusade. Rumors of homosexuality, whispered about but never definitively proven, long plagued him. He served as head of the New York archdiocese until his death in 1967.

Bishop Manning, who had headed the New York Episcopal diocese since 1921, has been discussed in earlier posts (see index). He turned 80 in May 1946. He was a supporter of the Anglo-Catholic high church movement in the Episcopal Church but also saw himself as the leader of the city's Protestant minority, particularly under Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, who was at least nominally an Episcopalian. Manning was a theological traditionalist who opposed theological modernism and liturgical innovations, but he also rejected biblical literalism preached by the fundamentalists as contrary to Christian tradition. He believed Christian faith was not at odds with science or scholarship. The Episcopal church was still the denomination of choice for much of the city's elite in 1946, although the mighty Rockefeller family had cast its lot with the Northern Baptists and the liberal Protestant movement. Manning had strong ties to the city's wealthy and to its business leaders, in large part because of his decades of fund-raising activities to complete the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

The Action Committee to Free Spain Takes An Ad in the NYT

2011-02-23T11:49:00.000-05:00

The New York Times on April 15, 1946 carried a large ad from the Action Committee to Free Spain, which had been initiated, according to the ad, by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the American Committee for Spanish Freedom. All three organizations would be branded Communist fronts, in all three cases with considerable reason. In April 1946, the Communist left looked forward to a resurgence after a wartime quiescence when winning the war against Hitler took precedence over denunciations of US policy. In a very short time, groups like this, labeled subversive by the US government, would find newspapers no longer willing to run their ads and people fleeing from association with their causes. The ad this day contained two clip-out coupons. One was in the form of a letter to be signed and sent to President Truman demanding that the State Department release all the documents supposedly uncovered in Berlin incriminating Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. The other coupon was meant to be sent to the organization with a donation.

The ostensible aim of the group was to demand United Nation's action against Francisco Franco, the last surviving fascist dictator in Europe. The ad accused the State Department of suppressing discovered documents which, the committee claimed, proved not only Franco's complicity with Hitler during the war but also showed that Spain was harboring Nazi scientists who were working in secret labs on an atom bomb. These charges were a mixture of fact, fantasy and propaganda that echoed the Soviet line being presented this week in the UN Security Council by the delegate from Poland, former US citizen Oskar Lange.

As a presumably single issue group, the Action Committee to Free Spain initially had the support of a number of liberals who opposed Franco, not a popular character in the US except among the arch-conservative wing of the Roman Catholic church. Officially the United States opposed Franco as well, having joined the Soviet Union and Britain in blocking UN membership for Spain. The American government would be happy to see him gone if they could be sure he would be replaced by a friendly and preferably democratic government. But the State Department rightfully suspected the motives of those who wished to throw Spain into immediate turmoil, reigniting the bloody civil war of the 1930s. Franco was not perceived as a real threat, as despicable as he might be. He was an isolate dependent on foreign trade. There were no secret atomic labs with Nazi scientists; they were either in the US or the Soviet Union.

Later in 1946, a number of prominent non-Communists withdrew their support from the Action Committee when it merged with the National Committee to Win the Peace, a recently formed organization with strong links to the Communist party. Among those who withdrew were the Methodist Bishop of New York, the Right Reverend G. Bromley Oxnam; Dr. Ralph W. Sockman, who was the featured speaker on the popular religious radio program "National Radio Pulpit" and minister of Christ Church Methodist on Park Avenue; Dr. Leon M. Birkhead, director of Friends of Democracy; and the venerable city planner and advocate of public welfare, Benjamin Marsh. In the post-war anti-Communist hysteria, men and women like these, who were perhaps too quick to lend their names to organizations that superficially appeared to have been formed in support of a good cause, would be branded "fellow travelers" and their patriotism questioned, although most were not Communists.

The National Committee to Win the Peace was the most recent iteration of an organization that changed its name every time the Soviet line changed. Its predecessors were the American League Against War and Fascism and the American League for Peace and Democracy. These groups were controlled by the Communist Party but had non-Communist members, the most prominent of whom were sometimes given leadership titles, although this was often only window dressing. The real leaders were party activists under direction from Moscow. This differentiated them from Popular Front organizations in which Communists were influential but power was shared with non-Communists. The party generally sought to transform Popular Front organizations into Communist organizations.

The National Committee to Win the Peace had scored a coup by enlisting former Brigadier General Evans Carlson, the much decorated Marine hero of Guadalcanal who had introduced the term "gung-ho" into the American vocabulary, to serve as co-chairman. Between the world wars, Carlson had spent time in China where he had developed contempt for the thoroughly corrupt Nationalists, who were supported by the US and were practically a religious cause for Henry Luce and his wife, and an admiration for the Chinese Communists. Carlson's death in 1947 from a heart ailment spared him the full wrath of the anti-Communist witch hunt, although Senator McCarthy did blacken his name posthumously, and he is generally regarded today as a true American military hero for his battlefield accomplishments. Carlson shared the chairmanship with the singer Paul Robeson, a virtually ubiquitous presence within Communist front organizations. At its meetings, the group parroted the Stalinist foreign policy line, denouncing American and British foreign policy with not a single disparaging word to say about the Soviet Union.

Nicholas Murray Butler Delivers His Final Annual Report For the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

2011-02-21T11:48:00.002-05:00

On April 15, 1946, The New York Times reported on the final annual report issued by Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler to the trustees of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Butler, now 83, was instrumental in the formation of the Endowment and had served as its president from 1925 until his resignation in 1945. In 1931 his work earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Butler was a towering figure of the New York Old Guard establishment for almost half a century, serving as president of Columbia University from 1902 until 1945. Under his tenure, Columbia significantly expanded, built up a huge endowment and grew in academic prestige as a premier research university. It was the centerpiece of the "American Acropolis" on Morningside Heights, considered the intellectual hub of New York City. Butler was one of the most honored men of his time. Now blind, he was retiring from public life. He died in 1947.

Butler issued the report in his capacity as director of the endowment's Division of Intercourse and Education, a position he had held since the organization's founding. He had also recently resigned from this post. The Times stated that, according to the report, one of the division's most important activities during the past year had been to survey organizations around the country to ascertain what they had done to build public support for the United Nations. It also noted that more than 100 radio stations were now carrying "Beyond Victory," a series produced by the endowment with the World-Wide Broadcasting Foundation. The endowment also was working with religious groups around the world.

While some rabid right-wing groups then, as now, characterized the formation of the United Nations as a left-wing assault on US sovereignty, Butler, a conservative Republican, had long been an advocate of the need for an international organization to resolve conflicts between nations and avoid wars. He unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1924 and 1928 and had been a convention delegate to every Republican convention between 1888 and 1936. In 1912, he was the stand-in designate for Vice President on the losing Taft Republican ticket in the electoral college after the original candidate, Vice President James S. Sherman, died a few days before the election.

Butler was a complex man. His achievements as president of Columbia were enormous but he was not without critics. Some faculty members and students found him autocratic and elitist, pompous and full of himself. He did not tolerate faculty dissent and summarily dismissed those he felt were out of line. At least in his early years, he believed academic freedom should be limited to a professor's own discipline and should be allowed only when it advanced the institution's academic and research goals. Faculty members were not to express opinions or engage in activities that might embarrass the university or alienate its benefactors. The university as an institution always came first. On the other hand, later in his tenure, Columbia developed a faculty notable for its diversity of opinions.

He held many of the prejudices of his generation, those who reached adulthood in 19th Century. Butler was born in 1862, during the Civil War. At the turn-of-the-century, he was considered a progressive reformer who battled the political patronage system, particularly as it applied to education. By 1946, when most of his contemporaries were long retired, many liberals and leftists saw him as a reactionary dinosaur. Charges of Antisemitism particularly plagued him. He found virulent Antisemitism repugnant and he cultivated relationships with leading Jewish intellectuals, some of whom came to teach at Columbia. But he complained that many Jews were vulgar and materialistic.

He instituted a strict quota on Jewish student enrollment at Columbia in the 1920s when the explosion of applications to Ivy League universities from highly qualified Jewish students was deemed the "Jewish problem" in academic circles. The fear was that Jewish enrollment might become so large that it would reach a tipping point, causing the Anglo-Saxon establishment to withhold financial support and to send their sons elsewhere for their education. Most of the prestigious universities of the day imposed a quota on Jewish students, but Butler was particularly fervent, perhaps because of the institution's location in New York City with its large Jewish population. Applicants to Columbia were required to state their father's place of birth and their religion and to supply a photograph.

During the interwar period, many Jewish students headed to more welcoming institutions like Penn, Brown and Cornell. During this period, the elite schools put an increased emphasis in their admission decisions on "character," which they attributed to Anglo-Saxons from good families and found lacking in most Jews and Italians. Columbia created a separate junior college in Brooklyn to which many Jewish and ethnic applicants were diverted. When that school folded, its students were eligible only to transfer to the School of General Studies and only in pursuit of a Bachelor of Science degree.

At the beginning of the century, Butler was instrumental in the founding of the College Board exams, which some presumed would separate the better class of Northern Europeans, who they assumed were naturally intelligent, cultured and well-rounded, from the immigrant scholars, who they believed were merely grinds and grade grubbers rather than innately intelligent. While discrimination was more discreet by 1946, Columbia, like Harvard, Yale and other prestigious schools, retained a quota system. Quotas were particularly severe at the professional schools. One study released in 1946 found that it was extremely difficult for Jews and Italians to gain admission to the top medical schools in the city.

Butler was very much a member of the city's Old Guard establishment. Writer Upton Sinclair branded him "the intellectual leader of the American plutocracy." Butler had a falling out with Theodore Roosevelt, with whom he had been close, when Roosevelt began his anti-trust campaign. Like many conservative intellectuals, Butler was an ardent admirer of Benito Mussolini when the Italian dictator first took power. This was a man, much like himself, who got things done. He once told entering freshman that totalitarian societies were more likely to produce great men than were electoral democracies.

In the 1930s, he created a furor by continuing Columbia's ties to German universities after they had come under Nazi control. His decision to appoint a Jewish delegate to an academic conference at Heidelberg University, which infuriated the Nazis, did not satisfy those who felt he should not send anyone. He was, however, a supporter of US involvement in the war when the situation in Europe worsened. A number of refugee scholars from the Frankfurt School, most of whom were Jewish or leftists or both, found an academic home at Columbia University.