Posted on 01/13/2009 8:05:52 AM PST by Homer_J_Simpson
thanks
That "WPA Uniforms" article was really creepy.
very interesting. thanks for posting
Obama will be making no such demands.
Will prove to be the only thing they DON’T have in common.
Campbell Playhouse Presents
The writter felt the need to explain his quip. I got it. It just wasn't funny.
It is kind of a creepy article though.
This material may seem a little dry but I think it goes to an important area of national policy. I probably would have been with the America Firsters, who thought that if we minded our own business we could stay out of foreign wars. After all, don’t big oceans make for good neighbors? In retrospect the isolationinst line looks foolish, but they didn’t know about long-range strategic bombing or ICBMs.
There was enough information about the Nazis even then to know that at the very least we had to build up to eventually fight them. And if the Nazis weren’t going to threaten us, the Soviets eventually would.
Again at this point both left and right were isolationist, only when their beloved Soviet Union was invaded, did they suddenly become hawks.
Adjusted for inflation, the price of clothing seems very expensive back then.
At the peak of WWII, US defense spending rose, in today's terms to somewhere around $6 TRILLION per year. So, as of early 1939, Americans haven't even begun to comprehend what lies ahead.
Another curious item: note that of the $552 million, about $300 million goes for what we'd call the air force, $150 million for the army, and only $65 million for the navy. The rest went for things like securing the Panama Canal.
Well, I find these numbers a bit hard to understand, since I've always heard the US Navy was relatively powerful and the Army relatively weak. These numbers say the Navy was by far the smallest service.
By contrast, last time I saw numbers on this, in today's world, the Army, Navy and Air Force each get somewhere around 1/3 of the military's budget.
It's extraordinarily important to understand that in the mind of Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers, the Soviet Union was not, would not be, and could not EVER become a threat to the United States. That was simply inconceivable to FDR.
In FDR's mind, there was only ONE serious potential threat, and that was the UNFINISHED BUSINESS left over from 1918. If war were ever to come, it was necessarily against Germany.
And if this possible war broke out, then Roosevelt wanted the Soviet Union, like Russia in 1914 to be the West's ally. And in the end, FDR gave Stalin everything Stalin wanted, in order to make certain the USSR did most of the war's fighting.
The $552M looks like only one piece of the defense appropriations pie. Examples:
The $21,000,000 for naval aviation is to tke care of the shortage as it exists under the provisions of the $1,000,000,000 Naval Expansion Bill of 1938.
The program undoubtedly will call for a larger enlsited as well as officer personnel for the aviation arms. This will probably be taken care of in the regular army and navy appropriations bills for the fiscal year 1940.
When total spending is considered your assumptions are probably correct.
Just saying.
I agree with you Homer. I certainly know better now, but that’s hindsight. I think I would have chosen isolation.
The idea for the rail link between Siberia and Alaska cropped up again a couple of years ago.
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