Reading the paper on Nov. 30, 1944

The US Army has engaged German field divisions in a sudden assault launched along a broad front in northwest Germany, as a thousand heavy bombers of the US Eighth Air Force struck German industrial and rail targets.

Retreating German forces have opened or destroyed river dams in their wake, adding floodwaters to the difficulty of fighting in heavy mud.

The difficult job of clearing German defenders from the Hürtgen Forest is nearly finished and hundreds of German prisoners have been taken.

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It is late evening on November 5, 1912.

Election Day.

And Theodore Roosevelt, the former president, has lost his third-party bid to return to the White House.

He has come in second to Woodrow Wilson, a man whom he will call “the most wretched creature we have had in the Presidential chair; and we have had some pretty weak sitters there.”

So Roosevelt writes to his son, identifying the elements of the campaign which led to his loss.

And it is striking.

These are the same forces which deprived Kamala Harris of a victory in 2024.

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It’s Thanksgiving Day, 1941.

The weather is unseasonably warm all across the country: 62 degrees in New York; 60 in Los Angeles; 56 in Phoenix; 36 in Minneapolis.

The short-skirted baton-twirlers in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade will introduce Macy’s newest balloon, a seventy-five-foot-tall football player straining to catch a twelve-foot-long football.

Those who can’t make it into the city to see the parade can listen to it on the radio.

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The two babies born on the Mayflower.

When the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England, on September 16, 1620, two women in the final stage of pregnancy were among the 102 passengers aboard.

While still at sea, Elizabeth Hopkins gave birth to a boy who was named “Oceanus.”

And Susanna White gave birth to a boy soon after the Mayflower reached the new world, while the ship was anchored off Cape Cod.

He was named “Peregrine,” from a Latin word meaning “one from abroad.”

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It is October 1940 and chaos reigns.

France has fallen and its puppet Vichy government has issued its first antisemitic legislation.

The remnants of France’s army are in Britain with the survivors of the British Expeditionary Force following their rescue at Dunkirk.

Winston Churchill has replaced Neville Chamberlain as Britain’s prime minister.

The Luftwaffe blitz bombing of Britain is in its final weeks and the RAF is conducting retaliatory bombing of German cities.

The Soviet Union has invaded the Baltic States and eastern Poland.

Nazi occupiers are driving Warsaw’s Jews into a walled ghetto.

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On November 5th, a few hundred thousands, in a few states, set the world on a different course.

On November 5th, the future lurched.

What had been ended.

And, like the uprooting of a great tree, a deep hole emerged.

Now, unlikely characters are rushing to fill it using both hands.

Cause and effect.

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Reading the paper on Nov. 23, 1941.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Cordell Hull summoned the Chinese ambassador from his sick bed to join discussions with ambassadors from Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands regarding the status of US—Japanese bilateral negotiations.

Japan currently occupies Manchuria and a large portion of China’s eastern coast, including Shanghai, Beijing and Nanjing.

Hull assured the ambassadors that, while the US wished to avoid war, no accommodation to Japan would be made at China’s expense.

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It is October 18, 1931.

Will Rogers, America’s cowboy philosopher, is on the radio.

The stock market crash is two years old.

Drought has come to thirty states, devastating family farms.

Employers have laid off millions to cope with declining consumer demand for their products.

Workers who have managed to keep their jobs have accepted wage cuts.

Early in the year, a wave of European bank collapses rippled through the economy, triggering more lay-offs.

And the needs of millions for food and necessities is much more than private charities can supply.

So Rogers steps up to the microphone and lays blame on ‘the big boys’ for causing the nation’s financial distress.

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JFK’s warning.

It is November 21, 1963.

The last full day for President Kennedy.

It begins with a late morning flight from Washington to San Antonio for three days of meetings and speaking engagements.

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In February 1945, FDR, Churchill and Stalin decided there would be no summary executions of the surviving Nazi leadership.

They would instead be held as defendants in an international criminal trial.

Prosecutors and jurors would come from the four Allied powers, who would cobble together and apply the world’s first precepts of international criminal law.

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