War Supplies Quotes
The Japanese Aggression in the Pacific had curtailed the navy’s supply of hemp for the large ropes that tethered ships. Nylon was not yet used for rope, and the navy provided seeds to Midwest farmers and would purchase their hemp crop. The marijuana was used as a recreational drug by relatively few people then even though there were hundreds of thousands of acres of marijuana growing throughout the Midwest. See {599550} for a similar effort at the time by, the Department of Agriculture.
Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view. Even before the Civil War, there was much less literature and book publishing in the South than the rest of the country. The illiteracy rate of the South was much higher due to the lesser support for public education in the Southern States than in the rest of the country. Even in the 21st century the South was behind the rest of the nation although the gap had closed considerably and Southern writers had become among the best in America.
There has been no war in US history where we ever knew who was getting the contracts during the war.
This included even the contracts that had nothing to do with the war, like the contractor who provided transportation for returning veterans or services to soldiers families when they were overseas. Individual contracts come into the open but the government has never supplied a list of the contracts to the public could see who was making money from the war and determine if the administration in power was selected the best and least expensive contractors or just rewarding donors and cronies.
The president had wanted to send large amounts of armament and other material to England—Lend Lease—to help stave off a German invasion. The leading military men argued against it. Conservative isolationists and Congress had prevented our own military from having enough supplies and equipment. Also the conclusion of the American military leadership of the time was that England was beyond help and would have to capitulate to Germany. Even with massive armaments they would not be able to defend themselves. Any arms that we might provide to England would then fall into German hands. Roosevelt then sent his civilian assistant, Harry Hopkins, to England to assess their ability to survive. Hopkins with no military experience told Roosevelt that with the arms and ammunition England would be able to forestall invasion. Roosevelt trusted Hopkins’ judgment and decided to arm England. Hopkins turned out to be exactly correct and the military leadership was wrong. See {642830}.
Selling supplies to foreign enemies has been an American problem for a long time. The next day, Congress passed the Embargo Act of 1813.
In the American Civil War, civilian weapons production first became a factor in the outcome of a war. In WWI, it became a significant factor. And in WWII it was THE MAJOR factor when America became the “Arsenal of Democracy”. At one point, a single Ford factory was producing an entire B24 (our heaviest) bomber every single hour on a 24/7 schedule—over 600 every month.
Roosevelt came up with Lend Lease and other mechanisms to provide military aid to England.
Monnet began to use the exact phrase in Mid 1940. He almost certainly had read Sherwood’s earlier, similar phrase {624748}. However so had Presidential Aid Harry Hopkins who thought that it would be a good phrase for President Roosevelt to use to “brand” the activity of the United States. So diplomatically, Monnet was asked not to use the phrase any more, and he acceded to the request. At the end of the year, in a famous radio address, FDR used the phrase {624747}, and it has been associated with him ever since.
It was the Dutch that first founded New York and there were many mercantile relationships existing between New Yorkers and Dutch merchants. Initially, the Dutch gunpowder was smuggled into New York because it was less expensive than English gunpowder or gunpowder from Kentucky or other parts of America. (The transportation costs by ship from Holland were much less than the overland cost from Kentucky.) By 1774, there was great friction between American patriots and the British and the smuggling was used to stockpile gunpowder for a possible revolutionary war. See {636944} for insight into the gunpowder shortage.
