What They Didn't Teach You in American History Class by Mike Henry

Author:Mike Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475815481
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving to the next-to-last Thursday in November to prolong the holiday shopping season. As expected, many Republicans rebelled against the president’s order.

That caused the holiday to be temporarily celebrated on different dates: November 30 became the “Republican Thanksgiving” and November 23 was “Franksgiving” or “Democrat Thanksgiving.”

Under Adolf Hitler, Germany greatly expanded its military. One of those areas of noticeable growth was its air force.

In April 1940, Reich aviation minister Hermann Göring issued the order to scrap both of its massive Graf Zeppelins and the unfinished framework of LZ-131, since the metal was needed for other aircraft. The Grafs were each as large as the Hindenburg.

By April 27, work crews had finished cutting up the airships. On May 6, the enormous hangars in Frankfurt were leveled by explosives, three years to the day after the destruction of the Hindenburg.

A large number of ships were used during World War II. However, when the Nazis overthrew France in 1940, the United States seized the French passenger liner SS Normandie while it was in port in New York City. It was the largest and fastest passenger ship afloat and is still on record as the most powerful steam turboelectric-propelled passenger ship ever built.

The Normandie was 223 feet longer than the Titanic, and plans were in place to convert the massive pleasure liner into a troopship.

On February 9, 1942, as the ship was being altered, a fire began when a welding torch ignited some onboard material. To make matters worse, the New York City Fire Department’s efforts were thwarted because their hoses did not fit the ship’s French inlets.

The following day, the vessel capsized, and it was scrapped in 1946.

Franklin Roosevelt, like several other presidents, was a heavy smoker of cigarettes. But some employed unique tactics in order to quit the habit.

Actor turned politician Ronald Reagan started eating jelly beans when he gave up smoking in the early 1960s. On his first day as governor of California, candy maker Henry Rowland gave Reagan a big jar of jelly beans, which he put on the Cabinet Room table. That was the beginning of a long tradition of passing out jelly beans during cabinet meetings. “We can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around the jar of jelly beans,” he told Rowland.

When Reagan was elected president in 1980, Henry Rowland told reporters, “There will be jelly beans in the White House, that’s all I can say.” True to form, Reagan kept a crystal jar full of his favorite jelly beans (Jelly Belly) for cabinet meetings and encouraged his department chiefs to eat them when they needed energy. Guests at Reagan’s 1981 inaugural parties consumed forty million jelly beans—almost equaling the number of votes he received in the election.

The Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1942. Its current site was originally created using landfill dredged from the Potomac River in the late 1800s.

The presidential retreat is located at Camp David, Maryland. It was originally known as Hi-Catoctin, a Works Progress Administration camp for government workers.

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