Eighty years ago today, Dec. 28 was a Sunday -- three weeks to the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. On that last Sunday of the year, Americans flocked to churches. As author Craig Shirley noted in "December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World," America's pastors and priests prayed unapologetically for their president that day -- and for Winston Churchill, who was visiting the United States.
During the dark days of World War II, Americans read newspapers and magazines in record numbers, turning in their hour of need to the twin pillars of the First Amendment: freedom of religion and freedom of the press. Contrary to how we'd like to remember the lives and times of the "greatest generation," even then U.S. public officials did not eschew political gamesmanship.
New York City's mayor, for example, used the war as a pretext for consolidating power and purging potential rivals from positions of authority -- or any position at all. Like Michael Bloomberg, Fiorello La Guardia had run for office as a nominal Republican, although he was actually a liberal New Dealer who had campaigned for Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 and 1940.
In so doing, Hizzoner found himself on the opposite side of May Davie, the wife of influential New York lawyer Preston Davie. Mrs. Davie had campaigned for Republican nominee Alf Landon in 1936, served as a delegate to the GOP convention in Cleveland, and penned a column for the New York Herald Tribune criticizing the New Deal.
In 1941, May Davie was serving as an assistant to William Morgan Jr., commissioner of public markets. When war broke out, La Guardia demanded that Morgan dismiss her. Mrs. Davie wasn't even being paid for her service, and Morgan initially ignored the mayor. La Guardia responded by having one of his flunkies call her "Morgan's girlfriend," which did the trick.
In other words, petty partisanship didn't start in recent times -- and it doesn't dissipate spontaneously even when the United States is facing grave threats. And although hyper-partisanship is maddening, as well as wasteful, another lesson from the 1940s is that if the media performs its job properly, partisanship needn't do lasting damage, as May Davie's own example attests.
In 1936, Mrs. Davie began one of her pro-Landon columns this way, "Only 20 days to save the American way of life…" But by 1940, as the New Yorker magazine observed puckishly, Mr. and Mrs. Davie had shown little signs of suffering during FDR's second term, having "managed somehow to retain membership in eleven social clubs."
May Davie was a better sport than Mayor La Guardia. Not begrudging the New Yorker magazine its little dig at her expense, after the war ended she passed along an item to the magazine about a new Republican dance step, "The GOP Hop," which was unveiled at a party at Delmonico's.
"It was created by Sara Mildred Strauss, choreographer, and was demonstrated by the team of Ed and Evelyn," the magazine noted in an Oct. 25, 1947, Talk of the Town item. "We didn't get to see the number, but we imagine that it is jubilant without being undignified, like Senator Taft, and that it will catch on and sweep the nation's ballrooms. Soon afterward, we imagine, somebody will decide to avoid the wisp of redundancy and simply call the dance the HOP, for Happy Old Party."
Those were the days, weren't they?
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
