War, Women, And the News How Female Journalists Won the Battle to Cover World War II

Chapter One: Fear Itself On a May morning in 1927, bells rang on Teletype machines in newsrooms across Europe and the United States. In just thirty-three and one half hours Charles Lindbergh had flown nonstop from New York to Paris, France. No one had ever accomplished such an amazing feat! Suddenly, the Atlantic Ocean that separated two continents seemed a little less grand. The world became a little smaller. Before his historic flight few knew who Charles Lindbergh was. But the moment the Spirit of Saint Louis bounced onto the landing field in France and the young aviator stepped from the cockpit, "Lucky Lindy" became big news. He was a hero. Nine months earlier a nineteen-year-old woman named Gertrude Ederle had also earned the admiration of the world. She did not fly on wings across an ocean. Rather, with the power of only her strong legs and lungs, she swam across the icy English Channel. For fourteen hours and thirty-one minutes she swam. Rain fell. Strong currents sucked at her kicking legs, trying to pull her back to the coast of France. Waves rose up and slapped her face and stole her breath. At last she spied the cliffs of Dover on the English coastline. On shore a crowd of people, reporters among them, cheered for her. Some splashed into the surf to help her out of the water. Trudy, too, had become a hero. In the 1920s, people wanted to believe in heroes. The world was still reeling from the wounds of a terrible world war. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died in Europe. Those who had survived returned to their homes haunted by what they had experienced on the battlefield. The Great War, as people called World War I then, had been so brutal and bloody that leaders of countries swore another world war could never happen again. They were wrong. The Great War changed America. Young people, in particular, were rebellious. Young women changed how they dressed. Gone were the tight-fitting corsets and long sweeping skirts their mothers had worn. They bobbed their hair shockingly short and wore thin, shapeless dresses that revealed -- for the first time ever -- their knees. Gone, too, were the old social traditions that said a woman's place was in the home taking care of her husband and children. More young women went to college than ever before. They took jobs as secretaries and typists, teachers and nurses. They joined the staffs of newspapers and magazines. The automobile gave young people new freedoms their parents never had. Men and women drove about together, unchaperoned. Instead of waltzing to the music of an orchestra, they danced the Charleston -- wildly kicking their legs and swinging their arms. Congress had outlawed alcohol, but gangsters still made and sold "bootleg," or illegal, liquor. Men and women, both young and old, knocked on the doors of "speakeasies," private clubs where they could buy the bootleg alcohol. The decade was so rowdy that this period of American history became known as the Roaring Twenties. It was as if America wanted to forget the old ways that had brought so much death and destruction to the world. In the 1920s, the country was "in a mood for magic," wrote journalist Anne O'Hare McCormick. Magic was the belief that anyone could accomplish their dreams, as Lucky Lindy and Trudy Ederle had. Magic was also the belief that anyone in America could one day become rich or famous. Andrew Carnegie had done it. As a boy, he had worked in a cotton factory in Pittsburgh. By the time of his death he had become one of the wealthiest men in the world. Henry Ford had tinkered with clocks and watches in the farmhouse where he was born. By the 1920s, hundreds of Ford's Model T automobiles were rolling off the assembly line every day. America was surely a land of opportunity and progress. Cities were growing. Factories were producing more goods than ever before. Herbert Hoover, who would become the thirty-first president of the UnitedGourley, Catherine is the author of 'War, Women, And the News How Female Journalists Won the Battle to Cover World War II', published 2007 under ISBN 9780689877520 and ISBN 0689877528.