Robert Emmett Murphy, Jr.

  Some thoughts about 1913   One of the things you learn on Social Media is how impassioned some people are about ideas that are just plain wrong. For example: Libertarians almost inevitably overlap with Tax Protestors, and for both groups the year 1913 was when the promise if the USA came to an end.   As that was more than a century ago, no one speaking of it today can actually remember it. It was before any of the most defining events of the last century, WWI, the Great Depressions, and WWII, and those are distant enough in the past that there are few remaining living witnesses either, so 1913 must have been an alien place indeed.   In 1913 the USA was just emerging as a World Power, and certainly was not yet the Super Power we became after World War II, so to state that was when we lost our way then seems seriously at odds with more conventional thinking, either Liberal or Conservative, which generally sites the 1950s as the USA’s “Golden Age.”   ...

  “Cyclist’s Raid” by Frank Rooney, “The Best American Short Stories: 1952,” & Discovering Some Ghosts of World War II   History is the consequences of decisions in the past, and as we are supposed to draw lessons from past events as we make the decisions that will shape our future. This makes understanding what drove the decisions as important as the events themselves.   When one looks at the last-seventy-odd-years of USA history, most of our decisions were shaped by this Nation’s experiences during WWII, and our decisions during WWII were shaped by the events that immediately preceded it. WWII was the largest global conflict in human history so far, and it forever changed our decision-making processes. Our first post-War President, Harry S. Truman, had also been a War-time Vice-President, and for a short time the War-time President, and eight of the next nine Presidents that followed, had served during that same conflict (this brought us all the way up t...