Memory Monday: Fourth Week of May 1918
by meep
I would have said “Memorial Day”… but it wasn’t Memorial Day 1918.
First, the Brewster Standard, the newspaper I’m reading week-to-week from 100 years ago, was published on Fridays.
So the issue I’m looking at occurs before Memorial Day.
As I mentioned last week, Memorial Day started as memorials out of the U.S. Civil War. First, from the Confederate side, and then the Union side.
During World War I (then, the Great War), the Confederate and Union memorials were still separate….
Uh yeah, I don’t want to rub it in, but yes, that was a very racist movie, and Woodrow Wilson, then-President of the U.S., and from Virginia, was also extremely racist. It would take until WWII until the Confederate side of Memorial Day got a bit muted… and then various people decided to bring it back again in the 1960s (ahem, centennial of the Civil War, and also height of campaign for equal civil rights for blacks in the U.S.)
So. Yeah.
The Brewster Standard is a New York paper. I can only imagine what was printed in Virginia at the time.
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
On the back page of the paper, we see a crowing of all the good work the Rockefeller Foundation is doing in the world.
Rockefeller was born into a large family in upstate New York and was shaped by his con man father and religious mother. His family moved several times before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Rockefeller became an assistant bookkeeper at the age of 16, and went into a business partnership with Maurice B. Clark and his brothers at 20. After buying them out, he and his brother William founded Rockefeller & Andrews with Samuel Andrews. Instead of drilling for oil, they concentrated on oil refining. In 1867, Henry Flagler entered the partnership. The Rockefeller, Andrews & Flagler company grew by taking-over local refineries. Rockefeller formally founded his most famous company, the Standard Oil Company, Inc., in 1870 as an Ohio partnership with William, Flagler, Andrews, Jabez A. Bostwick, and a silent partner, Stephen V. Harkness. He ran it until 1897.
…..
Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry, and along with other key contemporary industrialists such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, defined the structure of modern philanthropy.
…..
Rockefeller spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement at his estate in Westchester County, New York. His fortune was mainly used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy through the creation of foundations that had a major effect on medicine, education and scientific research.11 His foundations pioneered the development of medical research and were instrumental in the near-eradication of hookworm12 and yellow fever13 in the United States.
You ever get the idea that Bill Gates looks back to Rockefeller specifically?
That definitely sounds like the sort of thing that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation currently focuses on.
WOMEN ENROLL IN POLITICAL PARTIES
Remember, this is the time when women’s suffrage (for those unaware: that means women being able to vote) caught on, culminating in the Nineteenth Amendment.
New York was a little ahead of the amendment, and the moment women were available to vote… the political parties were ready to get the women involved.
and with women’s suffrage, and a war going on, the obvious came to the fore: why aren’t women drafted?
PRELUDE TO MEMORIAL DAY
Remember, this issue is before Memorial Day.
MISCELLANEOUS
I don’t necessarily know what to make of these. I’m not going to dig into it… but some interesting stuff.
I hope you had a peaceful Memorial Day. I started out mine with taking one of my kids to the ER for slicing her thumb with a kitchen knife, when she was preparing breakfast… so. YMMV.
