MILESTONES: September 15, birthdays for Heidi Montag, Dan Marino, Oliver Stone
Brooklyn Today
On this day in 1919, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page reported that debate began in the U.S. Senate on the German Peace Treaty. The Eagle reported that the treaty “became the first great document of its kind to be discussed in the Senate in the full light of publicity.” Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Republican, was opposed to the treaty and to Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. The bitter fight between Lodge and President Wilson led to the Senate’s defeat of the treaty in 1919-20, according to the U.S. Senate’s history webpage. (Lodge was the grandfather of Henry Cabot Lodge II, John F. Kennedy’s losing opponent in the 1952 Massachusetts Senatorial election.)
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On this day in 1940, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle front page announced that Congress approved a mandatory draft for men ages 21-35. This marked the first time in U.S. history that a peacetime draft bill won final Congressional approval. (The U.S. wasn’t at war until Dec. 7, 1941.) Meanwhile, President Franklin Roosevelt requested an additional $1.73 billion be budgeted to fund the defense program. On that same front page was another article announcing that the president would fix a day that fall on which “16,500,000” men were to be conscripted in the first phase. This figure of 16.5 million must have been a typo, whereas the total number of conscripted men was limited to just “900,000 in the Army at any one time.”