November – a month of bare trees and leaden skies, and days of remembering.
The recent election has featured violence and much drama, including two assassination attempts on Donald Trump, plus the slanders smeared on him and his electorate as traitorous, white-supremacy fascists. Mr. Trump’s media and political opponents (but I repeat myself) continue to claim that he plans to establish a Hitlerian-style dictatorship. At this writing, key arrests have been made of parties to an Iranian-sponsored plot to assassinate the President-elect. It is a tumultuous era, unlike any that I have seen in my 70+ years of observing American politics.
Americans will remember November 2024 for a long time, but some earlier Novembers are worth a passing acknowledgement. Toward that end I offer a collection of excerpts from earlier articles.
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Since the early 20th century, November has been a month for remembering days of valor, danger and death. When I was a boy in the 1940s and ‘50s, all activity in our public school ceased at the stroke of 11:00 AM, on the 11th day of the 11th month. We observed a minute of silence at the very hour when the Armistice ended the Great War of 1914-’18. My grandmother and millions of others of her generation always called it “The World War,” even after later events changed its label to World War I.
Had we marked the actual hour of the Armistice correctly, we should have done so at 5:00 AM in eastern Pennsylvania, where I grew up. (The effective time of the Armistice was 11:00 AM on the Western Front, in France.) Nevertheless, the observance was a solemn moment for a boy who didn’t really understand what it was all about.
The English observance on November 11th is called Remembrance Day. The anniversary of the Armistice-signing is observed with two minutes of silence at precisely 10:00 AM, Greenwich Mean Time – the exact hour when hostilities ended in France. As it happened, my wife and I were visiting London on Remembrance Day, 1984. We shall never forget the experience.
We were touring Westminster Abbey late on the afternoon of November 10th. There we found that the cathedral green had been divided into many small plots, each 1 or 2 square feet. Every plot bore a small sign or cross identifying some unit of British Arms from both world wars – Royal Fusiliers, 3rd Naval Battle Squadron, RAF Squadron 122, etc. Hundreds of units were represented. Inside each plot visitors had placed small matchstick crosses to which they had attached slips of paper containing inscriptions – “Remembering our pal, Jim;” “The old gang from Brighton;” “Fred, we haven’t forgotten;” “Tom, we whipped the best they had;” and many other notes of remembrance.
Tears sprang to our eyes as we walked among those memorial plots, reading those notes. It was perhaps the most moving war memorial we had ever seen – because it was so real. Those small crosses and notes were placed there by people for whom the searing blast of war was still fresh and terrible and intensely personal.
On the morning of November 11th, at the annual Service of Remembrance, the Queen placed a wreath on the grave of the Unknown Soldier – buried among the kings and queens of the realm in Westminster Abbey. Old veterans wore campaign ribbons and poppies in their lapels, and all commerce ceased for the two minutes of silence. People across the land of Kipling, Churchill, the Duke of Marlboro, the Hanoverian Georges, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth (herself also a veteran) paused to remember the sacrifices of the million-plus who fell “for King and country” at Flanders, the Marne, the Somme, Gallipoli, Passchendaele, and the other grim killing fields of the Great War.
Celebrated writer Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) made the British Day of Remembrance a key element in her mystery novel, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. In the story, an old general is found dead at the club on November 11, 1922. The absence of a poppy in his lapel becomes a pivotal clue to the time of his death (it was the night before), and whether it was by natural causes (it wasn’t).
The USA entered the Great War 107 years ago, and the Armistice was signed 106 years ago, so all of our veterans of the war are now gone. Our last veteran, Frank Buckles, died in 2011 at the age of 110. My mother-in-law, who passed in 2002 at age 89, spoke of hearing the church bells ringing to mark the war’s end, when she was a child of 5.
In my growing-up years, many WWI veterans were still around. My great-uncle Sam served, but he would never speak of his experiences. Dr. V. Raymond Edman, president of Wheaton College, was also a veteran who enlisted in 1918 to serve in Europe. When I was a Wheaton student, Dr. Edman related his Great War experiences in many of his chapel-talks. I recall him telling how he survived a serious illness – probably the 1918 flu – during the bitterly cold winter of 1918-’19, when a German family cared for him. I’ve often thought of how rare and valuable it was to hear those personal experiences from a man who was actually there.
Young Americans, who think “modern history” began in 1960 (or maybe 1992), might be vaguely aware that a war was going on around 1918, but aren’t sure if it was the Civil War or World War II (or whatever). A man-on-the-street poll would be instructive for revealing how many people know that November 11th means anything except department store sales.
Elsewhere in the world, Armistice Day became an occasion for grief and bitterness, as the war’s stupendous sacrifices were toted up and measured against a cipher in the national ledger. Many German veterans became convinced that they were not defeated in the field but had been “stabbed in the back” by the November Criminals – depicted by provocateurs as traitorous Jews.
Soon, every post-war November 11th became an occasion to roil these waters and renew Germans’ bitterness over their defeat. One young veteran – a German corporal who was temporarily blinded by poison gas near the end of the war – became fixated on the November Criminals tale. His name was Adolph Hitler. In the tempestuous climate of post-war Bavarian politics – fueled by nightly sessions of political speechifying and copious tankards of beer – Herr Hitler rose to prominence as an articulate demagogue for the fledgling National Socialist German Workers Party (a.k.a. the Nazis).
After months of plotting and tipsy table-pounding, the Nazis – now led by Hitler – hatched a plan to overthrow the democratic government of Bavaria. Their ultimate goal was to reach Berlin and overthrow the Weimar Republic. Toward that aim they enlisted war hero General Erich Ludendorf to lead a march and assault upon the Munich government on November 8, 1923. Their “revolution” was meant to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the Armistice.
Pundits after the fact described the Munich “Beer Hall Putsch” as a Gilbert and Sullivan Revolt, although the bullets that flew were lethal enough. On the morning of November 9, Ludendorf, Hitler, and Luftwaffe ace Herman Goering led an armed mob of 3,000 Nazi agitators and street toughs through Munich to join forces with Ernst Röhm and his Sturm Abteilung (SA) storm-troopers, who had already seized the War Ministry. Police and regular army soldiers blocking their way fired into the ground ahead of the marchers. The Nazis returned fire, and in a few minutes twenty-one people were killed and 100+ wounded, including Herman Goering.
Although they outnumbered the police forces, Hitler and the Nazis broke and ran when the shooting started. Only Ludendorf continued marching straight through police lines. So great was his reputation that not a hand touched him. Injured by a fall during the melee, Hitler hid for several days at a friend’s house. Eventually he was arrested and prosecuted for treason.
For his part in the revolt, Hitler could have received the death penalty. But Nazi sympathizers in the Bavarian government made sure he got off lightly. He was allowed to use the trial as a platform for Nazi propagandizing and national recognition. Sentenced to five years in prison, he served less than two years in gemütlich style at Landsberg Fortress – living in commodious rooms, entertaining visitors, and dictating his magnum opus, Mein Kampf. (Rudolph Hess was his secretary.) Other Nazis also received light sentences. General Ludendorf was acquitted.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, every November 9th became a lavish occasion for Nazi speechifying and maudlin remembrance of the Alte Kameraden who fell at the Odensplatz in the 1923 Putsch. (Hitler dedicated Mein Kampf to these “heroes” of the National Socialist Revolution.) With much ersatz pomp, wreath-laying and tears, the deaths of sixteen rioters against the legitimate government completely eclipsed the sacrifices of nearly two million German soldiers who had died for the Fatherland. November 11th became a footnote of history during the Nazi era, and November 9th became an absurdly big deal.
These annual orgies of Nazi ceremoniousness reached a macabre zenith on the night of November 9, 1938. In what some historians called “a national temper tantrum,” mobs of Nazi thugs ranged through Jewish communities, smashing and looting. Synagogues were torched; 30,000 people were arrested and deported; and tens of thousands of shop windows were shattered across the country. At least 100 people were killed. Police stood by as the reign of terror continued during Krystallnacht – the Night of the Broken Glass. (Even the Nazis called it thus.)
It was the horror’s beginning for Jews in Germany. Albert Einstein was among those who fled the country soon after the Nazis took power. But many others stayed on, hoping that earlier rhetoric and excesses would fade. Krystallnacht announced the grim future. After the glass was swept up, every Jew in Germany tried to get out. The Holocaust that followed justified their worst fears.
Today, the bloodstained banners of the Beer Hall Putsch are relegated to the Dustbin of History. Grotesque Nazi “celebrations” of rioters who died on a Munich street are forgotten. Instead, Jews everywhere have appropriated November 9th as their own solemn Day of Remembrance. The anniversary of Krystallnacht has become a day of grieving for the persecution of a whole people. And it marks the day when the soul of a great nation died.
Closer to our time, an attempted assassination of President Harry Truman occurred on November 1, 1950. While Mr. Truman was residing at the Blair House in Washington during extensive renovations to the White House, two Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to enter the grounds and reach the president. In a wild, 5-minute gun-battle, Secret Service agents and Capitol policemen engaged the would-be assassins and kept them from entering the house. A Capitol policeman and one of the assailants were killed, and two other officers were wounded, (A friend of mine actually witnessed the shootout as he and his colleagues were having coffee at a nearby drugstore. They thought a movie scene was being filmed.)
The first assassination attempt on a president since the 1933 attempt on FDR in Florida shocked the nation. No partisan ever justified the Blair House attempt or said it was too bad that the assassins had failed. Mr. Truman was not very popular at the time, but he was still our president. Wishing him harm simply wasn’t done – another difference between then and now. Bad things might happen, but our reaction to them was notably different then.
Of course, November 22, 1963, is another November date that is seared into the memories of all who are old enough to recall the shock of hearing that President John Kennedy had been fatally shot on a Dallas street. A filming of the event by spectator Abraham Zapruder still evokes the horror of the grisly scene. In many ways the country has never recovered from that terrible day. Let’s pray that we never see its like again.
November – a month of bare trees and leaden skies, and days of remembering.
