Chicago Celebrates Casimir Pulaski
For my first ten or twelve or thirty years in Chicago, I was regularly taken by surprise by a local holiday. On the first Monday in March, Chicago’s administrative offices, and public libraries are closed for Pulaski Day, a holiday honoring Casimir Pulaski, the Polish nobleman who fought on the colonial side in the American Revolution and is sometimes grandiosely described as the father of the American cavalry. More than once I’ve been greeted at the door of the main library by a notice that the library was closed in celebration of Pulaski Day. It did not make me feel celebratory.
The official word is that Chicago first celebrated Pulaski Day in 1986. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a news item in the Chicago Tribune on October 6, 1938 with the headline “Mayor Kelly Designates Oct. 11 as Pulaski Day.” * The piece was short, only two sentences. No explanation was given, other than the fact that it was the 159th anniversary of Pulaski’s death.
The piece was tucked in below a long article by Sigrid Schultz describing the Nazi occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. Many people believed Poland would be Hitler’s next target. Creating a holiday celebrating a Polish hero who had long been emblematic of both American and Polish freedom in this context seems to me to be a statement of solidarity, even if it was aimed at Chicago’s largely Polish population. A small thread in a larger story.
*Pulaski made the news more recently in 2019, when an exhumation of his bones (for reasons that are still unclear to me) revealed that though he identified as male, he probably had intersex characteristics. This discovery has added nuance to the discussion of remains that appear to be women warriors, and has given people who don’t want to believe in the existence of women warriors a new weapon in the discussion. But I digress.
Before the Women of Hidden Figures
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve recently been working on a book for 8 to 12 year olds about an incident in WWII. Non-fiction books for kids inevitably include one of my favorite things: sidebars.* Sidebars are a chance to explore an issue that enriches and expands the central text. They also are often a chance for me to learn something new. I did not, however, expect to learn something new about the role of women in World War II, a subject I’ve spent a lot of time on in recent years. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled across a reference to something I’d never heard of: women calculating the trajectories of missiles for the army. I did a quick literature search to verify that it was true, added a sentence about it to my side bar, and set the question aside for later investigation. The time for later investigation has come.
Changes in military technology made it possible to fire an artillery shell or drop a bomb from an airplane with greater accuracy than ever before, but that accuracy wasn’t the result of seat of the pants decisions made by soldiers in the field. Accuracy required someone to create complex firing tables that provided soldiers with the correct trajectories, drop points, elevation angles and muzzle velocities. Those tables were location specific. They had to take into account temperature, air density, wind, and target positions. In the days when “computer” referred to a person rather than a machine, those tables were calculated largely by hand.**
When the United States entered the war in 1941, the army needed more computers and needed them quickly. Instead of pulling computers from the limited pool of able-bodied men, they recruited young women with a gift for mathematics, many of them straight out of high-school. They were the heart of the Philadelphia Computing Section (PCS) at the University of Pennsylvania, where they became experts in the science of ballistics calculation.
Six of those women—Betty Jean Jennings, Kathleen McNulty,*** Frances Bilas, Elizabeth Snyder,*** Ruth Lichterman and Marilyn Wescoff—were selected to be part of the group that produced ENIAC, the first electronic computer. Male engineers designed the machine and turned the question of programing it over to the female computers. Their first program was designed to compute a shell trajectory.
The women’s role in the success of ENIAC was discounted almost immediately. Their part in the project was literally left out of the picture: the first public photo of the project, which appeared in the New York Times, was a wide shot that included both men and women working on the machine. When the photograph was reprinted, the women were cropped out. Grrr.
* I first met sidebars in my third-grade social studies text. I remember it clearly: it was nerdy love at first sight.
**They also used a 30-foot-long mechanical calculating machine called a Bush differential analyzer, shown in the picture above.
***Also shown in the picture above/
How Did the Axis Powers Get Their Name?
I recently struggled to explain the Allies and the Axis Powers in War II in a sidebar for a book aimed at 8 to 12 year olds.* It was harder than you might think. Even just listing who belonged in each group was tricky, because in some ways World War II was a collection of smaller wars mashed together into one big war. Who was on what side when changed. (The Soviet Union being the most astonishing example of this.) I think I succeeded. I hope my editor agrees.
In the process, I stumbled across the answer to a question I’ve had for a long time: why do we call German, Italy and Japan the Axis powers?** (This may not be news to anyone but me.)
In October, 1936, Germany and Italy signed the first of several treaties that would create the alliance between the three powers. On November 1, Benito Mussolini declared that from now on, Europe would revolve around the axis between Rome and Berlin.
And for at least a while it was true.
* One of the challenges of writing history for the general intelligent audience (that would be you, right?) is that occasionally you are required to explain something very complicated in very few words. Why uranium is radioactive, for example.
** A related question from an earlier blog post: How did Germany become the Hun?