Richard Rubin > Quotes

“None of us who lined the road that morning could have known that what we were actually witnessing there in Orleans was the last small-town Veterans Day parade anywhere to feature a living American veteran of World War I.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“It’s a funny thing about revolutions: Sometimes, they can begin very subtly. The Naval Reserve Act of 1916 started one not with a bold statement or action, but with an omission. What was omitted was any mention of the fact that you had to be a man to serve active duty in the Navy; by being omitted, it quietly ceased being a fact.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Tell me, what words can possibly do justice to the notion of a young man, freshly healed and back to fighting strength, being killed anonymously from a mile away by a lone piece of German artillery on the last night of the war?”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Lieutenant Colonel Charles Young of the 10th Cavalry Regiment, the third African American to graduate from West Point and the highest-ranking black officer in US Army history to that point, was discharged for fabricated “health issues” in the spring of 1917 to keep him from being promoted to brigadier general.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“the Great War occurred at, and in many ways created, a great crossroads in the history of man. It changed the Western world—and much of the rest of the world, too—more than any other war had, or has.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“[Pershing] said, 'We know that a certain percentage of the identified dead buried here are Jewish, so that same percentage should be represented as Jewish among the unknowns'" with a Star of David marker, explained Phil Rivers, who was superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery when I visited. "World War I was the only war for which this was done. If you go to a World War II cemetery, all the unknowns are marked with crosses.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Then General MacArthur literally called in the cavalry--and the infantry. As thousands of government employees watched, a phalanx of soldiers marched against the veterans, forcing them out of their camps at bayonet point. And just to make sure, tanks were deployed, too--under the command of Major George S. Patton--as well as gas. Yes, it's true: Soldiers of the United States Army gassed veterans of World War I in the streets of the nation's capital in the summer of 1932.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Returning to active duty, [Pershing} was sent to Montana, promoted to first lieutenant, and put in charge of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. Buffalo Soldiers: black soldiers. Two years later, he was appointed an instructor of tactics at West Point. He was strict; the cadets didn't much care for him. They mocked his previous posting, dubbed him "N*gger Jack." Eventually, they toned it down to "Black Jack." He was said to be quite proud of the sobriquet.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Their resistance to the newcomers took many forms, from boisterous rallies and incendiary pamphlets to employers and landlords who refused to hire or rent to Irish, or to Germans, or Jews, or Italians, or Poles, or Greeks, or Bohemians, or Norwegians, or Russians, or Hungarians, or, maybe, to all of them.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Mayor John Purroy Mitchel, who avidly supported U.S. entry to the war, was easily defeated by a more neutral Tammany Hall candidate. (Mitchel, who was then thirty-eight years old, enlisted in the Army Air Corps; he was killed during a training flight when he fell out of his plane, having failed to fasten his seat belt. Let that be a lesson to you.) Many”
― Richard Rubin, American History of the 20th Century

“In April, 1954, March published The Bad Seed, a novel about a sociopathic, homicidal eight-year-old girl. It became a phenomenal success, a bestseller that would be adapted for the stage by the renowned playwright Maxwell Anderson, and later made into a movie—twice.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“So I wonder if, maybe, George Briant managed to do something that seemingly no one else I’d met had—that perhaps like them he had, a ways back, set down his load, but that he had also, somehow, always kept track of where he’d left it, always knew where it was so that he could, if the occasion should call for it, run back and fetch it.”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“Thompson submachine gun—that icon of gangland Chicago and the FBI’s Most Wanted list”
― Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War

“History and memory are very important to me. - Madame George”
― Richard Rubin, Back Over There: One American Time-Traveler, 100 Years Since the Great War, 500 Miles of Battle-Scarred French Countryside, and Too Many Trenches, Shells, Legends, and Ghosts to Count