Reading 3 of 14 free1776 Club · all 14 storiesWednesday, June 24
From the desk
Dive into 1937's pivotal moment as the U.S. Navy orders its first fast battleships, North Carolina and Washington, breaking free from the Washington Naval Treaty's constraints. This strategic move reshaped naval warfare, setting the stage for future conflicts. Also, explore how John Cabot's 1497 landfall on North America's coast marked a new era of exploration and discovery.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1937Featured · This day in history
The U.S. Navy Orders Its First Fast Battleships: North Carolina and Washington
The Washington Naval Treaty had kept American battleships on ice for over a decade, and the navy that emerged from the freeze faced a Pacific where Japan's Kongō-class battlecruisers could outrun anything it could outgun. In 1937, the U.S. Navy ordered two fast battleships — North Carolina (BB-55) from the New York Naval Shipyard and Washington (BB-56) from the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard — the first new battleship design America had attempted under the treaty system. Japan's refusal to sign the Second London Naval Treaty that same year triggered an escalator clause, letting the Navy swap the planned twelve 14-inch guns for nine 16-inch weapons — a decision that would prove itself dramatically on a dark November night off Guadalcanal five years later.
New York Naval Shipyard, Brooklyn, New YorkStory page →
The American Throughline
The North Carolina class resolved a decade of treaty-era paralysis by proving that speed, firepower, and armor could coexist within international limits — and then exceed them when diplomacy collapsed. The class set the template for every subsequent American fast battleship, and Washington's destruction of the Kirishima at Guadalcanal in 1942 validated a design philosophy built in a Brooklyn drafting room in 1937.
Did you know
QWhy did Franklin Roosevelt personally try to limit the North Carolina class to 14-inch guns — and how did Japan accidentally overrule him?
Roosevelt told naval planners the new battleships 'should contemplate the ... 14-inch gun,' a position rooted in his belief that a smaller caliber would encourage other powers to follow suit and keep the arms race tamped down. Admiral Joseph Reeves pushed back hard, arguing the 16-inch gun's armor penetration was too important to surrender voluntarily. The debate was resolved not by either man but by Japan, which refused to sign the Second London Naval Treaty of 1936. That refusal automatically triggered the escalator clause, rendering Roosevelt's preference moot. The president who wanted 14-inch guns ended up with a class that sank a Japanese battleship with 16-inch ones.
QHow did USS Washington sink the Kirishima while remaining effectively invisible to the entire Japanese fleet?
During the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal on the night of November 14–15, 1942, Washington's sister ship South Dakota suffered a catastrophic electrical failure that lit her up on Japanese radar and drew concentrated fire. With Japanese guns and attention fixed on South Dakota, Captain Glenn B. Davis maneuvered Washington into a firing position without being detected. Rear Admiral Willis Lee held fire until Washington was close enough to make the engagement decisive. Washington then fired 75 sixteen-inch and 107 five-inch rounds, scoring roughly 20 main battery hits on Kirishima — destroying her steering and main battery. Kirishima's crew scuttled her before dawn. It was the last battleship-on-battleship surface engagement in naval history.
QWhy was USS North Carolina nicknamed 'The Showboat,' and what was actually wrong with her?
The nickname had two layers. North Carolina was the first new American battleship in years, drawing enormous public attention and press coverage — the 'showboat' in the theatrical sense. But the name also carried a gentler edge: the ship vibrated badly. Her propulsion system produced resonance severe enough to require repeated sea trials and multiple propeller configurations before the problem was brought under control. The testing delays made her the most-watched and most-scrutinized ship in the pre-war Navy. She survived a torpedo hit from Japanese submarine I-19 in September 1942 and went on to serve through Okinawa. She is now preserved as a museum ship in Wilmington, North Carolina — still drawing a crowd.
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1922culture
The American Professional Football Association Becomes the NFL
Two years after representatives from Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and New York gathered inside a Canton auto showroom to formalize professional football, the league they built was still wearing a borrowed name. On June 24, 1922, the American Professional Football Association voted to rename itself the National Football League — a title that matched the scope its founders had always intended. The APFA had been formed to standardize schedules, end the raiding of players between clubs, and lift the game's reputation. The new name was the simplest signal that it meant to do all of that, and more.
The NFL is now the wealthiest professional sports league in the world, with 32 teams and an annual championship — the Super Bowl — that routinely draws the largest single-day television audience in American broadcasting. That structure traces back to one vote on a June afternoon in 1922, when a loose association of Midwestern clubs decided the game deserved a national name.
Did you know
QWhy was Jim Thorpe elected president of the APFA if he was primarily a player?
Thorpe was the most famous athlete in American professional football in 1920 — an Olympic gold medalist, a collegiate legend, and an active player for the Canton Bulldogs. The founders of the APFA wanted a name that would give the new league credibility in newspapers and with the public. Thorpe's election as president was essentially a branding decision: his reputation was the association's best advertisement. He was not expected to run day-to-day operations, and he didn't. The arrangement said something honest about what the early league valued most.
QWhere, exactly, did professional football's founding meeting take place — and why there?
The August 20, 1920, meeting that created the APFA was held inside the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio. Canton was home to the Bulldogs, one of the stronger clubs in pre-league professional football, and the showroom belonged to a local businessman connected to the team. There was nothing ceremonial about the venue — it was simply a large indoor space available on short notice. Canton later became the home of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a choice that traces directly back to the city's role in that August meeting.
QHow many of the original 1920 APFA teams survived to become modern NFL franchises?
Of all the clubs that played in the APFA's inaugural 1920 season, only two have an unbroken lineage into the current NFL. The Decatur Staleys relocated to Chicago and became the Bears. The Chicago Cardinals moved cities over the decades, eventually settling in Arizona. Every other franchise from that founding season either folded, merged, or dissolved entirely. The NFL now fields 32 teams; the odds that any given 1920 club would still be operating a century later were, as it turned out, quite low.
1948military
Stalin Orders the Berlin Blockade, Triggering the Cold War's First Crisis
Three years after the Allied victory in Europe, the wartime partnership had curdled into something harder and more dangerous. On June 24, 1948, Stalin ordered Soviet forces to seal all rail and barge routes between West Germany and the Western-occupied sectors of Berlin — a city of more than two million people sitting 110 miles inside Soviet-controlled territory. The stated provocation was the Western Allies' plan to introduce the Deutsche Mark; the real aim was to strangle West Berlin until its residents pressured the Allies to leave. Two days later, American and British aircraft began flying in food, fuel, and coal, launching what would become fifteen months of round-the-clock airlift.
Truman's decision to airlift rather than retreat or fight set the template for American Cold War policy: hold ground, avoid direct military confrontation, absorb costs. The airlift's success fed directly into West Germany's integration into NATO in 1955 and established the American commitment to Berlin that would define U.S. foreign policy for the next four decades — right through the Wall's construction in 1961 and its fall in 1989.
Did you know
QHow did a young American pilot and a handkerchief-sized parachute shift public opinion about the Berlin Airlift?
Lieutenant Gail Halvorsen, a C-54 pilot from Utah, began dropping small candy parcels attached to handkerchief parachutes from his aircraft on approach to Tempelhof Airport in the summer of 1948 — without authorization. West Berlin children had gathered near the airfield fence and Halvorsen, struck by their patience and good manners, improvised the idea on the spot. When the operation was discovered, instead of a reprimand, it became official: Operation Little Vittles eventually involved pilots across the fleet, with candy donated by American confectioners. West Berliners called the aircraft 'raisin bombers' or 'candy bombers.' The gesture produced more goodwill coverage than any official press release the military managed during the entire fifteen-month operation.
QAt least one historian has argued that the 'Berlin Blockade' was not actually a blockade — what is his case?
Historian Joseph Pearson has challenged the standard narrative, arguing that while land routes for Allied military and civilian use were sealed, Soviet restrictions were never total. Goods continued to move through Soviet-controlled territory under certain conditions, and the humanitarian crisis, while genuine, was shaped as much by Allied decisions about what to stockpile as by Soviet action. Pearson's argument is that the 'blockade' framing was partly a persuasive narrative constructed to justify the airlift's enormous cost — the equivalent of nearly three billion dollars today — and to win public support in both America and Western Europe. The narrative worked. It also, Pearson notes, is one that almost everyone still believes essentially intact.
QWhat did General Curtis LeMay want to do instead of an airlift, and why did Truman refuse?
LeMay, commanding U.S. Air Forces in Europe, favored sending armed ground convoys down the autobahn into Berlin and forcing the Soviets to make the first military move. It was a calculated bluff rooted in LeMay's conviction that the Soviets would back down rather than risk open conflict with American forces. Truman rejected the approach on the grounds that any miscalculation — a Soviet officer who didn't receive the order to stand down, a nervous checkpoint guard — could start a shooting war in Europe less than three years after the last one had ended. The airlift was slower, more expensive, and initially less certain, but it gave the Soviets no pretext and America no moment of irreversible escalation. LeMay considered it insufficiently aggressive. Truman considered that a feature, not a flaw.
