Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) I

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Lead: At the age of 15, Jacob, the son of Rose and Morris Gershovitz, dropped out of high school to work in Tin-Pan Alley as a piano-playing song-plugger. After that, American popular music would never be quite the same.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Actually, Jacob’s brother Ira was originally intended to be the family musician. The piano was bought for him, but his younger brother, who later took the name George, started picking out tunes at a friend’s house. His talent was discovered and, much to Ira’s relief, George Gershwin took over the music lessons. In 1919 he wrote a couple of songs for the Capitol Review, one with a lyric by Irving Caesar which received little notice until Al Jolson used in his new show Sinbad. “Swanee” was an extraordinary success.

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First Ladies: Margaret Smith Taylor

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Lead: The wife of Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War and 12th President of the United States, passed most of her marriage moving from one frontier army post to another. Her fifteen months in the White House were spent largely in seclusion.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: Born in Calvert County, Maryland, the daughter of a well-to planter and veteran of the Revolutionary War, Margaret Smith met her future husband while visiting relatives in Kentucky. They were married the following year and began the nomadic life that enveloped his nearly four decades of military service. Insisting on going with Zachary to the many wilderness stations to which he was posted, she raised her four surviving children in crude wintertime log cabins and warm weather army tents. Against their wishes, daughter Sarah eloped with young Lt. Jefferson Davis, the future President of the Confederacy. She died of malaria after only three months of marriage. Margaret’s favorite post was Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and from there she received the news of her husband’s exploits in the Mexican War.

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Susan B Anthony II

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Lead:  Devoted to a succession of causes, Susan Brownell Anthony did not hesitate to challenge laws she felt were discriminatory.

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

 Content: At the end of the Civil War, women's rights advocates renewed the struggle which had lain fallow as the North concentrated on saving the Union. In 1869, Susan Anthony and her associate Elizabeth Cady Stanton formed the National Women's Suffrage Association and a national newspaper, The Revolution, which in its short life vigorously addressed women's issues including problems they faced in the workplace. Despite the good reception Anthony was receiving around the country, it seemed to her that little real progress was being made, therefore she decided to take more direct action. In the elections of November 1872, she and a handful of women walked into the Rochester, New York registration office and demanded to be registered as voters. Four days later they cast their ballots, three weeks after that, Anthony was arrested.

 

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Susan B Anthony I

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Lead: In a life devoted to various causes, Susan B. Anthony proved herself in many ways far ahead of her times.

 Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

 Content: Susan Brownell Anthony was born in 1820 in Adams, Massachusetts. Her father was a prosperous cotton manufacturer. A Quaker and an abolitionist, a man who hated alcohol, Daniel Anthony who gave his daughter a strict upbringing and demonstrated a zeal for moral crusading that Susan would follow for the rest of her life.

 

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The US and the Holocaust II

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Lead: The enormity of the Holocaust only became clear after the war. Yet, Allied leaders knew that to stop it, they had to destroy the Nazis.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: After the beginning of World War II, the Jews remaining in Europe were unable to escape. They were caught, and many millions would soon become victims of the grim German death nightmare. It was an instrument so indomitable that even as Hitler was taking the coward’s way out in his suicide bunker, his disciples were still hard at work operating the killing machine.

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The US and the Holocaust I

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Lead: During the horrific 12 years of the Third Reich, millions of Jews were murdered. Could the United States have done more to stop it?

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: It is hard to reject the judgment of Winston Churchill that the Holocaust “was probably the greatest and most terrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world.” Faced with such gratuitous, monumental evil, one is tempted to wonder if the forces of moral decency could not have done more to prevent this genocidal slaughter.

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Massachusetts Colored Regiment II

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Lead: The opportunity for blacks to serve in the Federal armed forces during the Civil War was a novel idea and was resisted by skeptical and prejudiced whites. Many minds were changed on the deadly slopes of Battery Wagner.

Intro. : A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Getting official permission for blacks to fight for the Union was one thing, making it happen was much harder. Massachusetts formed the 54th Colored Regiment in early 1863, but the Commonwealth did not have enough resident African-Americans to fill it. The Governor, a committed abolitionist, issued a national call for volunteers and, led by activist Frederick Douglass, who contributed time and energy as well as two sons to the regiment, the ranks of the 54th gradually filled. They were led by a white man, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, who turned down the Governor’s offer at first but later accepted and was glad he did.

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