Given recent headline-grabbing news from our nation’s capitol, and elsewhere across the country, it was something of a jaw-dropping revelation to find, quite by accident, this series of public service advertisements, which once appeared in over three hundred newspapers from Portsmouth, New Hampshire to Los Angeles, California (and in fact LA Times publisher Norman Chandler chaired the “Newspaper Publishers Committee” that sponsored these pieces).
We’ve selected four to share with you from October, 1941, only a handful of weeks before the bombing of Pearl Harbor would thrust America into the heart of World War II. Almost eighty years have passed since then, and while newspapers no longer provide the pipeline of information they did in the 20th Century, the essential message of these pieces still holds true.
