Word: gibsons
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Turkish corners were the rage; puff-sleeved, pompadoured pinups from the pen of Charles Dana Gibson blossomed on college study walls; bicycling scorchers menaced pedestrians; and rural free delivery was about to be established by law. The year was 1895. The same year, the late, great, tragic scholar and editor Harry Thurston Peck (Twenty Years of the Republic) began publishing in the Bookman the first U.S. best-seller lists, compiled on the basis of sales in the nation's 30 or 40 leading bookstores...
After that, few stories of the 92nd came through; those that did were wistfully played up by the U.S. Negro press. Gibson, on a special assignment to Europe, made his report from firsthand sources. In an interview in Rome he told some of the things which correspondents have never been allowed to cable...
...Gibson said he had found cases of panic in other units of the polyglot Allied outfits on the Italian front, but these were mostly individual cases. With the 92nd, he admitted, "the disintegration was likely to be the behavior pattern of ... patrols or platoons...
...Said Gibson, commenting on his own account: "It does not prove that Negroes can't fight [see below]. There is no question in my mind about the courage of Negro officers or soldiers and any generalization on the basis of race is entirely unfounded...
...chief explanation for the 92nd's poor showing: 17% of the division's men are illiterate; 75% are semiliterate. (Among white troops only 4% are in the illiterate class; only 16% are semiliterate.) The bewildered blacks, according to Gibson, were never given the psychological preparation they needed...