The Stroke of Midnight

After three weeks of the midnight curfew on the home front, one fact was well established: Jimmy Byrnes's remedy was worse than whatever disease it was supposed to cure.

If Jimmy Byrnes, as many suspected, was trying (perhaps at Army suggestion) to get at the conscience of the U.S. people and make them realize that they still face a stern war, he had indeed found the conscience. Municipal officials, jumping in to enforce the order, found general, if wondering, cooperation from the people who had to close down.

The pinch was that folks were still after fun where they could find it. In most parts of the country, even in sportive Chicago, the curfew made no tremendous ripple. Midnight was time to get started home anyhow; only the swing-shifters, who like to drink, dance or bowl after midnight, seemed to have been hurt much.

In the Metropolis. But in night-living Manhattan, where midnight is the shank of the evening, it was a different story. Moved out of the nightspots before the clock struck. New Yorkers and the hordes of visitors (including thousands of servicemen on pass) swarmed into the streets. Manhattan's sensitive transportation, from scabby subways to rachitic taxicabs, were strained to the limit. Its streets were jammed for hours past midnight by drunks who had downed too many too fast, by soberer folks who thought they had no place else to go. Speakeasies began to spring up, and Manhattan's policemen began to talk worriedly of the return of the Prohibition era's clip-joints.

By this, week, New York City's flamboyant, hen-shaped Fiorello LaGuardia, who had jumped enthusiastically into enforcement of the Jimmy Byrnes "request," decided it was time to try something else. He announced that New York City's closing hour would be extended to 1 a.m.

Next day War Manpower Commission Chairman Paul V. McNutt announced (speaking for Byrnes) that he had been authorized to exempt restaurants from the curfew, provided they sold no liquor, offered no entertainment after midnight.

Puzzled citizens began to wonder if the curfew were being eased out of existence, were still a little puzzled after another Byrnes announcement: "The government does not intend to withdraw its request for a midnight curfew."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.