To Stop Disturbance

I was reading to Sumana the most interesting bits from Washington Goes To War, a book by David Brinkley about the changes to Washington D.C. over the course of World War II. It's full of interesting historical tidbits, including:



The attempt to notify essential personnel of the attack on Pearl Harbor, without notifying the other 27,000 people in the same football stadium watching the Washington Redskins game.


An entirely legal scheme by which a Washington columnist and the Spanish ambassador arranged payoffs in exchange for "the columnist [writing] about previously unknown virtues he saw in Francisco Franco."

The controversial origins of having taxes automatically deducted from your paycheck.

But the thing Sumana wanted me to record verbatim was the policy that Washington D.C.'s Casino Royal put into place for dealing with the inevitable fistfights between soldiers and sailors. "Night after night," these inter-service resentments boiled over, and so the Casino Royal wrote down these rules and posted them "on a wall backstage under the heading TO STOP DISTURBANCE."


Lower the house lights
Turn the spotlight on a large American flag hanging from the ceiling
Start up an electric fan aimed at the flag, causing it to flutter
Have the band instantly stop playing dance music and strike up "The Star-Spangled Banner".
Call in the military police and the navy's shore patrol

It always worked. The soldiers and sailors stopped swinging at each other, faced the flag and stood at attention while the band played. There was no way a uniformed military man in wartime could refuse to do this, however angry he was. Before the anthem was finished, the military police and the shore patrol were walking up the steps from Fourteenth Street.

The one that really gets me is #3. I can see how this behavior would be drilled into you as a reflex action, but #3 makes it feel like they're trying to inspire you, remind you what you're fightin' for. And then the MPs show up.