In October 1940, New York Herald Tribune columnist Dorothy Thompson outraged her publisher, Ogden Reid, by switching her support from Wendell Willkie to Franklin D. Roosevelt in the midst of the latter's bid for an unprecedented third term as president of the United States. Reid initially suppressed the column containing Thompson's endorsement of FDR, but he ultimately printed it, beside a rejoinder from the Tribune editorial staff. His wife and co-publisher Helen Rogers Reid urged Thompson to confine herself, in the future, to “nonpolitical” subjects—a strange request to make of one of America's most widely read political commentators. Thompson's contract was up for renewal in the spring of 1941, and the Reids made clear that, if negotiations took place at all, they would be most unpleasant. Telling Helen Reid, “I feel an unbridgeable hostility to me in the Tribune,” Thompson accepted an offer to move her column to the New York Post.

In 1851, a “Great Exhibition” was held in London. There, under the dome of the Crystal Palace, each nation was invited to display its highest contributions to nineteenth-century civilization. Many Americans were mortified to learn, however, that their own offerings to this pageant were received as a dismal failure. The American exhibit, which included a model of Niagara Falls, some false teeth, and a large collection of pasteboard eagles, had even “fallen so far short of expectation as to excite ridicule.” Citizens of the young republic were stung by this blow to the nation's self-esteem.

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Keen competition characterized the American market for higher education in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Commercial design schools, normal institutes, business colleges, and four-year liberal arts colleges competed for overlapping pools of potential students. By the turn of the century, schools of commercial art and design, a major innovation in women's education in the 1850s, struggled to retain a small niche in the private education market. Aided by flexible admissions criteria exemplified by the 1919 catalog statement above, the Philadelphia School of Design for Women, a pioneer in the American design school movement, survived as a single-sex commercial art school from its founding in 1848 into the twentieth century. By 1932, when a merger with another women's school brought a name change that symbolized the end of an era, the School of Design had enrolled more than four thousand students. Familiar to Philadelphians today as Moore College of Art and Design, the school remains committed to its original mission of educating women for careers in the arts.