Articles from the San Francisco Chronicle, saved over 70 years ago by my father-in-law Wilson Slater, when he was a young history major and California National Guardsman at Stanford University, reveal how the world-shaking but hardly unexpected events of the previous few days had changed the world.
My father-in-law expected that America would be in the war, sooner or later. He was not alone in this opinion.
The paper cost 5 cents daily and a dime on Sunday. This was an extra edition probably on the streets of the city being hawked by news boys a scant couple hours after Neville Chamberlain's BBC address declaring the war had begun. Already in the paper it was reported children in London were started to be evacuated, babies were being issued gas masks and some English people were reportedly killing pets to spare them from a rumor that pet food would be banned for the duration of the war. Both England and France pledged to support President Roosevelt call not to use bacterial gas or fire on non-military shipping of Germany for a time. The Duke of Windsor and his wife were returning to London.
But in other ways, life in America went on. There were also articles in the Chronicle this day on New Yorkers being enthused over new General Motors and Ford cars coming out for 1940. The great radio and film comedian Jack Benny was coming to San Francisco to perform with his violin and his comedy routine at the Pacific Exposition at the man-made Treasure Island, a de facto World's Fair in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Seven million people had already visited the many sites there featuring expositions sent from all nations, including Czechoslovakia and Poland. The comics page was printed as usual, people were urged to visit Buenos Aries, Argentina, for the Fall in a travelogue section, and there were ads for everything from blood pressure medicine to "studios of oral expression" for public speaking tips.
Just another day, like the one two days before:
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
318 insurgents and civilians were killed and 2,217 wounded. 
