The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project

As planters, the white men who own the land encroached upon the wilderness with their "gangs of slaves" before the Civil War and their "hired labor" ever since, turning an "impenetrable jungle" of cane and cypress and other trees into endless fields of cotton (323).

Sally Rand was a minor actress and nightclub dancer who became famous at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair when she danced apparently naked, using a pair of ostrich feather "fans" to reveal and conceal her body in provocative ways that got her arrested four times in one day (323).

Wilkie was the Republican candidate for President in the 1940 election. He was defeated by Franklin Roosevelt.

Franklin Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States, re-elected to the third of his four terms in November, 1940.

Hitler was the infamous leader of Nazi Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945 at the end of World War II. By 1940 he had invaded Poland, which marked the formal beginning of that war. Ike's reference to him as "one Austrian paper-hanger" (322) repeats a term of contempt that was popular in America at the time; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary, but there's no evidence that he was ever a "paper-hanger."