48 Magazine

Articles from 48 Magazine

The New Yorker (’48 Magazine, 1948)

Twenty-three years after Harold Ross (1892 – 1951) launched The New Yorker, this profile of the man appeared on the newsstands:

Ross is a kind of impostor. The New Yorker is urbane; cactus is more urbane than Ross. The New Yorker carries understatement almost to the point of inaudibility; with Ross the expletive crowds out most of the eight parts of speech….It is true that he never had a high school education; but it is also true that he is a master grammarian, and that the superb sense of style which informs The New Yorker flows in part from his clean, uncompromising feeling for the English language.


Click here to read the second half of the Harold Ross profile. This portion is decorated with rejected cartoons from The New Yorker …


Ross never forgot his days in Paris as the editor of The Stars & Stars, click here to read an article about that period in his life.

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‘Panic in Hollywood” (’48 Magazine, 1948)

The years 1947 and 1948 was a rough patch for Hollywood – and journalist James Felton did a favor for all those geeky film historians yet unborn for documenting their myriad travails in the attached article. Aside from a major drop in box-office receipts, the most time consuming inconvenience involved U.S. Representative J. Parnell Thomas (1895 – 1970) and his cursed House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that threatened to reduce their profits to a further degree.

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The ”Unsinkable” Titanic (’48 Magazine, 1948)

Award winning word-smith Hanson W. Baldwin (1903 – 1991) wrote this tight little essay some 64 years after the Titanic sinking. He succinctly pieced together the events of that day (April 12, 1912) and clearly indicated that there was plenty of blame to go around for the tremendous loss of life; not simply the Grand Poobahs in the senior positions (Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay) but the small fries as well (such as Second Radio Operator Harold McBride). By the second page, Baldwin commences with an hour by hour break-down of the events on-board TITANIC until she made her final plunge into the deep:

12:30 a.m. The word is passed: ‘Women and children in the boats’. Stewards finish waking passengers below; life-preservers are tied on; some men smile at the precaution.
‘The Titanic is unsinkable.’

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They Molded the American Mind (’48 Magazine, 1948)

In 1948 the American history professor Henry Steele Commager (1902 – 1998) read this article that named the most powerful men in Cold War Washington – he then began to compose a list of his own, a list that he felt was far more permanent in nature. Commager wrote the names of the most influential thinkers of the past 100 years, leaders and writers who he credited for having supplied us with our symbols, our values, our ideas and ideals.

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Tokyo Living (’48 Magazine)

The post-war life of a Tokyo family as experienced by Mrs. Tanaya: the wife of a carpenter and mother of one son. This is an eleven page magazine article that will allow you to gain some understanding as to how the Tokyo black-market operated and how that city began to rebuild itself after so many years of war. Also of some interest the Tokyo reaction to the American occupying army:

There is a lot of talk about Americans. To the Japanese women and their husbands, the conquerors are a puzzling combination of good and bad. But they often thank their gods for ‘Marshal’ MacArthur…

••Click here to read about post-World War II Kyoto.

Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.

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The Nazi’s Man in British Palestine (’48 Magazine, 1948)

Written two and a half years after the Second World War, this article tells the story of Haj Amin Al-husseini (1897 – 1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; he was the most prominent of Nazi-collaborators in all of Islam. Believed to have been a blood relation of Yasser Arafat (1929 – 2004), Al-Husseini was the animating force behind numerous attacks on the Jews of British Palestine throughout the Twenties and Thirties.


Al-Husseini is also the subject of this article.


Here is an article from 1919 about Al Husseini.

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Things Were Not Right in Korea (’48 Magazine, 1948)

Written two years prior to the Korean War, this article is about the joint occupation of Korea – the Soviets in the industrialized North, the Americans in the agrarian South, and how poorly both regions were being served before the 1950 war:

The issue in Korea is not Communism vs. Americanism, but occupation-trusteeship vs. freedom. On that issue, both Russia and the United States would lose after a free vote of the people, because the two powers have, each in their own way, failed Korea.


The Soviet Army moved into northern Korea during the August of 1945, click here to read about it…

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General Douglas MacArthur (’48 Magazine)

If you’ve been looking for an editorial that was intended to take General MacArthur down a peg or two, you’ve found it. It was penned by Shelley Mydans (1915 – 2002), a journalist who was primarily known at the time for her LIFE MAGAZINE news dispatches; she found the General to be both admirable and repulsive at the same time and was thoroughly baffled as to why he was so loved on so many different continents.


Written two years before General MacArthur’s stunning 1950 victory in the Korean War (the Battle of Inchon), this article makes apparent a deep-seated fear held within the senior leadership of the Democratic party that MacArthur was planning to challenge Truman in the 1948 presidential election.


Another article on General MacArthur can be read here…

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Picasso Painted Me (’48 Magazine, 1948)

Artist and poet Jaime Sabartés (1881 – 1968) had been among the oldest and closest friends of Pablo Picasso since the two of them were 19-year-old artists in Barcelona. Throughout the course of their 40-year friendship Picasso had painted and drawn his pal on numerous occasions – Sabartés’ comments about those six portraits and his memories of those isolated moments appear on the attached pages. He recalled a day when Picasso energetically encouraged him to write down his thoughts, which in time lead to this article, that appeared in his 1948 book, PICASSO: an Intimate Portraitstyle=border:none:

I decided, therefore, to take these portraits as texts, to try to imbue with warmth Picasso’s pictures of me, to make them live anew, to enrich them with fragments from the life of their creator and shreds of my own.


A Picasso poem is included among the reminiscence (translator unknown).


A forgotten article from 1913 that degraded Picasso and other assorted Modernists can be read here.

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