Collier’s Magazine

Articles from Collier’s Magazine

Liberace Arrives (Collier’s Magazine, 1954)

Attached is a five page interview with the always demure and introverted pianist Liberace (b. Wladziu Valentino Liberace: 1919 – 1987). When this article first appeared on the pages of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE, no living performer was selling more records than he was, his television program was nearing its second year and American women had not yet figured out that he was gay. Life was good.


From Amazon: Liberace: An American Boystyle=border:nonestyle=border:none

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FDR vs. the Men in Black (Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

An article written by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945) in which he rants on about all the triumphs of his first two terms, repeating in several places how much better his administration was than the one that preceded him, how popular he was with the voters and emphasizing throughout that the Federal Government had tremendous potential as a force for good during the Great Depression, but it’s efforts were blocked at every turn:

For a dead hand was being laid upon this whole program of progress – to stay it all.
It was the hand of the Supreme Court of the United States…former Supreme Court Justices McReynolds, Van Devanter, and Butler, whose judgments were all consistently against New Deal measures.

Click here to see an anti-New Deal cartoon.

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The Man Germany Hates Most (Collier’s Magazine, 1944)

This is the story of Bomber Harris, also known as Sir Arthur Travers Harris, Marshal of the Royal Air Force (1892 – 1984) between the years 1942 through 1945. He was the daily tormentor of Nazi Germany, striving relentlessly to bring an end to German hostilities by bombing their home front without pity. This article tells the tale of Harris the soldier and Harris the man: his W.W. I experiences, his inter-war training and Washington posting, his W.W. II contributions as Air Marshal as well as his family life.


Click here to read W.W. II articles about life in Harris-plagued Germany.


Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.

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‘The Roosevelt I Knew” (Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Here is the recollection of FDR by a woman who worked closely with the man for nearly thirty five years as political colleague, state governor appointee and Labor Secretary: Francis Perkins (1880 – 1965).


Secretary Perkins and President Roosevelt were a vital team when it came to crafting many of the labor laws that are still enforced today. Click here to read a 1937 magazine article about the creation of the first minimum wage laws…

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John Nance Garner on F.D.R. (Collier’s, 1948)

A printable article by John Nance Garner (1868 – 1967), FDR’s first Vice-President (1933 – 1941), who wrote a number of pieces for the readers of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE in 1948 outlining the various reasons for their contentious relationship.

Cactus Jack Garner bickered with F.D.R. on a number of issues; primarily supporting a balanced federal budget and opposing F.D.R.’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court. Within these attached pages, Garner tells how Roosevelt lost the support of his Democratic Congress.


Read about FDR’s African-American advisers here…

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An Interview with Woodrow Wilson (Collier;s Magazine, 1916)

In 1916 Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) interviewed President Woodrow Wilson and came away with these impressions:

The common things of life interest him, and this fact somewhere strengthens enormously the estimate which any candid examination of his career forces, and that is that here at last we have a president whose real interest in life centers around the common man and on whom we can count to serve that man so far as his ability goes.

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The Iwo Jima Invasion (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Written by war correspondent Walter Davenport some thirteen months prior to taking the helm as editor-in-chief at Collier’s Magazine, this article gives the reader a sense as to what D-plus-one looked like from the fifty yard line at the Battle of Iwo Jima (Operation Detachment: February 19 – March 26, 1945):

There is no Jap navy here to stop us; no Jap air force, either… So you see Jap? On our way up here to Iwo we flew over more supply ships, more cargo carriers. Those decks carry concrete mixers, Diesel-powered road crushers and rollers. There aren’t many cliffs on Iwo to hide out in, Jap! You can’t live for weeks in the crevices of Suribachi. You can’t grow gardens on that rock. So, while you can still see, look down at what we’re seeing: An American city, a harsh, womanless city is moving in on you.


Davenport’s observations were no doubt a comfort to the Collier’s readers on the home front, but post-war accounting revealed that one quarter of the U.S. Navy’s losses took place at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.


Click here to read a unique story about the Battle of the Sula Straits…

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The Soviet Life Style (Collier’s Magazine, 1947)

The standard of living in Russia has never been very high, but even despite his natural stoicism, the average citizen feels he has a good reason to be disgruntled with his life… Like any other totalitarian state, the Soviet state has done its best to paint a larger than life-size picture of its citizens. It likes to describe them as steel-hard heroes with an inflexible will, living for nothing but the great ideal of a Communist future, laughing at difficulties, gaily grasping with hard ship – a continent of Douglas Fairbankses. This is just a bit too good to be true, and the last one to be taken in by it is the average Russian.

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U.N. Gripes (Collier’s Magazine, 1950)

This editorial was one of the first of its kind and many more would follow on its heels. The opinions expressed would be repeated in American schoolrooms, barrooms, dinner tables and state houses all the way up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was not merely the parents of draftees who wondered aloud as to the whereabouts of the U.N. signatories in times of crises, but practically the whole nation:

For two months the American and South Korean ground forces fought it out alone. For two months they fought without even the promise of help from other major powers…

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