Ken Magazine

Articles from Ken Magazine

There was Illegal Immigration from Mexico Back Then, Too (Ken Magazine, 1938)

This 1938 magazine article can be filed in the the more things change, the more they stay the same folder. It lists all the assorted means by which Mexicans have attempted to illegally cross over the Southern border, whether to smuggle others, import illegal drugs or for their own gratification.


Marijuana was becoming a problem in 1938, too. Read about it here.


Click here to read about the U.S. Border Patrol.

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Kaiser Wilhelm’s Thoughts On Hitler (Ken Magazine, 1938)

For the sixth time in his life, Ken Magazine‘s far-flung correspondent, W. Burkhardt, found himself cast in the roll as guest of the deposed king of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941). After exchanging pleasantries, their conversation turned to weightier topics, such as contemporary German politics and it was at that time that Ken‘s man in Doorn recognized his moment:

Suddenly, sensing a chance I may never have again, I pose the question:

And yourself, Sire, what do you think of him?

Nichts!

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

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The Okies and the Dust Bowl (Ken Magazine, 1938)

The other half of California’s 200,000 migratory workers are farmers who trekked from the dust bowl area; they found work on farms, but not farming; it’s seasonal piecework, like in a mill. Each Oklahoma nomad dreams of a cottage and a cow, but he’s just sitting on a barbed wire fence. With the publicity over, the government has forgotten the dust bowl refugees. At Depression depth, a man might make $8 a week; now, $5 is lucky. They are the bitterest folk in America; blood may flow…

Click here if you would like to read a 1940 article about the the finest movie to ever document the flight of the Okies: The Grapes of Wrath.

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The Imperial Wizard (Ken Magazine, 1938)

Fat, shrewd-smiling, garrulous Old Doc Evans (Hiram Evans, 1881 – 1966) is still Emperor and Imperial Wizard, but he’s now apparently only fronting for a Big Boss who has some sensational new plans which have already begun to click. Once again the Klan is holding hands with politicians all over the country, but the hand-holding is being done under the table. The big drive begins in May

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Japanese Spies on the West-Coast (Ken Magazine, 1939)

A 1939 magazine article that reported on the assorted activities of Japanese spies operating around the Tijuana/San Diego region (their presence was well-documented by the Mexican military in addition to the F.B.I.).


A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation – more about this can be read here.

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The Red Caps (Ken Magazine, 1938)

The history of the African American baggage handlers called Red Caps is a sad story in American social history. The Red Caps had been around since the 1890s and they were assigned the task of carrying luggage to and from trains and taxis; this article points out that in the Thirties, one of every three of them had a college degree:

Red Caps did not go to college to learn how to be Red Caps. Their problem is a racial one. To the white, a job toting luggage is a poor way to eke out an existence. To the black, red capping is one of the ‘big’ fields open. The white man who works as a porter can do nothing else, as a rule; the Negro almost invariably can do something else but can’t get it to do.


Dorie Miller was an African-American hero during the Second World War, click here if you would like to read about him.

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Life in Hitlerland (Ken Magazine, 1938)

It’s a prison or a concentration camp if they catch you tuned in on a forbidden radio program in Hitlerland. And they will take your driver’s license away if even once you are overheard making a careless or joking remark that could be interpreted as ‘out of sympathy with the spirit of the new state’. So even in the apparently private little world bounded by the turning wheels of your own closed car, you must think long and hard like a badgered witness under cross-examination, before you dare open your mouth…


Click here to read what life was like in Mussolini’s Italy in 1938…

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Only Über-Blondes Need Apply…(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This article covers a weird Nazi scheme to create the future rulers of the Reich. It is such a bizarre plan and it seemed to us that if it weren’t true, we would have had to rely on Robert Ludlum to dream it up for us:

The idea took root in the fertile brain of Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, also known as the ‘Limping Devil’…’Heroes are both born and trained’, is the Nazi slogan. The future leaders are taken under the government’s wings at the age of ten.’

-and over a period of about twelve years they would have been dragged around from one Harry Potter-style-castle to another being schooled in Nazi dogma and all other assorted Nordic pagan weirdness and then, after having jumped through a number of additional Teutonic hoops, they would be posted in top government positions.
A fascinating look into the queer thinking of the Nazi hierarchy.


A second article about the Adolf Hitler Schools can be read here


CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…

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