Ken Magazine

Articles from Ken Magazine

Censors of the Japanese War Machine (Ken Magazine, 1938)

The Japanese censorship boards have drafted regulations for the press in territory under their control, and unsuccessful attempts were made to control news dispatches in Shanghai’s foreign-owned newspapers. In Peiping, Tientsin, Tsingtao and other cities where the Japanese are in complete control, foreign editors are having their troubles, as evidenced by the ‘secret’ instructions to the press issued by the Special Military Missions to China, with Headquarters in Peiping… Under the heading ‘Important Standards for Press Censorship’ come the following regulations…


-what follows is an enormous laundry list of DONT’S issued to the officers of the foreign press stationed in Japanese-occupied China.

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‘Steel Ring Around Mussolini” (Ken Magazine, 1938)

One thousand men are charged with the personal responsibility of seeing that Il Duce doesn’t meet with an untimely death. Their frenzied precautions make him the best protected of all contemporary dictators – a protection which is sorely needed. Sixteen years after the victorious March on Rome a special tribunal dealing with the ‘enemies of fascism’ is still working along at exceptionally high pressure.


Click here to read about Mussolini’s departure from the League of Nations.

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Bad Press Day for Eleanor Roosevelt (Ken Magazine, 1938)

During a 1936 visit to a research facility devoted to finding a cure for children’s lung ailments, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was remembered by a reporter for having blurted out a highly insensitive question:

What is the use of saving babies, if they can’t earn a decent living when they grow up?

With two years to think about her impulsive inquiry, the reporter responded with outrage in formulating an answer.

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Movie Exhibitors vs Movie Producers (Ken Magazine, 1938)

A 1938 magazine article pertains to a brawl that once existed between movie exhibitors and movie producers involving the Hollywood practice known as block-booking, which required theater owners to commit to movies they have never seen. The article refers to how Hollywood employed their biggest stars to fight legislation in Washington designed to overturn this scheme.


The bill was defeated.


Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.


More about the American film business in the 1940s can be read here…

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Life in Sunny, Fascist Italy (Ken Magazine, 1938)

In Italy, every other man is wearing a uniform or just stepped out of one. Every other wife is about to become a mother again. Every boy is lugging a wooden gun and playing at soldier. So it sees to the eye, and amazingly, so it actually is. War, babies, self-sufficiency, poverty, persecution complexes, chest beating, magnetic pride and the most parrotty people in the world. This is the land determined to out-Caesar the greatest Roman of them all. The Italian’s thoughts, eyes, ears, destiny, morals, spaghetti, pocketbook and trigger finger are controlled completely by the whim of one man. And the Italians love him.


Click here to read about life in Hitler’s Germany during the same period…

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Horst Wessel: Nazi Martyr (Ken Magazine, 1939)

This 1939 article from Ken Magazine lays out the real story of the life and death of Nazi storm trooper Horst Wessel (1907 – 1930) – not the one believed by the fascists he left behind:

In Germany, 1930, a pimp killed another pimp for cutting in on his girl’s territory. The slain pimp was a Nazi named Horst Wessel. Then Hitler came into power, and propagandist Goebbels, in need of a ‘Hell-rouser’, dreamed up the Wessel legend, made him an official Nazi martyr-saint.’

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Wrong Turn at Gallipoli (Ken Magazine, 1938)

This is an opinion piece written at a time when the world stood at the doorstep of World War II. The writer went to some length to outline the fatal error made just one generation earlier and how the sins were to be paid for by their sons and daughters:

The world of today, an upheaval of antagonisms heading toward destructive war, was not inevitable. Russia need not have fallen to the Bolshevists, Germany to the Nazis, Italy to the Fascists. The United States need not have entered the Great War. Two million men slain in battle need not have died. These consequences resulted from a decision of a few men during the World War.


He argued that the Dardanelles Campaign is where the whole war went sideways.


Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.

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A German Dissident Recalls His Incarceration (Ken Magazine, 1938)

Locked-up for having run an underground newspaper in the Third Reich, this is the harrowing story one dissident’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps:

What a relief it would be to take that uniformed scoundrel by the throat, throw him on the floor, pay him back for his beating, yell ‘You dog! You swine!’

•Read about the American reporter who became a Nazi…•

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