Articles from Liberty Magazine
“General Storrs said, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the uncrowned king of Arabia.'”
“Now it all came back to me!
This was the man Todd Gilney had spoken of – the man who had fostered the Arab revolt against Turkish rule. He was the leader who had singlehandedly welded a hundred warring desert tribes into a compact fighting force which now protected Allenby’s right wing.”
“General Storrs said, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the uncrowned king of Arabia.'”
“Now it all came back to me!
This was the man Todd Gilney had spoken of – the man who had fostered the Arab revolt against Turkish rule. He was the leader who had singlehandedly welded a hundred warring desert tribes into a compact fighting force which now protected Allenby’s right wing.”
When Hitler and Mussolini declared that they would no longer import Hollywood films for viewing, they inadvertently gave birth to a new kind of Hollywood – a Hollywood that would now produce movies criticizing European Fascism.
Read about Mission to Moscow (Warner Brothers, 1943) – made when Hollywood wished not to offend Stalin…
Attached are two articles by American journalist Lowell Thomas (1892 – 1981) regarding all that he witnessed while reporting on General Edmund Allenby’s campaign against Johnny Turk in the Sinai and Palestine Theater during the First World War. This reminiscence was written many years after the war in an effort to make up for the fact that “after eighteen years, no clear-cut account of Allenby’s campaign has been set down.”
Click here to read about Lawrence of Arabia…
“What is the reason for Il Duce’s newly acquired antisemitism? Why the new laws degrading the Jews of Italy? There are hardly 60,000 native-born Jews in all Italy. Many Italians have never laid eyes on a Jew. Antisemitism played no part in Italian life until Il Duce determined to banish the Jews into a moral and material ghetto.”
Between the years 1913 through 1920, FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels:
“Roosevelt had not been in office a month before he gave out a public statement urging a more adequate navy:”
“‘The navy is not fit for war. We have today only sixteen ships we can send effectively against the first line of the enemy.'”
Throughout a good deal of the Great Depression (1929 – 1940), FDR liked to think he was cozying-up to the voters when he insulted the great captains of industry with mean names like “selfish” and “stubborn”. All that ended when the war started, and the President had to make common cause with these men in order gain their cooperation in meeting the military needs of the nation. This article concerns the importance of the industrial might of Detroit.
“Womanhood is industrialized in Germany today. The Führer has decreed that maternity is a state function, subject to production regulations like any part of the planned economy of the Third Reich. Sex has been regimented no less than the airplane industry. Love is now mechanized and runs on a twenty-four-hour schedule, with the slogan: Germany needs children.”
Retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (1881 – 1940) was well known for his 1935 book, War is a Racket in which he summed-up his military career as one in which he served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers”; he wrote of the importance of removing the profitability from war and cautioned his countrymen to be weary of American military adventurism. In this essay, Butler warned of well-healed, deep-pocketed “peace” organizations and prophesied that institutions like the League of Nation and the U.N. would be incapable of stopping wars (he got that right).
This interview with Barbara Stanwick (b. Ruby Catherine Stevens 1907 – 1990) will give you a genuine insight to her character, its a wonderful read.
“Business is just as important to this nation as food and drink is to the human body. And every effort that retards it in any way affects the entire nation… It was [the New Deal’s] attack on business that destroyed the confidence of businessmen generally.”
As editor-in-chief of Liberty Magazine, Bernarr Macfadden (1868 – 1955) asked an important question:
“What is the matter with this country? Why is it we are credited with being the last to recover from the world-wide Depression? As the wealthiest nation in the world we should have been the first?”
What was to be done with all the racketeers who dominated the Twenties once Prohibition was prohibited? Organizing the collective labor of truck drivers seemed to have been the most obvious project for the kingpins, but what of the average foot soldier?
“Even the rank and file have not been driven to the breadline. Current quotations for gunmen have fallen from $300 a week to as low as $100. Plain sluggers command even scantier wages. A fancy pineapple job once cost $250; by 1933 you could get a good workman for $50.”
Between the years 1941 and 1945 the United States achieved a level of power that the tyrants of yore only dreamed about:
“Clearly here was a phenomenon to make anyone sit up and take notice – a new kind of military machine, a new kind of global power that apparently could be delivered anywhere in the world, at any time… By building 75,000 to 100,000 planes yearly and by improving planes and motors, we have emerged suddenly as an air power…No other nation has made a comparable investment in carrier aviation. No other nation would dare to put an expeditionary force to sea against a nation strong in carriers and land -based aircraft…With the object of defending ourselves, we have solved one problem after another until we have stumbled on a formula for conquering most of the world.”
A similar article appeared twenty years earlier…
This article was published one month after the start of the war; it must have been a time when everyone had something to say about Harold Ickes (1874 – 1952) as he was composing the gas rationing laws for the home front. In this column, Ickes speaks for himself. He had been the one who saw to the President’s energy policy’s during the Great Depression and now he was FDR’s go-to-guy for gas during the war.
Hallett Abend (1884 – 1955) was an American journalist who lived in China for fifteen years. He covered the Sino-Japanese War during its early years and had seen first-hand the beastly vulgarity of the Japanese Army. After Pearl Harbor, the editor at Liberty turned to him in hopes that he would explain to the American reading public what kind of enemy they were fighting:
“In four and a half years of warfare [in China], the Japanese have taken almost no prisoners… Chinese prisoners of war are shot.”
This is a primary source article by a reporter who rode in the armored vehicles of the British Army during the Libyan campaign of 1942:
“It seemed incredible that in the melee either side could know whom or what they were firing at. The best I could do was identify the burning tanks: white smoke for the petrol-driven British – black smoke for the Diesel oil of the German tanks. There was plenty of both.”
“Probably never before has a country with three quarters of its army intact and the majority of its civilian population untouched by war surrendered so completely…In Tours, I ran into a French staff officer I had met on a trip to the Maginot Line in the quieter days of the war. It seemed incredible that then we had believed those fortifications would render France invincible. As we waited in a traffic jam, he told me the real story of the Ninth Army, which held the section adjoining the end of the Maginot Line, and which broke with such disastrous results…”
