Pathfinder Magazine

Articles from Pathfinder Magazine

Speeches by Hitler and Chamberlain Compared (Pathfinder Magazine, 1940)

We shall fight until the terror of the plutocracies has been broken.


– so blathered Adolf Hitler in a radio address from early 1940 in which he attempted to clarify the Nazi war aims. Never forgetting that the zi in Nazi is derived from Sozi for socialist (Compare with ‘Commie’ for ‘Communist’) – the dictator was heard here doing what he did from time to time in his speeches; borrowing the street hustle of the proletarian underdog (many thanks to WIKIanswers).


Click here to read another article on the same topic.

Speeches by Hitler and Chamberlain Compared (Pathfinder Magazine, 1940) Read More »

The Women Voter in Her First Five Elections (Pathfinder Magazine, 1940)

This is an interesting article that indicates just how profoundly elections had changed after 1920, when women began to vote. Previously, when the voting booth was a gender-specific domain, the victory margins were seldom greater than 10%; yet, beginning with the 1920 presidential election and continuing through the election of 1936, dramatic differences could be seen between the winners and losers that had never existed in prior contests.


The journalist believed that the advent of radio broadcasting also played a contributing factor in these elections.


Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.

The Women Voter in Her First Five Elections (Pathfinder Magazine, 1940) Read More »

The Wages and Hours Bill (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937, 1938)

This article recorded portions of the battle on Capitol Hill that were waged between the Spring and Winter of 1937 when Congress was crafting legislation that would establish a minimum wage law for the nation’s employees as well as a maximum amount of working hours they would be expected to toil before additional payments would be required. This legislation would also see to it that children were removed from the American labor force. The subject at hand is the Black-Connery Bill and it passed into law as the Fair Labor Standards Act.

The Wages and Hours Bill (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937, 1938) Read More »

African-Americans During the Great Depression (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

Written during the later years of the Great Depression, these columns summarize the sad lot of America’s Black population – their hardships, ambitions, leadership, and where they tended to live.

When the Depression struck, Negroes were the first to lose their jobs. Today, 1,500,000 colored adults are unemployed.


A 1938 article about the hardships of the Southern States during the Great Depression can be read here…


Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.

African-Americans During the Great Depression (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939) Read More »

KRISTALLNACHT (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

Herschel Grynszpan (1921 – ?) was a Polish-Jewish refugee born in Germany who, on his own volition, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris in 1938. This murder prompted the Nazis to terrorize the Jewish population throughout Germany and Austria the very next day (November 8) in an event that was called Kristallnacht. This article covers the murder and the senseless horror that followed; attention was also paid to the reactions from various capital cities.

In Vienna, Storm Troopers fired 18 synagogues, shot a Polish Jew in his bed, invaded homes and threw the furniture out the windows. Ten thousand Jews were arrested, at least 60 attempted suicide. Restaurants and grocery stores refused to sell to Jewas.

KRISTALLNACHT (Pathfinder Magazine, 1938) Read More »

Starvation in the San Joaquin Valley (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Renowned as an earthly paradise from whose rich soil the brilliant sun draws abundant crops of semi-tropical fruits, the Great Valley is today the state’s principal source of wealth. Last week, Californians were acutely conscious that the valley could also produce squalor, misery, disease and death…[The San Joaquin Valley] is host to 70,000 jobless, homeless families living in frightful squalor and privation….hopeless men and women sprawled in the sun as their ill-clad children played in the dirt.


Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

Starvation in the San Joaquin Valley (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937) Read More »