The Literary Digest

Articles from The Literary Digest

‘Making the Immigrant Unwelcome” (Literary Digest, 1921)

To read this 100-year-old article is to understand that the inhumane conditions of today’s alien detention centers on the Southwest border are a part of a larger continuum in American history. This article addressed the atrocious conditions and brutality that was the norm on Ellis Island in the Twenties.

But it is not the stupidity of the literacy test alone that is to be condemned. It is its inhumanity.

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50,000 Klansmen March in Washington, D.C. (Literary Digest, 1925)

A report on the August, 1925 KKK march in Washington, D.C.:
The parade itself marshaled ‘from 50,000 to 60,000 white-robed men and women’ as the correspondent of the The New York Times estimates, and H.L. Mencken tells us in the New York Sun:

The Klan put it all over its enemies. The parade was grander and gaudier, by far than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour. When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill – a full mile of Klansmen…


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

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The Missing Confederate Gold (Literary Digest, 1912)

For many it will come as no surprise that the Confederate States of America entered it’s twilight with the same hubris and cupidity that gave it life. This 1912 article solved a mystery: what had become of the gold and silver from the vaults of the CSA when it finally became clear to all that the rebellion was over.


Click here to read a memoir of the Union victory parade in 1865 Washington.

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Italy Condemned (Literary Digest, 1935)

Any of us born after 1945 have seen this before: the United Nations condemns a dreadful dictator and sends him a mean email and the dictator deletes it (Sadam Hussein was condemned 17 times by the U.N.) – but this was the first time it happened in the Twenties. The League of Nations condemned Mussolini for the Ethiopia invasion, and Mussolini couldn’t have cared less.

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The Passive Resistance of the Native Population (Literary Digest, 1938)

Recently former Viceroy Graziani cabled Mussolini that ‘my surveys demonstrate that tranquility is absolute. The native population is with Italy.’ But a writer in the Tribuna of Rome admitted that ‘nobody must delude himself with the idea that the former Shoan-Galla ruling caste have resigned themselves to the loss of their privileges and have welcomed our Italian Empire.’

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The Italian Conquest of Ethiopia (Literary Digest, 1937)

A column about Mussolini’s Minister of Colonies, Emilio De Bono (1866 – 1944) and his popular book, La Preparazione E Le Prime Operazioni:

Last week, with the appearance of a third printing, following a sold-out second edition (both of which were marked for publication in 1937), Italians at home and abroad noted certain deletions, including the passage which intimated that Mussolini had been on the point of abandoning his campaign in the face of British armed intervention.

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‘War Fears in Italo-Ethiopia Rift” (Literary Digest, 1935)

A report on the start of the Italian adventures in Ethiopia:

The dispute arose over alleged trespasses by Ethiopians on Italian possessions in Eritria and Italian Somaliland, in East Africa.

A solemn declaration of Abyssinia’s peaceful intentions toward Italy was read in broken but emphatic Italian to representatives of the foreign press in Rome by the nervous and impassioned Negradsa Yesus, Abyssinian Charge d’ Affaires. In fervent tones he asserted that Abyssinia’s intentions were so peaceful ‘that if Italy remained without a single soldier and without a single gun in her colonies, Abyssinia would not touch a single stone.’


Mussolini explained why he invaded Ethiopia in this article…

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The Terror of the Nazi Stormtroopers (Literary Digest, 1933)

This piece reported that the Manchester Guardian journalists who were posted to Nazi Germany were, without a doubt, the most reliable sources on all matters involving the violence committed by those brown shirted thugs during the earliest days of Hitler’s reign:

The ‘Brown terror does not exist in Germany, according to the Hitler dictatorship.

Even to talk about it is a penal offense. But the ‘Brown Terror’ goes on.


Read about the German POWs who were schooled in virtues of democracy.

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Marijuana in the Thirties (Literary Digest, 1938)

During the closing days of 1937, Clarence Beck, Attorney General for the State of Kansas made a radio address on the Mutual Broadcasting System concerning the growing popularity of Marijuana:

It Is estimated the Narcotic Bureau of the New York Police Department in 1936 alone destroyed almost 40,000 pounds of marijuana plants, found growing within the city limits. Because of its rapidly increasing use, Marijuana demands a price as high as $60 a pound. (continued)

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