Articles from The Literary Digest
Attached is a chart pulled from a 1936 issue of THE LITERARY DIGEST that reported on the U.S. urban homicide rate spanning the years 1926 through 1935. It indicates that the murder rate began climbing during the economic depression (from 8.8 in 1928); the years 1934 through 1936 saw a steady decline in urban homicide, more than likely as a result of the end of Prohibition.
To those of us living in the digital age, the concept that the pilots of an airplane race should be segregated by gender in order to compete seems just like a dictate from Sharia law – but for our great-grandfathers, it made perfect sense. This article is about the Women’s Air Derby of 1929, which had a list of women pilots that read like the Who’s Who of 1920s women aviation.
Amelia Earhart was one of the competitors.
This article tells the story of Susan B. Anthony, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw and the gang as they worked the state conventions in a effort to gain the right to vote. In states with large Republican majorities, they swore to vote vote Republican, in states with large Democratic majorities they promised to support that party:
The State Woman-Suffrage Association should remain non-partisan and each individual woman should feel free to ally herself with whatever party she approves.
This remarkable aeroplane gun is the invention of Lieutenant-Colonel Isaac N. Lewis of the United States Army Coast Artillery Corps. Curiously enough, the gun was designed primarily for infantry and cavalry use.
Click here to read a 1918 article about the Lewis Gun.
The attached article was written nineteen years after the smoke cleared over Vimy Ridge and succinctly tells the story of that battle in order that we can better understand why thousands of Canadian World War One veterans crossed the ocean a second time in order to witness the unveiling of the memorial dedicated to those Canadians who died there:
Walter S. Allward (1876 – 1955), Canadian sculptor, worked fourteen years on the completion of the monument, which cost $1,500,000.
The article also touches upon some of the weird events that have taken place at Vimy Ridge since the war ended…
Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.
A printable article that illustrated the sensitive diplomatic status existing between France, Britain and Germany in 1900 when France was still smarting from their humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War; recently allying themselves with Imperial Russia, Germany felt extremely ill at ease. The kaiser’s diplomats remarked openly that Britain, as the abusive tormentors of the Boer farmers in South Africa, were not likely to be on friendly terms with Germany any time soon.
– A well-illustrated article which sought to explain to American readers the workings of one of the most heinous inventions of the First World War:
This idea of projecting upon the adverse trenches and their occupants a rain of liquid fire was no sudden afterthought of the German mind. It was conceived, studied, and perfected for several years before the war, and its history may be traced in the German patent office.
Attached is a short review of a book that turned many heads in the diplomatic circles of Europe in 1911: Germany And The Next War, written by Germany’s General von Bernhardi (1849 – 1930):
A very influential military writer in Germany declares that Germany must win her place as a world power through warfare.
The book sales in Germany were quite meager up until the first shot was fired in August of 1914, when they picked up considerably.
A defense was offered for the growth of German military expenditures based on the spread of Slavik pride and the rise of a great Pan-Slavonic movement due to victory of their kinsmen in the Balkans. German leaders, furthermore, felt a deep uneasiness about the fact that about one-third of the population of the Hapsburg Monarchy consisted of Slavs and therefore felt that military aid from the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not guaranteed in the event of a war with Russia and France.
Ten years after America entered the First World War, thrice elected French Prime-Minister André Tardieu (1876 – 1945) put pen to paper and came up with a book about the complicated relations between France and the United States Devant l’Obstacle (1927):
They go on repeating the words ‘American friendship’ without realizing that America as a nation does not want friendships, and separates herself from her political associates the moment she can do so, as unceremoniously as she did in 1919, when she signed a separate peace with Germany. Few French students know or remember that less than twenty years after Lafayette left the American shores, America was at war with the country to which she virtually owed her freedom…
Click here to read another article in which André Tardieu slanders the Americans.
Click here should you wish to read good thoughts by a Frenchman concerning America’s entry into W.W. I.
British thinker Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of 1922 American society came up and this report is just one example. On a speaking tour in the United States, the Cambridge Professor opined that
love of truth [is] obscured in America by commercialism of which pragmatism is the philosophical expression; and love of our neighbor kept in fetters by Puritan morality.
He would have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.
There have been other ‘Fasci’ before the present, for the word, derived from Latin ‘fascia’ (a bandage), means any league or association. Thus, the association of laborers and sulfur-workers, that caused the agrarian agitation in Sicily in 1892, were called Fasci… the essence of the word being the close union of different elements in a common cause that binds them all together. Each ‘Fascio’ possesses so-called ‘squadre de azione’ (squadrons of action), composed of young men who have mostly served in the war. Each of these ‘squadrons’ has a commandant, named by the directing council of the particular Fascio.
In Milan there existed a general committee that supervised all these yahoos, but by enlarge, each local Fascio was free to do as they saw fit within their own domains. The earliest ‘Fasci di Combattimento’ were created in 1919 by Mussolini, who at the time enjoyed some popularity as the editor of the Il Popolo d’Italia
Attached is a 1927 American magazine article that reported on the Soviet influence taking place in China. Attention is paid to the activities of a young Soviet named Karl Berngardovich Radek (born Karol Sobelsohn: 1885 – 1939):
Russia has been the only country to assist the Nationalist China movement to which they all hope to devote their lives. Men who believe in the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ have furnished much of the brain-power that has organized, directed and articulated the Chinese popular uprising in it’s successful Northern drive…As far as foreign culture is concerned, China is still much more deeply steeped in American and British idealism than in those of modern Russia
The death and disfigurement of over four million young men during the course of the First World War (1914 – 1918) created an enormous problem for the women of Europe:
A French statesman recently estimated that in his country there are now 1,000,000 women for whom there are no mates, while similar conditions exist also in England, Italy, Germany and Austria.
This article makes clear that in a quest for husbands, half a million women had arrived in the U.S. following the end of hostilities and it was further believed that by the close of 1921 another half million will have landed.
The melting pot in this sense is applied to the race-conscious study of forensic anthropology. This article concerns the work of Dr. Ales Hrdlika (1869-1943) of the National Museum of Washington, and the records that he maintained regarding the physical features of the earliest European settlers compared to the Americans of the early Twentieth Century (read: Jews and Italians), following so many generations of immigration and intermarriage.
What is amusing is the illustration of The American Face
…the diagram drawn to scale from Dr. Hrdlicka’s data… shows the mean man of the old American stock. It is pointed out that the most conspicuous peculiarities of the type are the oblong outline of the face and the well-developed forehead.
Today the word football summons forth images of gigantic, vigorous and fully televised athletes sporting protective padding while surrounded by enthusiastic fans and well-compensated cheerleaders; yet, one hundred years ago, that same word made one think of embalmers, tombstones and weeping mothers. Football’s popularity had been increasing since the 1870s, and by the end of the Nineteenth Century the sport had amassed a lengthy casualty list. Footballers continued to keep the American medical establishment and sundry funeral directors fully employed up to the year 1910, when helmets and padding were introduced with some success.
The attached article is from an 1897 issue of THE LITERARY DIGEST and it reported on a strong civic movement to ban the sport of football.
Click here if you would like to see three editorial cartoons denouncing football from the same era.
While strong on land and in the air, [the Soviet Union] is weak on the water. Most Russian ships are World War or pre-War in origin, and many of her best vessels are in the Baltic, facing Germany, or in the Far East, where Japan looms up.
An article about American pilot Ruth Elder (1902 – 1977), who attempted to be the first woman aviator to fly to Paris; crashing in the Atlantic mid-flight:
she has to her credit the longest flight made entirely over water, beating the Pacific fliers by about 200 miles…She will rank with the most daring fliers of this year of aerial wonders.
Elder parlayed her notoriety into a starring roll in a Hollywood movie that came out the following year: Moran of the Marines.
Read a 1918 article about the women’s city.
