The Literary Digest – Page 19 – Old Magazine Articles

Oh Boy! Two-Way Video Chatting
(Literary Digest, 1927)

The attached jazz-age magazine article is about the creation of what we have come to call video communication; that is to say, the electronic compliance between telephone and video screen working in complete harmony in order that both participants can view one another during the conversation – and although one-sided, this did take place as early as 1927 when future President Herbert Hoover, in Washington, addressed an audience in New York (they were not viewed by the former).

Notable Flights 1919 – 1931
(the Literary Digest, 1935)

Attached herein is a printable list of the important record-breaking flights in aviation history that made the world sit up and take notice.

Unsuspected Qualities of Native American Music
(Literary Digest, 1908)

Attached is a brief article on the topic Native American music and the studies of Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838 – 1923), who had overseen a number of Native American archival recording sessions around the time this article appeared in print. Fletcher once wrote:

We find more or less of it in Beethoven and Schubert, still more in Schumann and Chopin, most of all in Wagner and Liszt.

A Bad Review for Enrico Caruso
(The Literary Digest, 1908)

André Tardieu (1876 – 1945),while writing for the French magazine TEMPS, committed to paper these unkind words regarding the Italian opera star Enrico Caruso (1873 – 1921) in an attempt, perhaps, to only slander Caruso’s many adoring American fans and the culture that created them.

…the American public admire only those artist’s for whom they pay dear.

The Drive on Undesirables
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

Some were called Lishentsi, some were called land lords, Romanov lackies, the rich, the elite or simply the middle class; no matter what the ruling Soviets labeled their preferred bogeymen, they wanted them out of the way. The attached article goes into some detail as to how this was done.

Military Buildup in Switzerland
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Little Switzerland will not be caught as Belgium was in 1914. The ‘Isle of Peace’, home of the League of Nations that was to forge all nations of the world together into a chain of amity, is fortifying her frontiers to the tune of war-rumbles. The army and air forces are being expanded in preparation for that ‘inevitable’ war Europe seems to be resigned to. She realizes that the only way to preserve her peace is to be prepared to fight for it.

A Swiss statesman, in an interview with correspondents, summed up his individual reaction, which probably holds good for the majority of the population, when he said:
War will come. We will try to stay out at any price, save our liberty. The moment a foreign soldier crosses our border, we will fight.
And you may rest assured that we shall fight to the last man.

The Need for French Military Glory
(Literary Digest, 1900)

Appearing on newsstands fourteen years prior to the outbreak of the First World War was this small piece from THE LITERARY DIGEST declaring that the thirst for military glory was woven into the very fiber of the French Republic:

Not within the memory of living men has France been the mistress of continental Europe; yet the memory of her military glory is still vivid among her people, and the expressions of many of her writers show that she has not given up her proud preeminence.
Revenge for Sedan is a sentiment necessary to our national existence.

Click here to read a 1912 article about the expansion of the Imperial German Navy.

Eleanor Roosevelt Was a Very Different First Lady
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

Written not too long after she assumed the title First Lady; Eleanor Roosevelt (1906 – 1975) was causing a dust-up in Washington:

With the Constitution making no provision whatever for the duties of President’s wives, they have heretofore confined their activities largely to the social side of the white House.

Mrs. Roosevelt’s governmental activities are approved by those who see in them altruism, sympathy for the downtrodden, and a great desire to serve others. Her activities are opposed by those who feel that she is not properly a public servant because she is not responsible to the American electorate or directly accountable to it at election time.

A Page from the Dartmouth Play Book Praised
(Literary Digest, 1930)

In one of his weekly columns for the year 1930, Sol Metzger (1880 – 1932) praised the well-coordinated teamwork of the Dartmouth boys for a surprising play they deployed in their contest against Harvard a year earlier (Crimson ate it 34 to 7).

The play is diagrammed and can easily be printed.

Chateau-Thierry: Setting the Record Straight
(Literary Digest, 1919)

It has been said that when the U.S. Army’s senior staff officers had learned of the great victory that the U.S. Marines had achieved at the Bois de Belleau in the summer of 1918, one of them had remarked, Those head-line hunting bastards! When reading this next piece you will immediately get a sense that the army was fed-up with the folks at home believing that the same Marines were responsible for the Army’s success at Chateau-Thierry. The war was already over by the time this piece appeared, making it clear to all that Chateau-Thierry was a feather in the cap for the Army.

Click here to read an article about the American snipers in W.W. I France.
Click here to read about W.W. I art.

The War Encouraged Prohibitionists
(Literary Digest, 1917)

An editorial cartoon made to illustrate that some of the combatant nations across the sea had taken measures to discourage liquor consumption and with the recent U.S. Declaration of war, America would be doing the same thing (only on a far more radical level)…

President Hoover’s Farewell Address
(Literary Digest, 1933)

With FDR waiting in the wings, eagerly anticipating the start of his administration, the outgoing president, Herbert Hoover (1874 – 1964), made his farewell address to the cash-strapped nation:

Warning against the ‘rapid degeneration into economic war which threatens to engulf the world’ the President said that ‘the imperative call to the world today is to prevent that war.’ The gold standard, he said ‘is the need of the world,’ for only by the early reëstablishment of that standard can the barriers to trade be reduced.’

Read about the Great Depression and the U.S. auto industry during the last year of the Hoover presidency…

Post-War French Opinions About Their American Allies
(Literary Digest, 1920)

Here are a few French thoughts regarding America’s late arrival in the war and some additional opinions on the matter of Uncle Sam’s inflated ego.

Click here to read an article by a grateful Frenchman who was full of praise for the bold and forward-thinking manner in which America entered the First World War.

The Red Cross Dogs
(Literary Digest, 1917)

There are canine sentries on duty on both sides in the Great War, and dogs that are dispatch-bearers. Marquis, a French dog, fell from a bullet-wound almost at the feet of a group of French soldiers to whom he bore a message across a shell-raked stretch of country. But the message was delivered!

Helmets Along the Western Front
(Literary Digest, 1915)

The tremendous advances in artillery that took place during the years leading up to the war helped to reintroduce an old, time-tested element to the uniforms of the 20th Century soldier: the helmet.

So numerous were head injuries from high-explosive shells during the first year of the war that it compelled the doctors on both sides to beg their respective generals to issue some measure of cranium protection in order to reduce the casualty figures. As you will read in the attached article, the French began to wear helmets in the fall of 1915; the British and Germans a year later.

General John Rawlins: General Grant’s Chief of Staff
(The Literary Digest, 1917)

Attached is a review of a biography covering the life and times of Brigadier General John Rawlins (1831 – 1869). Rawlins distinguished himself as the Chief of Staff to General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. It is explained that the two met while Grant was engaged as a sales clerk at a leather shop which was owned by Rawlin’s brother; at the outbreak of the war, in 1861, Grant’s skill as an officer became clear to many and with each promotion he was able to secure Rawlins’ certain advancements in grade. By 1863 Rawlins was promoted to Brigadier General. During Grant’s term in the White House, Rawlins served as Secretary of War.
The author of the book, Major-General James Harrison Wilson, is remembered as the man who captured Confederate President Jefferson Davis in flight; the review of his autobiography can be read here.

‘Lady Macbeth of Mzensk” by Dmitri Shostakovich
(Literary Digest, 1935)

The Cleveland Orchestra, on February 5 [1935], with Arthur Rodzinski conducting, will introduce to New York ‘Lady Macbeth of Mzensk’, an opera by twenty-eight year-old Soviet composer, Dmitri Shostakovich.

Shostakovich completed the work in December, 1932. It is the first of a projected cycle of four operas in which the composer plans to trace the condition of women in Russia…

The First Five Year Plan
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

A 1933 magazine article that reported on the success of the Soviet Union’s first (of many) Five Year Plans.

The myriad five year economic development plans dreamed-up by the assorted butchers of the dear dead Soviet Union all had one thing in common that was never lost on the Russian people: they always involved the construction of new factories, but never the construction of new housing.

Additional magazine and newspaper articles about the Cold War may be read on this page.