The Literary Digest

Articles from The Literary Digest

Japan Rejects the Washington Naval Treaty (Literary Digest, 1935)

The first successful attempt in world history to limit armaments was marked for the scrap-heap on December 31, 1936, when Hirosi Saito, the slim and smiling Japanese Ambassador to the United States, bowed himself into the State Department building in Washington last Saturday and handed to Secretary Cordell Hull a document that the world has expecting for many months – Japan’s formal denunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty.


Click here to read about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.

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The Increased Suicide Rate (Literary Digest, 1933)

With the arrival of the Great Depression came an increase in American suicides. When this article appeared on the newsstands the Depression was just three and a half years old – with many more years yet to come. As the Americans saw 1932 come to a close, the records showed that 3,088 more acts of self-immolation had taken place than had been recorded the year before.


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

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‘The Battle of the Somme” by Philip Gibbs (Literary Digest, 1917)

This book review was published in an American magazine shortly after President Wilson and the U.S. Congress declared war on the Germany. The book in question, The battle of the Somme, was written by Philip Gibbs (1877 – 1962). Highly respected among his peers and the reading public, Gibbs was knighted for his efforts at the war’s end but soon he let the world know what he really thought of the war and, in particular, his feelings concerning General Douglas Haig.


Gibbs wrote a number of books that were critical of war, click here to read a review of More That Must Be Told (1921).

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No More Parades’ by Ford Madox Ford (Literary Digest, 1926)

The attached article is a 1926 review of Ford Madox Ford’s (1873 – 1939) novel, No More Parades, his second in a series of four related novels concerning the Great War. Billed as the most highly praised novel of the year, the reviewer lapses into superlatives and exults:

Not since Three Soldiers has a novel of the war made such an impression on reviewers as Ford Madox Ford’s No More Parades… All our ‘intellectuals’ are reading it…our young intellectual novelists will be heavily influenced by it or will attempt to imitate a whole-cloth imitation of it.


Ford was a veteran of the war who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers; the article is illustrated with a black and white photo of the author standing shoulder to shoulder with Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

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The Victory Parade Down Pennsylvania Avenue (Literary Digest, 1919)

Here is a reminiscence of the grand parade following the close of America’s bloody Civil War. It took two days; with the Army of the Potomac marching on the first day followed by General Sherman’s Army of the West on the next. The Grand Review was the brain-child of Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton and was attended by (so it was believed) over one hundred thousand people from the victorious Northern states.


From Amazon: Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil Warstyle=border:none

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Turning Back The Fashion Revolution (Literary Digest, 1929)

Periodically we run across articles on this subject and it makes us sit up and recognize that this must have been a constant fear for numerous women (and fashion journalists) during the Twenties. Each article centers on a widespread belief that the Deep State behind the fashion industry had plans afoot to force women back into long skirts and corsets and that women would not be allowed any say in the matter.


Click here to read a similar article and here to read our other article on the subject.

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Wilson’s Fourteen Points (Literary Digest, 1919)

Here is a very simple list of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points can be printed off of a PDF by clicking the title above.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points were ignored at Versailles and the United States withdrew it’s support for the historical conference in favor of two separate peace agreements made with Germany and Austria at a later date.


Click here to read more magazine articles about President Woodrow Wilson.

Read a 1936 article concerning Hitler’s Versailles Treaty violations.


The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Woodrow Wilson at number 18 insofar as his impact on the American mind is concerned – click here to understand his reasoning…

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Military Expenditures: 1908 – 1913 (Literary Digest, 1935)

A printable chart calculated in millions of U.S. dollars (evaluated prior to the 1934 value), which lays out the military spending as it increased between the years 1908 through 1913. The nations taken into account are Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States.


Numerous articles about military spending prior to W.W. II in this section…

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‘Movies & Myths As Seen by an Insider” (Literary Digest, 1921)

This writer, Banjamin B. Hampton (1875 – 1932), having heard so much hokum about Hollywood, decided to write an article about all he knew about the place – he was a film director and a producer, so he knew plenty. He was especially irked by the number of young women who arrived at the dream factory each month only to be bamboozled and find themselves on the street before too long.

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