The Literary Digest

Articles from The Literary Digest

The Forgotten Men and the NRA (Literary Digest, 1935)

A long program of suggested remedial legislation lies ahead of the 7,500 representatives of the people who gather this year in the halls of Congress and of all but four State Legislatures. The NRA (National Recovery Administration) will come under the closest scrutiny. As the old year waned, the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act)was being attacked and defended.

Click here to see a chart concerning the U.S. urban murder rate between the years 1926 – 1936.


In 1934, the NRA went to Hollywood and performed a task it was not legally obligated to do; click here to read about it…

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

Rumor has it that when the U.S. Army’s senior staff officers had learned of the 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, and no one else.

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Who Were the Young Turks? (Literary Digest, 1908)

This 1908 magazine article serves to define the Young Turk movement and present a brief history of those reformers who sought to modernize the government of Turkey and introduce a constitutional form of government that would benefit not only the Turks but also the people who reside within the dominions of the Ottoman Empire:

The program of the Young Turks includes individual liberty to all Ottomans; this liberty is to be inviolable excepting by process of law; the press is to be free, Ottomans may form commercial, industrial, or agricultural associations, so long as no law is infringed. All are to be equal before the law.

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A Call to Repeal the Japanese Exclusion Act (Literary Digest, 1935)

The anonymous journalist opened this 1935 magazine article explaining how the Indian caste system took root and reasoned as to why he believed such a system was an inevitability in the United States as well.

With the California Council on Oriental Relations waging an eloquent campaign for repeal of the Japanese Exclusion Act, a quota-basis solution is suggested.


Read another article about Asian immigration to California


Click here to read about the 1921 [anti-]Alien Land Bill in California.


You might also be interested in reading about the Yellow Peril in Canada.

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No Citizenship for Japanese Immigrants (Literary Digest, 1922)

An article that marks the date of November 13, 1922 as a poor one for the assembled masses who happened to have been of Japanese ancestry in the United States. On that date Justice George Sutherland (1862-1942), of the United States Supreme Court, handed down the ruling that the Japanese can not be citizens of this country. The opinions of many American Newspapers are presented herein, among them an excerpt from the St. Louis Star which summed up the opinion just so:

The law which prevents the naturalization of Japanese is plainly intended to exclude the Japanese because they are racially unassimlable and their presence creates economic difficulties.


You can read more about Justice Sutherland HERE…

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Citizenship Denied (Literary Digest, 1922)

This article reported that as of 1922, the United States Government saw fit to deny 19,000 immigrants U.S. citizenship. This number, when added to the other repatriated applicants of the previous ten years, totals up to 760,000 people; which was, at that time, more than the entire population of North Dakota. The Ellis Island based naturalization service classified all rejected immigrants in fifteen different categories, this reporter preferred to name just two: Ignorance and Immoral Character. Immoral Character speaks for itself. And Ignorance covers those who didn’t appear to know enough to exercise the rights of citizenship intelligently. Oddly, there seemed to have been no talk of amnesty.

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Citizenship Denied (Literary Digest, 1922)

This article reported that as of 1922, the United States Government saw fit to deny 19,000 immigrants U.S. citizenship. This number, when added to the other repatriated applicants of the previous ten years, totals up to 760,000 people; which was, at that time, more than the entire population of North Dakota. The Ellis Island based naturalization service classified all rejected immigrants in fifteen different categories, this reporter preferred to name just two: Ignorance and Immoral Character. Immoral Character speaks for itself. And Ignorance covers those who didn’t appear to know enough to exercise the rights of citizenship intelligently. Oddly, there seemed to have been no talk of amnesty.

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FDR Takes On the Great Depression (The Literary Digest, 1933)

All the editorial writers quoted in this 1933 article agreed that FDR was the first U.S. President to ever have faced a genuine economic calamity as that which was created by the Great Depression:

Look at the picture flung into the face of Franklin Roosevelt:

Ships are tied up in harbors and their hulls are rotting; freight trains are idle; passenger trains are empty; 11,000,000 people are without work; business is at a standstill; the treasury building is bursting with gold, yet Congress wrestles with a deficit mounting into the billions, the result of wild and extravagant spending; granaries are overflowing with wheat and corn; cotton is a drag on the market, food crops are gigantic and unsalable, yet millions beg for food; mines are shut down; oil industries are engaged in cutthroat competition; farmers are desperate, taking the law into their own hands to prevent foreclosures; factories are idle; industry is paralyzed…

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