The Literary Digest

Articles from The Literary Digest

The Suffragettes Appeal To The States (Literary Digest, 1894)

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.

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The Monument at Vimy Ridge (The Literary Digest, 1936)

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.

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France, Germany & Alsace-Lorraine (Literary Digest, 1900)

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.

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Liquid Fire (Literary Digest, 1916)

– 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.

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The German View of the Next War (Literary Digest, 1912)

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.

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Germany Defends It’s Military Build Up (Literary Digest, 1913)

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.

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Franco-American Relations After W.W. I (Literary Digest, 1927)

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.

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Bertrand Russell on American Idealism (The Literary Digest, 1922)

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.

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Who Are the Italian Fascists? (The Literary Digest, 1921)

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’Italiastyle=border:none. The Fascists saw the destruction of Italian socialism as their primary job.

Who Are the Italian Fascists? (The Literary Digest, 1921) Read More »