The Literary Digest

Articles from The Literary Digest

‘Where Moscow Is Teaching China to see Red” (Literary Digest, 1927)

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

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1921 Saw Many Single European Women Moving to the U.S. (Literary Digest, 1921)

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.

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Junk Science and Immigration Policy (Literary Digest, 1917)

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 Facestyle=border:none:

…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.

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The Case Against Football (Literary Digest, 1897)

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.

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