The Literary Digest

Articles from The Literary Digest

Scrambling for Oil (Literary Digest, 1921)

Even as early as 1921 the world was noticing that in the U.S., that old Yankee mantra about avoiding foreign entanglements (a distortion of Washington’s Farewell Address) was being updated with a disclaimer: avoid foreign entanglements except when oil is involved.


Having put the Prussians in their place three years earlier, oil had become the new peace-time obsession for the Americans and their British ally – but it was to be the bane in their relationship: the Anglo-American irritant as Sydney Brooks remarked in FORTNIGHT REVIEW. With car manufacturers filling orders to placate a booming consumer market, the Brits pumped oil in Mesopotamia, the Americans in Texas while the oil companies from both locals vied for the rights to explore Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Protestant Churches Condemn the KKK (The Literary Digest, 1922)

A couple of years after the membership lists of the Ku Klux Klan had swelled to record levels, and just seven years after a chic Hollywood film director made a movie that ennobled their crimes,the Administrative Committee of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America issued a statement which served to distance the Protestant churches from that hate-filled organization.


From Amazon: Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930style=border:none

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Grim Determination on the German Home Front (Literary Digest, 1916)

This report, filed from Switzerland, stood in stark contrast to hundreds of other articles previously published by the Allied presses that reported how regretful the Germans were for having provoked war and how economic privations were making them even more-so. This unnamed journalist insisted that the German home front that he saw in 1916 was composed of a proud and determined people who were fully prepared to see the war through to a German victory.

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T.E. Lawrence: Tiresome Literary Celebrity (Literary Digest, 1933)

Hannen Swaffer (1879 – 1962), long-time dead British journalist who once presided as the Grand Pooh-Bah of Fleet Street’s chattering classes declared in this editorial that one by one the war heroes of the past are being debunked and now it is Lawrence’s turn…


Read these various accounts that serve as proof that there is a life after this one.

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T.E. Lawrence and the Literary Coup of 1935 (Literary Digest, 1935)

The accidental death of T.E. Lawrence (1888 – 1935) triggered an event within the publishing world that was much discussed in all quarters:

THE SATURDAY REVIEW of LITERATURE, weekly guide-post for the literati, last week scooped the world with an air-tight exclusive story that was scheduled to be front page news fourteen years hence. The editorial coup was a review of Thomas Edward Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) final book, The Mintstyle=border:none, which by the terms of his will was not to be made known to the world until 1950.

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M.G.M. Casting Director Billy Grady Tells All (Literary Digest, 1936)

Back in the day, he was responsible for casting 91,000 film actors each year, he was,

Hollywood’s No. 1 casting director, Billy Grady: broad-shouldered, open-faced Irishman, a terror to counterfeits, a down-right softy when he encounters an honest man – or woman.

This article tells much of his life story and provides a blow-by-blow as to what his days were like. One of the more interesting aspects of the article addressed the charities that were designed to aid and comfort those many souls who worked as extras in the movies. Today, extra players (also known as ‘atmosphere) are extended benefits through the Screen Actors Guild – but this was not always the case.

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‘Troublesome Mesopotamia” (Literary Digest, 1920)

This is a very interesting magazine article concerning the 1920s British experience in Iraq (Mesopotamia); regardless as to where the reader stands concerning the 2003 Iraq War, you will find a striking similarity in the language used in this piece and the articles printed prior to the U.S. infantry surge of 2008:

Unless there is a complete change of policy, Mesopotamia, which has been the grave of empires, is now likely to be the grave of the Coalition.


Click here to read more articles about the British struggle for 1920s Mesopotamia.

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Germany and the German-Americans (Literary Digest, 1897)

The attached article briefly recalls the general discomfort that the German government experienced when confronted with a unique social sect called German-Americans. As handsome and affable as they might have been, these volk still irked the Kaiser and his administrators to a high degree, although this article points out that the Fatherland was warming to them slowly.


This article makes a number of references to the Bancroft Treaty and how the agreement pertained to a particular German-American family named Meyer. After years spent in the U.S., Meyer the elder returned to Germany along with his wife and children – the story became a news-worthy when it was revealed that his draft-age son, a naturalized Yank, resisted military conscription and was thrown in the hoosegow. It was at that moment when the American embassy stepped forward.


Not surprisngly, Hitler didn’t like German-Americans any better than the Kaiser…

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