The Literary Digest – Page 7 – Old Magazine Articles

The Lampooning of Picasso (Literary Digest, 1913)

A child could do that has been one of the most common utterances in response to the avant-garde movements of modern art. This short article reflects that view and was written in response to the New York Armory Show, which at that time, was attracting a good deal of attention in the press. The Armory Show is well-remembered today as the first art exhibition to introduce European-style modernism to the people (and artists) of that city. Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), as the co-creator of Cubism, is among those lampooned, as is Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) for his painting, A Nude Descending the Staircase.

Another Picasso article can be read here…

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Their Freaky Religion (Literary Digest, 1938)

Last spring the Third Reich recognized a third official state religion: a neo-pagan cult based on Thor, Wotan, Siegfried and the old Nordic gods. It was especially favored by ultranazis and by Hitler’s black-shirted bodyguards, the Schutzstaffel or S.S. corps. The other two official German religions are Catholic and Protestant Evangelical, whose proponents today are deadlocked in combat with the up and coming neopagans.

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Mexican Hatred of the United States (Literary Digest, 1912)

This article was penned in 1912 by a Mexican editorial writer who shared his countryman’s deep distrust of American motives and believed that the United States is the natural enemy of Mexico:

No other people can have less friendship for this hostile neighbor than the Mexicans.

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Marcus Garvey: The Negro Moses (Literary Digest, 1922)

A profile of Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887 – 1940), Jr.; National Hero of Jamaica. During his lifetime Garvey worked as a publisher, a journalist, and an entrepreneur. A devoted Black nationalist and a black separatist, Marcus Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He rubbed a good many white folk the wrong way and this article from The Literary Digest covers much of his activities leading up to 1922.

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It All Began With Madame Curie (Literary Digest, 1921)

Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn’t possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.

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Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Many Firsts (The Literary Digest, 1937)

This magazine article explains what a unique force in presidential history Eleanor Roosevelt was. She defied convention in so many ways and to illustrate this point, this anonymous journalist went to some length listing fifteen firsts that this most tireless of all First Ladies had racked-up through the years.

Those councilors who advised FDR and the First Lady on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…

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American English is Better Than U.K. English… (Literary Digest, 1922)

E.B. Osborn of the London Morning Post reviewed H.L. Mencken’s book, The American Language (1921) and came away amused and in agreement with many of the same conclusions that the Bard of Baltimore had reached:

…Americans show superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness; for example, movie is better than cinema…The American language offers a far greater variety of synonyms than ours; transatlantic equivalents for drunk are Piffled, spifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged and burned.

Read about the Canadian Preferences in English…

– from Amazon: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century

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The Conversational Lenin (Literary Digest, 1921)

When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print. He wasn’t blathering on about the proletariat or the bourgeoisie but rather musing about his pastimes and dreams for the future.

On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. ‘Do you really read it?’ I asked. ‘I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,’ he said.’Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to find them.’

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Fascism’s Triumph Explained by Italian-American Journalists (Literary Digest, 1922)

At the request of The Literary Digest editors, a number of Italian-language journalists working in North America were asked to explain the great success that the Italian Fascists were experiencing in 1922 Italy. This article lists an enormous number of Italian language newspapers that existed in the United States at that time; virtually every medium-sized to large American city had one. We were surprised to find that the most pro-Mussolini Italian-American newspaper operating in the U.S. was located in New York City.

In the late Thirties, early Forties the FBI began to monitor the Italian-Americans who adored Mussolini – Click here to read about it

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Hitler: Ten Years Before his Rise (Literary Digest, 1923)

This article was written shortly after the French occupation of the Ruhr and at a time when Adolf Hitler did not have much of a following -he was something of a curiosity to the Western press:

A principal reason why Hitler’s followers have begun to doubt him, it appears, is that the ‘dreaded gathering’ of the National Socialists in Munich came and went without ‘accomplishment.’

Read about the earliest post-war sightings of Hitler: 1945-1955

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