Recent Articles – Page 37 – Old Magazine Articles

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

The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse (PM Tabloid, 1943)

The reason the Nazis banned The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse was that it was a political preachment against Hitler ‘socialism,’ by a man [Fritz Lang] whose films were appreciated by the Germans as true interpretations of the social trends of post-war Germany… Lang’s intention in the film was, in his own words, ‘to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything which is precious to a people so that they would lose all faith in the institutions and ideals of the State. Then, when everything collapsed, they would try to find help in the new order.’

Yvonne De Carlo Arrives (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

A 1945 Collier’s Magazine article about Yvonne De Carlo (a.k.a. Lilly Munster: 1922 – 2007) that appeared shortly after her first big break in Hollywood, Salome, Where She Danced. At the time of this interview the actress had well-over fifteen minor films on her resume but the journalist chose to claim that Salome was her first, just for the unbelievable glamor of it all; he also chose to shave three years off her age.

Yvonne De Carlo was born twenty years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia…She was a featured dancer at Earl Caroll’s and earned the undying respect of the producer by tipping the scales at a svelte 115 pounds, standing on the runway at a mere 5 feet four inches, and by displaying an 11 -/2 -inch neck, a 36 bust, a 24 waist, 32 hips a 7 1/2 -inch ankle, and 15 2/3 -inch wrist.

The Strong Economy and its Effect on Fashion (Quick Magazine, 1951)

The antidote to the austere fashion deprivations of the 1930s and the wartime fabric restrictions that characterized the Forties arrived in the immediate post-war period when designers were at last permitted to make manifest their restrained cleverness and create an aesthetic style in a mode that was overindulgent in its use of fabric. This fashion revolt commenced in Paris, when Christian Dior showed his first collection in 1947 – couturiers in every style capitol in the West willingly kowtowed and a new era in fashion was born.

Should Movie Stars Be Expected to Fight, As Well? (Photoplay Magazine, 1942)

We were very surprised to read in the attached editorial that the whole idea of draft deferments for actors and other assorted Hollywood flunkies was not a scheme cooked-up by their respective agents and yes-men, but a plan that sprung forth from the fertile mind of the executive officer in charge of the Selective Service System: Brigadier General Lewis Blaine Hershey (1893 – 1977) in Washington.

Always one to ask the difficult questions, Ernest V. Heyn (1905 – 1995) executive editor of Photoplay posed the query Should Stars Fight? and in this column he began to weigh the pros-and-cons of the need for propaganda and an uninterrupted flow of movies for the home front, and the appearance of creating a new entitled class of pretty boys.

Twenty years earlier a Hollywood actor would get in some hot water for also suggesting that talented men be excused from the W.W. I draft…

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.’

Regretting the A-Bomb (Commonweal Magazine, 1945)

An anonymous columnist at The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the Atomic Bombs:

… we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (NY Times, 1920)

A remarkable book is this latest by Sinclair Lewis. A novel, yes, but so unusual as not to fall easily into a class. There is practically no plot, yet the book is absorbing. It is so much like life itself, so extraordinarily real. These people are actual folk, and there was never better dialogue written than their revealing talk.

Assemblies of God (Coronet Magazine, 1958)

The fastest-growing Protestant religion today is the Pentecostal movement… In barely half a century this dynamic young version of old-time fundamentalism has produced spectacularly successful leaders such as Oral Roberts and the late Aimee Semple McPherson, has won the devotion of at least 2,000,000 Americans of every racial and religious origin and through zealous foreign missionary work, has gained thousands of converts on every continent.

The Non-Success of Prohibition (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

Prohibition had been in place for a little over eleven and a half years by the time this uncredited editorial was published. The column is informative for all the trivial events that Prohibition had set in motion and are seldom remembered in our own time – such as the proliferation of private golfing institutions; clubs that intended to appear innocent enough, but were actually created for Wet dues-paying golfers. A recently posted article (1917) that appeared in THE LITERARY DIGEST near the end of 1929 examined the astronomical wealth that had been earned by the gangsters in America’s biggest cities.