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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

The Capture of General Hideko Tojo (Yank Magazine, 1945)

War correspondent George Burns reported on the momentous day when the American Army came to arrest the former Prime Minister of Imperial Japan, General Hideko Tojo (1884 – 1948). Tojo served as Japan’s Prime Minister between 1941 and 1944 and is remembered for having ordered the attack on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor, as well as the invasions of many other Western outposts in the Pacific. Judged as incompetent by the Emperor, he was removed from office in the summer of 1944.


This article describes the efforts of Lt. Jack Wilpers who is credited for prolonging the life of Tojo after his amateur suicide attempt and seeing to it that the man kept his date with the hangman. Nominated for the Bronze Star, he was decorated in 2010: read THE WASHINGTON POST article.

Warm Recollections of Marilyn (Pageant Magazine, 1971)

Nine years after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Hollywood reporter James Henaghan remembered his friendship with the star and their warm, unguarded moments together:

I guess I had known it all the time. I knew that I belonged to the public and to the world. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming, and the only home I ever had dreamed about.

When FDR Wrote a Script… (Coronet Magazine, 1947)

Here is an article by one of the foot soldiers of legendary silent movie producer Adolf Zukor, in which she recalled a time in 1923 when the future president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mailed an unsolicited photoplay (ie. script) to their offices in hopes of securing some measure of Hollywood immortality.

Knowing that FDR had tremendous power in both New York and Washington, Zukor instructed her to let him down gently; twenty years later Roosevelt would chuckle about his ambitions with her at a White House party.


President Lincoln had his own dreams and aspirations…

How Much Can the Germans Take? (Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

The attached 1941 Collier’s Magazine article reported on how the people of Berlin were faring after one solid year of R.A.F. bombing. By war’s end it was estimated that as many as 580,000 Germans had been killed as a result of the Allied bombing campaign (many of them were children and far more women than men). This article examines what Berlin life was like when the bombs fell.


Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.

The Question of Japanese Youth (PM Tabloid, 1945)

Far-flung correspondent Max Lerner (1902 – 1992) penned the attached editorial concerning the necessity of reëducation Japanese school children:

The Japanese youth are the key to Japan’s future. There were 12,000,000 of them in the elementary schools before the war, dressed in school uniforms, bowing before the Emperor’s portrait every day on entering and leaving… The values taught to him were feudal and fascist values, but the weapons given him were modern weapons. This is the combination that produced the suicide-squadrons of the Kamikaze.


A similar article about German youth can be read here.

Socialism Bad (The American Magazine, 1949)

It seems difficult to imagine, but this opinion writer felt America leaning toward socialism as far back as 1949:


While the people look more and more to Washington to do everything under the sun for them, the Federal Government hasn’t been discouraging them at all. On the contrary, the Administration has been repeatedly asking for more and more powers to use when it may see fit.


He is sympathetic to their feelings, but cautions his readers that Marxism looks alluring on the printed page – but it will simply lead to serfdom in the end

Hitler’s Economist (Literary Digest, 1937)

Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht (1877 – 1970) was the German economist who is credited with having stabilized that nation’s currency following the Wiemar Republic and made possible the Nazi quest of military rearmament:

Germany lacks the stuff of which tanks and guns and explosives are made . It lacks rubber, cotton, silk, copper, tin and iron ore. It lacks food for its 65,000,000 people and fodder for it cattle. So Dr. Schacht has laced German business and industry into a straight-jacket of rigid control, to conserve materials and exchange.


Although he never became a Nazi Party member, he was highly placed in the Reich. In the attached 1937 profile, you will learn that Schacht cautioned Hitler numerous times to remove the Socialist regulations that restrained the German economy from kicking in to high gear.


Click here to read an article that explains in great detail how the Nazi economic system (with it’s wage and price controls) was Marxist in origin.

Labor Abuses in the South (Focus Magazine, 1938)

Many of the back-handed dealings that would be addressed in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath are illustrated in the attached photo-essay titled, Slavery in America. This article is about the cruel world of the Deep South that existed in the Twenties and Thirties. It was an agrarian fiefdom where generations of White planters and factory owners practiced the most un-American system of exploitation and feudalism that developed and was perpetuated from the chaos wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was a nasty place where the working people of both races labored under conditions of peonage and bone-crushing poverty with no hope in sight.


Click here to read more about the American South during the Great Depression.

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