Recent Articles – Page 49 – Old Magazine Articles

The Down-Hill Side of Being a Society Girl
(Collier’s Magazine, 1933)

The attached Collier’s article was written by two post-debs of the Boston/Manhattan variety who were both products of what they called the approval mill of America’s upper-crust. Having been run through the right schools and the right summer camps, they attended the right parties and made charming with all the right people; looking back in their 20s, they were able to see how this long-treasured practice prepared them poorly for life – tending to perpetuate the spiraling vortex of women who were educated and polite, yet unable to think.

Segregation Soviet-Style
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

As the April of 1949 was winding down, 11 members of the Communist Party U.S.A. were standing trial in a Federal courtroom spilling every secret they had in an all-out effort to lighten their load further down the road. Among these classified plots was a 1930s plan to invade the United States and create two separate Soviet republics – one White, the other Black. The region they had in mind for the African-Americans would cover nine of the old Confederate states.

A Quick Read About Soviet-Enforced Atheism Behind the Iron Curtain…

‘What Kind of Women are the WAACs?”
(Click Magazine, 1942)

They’re career women, housewives, professionals, factory hands, debutantes. They’ve taught school, modeled, supported themselves, as secretaries, salesgirls, mechanics. Single and married, white and colored, between the ages of 21 and 45, they’re corresponding with a beau, in Ireland, a husband Australia, or the ‘folks back home’ in Flatbush. But varied as their background may be, they’ve enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) with a common purpose: to get behind America’s fighting men and help win a lasting peace.

When well-versed in army-administrative methods, the WAAC will cause the transfer of 450 enlisted men to combat areas each week. It realizes full-well its responsibility and has dedicated itself to the idea that the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps will prove itself equal to the opportunity.

The Women of the U.S. Marine Corps
(Think Magazine, 1946)

Lady Leathernecks’, as the trimly-clad members were affectionately dubbed, responded to their country’s call some 19,000 strong, accomplishing more than 150 different jobs at more than fifty Marine bases and stations throughout the United States.

Organized February 13, 1943 the Women’s Reserve was directed by Lt. Colonel Ruth Cheney Streeter (1895 – 1990). Women in the Marine Corps were authorized to hold the same jobs, ranks and pay as Marines.

The American Way of War
(American Magazine, 1945)

The Yank is not expert at deception, but he can change his plans rapidly. He is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.

– so wrote one of the bewildered Japanese Army generals concerning his experiences with the American military in the Pacific.

American W.W. I Cemeteries and French Gratitude
(American Legion Monthly, 1936)

Eighteen years after the last shot was fired in World War I, Americans collectively wondered, as they began to think about all the empty chairs that were setting at so many family dinner tables, Do the French care about all that we sacrificed? Do they still remember that we were there? In response to this question, an American veteran who remained behind in France, submitted the attached article to The American Legion Monthly and answered with a resounding Yes on all six pages:

…I can assure you that the real France, the France of a thousand and one villages in which we were billeted; the France of Lorraine peasants, of Picardy craftsmen, of Burgundy winegrowers – remembers, with gratitude, the A.E.F. and its contribution to the Allied victory.

The article is accompanied by eight photographs of assembled Frenchmen decorating American grave sites.

Click here to read about the foreign-born soldiers who served in the American Army of the First World War.

The Armistice Day Offensive
(The Home Sector, 1920)

A Congressional committee of investigation has recently been treated to a scathing arraignment of the General Staff because military operations on the front of the Second Army were continued up to the hour of the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. Members of the operations Section of the Staff, particularly the chief, Brigadier General Fox Conner, have been accused of slaughtering men on the last day of the war in order to satisfy their personal ambitions.

11/11 with the U.S. First Division
(American Legion Weekly, 1919)

A 1919 article that recalled the U.S. Army’s First Division Armistice Day assault in the Bois de Romaigne:

The First Division was a pretty tired outfit. It had seen eleven months of almost continuous fighting…Rumors were around that there was going to be an armistice, but few listened and none believed. We had been bunked before.

The artillery fire increased and the machine guns rattled. You were on outpost and you fired your rifle, just fired it at nothing in particular. Everybody was doing it. The din increased until 11 o’clock, it ended with a crash that startled you. Fini la Guerre?

The News of the Armistice
(The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

By the time this column was read by the American Doughboys, the truce was old news and this STARS AND STRIPES article makes for an interesting read as it imparts much of the November, 1918 excitement that filled the streets of Paris when the news of the Armistice hit the previously gloomy boulevards. This front-page article makes clear that many of the rumors pertaining to the German collapse could not be verified, yet affirms reports concerning the revolution in Germany, it’s food shortages and the Kaiser’s exile to Holland.

The Wrong Armistice Day
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

In the attached 1945 article an anonymous YANK MAGAZINE correspondent describes for his young readers how the last World War ended; the widely reported misinformation of a premature armistice treaty that was reported as being signed on November 7, 1918 – the retraction, and the subsequent announcement of the genuine armistice being signed four days later. General John J. Pershing recalled the scene in Paris:

It looked as though the whole population had gone out of their minds. The city turned into pandemonium. The streets and boulevards were packed with people singing and wearing all sorts of odd costumes. The crowds were doing the most clownish things. One could hardly hear his own voice, it was such bedlam.

Click here to read another article describing the Armistice Day celebrations in 1918 Paris.

Click here to read an explanation as to what was understood about the truce of November 11, 1918.

A Pat on the Back for the GIs
(Coronet Magazine, 1945)

So they’ve given up.

They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the the Wilhelmstrasse.

Take a Bow, GI – take a bow, little guy.

Far-flung ordinary men, unspectacular but free, rousing out of their habits and their homes – got up early one morning, flexed their muscles, learned the manual of arms (as amateurs) and set out across perilous oceans to whop the bejeepers out of the professionals.

And they did.

Where Were You When You Heard of The Armistice?
(American Legion Weekly, 1921)

To mark the 1921 anniversary of Armistice Day, the editors put the word out to all their readers that they wanted to hear from them concerning where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that la guerre was fini – they received many answers, from both veterans and civilians alike.

How the W.W. I Unknown Soldier was Selected
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

A printable piece from a 1945 COLLIER’S MAGAZINE outlining how Sergeant Edward F. Younger (died August 6, 1942) selected which of the four unidentified Doughboys set before him would be interred in the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington Cemetery.

Murray Korman
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

Brilliant photographer Ralph Steiner (1899 – 1986) spent some time examining the photographs of Murray Korman (1902 – 1961) and, to his surprise, came away finding his work to be very interesting:

Murray Korman is the man whose pictures you see outside the musical shows and in girlie magazines… After four hours of looking I was dizzy. I figured that no man could take such pictures for 17 years and get satiated with lusciousness and bored by the sameness of the girls. I figured that all that kept Korman going was the profit motive. But when I went to his studio on Broadway I found I was all wrong.

Trying to Understand Learning Disabilities
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The kids who are discussed in this article would be called LD today – you don’t want to know how they were referred to in the early Twenties. Back then there were no Federally-funded commissions thronging with sympathetic PhD candidates to ramble on about convergence issues, processing concerns, the-classroom-learning-environment and the Learning Disabled. There were only frustrated kids, frustrated teachers and broken-hearted parents. This 1937 news article reports on the pioneering teachers at Seward Park High School in New York City and the earliest attempts to address the needs of students who suffered from language processing disorders, dyscalculia, dyslexia, dysgraphia and America’s favorite – good ol’ ADHD.

FDR: The First One Hundred Days
(Literary Digest, 1933)

Here are the Chief accomplishments of the special Session of the 73rd Congress, March 9 – June 16, 1933

These fifteen pieces of legislation were called the Honeymoon Bills – his critics pointed out that not one of them originated in Congress and added to their argument that Congress had been marginalized during the earliest period of his presidency.

FDR’s critics had a thing or two to say about the first year of The New Deal…

Click here to read about FDR and the press.

The Windsors in Hitlerland
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

An eyewitness account of the Windsors on their visit through Germany in 1937. The journalist reported that the two seemed nervous – reluctant to sign guest ledgers or photographed with Nazi leaders (except with Hitler, they seem very pleased in that photo).

In Search of the Average New Yorker
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

A well-known writer consulted many different sources about that rarest of species, the New Yorker – he came away with these many different replies:

Yeah. New Yorkers are suckers, all right. They think they are so much smarter than anybody else, but they’re the biggest suckers of them all.