1919 – Old Magazine Articles

How the ‘Stars & Stripes’ Operated
(The Stars and Stripes, 1919)

Written during the closing days of the paper’s existence, the reporting journalist could not emphasize enough how lousy the paper was with enlisted men serving in the most important positions. You will come away with a good amount of knowledge concerning the manner in which The Stars and Stripes crew addressed their daily duties and still made it to the presses on time. Surprising is the high number of experienced newspapermen who wrote for the paper during the paper’s short existence.

‘The Hope of American English”

Vanity Fair correspondent L.L. Jones cracked open a copy of The American Language by H.L. Mencken:

At last a man has arrived who knows something about English prose style under American conditions…

The rest of his thoughts can be read in the attached review.

A Review of Two W.W. I Books
(The Dial Magazine, 1919)

Dial editor Robert Morss Lovett compared and contrasted two very different First World War memoirs in this article: America in France, by Frederick Palmer (1873 – 1958) and Floyd Gibbons’ (1887 – 1939) And They Thought We Wouldn’t Fight.

The Victory Parade Down Pennsylvania Avenue
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Here is a reminiscence of the grand parade following the close of America’s bloody Civil War. It took two days; with the Army of the Potomac marching on the first day followed by General Sherman’s Army of the West on the next. The Grand Review was the brain-child of Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton and was attended by (so it was believed) over one hundred thousand people from the victorious Northern states.

From Amazon: Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War

Wilson’s Fourteen Points
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Here is a very simple list of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points can be printed off of a PDF by clicking the title above.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points were ignored at Versailles and the United States withdrew it’s support for the historical conference in favor of two separate peace agreements made with Germany and Austria at a later date.

Click here to read more magazine articles about President Woodrow Wilson.

Read a 1936 article concerning Hitler’s Versailles Treaty violations.

The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Woodrow Wilson at number 18 insofar as his impact on the American mind is concerned – click here to understand his reasoning…

The Negro in the War’
(NY Times, 1919)

Senegalese, Moroccans, Algerians, Americans – this six page article summarizes the participation of the various Allied units that were composed entirely of Black men throughout the four year course of W.W. I.

‘Black devils‘ the German soldiers called them, when, fighting like demons, they had forced the Kaiser’s shock troops to retreat before them.

Women Can Do The Heavy War Work
(Scribner’s Magazine, 1919)

The essential facts are that women can do men’s heavy work with substantially equal output, without any disturbance of the particular industry, and, when guided by proper conditions, without detriment to their health. How far and how long they ought to do it in the emergency arising from the war is to be decided upon different grounds.

Click here to read about the women war workers of the Second World War.

Sergeant York
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Sergeant Alvin York (1887 – 1964) of the 328th Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Division, was one of the great heroes of the First World War. The attached four page article recalled those deeds as well as his glorious trip to New York City where he was luxuriated at the Waldorf Astoria and feted by the swells of Gotham.

The Silent Movie Producers of 1919
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

In three short pages this article outlines the growth of the film industry beginning in 1909 to the time of this printing, in 1919.

In 1930 Adolf Zukor was listed as one of the most powerful men in Washington…

Sharp-Shooting on the Western Front
(Cornhill Magazine, 1919)

The attached remembrance of sniping on the Western Front was written by Major H. Hesketh-Pritchard, D.S.O, M.C. (author of Sniping in France 1914-18) and recalls the development and changes of sharp-shooting on both sides during the war. Pritchard broke down the scouting and sniper involvement on the Western Front into four phases:

Phase I (1914 – 1915): German snipers weigh heavily on Allied soldiers (Clear German advantage)

Phase II (1915 – 1916): British sniping organized (Advantage even)

Phase III (1916 – 1918): British sniper program takes off (Slight British Advantage)

Phase IV (1918 through to the Armistice): Allied Offensive takes effect (Snipers began scouting)

Categorizing The Lynchings
(The Crises, 1919)

Here is a Crisis Magazine summary of the all the various lynchings that had been recorded in the United States between the years 1885 through 1918. Additional lists are provided that give an account of the participating states for the year 1918, the genders of the victims and the racial group to which they belonged.

Click here for the Ku Klux Klan Archive.

The Well Dressed Man in February
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1919)

Attached herein, you will find the fashionable coats, suits, shoes and cufflinks for men from the harsh winter of 1919 that had been approved by the Fifth Avenue swells of the VANITY FAIR editorial department.

The Return of the Coldstream Guards
(The New Red Cross Magazine, 1919)

To-day was a great day in London. The Guards’ Division was inspected by the King at Buckingham Palace and had a triumphant march to welcome them home…East End and West End rubbed shoulders to-day and showed the same respect for each other that not so long ago they had shown in the trenches.

Click here to read an article about the German veterans of W.W. I.

The American Cemetery at Romagne
(Literary Digest, 1919)

An eye-witness account of the construction of the American Meuse-Argonne Cemetery in Romagne, France:

They are now gathering up the bodies of the 26,000 American boys who were killed on the Argonne-Meuse battlefield, and are burying them in a great cemetery at Romagne, a little town in the heart of the region where the fighting took place. Here and there all over the battlefield are stakes, each marking the grave of an American soldier who was buried where he fell.

In one of the office buildings a large force of clerks is keeping the records of the dead; no banking firm could be more careful of its accounts than are these clerks…and their superiors of their registration of graves.

African-American Stevedores in the U.S. Army
(The Independent, 1919)

An article written by David Le Roy Ferguson (dates unknown), an African-American pastor assigned to minister to the black Doughboys posted to the depot at St. Nazaire, France. The men of his flock were stevedores who were ordered to perform the thankless task of off-loading cargo from the various supply ships arriving daily to support the A.E.F.. Aside from working as cooks or in other service positions, this was a customary assignment given to the African-Americans during the war; only a small percentage were posted to the 92nd and 93rd combat divisions.

Pastor Ferguson’s magazine article salutes the necessary labor of these men while at the same time adhering to the usual simple descriptions of the African-American as cheerful, musical and rather crude.

‘The Literary View of Prohibition”
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Four months into the Noble Experiment of Prohibition, three respected British Writers, Hilaire Belloc, G K. Chesterton and Solomon Eagle all sound-off on American Prohibition.

Farewell to Alcohol
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Published at a time when America stood so reluctantly on the doorstep of the Prohibition era, an unnamed editor at The Literary Digest compiled a number of quotes from numerous literary sources as if to illustrate the deep roots the Western world of belles-lettres has invested in the culture of alcohol.

The Political Crisis in Post-War Germany
(Current Opinion Magazine, 1919)

The Current Opinion foreign correspondent filed this short dispatch about the pandemonium unfolding in post-World War I Germany:

The great fact to the outside world is that a German parliament has actually precipitated a crisis. It threw out the Scheidemann cabinet. It presided over the birth of a Bauer one. It was the German parliament which dictated to the government regarding its composition, instead of meekly obeying the government, as had been the custom…

More about leftists in Weimar Germany can be read here.