1937 – Page 5 – Old Magazine Articles

Nanking Falls
(The Literary Digest, 1937)

Exactly four months after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese hostilities on the Shanghai peninsula’ a New York Herald Tribune correspondent cabled from Shanghai last week, ‘Nanking, China’s abandoned capital, for the third time in it’s more than 2000 years of history, was captured by an alien foe when the Japanese military forces completely occupied the city.’ …To this, Quo Taichi, Chinese ambassador to England, replied defiantly: ‘Capture of Nanking will by no means mark the end of China’s resistance.’

Starvation in the San Joaquin Valley
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Renowned as an earthly paradise from whose rich soil the brilliant sun draws abundant crops of semi-tropical fruits, the Great Valley is today the state’s principal source of wealth. Last week, Californians were acutely conscious that the valley could also produce squalor, misery, disease and death…[The San Joaquin Valley] is host to 70,000 jobless, homeless families living in frightful squalor and privation….hopeless men and women sprawled in the sun as their ill-clad children played in the dirt.

Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

Hugh S. Johnson of the NRA
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Published some time after the demise of the NRA, this article presents a thumbnail profile of Hugh S. Johnson (1882 – 1942), FDR’s fair-haired boy who ran that shop from start to finish. He was once again in the news after having compared the New Deal to a fascist dictatorship during the Fall of 1937.

The Arms Race
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Stirred by [the] Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and by subsequent German scrapping of the Versailles Treaty, military experts of every nation have been altering the smallest details of army life to make their forces bigger, faster and more deadly than those of their neighbors.

Nowhere was there any indication that the pace of armaments might slacken. No nation gave any sign of dropping out of the race.

The economist who made the German rearmament possible was named Hjalmar Schacht, click here to read about him…

Repeal + Four Years
(Literary Digest, 1937)

With the [Prohibition] Repeal, approximately one million people went back to work, making wine, beer and distilled spirits, bottles and barrels; transporting, selling and serving and advertising it. Innumerable industries indirectly connected with liquor, such as printing, building and machinery-making, received a sharp stimulus. With Repeal also, sorely needed tax money started to roll into the public coffers. Since 1933 more than two billion dollars in liquor taxes has gone into national, state and local treasuries…

The Police State
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Victor Serge (1890 – 1947) was a devoted Bolshevik writer who was highly critical of Joseph Stalin; he spent five years in the gulag for his subversive activity and would have no doubt died there had not an international mishmash of humanitarians raised a stink about his incarceration. He was exiled from the Marxist-dream-land in 1936 – the attached column is an extract from his gulag writings concerning the cruelties of Stalin’s secret police.

‘The Madhouse”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The party purge had been widened to include the Soviet Secret Police itself, with 50 of its number being arrested.

One Year in the Life of NYC
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Within twelve months time the following things happen in New York:

• One hundred thousand New Yorkers are born.

• Five thousand of them die.

• Twelve thousand New Yorkers die in car accidents.

• Sixty thousand New Yorkers are married.

• 1,350 New Yorkers commit suicide etc., etc., etc.,

The End of the NRA
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

During the Spring of 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously proclaimed FDR’s National Recovery Administration and void – and the names of some 5,300 of its Washington, D.C. functionaries were immediately entered onto the unemployment list. All except one: Diana Rogovin; she was the sole survivor of the bureaucracy. To her fell the task of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as the great ship went down. She completed her last duty in February of 1937.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Here is a very thorough profile of Mustafa Kamel Atatürk (1881 – 1938), the first president of the Republic of Turkey (1923 – 1938). The article goes into some detail concerning his humble beginnings, his vices and his secret writings for the revolutionary Vatan ve Hürriyet (Motherland and Liberty) underground movement. His rise to power came with his assorted military triumphs in the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan War, the First World War and most notably, the Greko-Turkish War. He came to power in 1922 and began reforming Turkish society in ways that rocked the nation to its very corps.

Click here to read a 1922 article about the Turkish slaughter of Christians.

A Most Dangerous Man
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Although Hitler was no mystery to the readers of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE (the editors had been following his trajectory since the early Twenties), the attached article tells of the maniac’s impoverished boyhood all the way up to his exulted status in 1937.

Dumping Justices
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The attached editorial was intended to serve as PATHFINDER MAGAZINE‘s introduction to six pen-portraits that follow on the next webpage. In order to better serve their readers the editors provided profiles of the oldest Supreme Court justices who FDR wished to remove.

[Justices] McReynolds, Sutherland, Van Devanter, and Butler are generally conceded to be the court’s consistently conservative bloc. In some cases, this bloc is viewed as not only conservative but also reactionary.

Click here to read the profiles of the six justices…

Hitler Rejects Old Treaty Obligations
(Literary Digest, 1937)

This magazine article covered a speech made by Hitler four years into his rule:

In his efforts to wipe out the country’s status as a pariah among the nations, Hitler boasted Saturday, he had rearmed the Reich and seized the disarmed Rhineland. Still denouncing Versailles, he last week erased one of the most painful of the treaty’s blots on German honor with a few words:

‘I hereby and above all annul the signature extorted from a weak and impotent Government against its better knowledge, confessing Germany’s responsibility for the late war.’

Click here to read about Germany’s treaty violations…

Silent Film Library Established
(Delineator Magazine, 1937)

This article is about the 1935 founding of the Museum of Modern Art Film Library. Established with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation, today the MOMA Film Library is comprised of more than 14,000 films and four million motion picture stills.

Was Tobé the First Fashion Stylist?
(Delineator Magazine, 1937)

Here is a 1937 magazine article from the long forgotten pages of DELINEATOR MAGAZINE insisted that they found the very first fashion stylist -some lass named Tobé (born Taubé Coller, a.k.a. Mrs Herbert Davis, 1890 – 1962). They were very insistent on the matter, although they failed to explain the sources used to reach this conclusion:

This woman is the first official stylist…Now she is head of Tobé Incorporated, through which she does for more than a hundred stores in America and some in Canada, England, Australia, Norway and Sweden.

A Day in the Life of F.D.R.
(Literary Digest, 1937)

The attached article presented a dusk till dawn account of one day in the life of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945).
Written during his first term (prior to the war), the journalist recounted who the reoccurring players in his life were, the time of his rising, the preferred meals, the length of the meetings, distractions, recreations and other assorted minutia -but you’ll not read the word wheelchair once. This is a fine example of the press black-out that was in place in order to prevent the public any knowledge whatever of Roosevelt’s paralytic illness, which rendered him paralyzed from the waist down (he suffered from Guillain-Barré syndrome which he contracted in 1921).

Read a 1945 interview with FDR’s economic adviser, Bernard Baruch; click here.
Click here to read about the four inaugurations of FDR.

The Coronation of George VI
(Stage Magazine, 1937)

An article by Rebecca West (1892 – 1983) in which she listed an enormous number of reasons as to why May 12, 1937 (the coronation date for George VI) will not be a good day to be in London. From time to time throughout the article she throws-in some bon mots:

This is a crucifixion as well as a coronation. The best kings we have ever had have been Queens, and every year Kingship becomes less and less suitable for a man. A constitutional monarch has constantly to behave as if he were a mindless puppet in circumstances which would prove fatal to everybody, including himself, if he really were a mindless puppet.

The King’s Speech

Hitler’s Earlies Years In Power
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

When Adolf Hitler was made chancellor of the Third Reich on January 30, 1933, he pledged his government would (1) unify the German people; (2) eliminate class distinction; and (3) secure equal rights abroad for Germany. At that time the Nazi leader addressed the nation: Now, German people, give us four years and then judge us!

That was four years ago.