1938 – Page 6 – Old Magazine Articles

‘Steel Ring Around Mussolini”
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

One thousand men are charged with the personal responsibility of seeing that Il Duce doesn’t meet with an untimely death. Their frenzied precautions make him the best protected of all contemporary dictators – a protection which is sorely needed. Sixteen years after the victorious March on Rome a special tribunal dealing with the ‘enemies of fascism’ is still working along at exceptionally high pressure.

Click here to read about Mussolini’s departure from the League of Nations.

Beauticians Without Borders
(Click Magazine, 1938)

This is the story of the Jacob A. Riis Settlement beauty clinic which was funded by a well-heeled New Yorker in order that the impoverished women from the down-trodden quarters of New York might come to know all the relaxation that comes with electrolysis and eyebrow-plucking (sadly, anal bleaching was not offered at the time).

Bad Press Day for Eleanor Roosevelt
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

During a 1936 visit to a research facility devoted to finding a cure for children’s lung ailments, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was remembered by a reporter for having blurted out a highly insensitive question:

What is the use of saving babies, if they can’t earn a decent living when they grow up?

With two years to think about her impulsive inquiry, the reporter responded with outrage in formulating an answer.

He was Too Tough on Businesses
(Collier’s Magazine, 1938)

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well-known for cracking wise about the members of the American business community, such as stock brokers, speculators, company functionaries and the leading corporate executives during the Great Depression – believing that there actually could be an economy worth saving if they didn’t exist. Throughout the Thirties the New Deal launched numerous tax laws and assorted other pieces of legislation that served only to stymy competition, raise prices and slow all economic growth. The editors of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE published this spirited and rational defense of corporate America in 1938 and it is attached herein:

American business, whatever its limitations, has produced a better living for more people than any other system of production… The American big-business system has fed people better and more generously. It has provided more convenient and more wholesome shelter. It has distributed vastly more of the mechanical aids to civilized living.

Click here to read about FDR’s tax plan from 1935.

Movie Exhibitors vs Movie Producers
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

A 1938 magazine article pertains to a brawl that once existed between movie exhibitors and movie producers involving the Hollywood practice known as block-booking, which required theater owners to commit to movies they have never seen. The article refers to how Hollywood employed their biggest stars to fight legislation in Washington designed to overturn this scheme.

The bill was defeated.

Click here to read about Marilyn Monroe and watch a terrific documentary about her life.

More about the American film business in the 1940s can be read here…

FDR on Wage Reduction
(Literary Digest, 1938)

I am opposed to wage reductions – a statement made by President Roosevelt at a February press conference in 1938, compelled both economists and industrialists to ejaculate numerous multisyllabic words on the matter. In light of the fact that magazine editors are wage earners, the majority of selected quotes side with FDR.

Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…

Eyes on Chiang Kai-Shek
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Before the war was hours old, Chiang’s most secret plans were known to the Japs. Again and again Jap actions showed foreknowledge of Chiang’s movements and stratagems, as discussed and decided with his most trusted leaders. This explains many mysterious incidents, and makes China’s apparent ‘spy complex’ fully understandable.

Life in Sunny, Fascist Italy
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

In Italy, every other man is wearing a uniform or just stepped out of one. Every other wife is about to become a mother again. Every boy is lugging a wooden gun and playing at soldier. So it sees to the eye, and amazingly, so it actually is. War, babies, self-sufficiency, poverty, persecution complexes, chest beating, magnetic pride and the most parrotty people in the world. This is the land determined to out-Caesar the greatest Roman of them all. The Italian’s thoughts, eyes, ears, destiny, morals, spaghetti, pocketbook and trigger finger are controlled completely by the whim of one man. And the Italians love him.

Click here to read about life in Hitler’s Germany during the same period…

Gloom in Germany
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

But today there is no laughter in Germany. There are only smiles of disdain, contempt, conceit and strain. There is no humility, no pity, not much mercy. There is an odd sort of honor, an amazing egotism. But there is no will power nor need there be in a nation that knows but one man’s will.

CLICK HERE to read an article from 1923 about the abitious Adolf Hitler.

More Peer Adoration for Walt Disney
(Stage Magazine, 1938)

The attached article was first seen during a time when a Palm Award, granted by the editors of Stage Magazine, was a reliable form of social currency and would actually serve the highly favored recipients in such a grand manner as to allow them brief respites at dining tables found at swank watering holes as New York’s Twenty-One Club and El Morocco.

Today, a Palm Award, plus four dollars, will get you a medium-sized cappuccino at Starbucks. Walt Disney was awarded a Palm in 1938 for his achievement in producing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Wrong Turn at Gallipoli
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This is an opinion piece written at a time when the world stood at the doorstep of World War II. The writer went to some length to outline the fatal error made just one generation earlier and how the sins were to be paid for by their sons and daughters:

The world of today, an upheaval of antagonisms heading toward destructive war, was not inevitable. Russia need not have fallen to the Bolshevists, Germany to the Nazis, Italy to the Fascists. The United States need not have entered the Great War. Two million men slain in battle need not have died. These consequences resulted from a decision of a few men during the World War.

He argued that the Dardanelles Campaign is where the whole war went sideways.

Click here to read what the Kaiser thought of Adolf Hitler.

An Interview with Leon Trotsky
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1938)

This magazine interview with Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) was conducted by Gladys Lloyd Robinson: Beverly Hills doyenne, matron of the arts and wife of actor Edgar G. Robinson – in the parlance of the dearly departed Soviet Union, she was what would have been labeled a useful idiot. Easily impressed by the goings-on at the worker’s paradise, she avoided such uncomfortable topics as the Soviet famine, the class privileges extended to Party Members or his own war on private property, but regardless of that, and much to her credit, she was able to get the most famous of Soviet refugees to speak about the 1938 world stage while conducting this interview.

Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.

Read an article explaining how the Soviets used early radio…

A German Dissident Recalls His Incarceration
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Locked-up for having run an underground newspaper in the Third Reich, this is the harrowing story one dissident’s experiences in the Nazi concentration camps:

What a relief it would be to take that uniformed scoundrel by the throat, throw him on the floor, pay him back for his beating, yell ‘You dog! You swine!’

•Read about the American reporter who became a Nazi…•

Germany’s Lost African Colonies
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

One thing about Adolf Hitler: he had a real bee in his bonnet when it came to the colonies that Imperial Germany had lost as a result of article 119 of the Versailles Treaty:

Germany renounces in favor of the principal Allied and Associated Powers all her rights and titles over her overseas possessions.

Attached, you will find a nifty cartoon depicting a terribly upset Hitler as he contemplated the map of Africa and all the colonies he was having to do without – all rendered in that glorious 1930s manner.

Click here to read more about the African colonies lost to Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.

Sing Sing Prison: Home of the Bad New Yorkers
(Click Magazine, 1938)

Sing Sing Prison was where the vulgar New Yorkers of the criminal variety spent much of their time:

Murderers and felons, rogues and embezzlers, an average of 2750 of them inhabit Sing Sing Prison at Ossining, N.Y. on the bank of the Hudson River. Theirs is a world apart. A world of gray stone walls and steel bars. When the gates clang shut behind them they enter upon a life scientifically regulated by Warden Lewis E. Lawes (1883 – 1947)…CLICK MAGAZINE takes you inside the grim walls and shows you what happens to the convicted criminal from the day he is committed to Sing Sing Prison until the day he leaves as a free man.

This is a photo-essay that is made up of twenty-five black and white pictures.

Read about the religious make up of Sing Sing Prison in the Thirties.

Hitler Slams Goering for his Girth
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Having been encouraged by Goebels to show more than a little excitement about meeting Adolf Hitler, the German screen actress Renate Müller (1906 – 1937) recalled that during their time alone, the Führer slandered Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering for his gluttonous appearance…

The entire story is told in a longer article about Hitler’s wish for a wife.

A Screenwriter’s Progress
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Yardley, a cartoonist from KEN MAGAZINE, made this four panel yuk-yuk about Depression era screenwriters and the shoe being on the other foot. Truth be told, the story it tells is as fitting in our own time as it was in the Thirties. Nicely rendered, too.

Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York ladies rooms of 1937.

Where is King George of Serbia?
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Younger brother Alexander hated dashing, erratic Crown Prince George (1887 – 1972), darling of the Serbian people, so he framed him as a loony, got him exiled, and in due course became King instead. George made the mistake of writing an insulting letter and going back home on the heels of it. Now, in a remote Yugoslavian villa, surrounded by trees, hedges, and mustachioed detectives, the Serbian Bad Boy lives in solitary confinement, doing mathematical problems to keep from getting bored.

A 1938 article which gave a brief account of the incarcerated Crown Prince George of Serbia. As the above makes clear, he was judged insane and locked up between the years 1925 through 1939. He was set free by the Nazis during their brief occupation of that country.

Click here to read about the 1922 discovery of King Tut’s tomb.