1946 – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

Confronting the Bigots
(The American Magazine, 1946)

With the passing of the Ives-Quinn Bill in 1945, the state of New York was empowered to bring the full weight of the law down upon all employers who practiced any sort of discrimination in the workplace:

During the first eight months of the law’s operation, the Commission received 240 formal complaints charging some form of discrimination in employment… The charges varied greatly. Fifty-nine complained because of alleged prejudice against their religion. Another 113 charged color bias: 105 Negroes and eight Whites. Still another 48 charged prejudice against their race or national origin: 8 Germans, 5 Spaniards…

A similar article from 1941 can be read here…

‘Our Schools Are A Scandal”
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Ten million Americans can’t read and write, thousands of teachers are underpaid and, try as they may, our poorer states cannot afford to do anything about it. Every Congress since 1919 has refused to improve the situation… The truth seems to be that schools are no longer America’s sweetheart. When there is money to be divided in a state, roads come first, public health second and schools third.

Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who loitered on every street corner during the Great Depression…

The Twilight of the New Deal
(United States News and World Report, 1946)

The crusading spirit that Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to summon up in the minds of Government employees at the outset of his first administration, and again in the years that followed, now is vanishing. The spirit and imagination of Mr. Roosevelt brought into public service would not have been there.

It was this quality that captured the enthusiasm of engineers like J.A. Krug; of lawyers like Oscar S. Cox, Ben Cohen and Thomas Corcoran; of economists like Robert Nathan, Launchlin Curie, Leon Henderson and Isadore Lubin.

Post-War America and the KKK
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946)

Written in the aftermath of W.W. II, this is an article which cautioned that the KKK was attempting to pick-up where it had left off prior to the war and made known it’s intentions to open a franchise in Southern California.

The Birth of the KKK
(Coronet Magazine, 1946)

A brief account outlining the post-Civil War origins of the KKK:

The original Ku Klux Klan began in 1865 as a social club of young men in Pulaski, Tennessee. Its ghostly uniform and rituals frightened superstitious Negroes; and when Klansmen discovered this fact accidentally, they lost little time in recruiting membership to 55,000.

During the Thirties and early Forties there was a link between the Bund and the KKK: click here to read about him.

New York Exhibit for Le Corbusier
(Art Digest, 1946)

A brief art review from 1946 announcing an exhibition of paintings, drawings, photographs, architectural plans and models by the modern architect Le Corbusier (né Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, 1887 – 1965) at the Mezzanine Gallery in Rockefeller Center.

Along with Ozenfant, Le Corbusier invented Purism. The earliest painting in the collection, and the only one of that period (1920), which is familiar to art audiences as part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The U.S. Army Nurse Corps
(Think Magazine, 1946)

The Army Nurse during World War II was at work in every quarter of the globe, serving on land, on the sea in hospital ships and in the air, evacuating the wounded by plane. Because of the rugged conditions under which she served, she was trained to use foxholes and to understand gas defense, to purify water in the field and to crawl , heavily equipped, under barbed wire.

By the time VJ-Day rolled around, the Army Nurse Corps was 55,000 strong.

(From Amazon: G.I. Nightingales: The Army Nurse Corps in World War II)

Pointing Fingers
(Maptalk Magazine, 1946)

Cordell Hull, aging ex-Secretary of State, snapped back in reply to the section of the report which had implied that he was partly at fault for the disaster because his actions had precipitated a crisis. In a hitherto unpublished letter, Hull pointed out

(1.) that he had personally advised the general staff on 25 November, 1941 that war was imminent, and (2.) that his final negotiations had not included any ultimatum that was a spark to set off the Asiatic conflagration.

A Review of Brideshead Revisited
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazinet, 1946)

A favorable review of Evelyn Waugh’s (1903 – 1966) triumph Brideshead Revisited
(1945):

Looking up momentarily from our crystal ball, we predict that ‘Brideshead Revisited’ will set sales records and arouse more comment – critical and otherwise – than any book in many a day.

The Plot to Assassinate Eisenhower Foiled by Cartoons…(Lion’s Roar, 1946)

An interesting W.W. II story was passed along by actor, announcer, producer and screenwriter John Nesbitt (1910 – 1960), who is best remembered as the narrator for the MGM radio series Passing Parade. Five months after the end of the war, Nesbitt relayed to his audience that during the Battle of the Bulge, U.S.-born Nazi agents, having been ordered to kill General Eisenhower, did not even come close to fulfilling their mission, suffered incarceration among other humiliations – all due to a lack of knowledge where American comic strips were concerned. Read on…

Here is another Now it Can be Told article…

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

The attached is a short article from THINK MAGAZINE that sums up the contributions made by the 87,000 American women of the U.S. Navy during World War II. These women were organized into a body called WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service):

In 500 shore establishments of the United States Fleet, women in navy blue released enough men from non-combatant duty to man all of America’s landing crafts in two important operations: the Normandy landings on D-Day and the invasion of Saipan.

Created July 30, 1942, the Corps completed more than three years of service while the nation was engaged in war. The director was Captain Mildred H. McAfee (1900 – 1994), former president of Wellseley College.

Reichsmarshal Herman Göering Imprisoned
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

An interesting article is attached herein that originally appeared in a 1946 issue of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE recalling the last days of the once fair-haired boy of the Third Reich, Herman Göering (1893 – 1946). Filed from the U.S. Army interrogation center at the Ashcan (nom de guerre for the Palace Hotel in Fromburg, Luxemburg) you’ll get a sense as to how the fallen Luftwaffe Reichsmarshal, formerly so over-plumed and perfumed, paraded and posed for both his jailers and his fellow inmates while awaiting trial. A good read.

Click here to read an eyewitness account of the suicide of Himmler.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.

‘The Roosevelt I Knew”
(Collier’s Magazine, 1946)

Here is the recollection of FDR by a woman who worked closely with the man for nearly thirty five years as political colleague, state governor appointee and Labor Secretary: Francis Perkins (1880 – 1965).

Secretary Perkins and President Roosevelt were a vital team when it came to crafting many of the labor laws that are still enforced today. Click here to read a 1937 magazine article about the creation of the first minimum wage laws…

D.W. Griffith: His Minor Masterworks
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1946)

In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art Film Department decided to exhibit only the most famous films of D.W. Griffith for the retrospective that was being launched to celebrate the famed director. This enormous omission inspired film critic Herb Sterne (1906 – 1995) to think again about the large body of work that the director created and, putting pen to paper, he wrote:

Because of the museum’s lack of judgment, the Griffith collection it has chosen to circulate is woefully incomplete, thereby giving contemporary students of the motion picture a distorted and erroneous impression of the scope of the man’s achievements.

To read a 1924 article regarding Hollywood film executive Irving Thalberg, click here.

Howard Johnson’s Roadside Restaurants
(Coronet Magazine, 1946)

By the mid-Twenties millions of cars were on America’s highways and by-ways and family road trips were all the rage. However, the few roadside food stands that existed at the time were woefully inadequate and numerous journalists in every locale were writing articles about the various stomach aches that were regularly descending upon hapless motorists who patronized these businesses. This article is about a Massachusetts fellow named Howard Johnson –

Somewhere along the line he figured out that what America needed even more than a good five-cent cigar was a chain of stands that would take the chance out of roadside eating.

It’s Superman!
(Coronet Magazine, 1946)

Attached is a 1946 article by Mort Weisinger (1915 – 1978), who is remembered primarily as the editor for DC Comics’ Superman throughout much of the Fifties and Sixties. His four page history of Superman, attached herein, lays out not simply the origins of the character but all his great successes when deployed on behalf of the enemies of bad grammar, tooth decay, and slot machines. The author lucidly explained his own amazement at the fact that during those years spanning 1936 through 1946, Superman not only fought tooth and nail for truth, justice and the American way, but had been successfully harnessed by numerous ad men to advocate for the study of geography, civics, literacy, vocabulary and the importance of iron salvage in wartime.
At the time Weisinger penned this article, SUPERMAN was purchased annually by as many as 30,000,000 buyers.

Click here to read about the roll comic books played during the Second World War.

President Truman’s VE-Day Proclamation
(Think Magazine, 1946)

Attached is a page from the Diary of Participation in W.W. II which was compiled by the editors of THINK MAGAZINE; this page contains the printable text of a portion of President Harry Truman’s VE-Day Proclamation of May 8, 1945:

The Allied armies, through sacrifice and devotion and with God’s help, have won from Germany a final and unconditional surrender. The Western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men… Much remains to be done. The victory won in the West must now be won in the East…

The Cadet Nurse Corps
(Think Magazine, 1946)

Youngest and largest of the the women’s uniformed services, the U.S. Cadet Nurse Corps, has made nursing history in the brief span of it’s existence…the corps includes more than 112,000 women between 17 and 35 who enrolled to help meet the emergency demand for nursing service and at the same time prepare themselves for a post-war profession.