1947

Articles from 1947

When FDR Wrote a Script… (Coronet Magazine, 1947)

Here is an article by one of the foot soldiers of legendary silent movie producer Adolf Zukor, in which she recalled a time in 1923 when the future president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mailed an unsolicited photoplay (ie. script) to their offices in hopes of securing some measure of Hollywood immortality.

Knowing that FDR had tremendous power in both New York and Washington, Zukor instructed her to let him down gently; twenty years later Roosevelt would chuckle about his ambitions with her at a White House party.


President Lincoln had his own dreams and aspirations…

The American-Imposed Censorship (Commonweal, 1947)

The suspicious lads of the U.S. Army’s Civil Censorship Detachment, General Headquarters, Japan, were given the task of combing-over not simply the articles that were to appear in the Japanese press, but all civilian correspondences that were to be delivered through the mail, as well. Seeing that the Japanese were recovering Fascists, like their former BFFs in far-off Germany, the chatter of unfulfilled totalitarians was a primary concern. They were especially keen on seeing to it that the gruesome photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki be as limited in their circulation as possible. But what makes this column most surprising is the fact that the brass hats at GHQ knew full well that the American people hate censorship and would not want it practiced in their name.

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