1948

Articles from 1948

Cover Girls
(Coronet Magazine, 1948)

By 1948 the business of fashion modeling had developed into a $15,000,000-a-year industry. This article examines just how such changes evolved in just a ten year span of time:

American advertising struck pay dirt when it discovered the super salesgirls whose irresistible allure will sell anything from a bar of soap to a seagoing yacht…Always there was the secret whisper of sex. For women it was, ‘Be lovely, be loved, don’t grow old, be exciting’… For men it was, ‘Be successful, make everyone know that your successful, how can you get women if your not successful?’

The importance of attractive girls in our economy was stressed by John McPartland when he discussed modern advertising in his recent best seller, Sex in Our Changing World (1947).


Legendary fashion designer Christian Dior had a good deal of trouble with people who would illegally copy his designs; click here to read about that part of fashion history.

When W.W. II Came to Hollywood
(Photoplay Magazine, 1948)

The attached article is but a small segment addressing the history of Hollywood during the war W.W. II years; clipped from a longer Photoplay Magazine piece that recounted the illustrious past of Hollywood some thirty-five years earlier.

After Pearl Harbor, the men really began leaving town. David Niven was gone now. So too, was Flight Officer Laurence Olivier. And more and more from the Hollywood ranks kept leaving. Gable, Fonda, Reagan, the well-knowns and the lesser-knowns. Power, Taylor, Payne, Skelton and many others…More Hollywood regulars went away, so other, newer newcomers had to be found to replace them because the box office was booming.

In Defense of President Hoover
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)

Attached is a small excerpt from the Pathfinder review of Eugene Lyons’ book, Our Unknown Ex-President (1948). The author outlined the various measures taken by the Hoover administration during the earliest years of the Great Depression in hopes that the flood waters would subside:


He fought for banking reform laws, appropriations for public works, home-loan banks to protect farms and residences. He asked for millions for relief to be administered by state and local organizations… A Democratic Congress refused to heed his suggestions.


Yet, regardless of the various missteps made by Hoover and FDR, the United States remailed an enormously wealthy nation…

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Fear in Post-War Berlin
(Collier’s Magazine, 1948)

Barely existing on brief rations of food and other necessities, the three million-odd Germans in 1948 Berlin are cold and afraid. In their battle for survival they spy on one another, steal coffins from the dead for firewood and raid garbage cans to eat.


Just how accurate was the Allied bombing campaign of Germany? Click here and find out.

Beautiful Girls Wanted
(Coronet Magazine, 1948)

American advertising struck pay dirt when it discovered the super salesgirls whose irresistible allure will sell anything from a bar of soap to a seagoing yacht…Always there was the secret whisper of sex. For women it was, ‘Be lovely, be loved, don’t grow old, be exciting’… For men it was, ‘Be successful, make everyone know that your successful, how can you get women if your not successful?’

Beautiful Girls Wanted
(Coronet Magazine, 1948)

American advertising struck pay dirt when it discovered the super salesgirls whose irresistible allure will sell anything from a bar of soap to a seagoing yacht…Always there was the secret whisper of sex. For women it was, ‘Be lovely, be loved, don’t grow old, be exciting’… For men it was, ‘Be successful, make everyone know that your successful, how can you get women if your not successful?’

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‘Panic in Hollywood”
(’48 Magazine, 1948)

The years 1947 and 1948 was a rough patch for Hollywood – and journalist James Felton did a favor for all those geeky film historians yet unborn for documenting their myriad travails in the attached article. Aside from a major drop in box-office receipts, the most time consuming inconvenience involved U.S. Representative J. Parnell Thomas (1895 – 1970) and his cursed House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that threatened to reduce their profits to a further degree.

Mahatma Gandhi, RIP
(America Weekly, 1948)

Shortly after hearing about the murder of Mahatma Gandhi (January 30, 1948) the editor of America Weekly typed up these six solemn paragraphs
in order to consecrate his memory and deeds.


“It is the death of a man of the highest moral prestige, and it leaves us with forebodings of the future.”

The ”Unsinkable” Titanic
(’48 Magazine, 1948)

Award winning word-smith Hanson W. Baldwin (1903 – 1991) wrote this tight little essay some 64 years after the Titanic sinking. He succinctly pieced together the events of that day (April 12, 1912) and clearly indicated that there was plenty of blame to go around for the tremendous loss of life; not simply the Grand Poobahs in the senior positions (Captain Smith and Bruce Ismay) but the small fries as well (such as Second Radio Operator Harold McBride). By the second page, Baldwin commences with an hour by hour break-down of the events on-board TITANIC until she made her final plunge into the deep:

12:30 a.m. The word is passed: ‘Women and children in the boats’. Stewards finish waking passengers below; life-preservers are tied on; some men smile at the precaution.
‘The Titanic is unsinkable.’

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President Truman and Civil Rights
(Commonweal, 1948)

When President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights submitted their findings to the White House in December of 1947, the anxious and skeptical editors at COMMONWEAL MAGAZINE eagerly waited their conclusions. Knowing that this Southern president was the only Klansman (1924 membership) to have ever attained such high office, they were doubtful that any good would come of it, and in this column they explain why they felt that way.


Four years later an article was written about the gratitude many African-Americans felt toward President Truman and his stand on civil rights – read it here…

They Molded the American Mind
(’48 Magazine, 1948)

In 1948 the American history professor Henry Steele Commager (1902 – 1998) read this article that named the most powerful men in Cold War Washington – he then began to compose a list of his own, a list that he felt was far more permanent in nature. Commager wrote the names of the most influential thinkers of the past 100 years, leaders and writers who he credited for having supplied us with our symbols, our values, our ideas and ideals.

Tokyo Living
(’48 Magazine)

The post-war life of a Tokyo family as experienced by Mrs. Tanaya: the wife of a carpenter and mother of one son. This is an eleven page magazine article that will allow you to gain some understanding as to how the Tokyo black-market operated and how that city began to rebuild itself after so many years of war. Also of some interest the Tokyo reaction to the American occupying army:

There is a lot of talk about Americans. To the Japanese women and their husbands, the conquerors are a puzzling combination of good and bad. But they often thank their gods for ‘Marshal’ MacArthur…

••Click here to read about post-World War II Kyoto.

Articles about the daily hardships in post-war Germany can be read by clicking here.

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The Stewardship of General MacArthur
(Collier’s Magazine, 1948)

The attached article is about the governance of
General Douglas MacArthur (1880 – 1964) over conquered Japan following the close of World War II and was written half way through the American occupation period by the well-respected American journalist George Creel (1876 – 1953). The article clarifies what regime change meant for post-war Japan and the roll that MacArthur’s creed and character played in the process.


Click here to read about the 1918 portrait of General MacArthur painted by Joseph Cummings Chase.

The Stalin-Hitler Non-Aggression Pact
(Pathfinder, 1948)

During the April of 1945 elements of the U.S. First Army barreled across the countryside of central Germany. Coming across the chateau outside of the Harz Mountain village of Degenershausen it must have seemed to them to be just another pretty pile of high class European rocks, just like all the other ones they’d been stumbling upon since D-Day – but they soon found that the joint was used to house many of the records of pertaining to German diplomacy between the years 1871 through 1944. This article lays bare some of the hidden details in the agreement that was struck between foreign ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop in 1939; the treaty that came to be known as the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.


Read about the earliest post-war sightings of Hitler: 1945-1955
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Skiiers Discover Aspen
(Collier’s Magazine, 1948)

A late Forties travel article that simultaneously announced the end of Aspen, Colorado, as a ghost town and the beginning of it’s reign as a ski resort of the first order.

Aspen is a tiny Colorado village tucked away in one corner of a lush green valley ringed by snow-capped peaks rising to altitudes of more than 14,000 feet…

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