Charlie Chaplin Snubs Hollywood and Departs
(Collier’s Magazine, 1948)
Read more …
1948
Articles from 1948
The Nazi’s Man in British Palestine
(’48 Magazine, 1948)
Written two and a half years after the Second World War, this article tells the story of Haj Amin Al-husseini (1897 – 1974), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem; he was the most prominent of Nazi-collaborators in all of Islam. Believed to have been a blood relation of Yasser Arafat (1929 – 2004), Al-Husseini was the animating force behind numerous attacks on the Jews of British Palestine throughout the Twenties and Thirties.
Al-Husseini is also the subject of this article.
Here is an article from 1919 about Al Husseini.
Things Were Not Right in Korea
(’48 Magazine, 1948)
Written two years prior to the Korean War, this article is about the joint occupation of Korea – the Soviets in the industrialized North, the Americans in the agrarian South, and how poorly both regions were being served before the 1950 war:
The issue in Korea is not Communism vs. Americanism, but occupation-trusteeship vs. freedom. On that issue, both Russia and the United States would lose after a free vote of the people, because the two powers have, each in their own way, failed Korea.
The Soviet Army moved into northern Korea during the August of 1945, click here to read about it…
Henry Wallace: Was He Red?
(Collier’s Magazine, 1948)
Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965) was FDR’s second Vice President (1941 – 1945) and as a seasoned Washington politician he must have known that his political career was coming to an end when the attached editorial hit the newsstands in early October of 1948. Written by William L. Chenery, publisher of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE, one of the most staid, middle class news and fiction organs around – it was not the sort of organization that looked upon libel lightly; Chenery meant what he wrote when he slandered the former vice president as the spokesman of Russia.
Wallace, who at the time was taking a licking as the Progressive Party nominee for president in the 1948 race, left politics shortly afterward. In 1952 he wrote a book in which he admitted how wrong he was to have ever trusted Joseph Stalin.
General Douglas MacArthur
(’48 Magazine)
If you’ve been looking for an editorial that was intended to take General MacArthur down a peg or two, you’ve found it. It was penned by Shelley Mydans (1915 – 2002), a journalist who was primarily known at the time for her LIFE MAGAZINE news dispatches; she found the General to be both admirable and repulsive at the same time and was thoroughly baffled as to why he was so loved on so many different continents.
Written two years before General MacArthur’s stunning 1950 victory in the Korean War (the Battle of Inchon), this article makes apparent a deep-seated fear held within the senior leadership of the Democratic party that MacArthur was planning to challenge Truman in the 1948 presidential election.
Another article on General MacArthur can be read here…
The Atomic Crusade
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1948)
Attached is a 1948 article by the Nobel laureate Arthur Holly Compton (1892 – 1962) concerning the widespread understanding among nuclear physicists to wrestle control of atomic energy away from the military and firmly in the hands of civil authorities, where it’s benefits can be put to general use and harnessed as positive force in the lives of all mankind.
Awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 1927, the SCRIPT MAGAZINE editors believed that Arthur Compton, more than anyone else, deserved the title Daddy of the Atomic bomb. When the U.S. Government decided to proceed with the research and development of this weapon, Compton was assigned the double task of attempting a nuclear chain reaction and of designing the bomb itself.
Compton is remembered as the senior physicist at the Manhattan Project who hired Dr. Robert Oppenheimer.
Click here to read an article about American public opinion during the early Cold War years.
Click here to read about the invention of the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile
One Month Into the Berlin Blockade
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)
The firm of Uncle Sam and John Bull flying grocers, kept the Western Allies in the Battle for Berlin last week… If the peace continues, the U.S. British estimated, by mid-July there will be enough food in Berlin’s stockpile to feed the 2 million Germans in western sectors of the capital until September 1… Supplying fuel and coal was another problem…
The article is accompanied by one cartoon from THE NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE.
‘How Close are We to War with Russia?”
(See Magazine, 1948)
The article is illustrated with five black and white photos and answers thirty-four questions as to whether or not a war with the Soviet Union can be avoided.
When these columns first appeared on the newsstands Berlin was undergoing it’s third month of hardships as a result of a Soviet blockade (you can read about the Berlin Blockade here).
The Economic Downturn Affected Clothing
(The Era of the Great Depression, 1948)
Men’s attire was more sensitive to depression than women’s, for even the most elemental sense of chivalry recognized the superior importance of fashion for wife and daughter.
More articles on 1930s fashion can be read here…
Picasso Painted Me
(’48 Magazine, 1948)
Artist and poet Jaime Sabartés (1881 – 1968) had been among the oldest and closest friends of Pablo Picasso since the two of them were 19-year-old artists in Barcelona. Throughout the course of their 40-year friendship Picasso had painted and drawn his pal on numerous occasions – Sabartés’ comments about those six portraits and his memories of those isolated moments appear on the attached pages. He recalled a day when Picasso energetically encouraged him to write down his thoughts, which in time lead to this article, that appeared in his 1948 book, PICASSO: an Intimate Portrait
I decided, therefore, to take these portraits as texts, to try to imbue with warmth Picasso’s pictures of me, to make them live anew, to enrich them with fragments from the life of their creator and shreds of my own.
A Picasso poem is included among the reminiscence (translator unknown).
A forgotten article from 1913 that degraded Picasso and other assorted Modernists can be read here.
Third Symphony’ by Aaron Copland
(Rob Wagner’s Script, 1948)
A review of Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony written in 1948 by the respected Los Angeles music critic and historian Lawrence Morton (1908 – 1987):
…there can be no mistake about the Third. It is a solid structure, exceedingly rich and varied in expressiveness, large in concept, masterful in execution, completely unabashed and outspoken.
No wonder that Sergi Koussevitsky called it ‘the greatest American symphony.’
‘The Women Are Coming”
(The Saturday Review, 1948)
Unknown to the majority of women in this country, a steadily mounting feminist campaign is under way for Equal Rights for women under the Constitution. The average man will regard this statement with bewilderment.
British Girls Loved ‘The New Look’
(See Magazine, 1948)
Weary of restraints imposed by more than a decade of war followed by the austerity program…British women have now cast aside the old look, are stampeding West End shops for the built-in New Look.
Back-Handed Compliments for D.W. Griffith
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1948)
This 1940s Hollywood journalist refrained from using the pejorative white cracker while condemning silent film director D.W. Griffith for his racial views -and yet at the same time did something rather bold in that he put in print his views that the man has been erroneously credited as the creator of various assorted film innovations that were pioneered by other filmmakers.
Hermann Goering’s Car Finds a New Owner
(See Magazine, 1948)
A remarkable 1948 photo essay from the pages of the defunct weekly SEE MAGAZINE illustrating the bullet-proof, 2-door, 4 passenger, Mercedes convertible roadster that was previously owned by Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Göering (1893 – 1946). The car was purchased by the Danish industrialist Svend Vestergaard:
Vestergaard purchased the 8-cylinder, 240 h.p., under-slung speedster from British occupation authorities…The car was especially built according to the ostentatious Number 2 Nazi’s exacting specifications, the German-made product of Stuttgart’s famed Daimler-Benz Aktiengesellschaft is 11 feet long, weighs three truck-like tons,[and] has six forward speeds.
Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.
Forties Ski Mode
(Collier’s Magazine, 1948)
Clipped from the pages of a 1948 issue of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE were these four color pictures of skiers loafing about the slopes in a place that had just recently been discovered for such purposes; it was called Aspen, in Colorado.
You will no doubt notice that there is no real difference between the skiing togs worn by either gender; both wore only wool, jaunty ski sweaters and pegged trousers.
Click here if you would like to read the entire article about Aspen in 1948; there are additional color photographs.
Berlin Becomes the Center of Global Espionage
(See Magazine, 1948)
ESPIONAGE is big business in Berlin and has it’s painstaking, pecuniary bureaucracy. It is practiced by small fry (who is willing to procure for you anything from the latest deployment plan of the Red Army to a lock of Hitler’s hair) and by big-time operators who deal nonchalantly and lucratively in international secrets.
A Warning to the West
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)
This is a 1948 Soviet poster that foreign correspondents of the day reported as having been widely distributed across the Worker’s Paradise. A veiled piece of patriotic pageantry, it was clearly intended to intimidate the Western democracies; it made its appearance a few weeks into the Berlin Blockade (June, 1948 – May, 1949) – an international stunt that gained the Soviets nothing.
From Amazon:
Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin
