The Atlantic Monthly – Old Magazine Articles

‘What the Negro Means to America”
(Atlantic Monthly, 1929)

In the attached article Count Hermann Alexander Keyserling (1880 – 1946), German philosopher and social critic, wrote about those uncommon cultural elements within the African-American culture that renders American blacks as an unprecedented, unique cultural force in the world:

There has never been anything like the American Negro in Africa, nor is there anything like him in the West Indies or in South America.

‘The New Deal Was Not Fascist”
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1933)

In certain quarters it is asserted that Mr. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ is nothing other than the first stage of an American movement toward Fascism. It is said that, although the United States has not yet adopted the political structure of Italy and Germany, the economic structure of the country is rapidly being molded upon the Fascist pattern.

FDR’s D-Day prayer can be read here

What the Stenographer Saw…
(Atlantic Monthly, 1930)

The attached recollection was written by a British woman who worked as a stenographer at the American embassy in London. She recalled much of what she saw from the typing pool on that dreadful August day in 1914 when the Great War began.

Hitler Gets a Bad Review
(Atlantic Monthly, 1933)

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the German-speaking Alice Hamilton (1869 – 1970; sister to the classics scholar, Edith) was assigned the task of reviewing Mein Kampf
(1925) for The Atlantic Monthly. She didn’t like it.

He loves rough, red-blooded words – ‘relentless’, ‘steely’, ‘iron-hearted’, ‘brutal’; his favorite phrase is ‘ruthless brutality’. His confidence in himself is unbounded.
The royalties generated by the sales of Mein Kampf made Adolf Hitler a very rich man. To read about this wealth and Hitler’s financial adviser, click here.

Read another review of Mein Kampf.

Although Hitler didn’t mention it his book, German-Americans drove him crazy.

The Atmosphere of W.W. I Paris
(Atlantic Monthly, 1918)

William Beebe is best remembered for his exploration of the oceans in a submersible craft called a Bathysphere, however, as a younger man his study of nature brought him to war-weary Paris.

Four devastating years of war had altered the city and made quite an affect on the young naturalist. His astute and very moving observations were recorded in this essay, A Naturalist in Paris.

This link displays the first six pages; the remaining seven pages are available upon request.

Click here to read about the day when the Nazis took Paris.

General Sherman Recalls His War Record
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1911)

The 1866 comments of General William Tecumseh Sherman (1820 – 1891) to Colonel Samuel M. Bowman, concerning the book Bowman was assembling, entitled Sherman and His Campaigns. General Sherman recalled his thoughts on such matters as the causes of the Civil War, the assassination of President Lincoln, the struggle for Kentucky, the use of the railways in war, the Great March and the political talents of President George Washington.

When Grant Captured Richmond
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1865)

A moving account of the fall of Richmond, pieced together from various eyewitness accounts:

The whole Rebel Government was on the move, and all Richmond desired to be. No thoughts of taking Washington now, or of the flag of the Confederacy flaunting in the breeze over the old capitol! Hundreds of officials were at the depot, to get away from the doomed city. Public documents, the archives of the Confederacy, were hastily gathered up, tumbled into boxes and barrels, and taken to the trains, or carried into the streets and set on fire.

General Grant’s March on Richmond
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1865)

The Atlantic Monthly who witnessed Grant’s maneuvering outside the city of Richmond filed this article:

General Grant’s entire force could not have been less than a hundred and thirty thousand, including Sheridan’s cavalry, the force at City Point, and the provisional brigade at Fort Powhatan. Lee’s whole force was not far from seventy thousand, – or seventy-five thousand, including the militia of Richmond and Petersburg…

Click here to learn why Richmond was chosen as the capitol of the Confederacy

General Lee’s Unique Bond with his Army
(Atlantic Monthly, 1911)

Confederate General Robert E. Lee (1807 – 1870) is the topic of this psycho-graphic essay from Confederate Portraits (1914) by the celebrated biographer, Gamaliel Bradford (1863 – 1932).

…Lee won the hearts of his soldiers by living as they did. He managed the business of his position with as little fuss and parade as possible. Foreign officers were struck with the absolute simplicity of his arrangements. There were no guards or sentries around his headquarters, no idle aids-de-camp loitering about…

Civil War Pirate Raphael Semmes
(Atlantic Monthly, 1913)

Attached is a psychographic essay from Confederate Portraits (1914) by the noted biographer, Gamaliel Bradford (1863 – 1932). It must have been written in order to expose to the reading public that softer, more sensitive Raphael Semmes (1809 – 1877) that no historian ever seems to consider. This vision of the American Civil War pirate comes off as a quiet, pious Renaissance man, with a flare for the dramatic.

Semmes was not only a wide reader in his profession and in lines connected with it, but he loved literature proper, read much poetry and quoted it aptly. He was a singularly sensitive to beauty in any form.

The Pessimism That Followed W.W. I
(Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

A few years after the Great War reached it’s bloody conclusion, literary critic Helen McAfee discovered that a careful reading of the prominent authors and poets writing between 1918 and 1923 revealed that each of them shared a newfound sense of malaise – a despairing, pessimistic voice that was not found in their pre-war predecessors.

Certainly the most striking dramatization of this depth of confusion and bitterness is Mr. Eliot’s The Waste Land. As if by flashes of lightening it reveals the wreck of the storm… The poem is written in the Expressionist manner – a manner peculiarly adapted to the present temper… It is mood more than idea that gives the poem its unity. And the mood is black. It is bitter as gall; not only with a personal bitterness, but also with the bitterness of a man facing a world devastated by a war for a peace without ideals.

If you would like to read another 1920s article about the disillusioned post-war spirit, click here.

The Unknown Soldier
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1927)

Ten years after Congress decided to enter the war in Europe, James Truslow Adams (1878 – 1949) wrote this article that appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in which he noted that one of the maladies of the modern era was the creation of a new type of collective thinking that celebrated the common man:

Man has always delighted to honor the great…But now for the first time whole nations, and those the most enlightened, have come to honor the man of whom we know nothing: the Unknown Soldier. As a matter of unfortunate fact, the particular body may be that of one who fought the draft to the last ditch and was a slacker in service. That, however, is of course wholly irrelevant; for it is not really the Unknown Soldier who thus receives the almost religious adoration of his people, but the Common Man, for that is what he is intending to typify…

The Modern Klan
(Atlantic Monthly, 1922)

An Atlantic Monthly article by LeRoy Percy (1860– 1929), a well-off planter who had successfully fought the spread of the KKK into Washington County, Mississippi. This article explains how the Klan operated in 1922. Their wide-spread appeal is also discussed.

One of the strangest aberrations in American life since the war is the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. In the North that organization, when considered at all, has been thought of as a colossal buffoonery, a matter unworthy of the time or thought of intelligent folk; and indeed for the average American, with his common sense and his appreciation for the ridiculous, any other attitude of numbers would seem unlikely…The Klan excludes from membership Negroes, Jews, Catholics and foreign-born, whether citizens or not. In its own phrase, it is the only Gentile White Protestant American-born organization in the world. It is secret… When asked if he is a member, the custom is for a good Klansman to evade, more rarely to reply in the negative, but in any event not to avow his membership.

Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.

Remembering the American Dead
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

Always stationed to the most forward field hospitals during America’s five major campaigns, a former W.W. I nurse penned this moving reminiscence that recalled her experiences tending to the soldiers who slowly died in the army hospitals. Haunted by the memories of these dying boys, she asked her readers as to whether they feel the world has kept the promises made to those who sacrificed so much: is the France they died to protect a better place? is the country that demanded they fight a better place?

Click here for clip art depicting the nurses of World War One.

Letters from the Dying
(The Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

Printed five years after the war, an American nurse published these letters that were dictated to her in France by a handful of dying American soldiers; equally moving were the grateful responses she received months later from their recipients:

I am glad and thank God he had such a quiet, peaceful death. It is a very hard thing for a mother to realize she cannot be with [her son] in his last moments…I am proud to give up my only boy to his country, and that alone is a great consolation.

This is just a segment from a longer article; to read the six page memoir in it’s entirety, click here.

Click here for clip art depicting the nurses of World War One.

Post-War Diary
(Atlantic Monthly, 1928)

Printed posthumously, the attached article was written by British Lieutenant Colonel Charles A Court Repington (1858 – 1925) as he recalled his conversations with French Field Marshals Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929), Joseph Joffre (1852 – 1931) and a number of other French statesmen about the First World War during a series of chats that took place in the autumn 1924.

Woodrow Wilson on the Russian Revolution and the Red Scare
(Atlantic Monthly, 1923)

Attached is an essay by Woodrow Wilson (1856 — 1924) in which the former president implored his fellow citizens to see that the world has indeed been made safe for democracy and that better days are ahead, regardless of the events in Russia and their own fears of communism at home.

Virginia Woolf Reviews E.M. Forster
(Atlantic Monthly, 1927)

Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941) had her say regarding the novels of E.M. Forster (1879 – 1970):

There are a many reasons which should prevent one from criticizing the work of contemporaries… With a novelist like E.M. Forster this is specially true, for he is in any case an author about whom there is considerable disagreement. There is something baffling and evasive in the very nature of his gifts.