Articles from Current Opinion Magazine
Rebecca West
(born Regina Miriam Bloch: 1892 – 1983) became a fixture on the literary landscape just prior to the First World War when she was recognized as a young, thought-provoking writer with much to say on many matters. The article serves as an interesting profile of the woman by compiling various remarks made during the course of her early career.
The first Soviet famine lasted from 1919 through 1923; some historians have placed the death toll as high as five million:
[Lenin] is held responsible for the policy which has brought about a consumption of so great a proportion of the seed wheat that the fields cannot be sown. For the first time since Bolsheviki gained power, says the Berlin Lokalanzeiger, Lenin is a cipher.
Click here to read about the blackmail and extortion tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression…
Eighty-three years ago, aircraft pilot Major Kurt Bilau (formerly of the Imperial German Air Corps) was intrigued by the abilities a properly designed propeller; he applied his curiosity to the design of a windmill in order to experiment with the possibility harnessing the power of the wind as a source of energy.
This magazine article briefly explains what a success that experiment was. Bilau’s aerodynamo was able to convert a sixteen-mile per/hour wind into an amount of energy that was measured at sixty horse power.
These days, the good works of Kurt Bilau are very actively being improved upon and his same theory is being adapted to harness the power of underwater sea currents.
Click here to read a 1947 article about the battle against air pollution.
Click here to read a 1951 article about America’s polluted rivers.
Attached is a digest of a Zionist article that appeared some weeks earlier in THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY written by Rabbi Joel Blau who tended to believe that antisemitism could only be eradicated if the Jews of the world were to return to Israel.
This is a news article that first appeared in 1921 concerning the continuing clash of civilizations in British Palestine:
There are in Palestine about half a million Muslems, about 62,500 Christians and 65,300 Jews. The aspiration for a Jewish State encounters the opposition not only of all Moslems and Christians but of many Orthodox Jews residing in Palestine. …The Zionist leaders, erroneously classifying the present inhabitants as Arabs, expect them to silently steal away, as Zangwill puts it, and leave the Jews free to rule.
So deep were the ranks of khaki-clad immigrants who filled the U.S. military’s regiments and divisions throughout the course the First World War that our British allies would often refer to the U.S. Army as the American Foreign Legion; yet as grateful as the services were to have so many additional strong arms to deploy during a time of national emergency, it was not without a cost.
This article is all about how the army addressed the issue regarding the high number of illiterate immigrants who broadened their phalanx spanning the years 1917 through 1920.
This article discusses the various opinions between several Jewish organizations and prominent Rabbis in the United States as to what an independent Israel would mean for American Jews.
I predict increasing ferment and unrest throughout all Islam; a continued awakening to self-consciousness; an increasing dislike for Western domination.
So wrote Lothrop Stoddard (1883 – 1950), an author who was very much a man of his time and tended to gaze outside the borders of Western Civilization with much the same vision as his contemporary Rudyard Kipling, seeing the majority of the world’s inhabitants as the white man’s burden. Yet, for all his concern on the matter of Anglo-Saxon hegemony, he seemed to recognize the growing discontent in Islam, even if he was some sixty years early.
One of the most sinister results of the war has been a new wave of anti-Semitism in Europe. Recent dispatches from Berlin describe street demonstrations against Jews and speak of a veritable pogrom atmosphere in Munich and Budapest. In Poland, Jewish blood has flown freely, amid scenes of horror described by Herman Bernstein and other writers in American newspapers. In Ukraine the number of Jews massacred during the early part of the present year is estimated anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000.
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865 – 1922) was an influential soul back in the day who owned a string of widely-read newspapers. Just months prior to his death, he spent some time stateside and drew some conclusions regarding American Prohibition which were noteworthy:
While in our midst he made up his mind about Prohibition. In his opinion it is a failure… His reasons seem to be that he saw plenty of liquor everywhere he was entertained; that Prohibition encourages hypocrisy in the vision of the law, and that he did not like it anyhow… But America has taken it’s stand and will stick to it.
We have all seen it many times before: the well-loved, widely accepted comedian who decides that being adored by the masses is simply not enough. For too many comic talents, sadly, there comes a time when they slip on one banana peel too many and it occurs to them that they want the world to appreciate them for their ability to think. Comics who fill this description might be Al Frankin, Woody Allen or Steve Martin.
This article tries to understand why Chaplin wanted to play a tragic part in a 1921 London stage adaptation of William Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’.
We have seen such behavior in comics many times before, they hadn’t.
The attached article is about a 1921 exhibition displaying the art of the mentally ill; it was organized under the direction of the psychiatric department of Heidelberg University. The exhibition made quite an impact on a number of modernists at the time and it is said that a few of the pieces from the show were later displayed in the 1938 Degenerate Art exhibit that the Nazis launched in an effort to discredit modernism.
A review of Harold Nicolson’s 1921 biography, Paul Verlaine. Numerous aspects of Verlaine’s life and poetry are discussed as are the roots of French Symbolism.
Sir Edward Elgar (1857 – 1934), the noted composer, recently presided at the opening of the new headquarters of a gramophone company in London. Elgar is a great believer in the mechanical reproduction of music, and always conducts for records of his own works.
What musicians want, he said, is more listeners.
Additional data regarding the 1917 Draft and how the first one million inductees measured-up physically:
The first adequate physical survey in half a century was made possible when the Selective Service system brought before medical examiners some ten million men. Of the 2,510,000 men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one 730,000 (29 percent) were rejected on physical grounds.
We found it interesting to learn two facts from this article; the first being that the highest number of acceptable draftees were from the countryside and the second involved the malady of flat feet -which effected one out of every five American men at that time.
