Ken Magazine – Old Magazine Articles

There was Illegal Immigration from Mexico Back Then, Too
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This 1938 magazine article can be filed in the the more things change, the more they stay the same folder. It lists all the assorted means by which Mexicans have attempted to illegally cross over the Southern border, whether to smuggle others, import illegal drugs or for their own gratification.

Marijuana was becoming a problem in 1938, too. Read about it here.

Click here to read about the U.S. Border Patrol.

Black Nazis?
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

Black Nazis: Fritz Delfs, leader of the Nazis in Tanganyika, the former German East Africa that Hitler is demanding, soft-pedals Aryan supremacy credo in propounding Nazi ideology, and capitalizes traditional use of the swastika by the natives as a symbol of fertility.

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

Kaiser Wilhelm’s Thoughts On Hitler
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

For the sixth time in his life, Ken Magazine‘s far-flung correspondent, W. Burkhardt, found himself cast in the roll as guest of the deposed king of Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859 – 1941). After exchanging pleasantries, their conversation turned to weightier topics, such as contemporary German politics and it was at that time that Ken‘s man in Doorn recognized his moment:

Suddenly, sensing a chance I may never have again, I pose the question:

And yourself, Sire, what do you think of him?

Nichts!

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

The Okies and the Dust Bowl
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

The other half of California’s 200,000 migratory workers are farmers who trekked from the dust bowl area; they found work on farms, but not farming; it’s seasonal piecework, like in a mill. Each Oklahoma nomad dreams of a cottage and a cow, but he’s just sitting on a barbed wire fence. With the publicity over, the government has forgotten the dust bowl refugees. At Depression depth, a man might make $8 a week; now, $5 is lucky. They are the bitterest folk in America; blood may flow…

Click here if you would like to read a 1940 article about the the finest movie to ever document the flight of the Okies: The Grapes of Wrath.

The Imperial Wizard
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Fat, shrewd-smiling, garrulous Old Doc Evans (Hiram Evans, 1881 – 1966) is still Emperor and Imperial Wizard, but he’s now apparently only fronting for a Big Boss who has some sensational new plans which have already begun to click. Once again the Klan is holding hands with politicians all over the country, but the hand-holding is being done under the table. The big drive begins in May

Adolf Hitler: Millionaire
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

Der Fuhrer boasts of his impecuniosity, but the fact is that royalties from his book, Mein Kampf and investments in German real-estate and industrial firms make him one of Germnay’s wealthiest men. This money is deposited throughout Europe in 15 bank accounts under three names…

Japanese Spies on the West-Coast
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

A 1939 magazine article that reported on the assorted activities of Japanese spies operating around the Tijuana/San Diego region (their presence was well-documented by the Mexican military in addition to the F.B.I.).

A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation – more about this can be read here.

The Red Caps
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

The history of the African American baggage handlers called Red Caps is a sad story in American social history. The Red Caps had been around since the 1890s and they were assigned the task of carrying luggage to and from trains and taxis; this article points out that in the Thirties, one of every three of them had a college degree:

Red Caps did not go to college to learn how to be Red Caps. Their problem is a racial one. To the white, a job toting luggage is a poor way to eke out an existence. To the black, red capping is one of the ‘big’ fields open. The white man who works as a porter can do nothing else, as a rule; the Negro almost invariably can do something else but can’t get it to do.

Dorie Miller was an African-American hero during the Second World War, click here if you would like to read about him.

Life in Hitlerland
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

It’s a prison or a concentration camp if they catch you tuned in on a forbidden radio program in Hitlerland. And they will take your driver’s license away if even once you are overheard making a careless or joking remark that could be interpreted as ‘out of sympathy with the spirit of the new state’. So even in the apparently private little world bounded by the turning wheels of your own closed car, you must think long and hard like a badgered witness under cross-examination, before you dare open your mouth…

Click here to read what life was like in Mussolini’s Italy in 1938…

Only Über-Blondes Need Apply…(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This article covers a weird Nazi scheme to create the future rulers of the Reich. It is such a bizarre plan and it seemed to us that if it weren’t true, we would have had to rely on Robert Ludlum to dream it up for us:

The idea took root in the fertile brain of Minister of Propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, also known as the ‘Limping Devil’…’Heroes are both born and trained’, is the Nazi slogan. The future leaders are taken under the government’s wings at the age of ten.’

-and over a period of about twelve years they would have been dragged around from one Harry Potter-style-castle to another being schooled in Nazi dogma and all other assorted Nordic pagan weirdness and then, after having jumped through a number of additional Teutonic hoops, they would be posted in top government positions.
A fascinating look into the queer thinking of the Nazi hierarchy.

A second article about the Adolf Hitler Schools can be read here

CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…

Nazi Indoctrination: the Eighth Grade
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

Five months before the Second World War began an American journalist paid a visit to a German middle school and watched an eighth grade German history pageant; these are his observations:

Sitting in Germany’s schoolrooms are 20 million boys and girls. It is the custom, in democratic countries, to think that Hitler is engaged in pulling wool, or at least some cheap non-import substitute for it, over their eyes every school day.
For two years , for instance, all German boys and girls have been exposed to the following clear-cut lesson:

‘Where e’er I gaze, as German,
My soul with pain o’erflows,
I see the German nation
Girt round and round with foes.’

Click here to read about the Allied effort to re-educate the German boy soldiers of W.W. II.

Re-Touching the Pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

Perhaps, one day in that perfect world we seem to be rushing to, all cameras will automatically delete our blemishes, correct our tailoring flaws and add muscle tone as needed to each imperfect image; but until that time, we, like the Duke of Windsor and all manner of other celebrity, must rely on the charitable instincts of the fourth estate. This article pertains to bad pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the courtesy that was, for the most part, extended to them to make them appear just a little bit more glam than they otherwise appeared. The article is illustrated with one bad photograph and one retouched (Photoshopped) image of the couple, so that we might all know what the editors were up against:

Immediately after their marriage Edward and Wally posed for the newsreels. When their pictures were flashed on American screens, Wally was seen to have a large mole on the left side of her face and the Duke stood revealed with a much-wrinkled and worried countenance…

Re-Touching the Pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

An Interview with Dr. George Washington Carver
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

A profile of Dr. George Washington Carver (1864 – 1943):

One of the greatest agricultural chemists of our day was born a slave 80 years ago. He has given the world approximately 300 new by-products from the peanut…Today Dr. Carver is the South’s most distinguished scientist. He turned the peanut into a $60,000,000 industry.

I simply go to my laboratory, shut myself in and ask my Creator why He made the peanut. My Creator tells me to pull the peanut apart and examine the constituents. When this is done, I tell Him what I want to create, and He tells me I can make anything that contains the same constituents as a peanut. I go to work and keep working until I get what I want.

Hitler Goes Wife Shopping
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

An illustrated five page article that will key you in on all the actresses, nieces, Mifords and assorted divas courted by handsome Adolf throughout the Twenties and Thirties. It was said that the dictators co-tyrants wished deeply that he would marry if only to end his moods of melancholy, storms of anger, alternate depression and driving energy, hoping it will make Hitler more human.

Click here to read about the magic Hitler had with German women…

Hitler’s Sister Tells Her Story
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

For twenty years Paula Hitler lived in a Vienna garret, never hearing from [her] lost brothers, Gustav and Adolf… When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor, he at last wrote to [her]. Paula, embittered by his long desertion and the loss of her youth, declared that he was no longer her brother. She gave out an interview revealing that their father was an illegitimate child. The Fuehrer’s emissaries told her to keep quiet, she refused. But finally when Hitler came as ruler to Vienna, there was a reconciliation, and family Anschluss.

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

British Fascists
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This article is about the founder of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley (1896 – 1980). The article outlines much of his life and political career up to the year 1938, with heavy emphasis concerning some of the least admirable aspects of his character

His father’s comment sums Mosely up admirably:
‘He has never done an honest days work in his life.’

Click here to read about the origins of Fascist thought…

The Man Behind Mussolini
(Ken Magazine, 1939)

This short, slanderous profile of Italy’s Victor Emmanuel III (1869 – 1947) is accompanied by a caricature of the potentate:

He chose Mussolini in 1922 in preference to dictatorship by Premiere (Luigi) Facta, aided him in attaining supreme power…Hasn’t had any choice about anything since.