Liberty Magazine – Old Magazine Articles

‘God and Alcoholics” (Liberty Magazine, 1939)

Somebody said The Lord’s Prayer as the meeting broke up. I walked three blocks to the subway station. Just as I was about to go down the stairs – bang! – It happened! I don’t like the word miracle, but that’s all I can call it. The lights in the street seemed to flared up. My feet seemed to leave the pavement. A kind of shiver went over me and I burst into tears…I haven’t touched a drop in four years and I’ve sent four other fellows on the same road.

H.L. Mencken on the Brain Trust (Liberty Magazine, 1934)

The Brain Trust has devised a number of schemes for getting money away from the fellows who accumulated it during the Golden Age of Coolidge, and some of those schemes are working. Any man who hoarded gold has now been relieved of it, any man who piled up a bank deposit sees it reduced by 40% in value.

‘I Am Not a Dictator” (Liberty Magazine, 1938)

In 1938, Fulton Oursler (1893 – 1952), editor of Liberty, crossed the Atlantic Ocean in order to ask Benito Mussolini why he invaded Ethiopia and to get his thoughts as to whether there would be peace in Europe. We can’t say that Il Duce gave very thorough answers to those questions, but Oursler did find out what was eating Mussolini:

Why is it that the people of the United States are so against Fascism? What is the matter with them? Why is the whole press so bitter against Fascism? Can you answer me that?

The Black Women Who Pass For White (Liberty Magazine, 1949)

In most of our larger cities and many small towns there are thousands of Negroes who have successfully ‘gone over the line’ and are now living as white. Among them, it is said, are several well-known athletes and members of Congress – But you don’t hear much about the Negro women who pass. The roving male nature makes it easier for a man to pass completely, though it involves giving up his family as well as his friends. A woman finds passing harder to take.

Click here to read about the social differences between darker skinned and lighter skinned black people.

DON’T BECOME AN EXTRA (Liberty Magazine, 1935)

If you were planning to use your time machine to travel back to 1935 so you could work as a Hollywood extra – you might want to read this article about what a bad hand was dealt to that crowd back in the day. It was written by Campbell MacCulloch, General Manager of the Central Casting Corporation – and he knew all about it:

In Hollywood dwell some ten or twelve thousand misguided folk who cling tenaciously to a couple of really fantastic illusions…

She Fought in the Trenches (Liberty Magazine, 1938)

Well, Monsieur, did I ever tell you about the time I was a Doughboy in the Great war?

This is the story of Marie Marvingt (1875 – 1963), an amazing French woman who did indeed serve in the forward trenches disguised as a man during the Summer of 1917.

Threat of Nationalizing (Liberty Magazine, 1938)

In the winter of 1938, when one of FDR’s anointed Brain Trusters made an off-the-cuff remark that the Federal Government would take over industry if the economy did not turn around, it must have alarmed many of the industry captains and sent the stock market through the floor. It also moved the eccentric Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) to put a fresh ribbon in his typewriter and have at it:

The present administration has made a ghastly failure of the business management of this government. It has increased the national indebtedness at the rate of five to ten million dollars every day. It has added more than twenty thousand million dollars to our national debt, and it probably has twenty million or more of our citizens on the dole, or in charity jobs, which is the dole in another form.

A Few Days With Lenin and Trotsky (Liberty, 1920)

Often published by the editors of Liberty, Life and Judge, was the American cartoonist Ellison Hoover (d. 1966) who poked some fun at the instability and blood-lusting thirst of the still-born Soviet Union in 1920.

Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.