Liberty Magazine – Page 2 – Old Magazine Articles

FDR and his Learning Disabilities
(Liberty Magazine, 1938)

Liberty publisher Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) was a reliable critic of FDR and his economic policies. In this column MacFadden lambasts the President for making error after error and learning from none of them. He points out that the open market economy of the United States has traditionally provided Americans with the world’s highest standard of living, and yet:

“They would like to ignore precedent… entirely cast aside and forget the extraordinary results of our experiences in following the American system. They hate business and everything connected with it.”

Sticking It to FDR
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)

George Creel (1876 – 1953), the nation’s first and only official censor (1917 – 1918), knew FDR for twenty-five years, and in this wartime recollection he made FDR wish that the two had never met. This is the type of article Creel would never have allowed to be published twenty some years earlier because it sought to reduce confidence in the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, with the war in its eleventh month, Creel gave it to FDR with both barrels:

“No man ever dreamed more nobly or had less skill in making his dreams come true.”

FDR and the Business Class
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

“The attack on business so well popularized by the present administration at Washington unquestionably prolonged the Depression, perpetuated the dole, and added millions to the unemployed”

T.E. Lawrence: On Allenby’s Right
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

“General Storrs said, ‘I want you to meet Colonel Lawrence, the uncrowned king of Arabia.'”

“Now it all came back to me!
This was the man Todd Gilney had spoken of – the man who had fostered the Arab revolt against Turkish rule. He was the leader who had singlehandedly welded a hundred warring desert tribes into a compact fighting force which now protected Allenby’s right wing.”

T.E. Lawrence: On Allenby’s Right
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

When Hollywood Wished Not to Offend Hitler
(Liberty Magazine, 1939)

When Hitler and Mussolini declared that they would no longer import Hollywood films for viewing, they inadvertently gave birth to a new kind of Hollywood – a Hollywood that would now produce movies criticizing European Fascism.

Read about Mission to Moscow (Warner Brothers, 1943) – made when Hollywood wished not to offend Stalin…

Sinai And Palestine: Allenby’s Victory
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

Attached are two articles by American journalist Lowell Thomas (1892 – 1981) regarding all that he witnessed while reporting on General Edmund Allenby’s campaign against Johnny Turk in the Sinai and Palestine Theater during the First World War. This reminiscence was written many years after the war in an effort to make up for the fact that “after eighteen years, no clear-cut account of Allenby’s campaign has been set down.”

Click here to read about Lawrence of Arabia…

Sinai And Palestine: Allenby’s Victory
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

Click here to read about Lawrence of Arabia…

Mussolini Betrayed the Italian Jews
(Liberty Magazine, 1939)

“What is the reason for Il Duce’s newly acquired antisemitism? Why the new laws degrading the Jews of Italy? There are hardly 60,000 native-born Jews in all Italy. Many Italians have never laid eyes on a Jew. Antisemitism played no part in Italian life until Il Duce determined to banish the Jews into a moral and material ghetto.”

FDR in W.W. I
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)

Between the years 1913 through 1920, FDR served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels:

“Roosevelt had not been in office a month before he gave out a public statement urging a more adequate navy:”

“‘The navy is not fit for war. We have today only sixteen ships we can send effectively against the first line of the enemy.'”

The Importance of Detroit
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)

Throughout a good deal of the Great Depression (1929 – 1940), FDR liked to think he was cozying-up to the voters when he insulted the great captains of industry with mean names like “selfish” and “stubborn”. All that ended when the war started, and the President had to make common cause with these men in order gain their cooperation in meeting the military needs of the nation. This article concerns the importance of the industrial might of Detroit.

Babies Wanted
(Liberty Magazine, 1940)

“Womanhood is industrialized in Germany today. The Führer has decreed that maternity is a state function, subject to production regulations like any part of the planned economy of the Third Reich. Sex has been regimented no less than the airplane industry. Love is now mechanized and runs on a twenty-four-hour schedule, with the slogan: Germany needs children.”

General Smedley Butler on Peace
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

Retired Marine Corps General Smedley Butler (1881 – 1940) was well known for his 1935 book, War is a Racket in which he summed-up his military career as one in which he served as “a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the bankers”; he wrote of the importance of removing the profitability from war and cautioned his countrymen to be weary of American military adventurism. In this essay, Butler warned of well-healed, deep-pocketed “peace” organizations and prophesied that institutions like the League of Nation and the U.N. would be incapable of stopping wars (he got that right).

The Young Barbara Stanwick
(Liberty Magazine, 1932)

This interview with Barbara Stanwick (b. Ruby Catherine Stevens 1907 – 1990) will give you a genuine insight to her character, its a wonderful read.

Damaging Businesses was not Helpful
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

“Business is just as important to this nation as food and drink is to the human body. And every effort that retards it in any way affects the entire nation… It was [the New Deal’s] attack on business that destroyed the confidence of businessmen generally.”

Why Was The U.S. Last to Recover?
(Liberty Magazine, 1940)

As editor-in-chief of Liberty Magazine, Bernarr Macfadden (1868 – 1955) asked an important question:

“What is the matter with this country? Why is it we are credited with being the last to recover from the world-wide Depression? As the wealthiest nation in the world we should have been the first?”

Post-Repeal Fears
(Liberty Magazine, 1933)

What was to be done with all the racketeers who dominated the Twenties once Prohibition was prohibited? Organizing the collective labor of truck drivers seemed to have been the most obvious project for the kingpins, but what of the average foot soldier?

“Even the rank and file have not been driven to the breadline. Current quotations for gunmen have fallen from $300 a week to as low as $100. Plain sluggers command even scantier wages. A fancy pineapple job once cost $250; by 1933 you could get a good workman for $50.”