Pathfinder Magazine – Page 11 – Old Magazine Articles

Design for Modern Living
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

In an attempt to define modernism for a broad audience, architect/designer Alexander Girard curated the Exhibition for Modern Living that was housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts during the winter of 1949. It was a ground breaking exhibit that brought modernism down from the mountain and allowed people to see that modern design was intended to make life more pleasant:

Modern design implies shape for use, simplicity, new forms to utilize new materials, easier housekeeping, and honest expression of mass production… Up the richly carpeted ramp, viewers walk up to a dining room done by Alvar Aalto; past two studies Bruno Mathsson and Jean Risom and a bedroom and living-room representing a variety of designers; then up another level to a space furnished by Charles Eames; and finally to a small balcony overlooking George Nelson’s living area. The quiet simplicity of the rooms and the gentle tones of symphonic music have people talking in whispers. Sighed one woman: ‘I’d like to live here.’

Design for Modern Living
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

‘A Red Is a Red is a Red”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1947)

The Cold War was not often seen as a subject for poetry – but that didn’t stop a popular versifier like Berton Braley (1882 – 1966). He took a look around at the post-war world and saw plenty subjects that rhymed:

You’ll meet, methinks, a lot of pinks
Whose statements are dogmatic
That Communists are Liberals
And really Democratic;
But when you hear that type of tripe
Keep this fact in your nut
– That Communists are Communists and nothing else but!

His poem went on for three more stanzas…

Atomic Researcher Arrested in London
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

In January, 1950, a British scientist named Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988) was arrested for passing atomic secrets on to Soviet agents.

In his confession Fuchs admitted that the transfer of information began in 1942, shortly after he joined the [British Ministry of Supply] as a German Refugee.

Cardinal Innitzer Stands Up
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

With the 1938 merging of Austria with Hitler’s Germany came the Nazi coercion of Austrian Christianity. One of the first clerics to rebel against their repression was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer (1875 – 1955) of Vienna who made clear his outrage in a series of open letters criticizing the various Nazi restrictions involving marriage and the removal of nuns and priests from various schools and hospitals.

Yamashita Sentenced to Death
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

The article posted herein lists the aleged crimes of General Tomoyuki Yamishita of the Imperial Japanese Army. The article also states the results of his sentencing, death by hanging. Two weeks after the trial he received a stay of execution by the United States Supreme Court.

Statism
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1946)

Not long after the free world had conquered fascism, the long twilight struggle against Communism commenced. Stalin’s Soviet Union had refused to comply with the treaties it had previously agreed to and was occupying North Korea and many of the Eastern European countries that the Nazis had invaded. Furthermore, Stalin was was funding armed insurgencies in Greece, Vietnam and China. In an effort to help define the tyranny that is Communism, Pathfinder ran this column that defined Communism as Statism and explained it in simple terms.

‘Lynching No. 3”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

A dreary news story relaying the violent end that came to one R.C. Williams of Ruston, Louisiana.

‘Outmaneuvered”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

Here is a short column that lists the impact that the American counterattack wrought upon the German forces as a result of their winter offensive during the Battle of the Bulge – no explanation was given as to how this information was attained.

The Secret Papers of Robert Lansing
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1940)

In 1940, when America stood on the precipice preparing to enter another enormous conflict, the heretofore secret papers of Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing (1864 – 1928), were released – shedding light on the government’s reasoning as to why they felt U.S. intervention in the European war was necessary.

What was Pathfinder Magazine
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

PATHFINDER MAGAZINE was a pretty terrific news organ and to thumb through any of the issues spanning 1910 through 1922 you’ll get the sense that it had a heavy hand in influencing TIME, NEWSWEEK and any number of other magazines that came later. Established in Washington, D.C. in 1894, PATHFINDER earned its reputation as a genuine source for domestic and international news.

This article was written by its last publisher, Graham Patterson, and it served as both a history of that weekly as well as an obituary for its founder, George Mitchell – which is entirely fitting because the whole enterprise folded four and half years later. By the time its final issue rolled off the press in 1952 it had become the second largest news magazine in America – with a circulation numbering 1,200,000. With a record like that it seems odd that it went under at all.

Click here to read our collection of articles from PATHFINDER MAGAZINE.

Japanese Nationalists
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

This article tells the tale of the Japanese Nationalist Masaharu Kageyama (1910 – 1979), a fellow who, in the political landscape of U.S.-occupied Japan, seemed rather like the late Mussolini of Italy: always remembering the storied past of a Japan that no longer existed. Kageyama was something a flat-Earther, choosing the road of the Japanese Nationalist, he held that Emperor Hirohito was indeed divine and that the Fascist vision of an East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was achievable, even in 1949.

Whither Latin?
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

This article charts the decline of Latin as an academic study in American schools. The disappearance of Latin began in the Thirties and steadily snowballed to such a point that by 1952 its absence was finally noticed.

Is Latin on its way out in high schools? The answer is a confident ‘NO.’
It’s hard to see how it can go any lower,’ declares Dr. John F. Latimer, head of Latin studies
at George Washington University.

Draft-Resistance In Canada
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1944)

A mob of French-Canadian youths surged through Montreal with skull-and-crossbones sign [that read]: Are We Cannon fodder? Do We Want Conscription? No! Quebec province seethed with rage at Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s decision to send draftees overseas.

Their father’s resisted the draft some twenty years earlier…

The Holocaust Rescuers
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1943)

Here is a small article that appeared during the middle of the war saying that there were German parishioners within both Protestant and Catholic churches who offered food and shelter to the various assorted minorities (primarily Jews) who were persecuted by the Nazis.

The Trial of Franz von Papen
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1947)

Franz von Papen (1879 – 1969) was born into the German nobility; he worked as a diplomat, a politician and during both World Wars he served as an intelligence officer in his nation’s army. During the Third Reich von Papen was appointed Vice Chancellor under Adolf Hitler. This article concerns the period in von Papen’s life when, after having been acquitted earlier by the international tribunal, he found himself once more on the docket for another misdeed.

Franz von Papen had an IQ that measured 134 – click here to read about the strangely high IQs of the other lunatics in Nazi leadership…

Pearl Harbor’s Two Fall Guys
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945

Recognizing that responsible commanders must always assume the blame for the failings within their respective domains, former U.S. General George C. Marshall and General Leonard T. Gerow stood up and claimed responsibility for leaving Pearl Harbor vulnerable to Japanese attack. Marshall had been FDR’s Army Chief-of-Staff since the Autumn of 1939 and Gerow had been serving as executive officer of the War Plans Division at the time of the sneak attack – however, To read this article is to understand that these men were responsible for Pearl Harbor’s lack of preparedness…

The Soviets Get the Bomb
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

A news column that is appropriately drenched in the gravitas of the day because it announced that the short-lived age of atomic security that brought W.W. II to a close had come to an end. A new epoch had arrived at 11:00 a.m., September 23, 1949, when President Harry Truman announced

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.

With nuclear bombs must come a nuclear strategy:
click here to read about that…