Pathfinder Magazine

Articles from Pathfinder Magazine

WPA and the States
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

In early March, numerous governors convened and agreed that the WPA was dropping too many dependents from their rolls who were then becoming burdensome to their respective states. The executives then wrote a telegram to the White House insisting that the Federal program stop this practice.

The Federal Theater Project
(Pathfinder & Literary Digest Magazines, 1939)

The Federal Theater Project (FTP) was a division of President
Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration (WPA). The WPA was organized in order to dream up jobs for the many unemployed Americans during the Great Depression. They employed manual laborers with the Civilian Conservation Corps, musicians with the Federal Music Project and historians with the Federal Records Survey – to name only a few of the agencies within the WPA. The Federal Theater Project was intended to hire the nation’s actors, costumers,directors and stagehands:

At its peak in 1936, FTP employed 12,500 people…it had puppet shows, vaudeville units, circuses and stock companies traveling through every state.

Fashion’s Rainmaker
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

In the February of 1947, he opened eyes and mouths all over the world by showing almost-ankle-length daytime dresses. In the United States this length was christened the New Look. And Christian Dior had won, by inches the title, King of Fashion. His title is still secure. Dior designs accounted for an estimated 60% of total haute couture exports last year.

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More Fighting for Christmas
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

The toughest fighting was in a three-mile beachead at the chewed-up port of Hungnam. There the U.S X Corps had escaped from a Chinese trap and was piling aboard a fleet of Victory and Liberty ships.


The U.S. Navy had a strong presence off shore to cover the American withdrawal.

The Atomic Spy Ring
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1951)

An interesting column that succinctly sums up how Stalin’s spies were able to compromise the Manhattan Project, who organized the spy ring, the intelligence that was gleaned, how they were caught and what their fate within the legal system would be.


You can read about Alger Hiss HERE…

Japanese Feudalism Overturned
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1945)

The reforms that were imposed upon Occupied Japan in the Forties and Fifties did not simply come in the form of death sentences for war criminals – but additionally the Japanese came to know the rights and protections that are guaranteed to All Americans under the United States Constitution. For the first time ever Japanese women were permitted to vote, unions were legalized and equality under the law was mandated. This small notice concerned the overthrow of the feudal laws that governed the Japanese tenant farmers.

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Oscars for 1938
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

Attached is short report listing some of the highlights of the 11th Academy Awards ceremony that was held on February 23, 1939 in downtown Los Angeles:


• Director Frank Capra received his third Best Director statue for You Can’t Take It with You
.
• Walt Disney was awarded an Oscar for the best animated short film, Ferdinand The Bull – in addition to a special award for his innovative work on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.


• The Best Screenplay Oscar went to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw for his efforts on Pygmalion.



An amusing, if blasphemous, article about the 1938 Oscars can be read here…

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The Mid-Century Look in Fashion
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Hair as short as a boy’s and feathered into wisps about the face… Accented waist… Long slim look… Spread-eagle effect about the shoulders obtained by deep armholes, bloused backs, big collars or little capes… Mostly narrow skirts but still plenty of full ones.


– so begins the attached two page Spring fashion review that was torn from the Women’s Page of the January 25, 1950 issue of Pathfinder Magazine. Judging from the six photographs that illustrate the column, Christian Dior continued call the tunes that other fashion designers had to dance to if they expected to attract a following. The New York designers whose efforts were singled out for praise were Lilly Daché, Hattie Carnegie, Ben Reig, Ceil Chapman and Vera Jacobs of Capri Originals.


More about 1950s hairstyles can be read here…

The Mid-Century Look in Fashion
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Hair as short as a boy’s and feathered into wisps about the face… Accented waist… Long slim look… Spread-eagle effect about the shoulders obtained by deep armholes, bloused backs, big collars or little capes… Mostly narrow skirts but still plenty of full ones.


– so begins the attached two page Spring fashion review that was torn from the Women’s Page of the January 25, 1950 issue of Pathfinder Magazine. Judging from the six photographs that illustrate the column, Christian Dior continued call the tunes that other fashion designers had to dance to if they expected to attract a following. The New York designers whose efforts were singled out for praise were Lilly Daché, Hattie Carnegie, Ben Reig, Ceil Chapman and Vera Jacobs of Capri Originals.


More about 1950s hairstyles can be read here…

Stalin’s ‘Hate-America’ Campaign
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

In 1952 the Soviet hierarchy began publishing an enormous amount of anti-American cartoons in magazines and newspapers throughout the worker’s paradise. As you will see, the Red cartoonists of yore were really big on comparing Americans to bugs and Nazis; they also delighted in making all American senior officers resemble the obese General Walker, who was the American corps commander leading the U.N. Forces in Korea.


The Soviets were very clever in the way in which they used radio to manipulate their people, click here to read about that…

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Inequality For Female Barflies
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

This column concerns a 1937 bill sponsored by New York State Senator Edward Coughlin. The senator’s bill provided for the arrest of any woman who stood at or in front of the bar of any club, hotel or restaurant licensed to sell alcoholic beverages. Coughlin held that any woman found guilty of this pastime should be charged with disorderly conduct. A few other states were also attracted to this legislation; it passed a year later only to be repealed in the early Sixties.


Click here to read about that moment in 1920 when American Women attained the vote.

Alternative Lyrics for the National Anthem
(Pathfinder, 1941)

Do you fail to recall the words to our national anthem time and again? You’re not alone – a quick glance at Google’s records indicate that in the silence of their rooms, thousands of your fellow Americans suffer from the same malady (and smirk at others who make their memory loss public). To say that the Americans of today are not as patriotic as they used to be is an understatement to be sure – but some of you will no doubt be relieved to know that the Americans of yore, vintage 1941, didn’t know the lyrics to The Star Spangled Banner any better than we do – as you can tell by the attached verses which were penned over seventy years ago about his fellow Americans and their inability to keep the words of Francis Scott Key in their heads.

‘Americans All”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

In an effort to keep the writers and actors of the Works Progress Administration busy, FDR’s Department of the Interior produced a 26-part radio program intended to prove that America could never have become so great without the contributions of all the various hyphenated groups that make up the country. On Sunday afternoon throughout much of 1938, Americans could gather around their radios, if they had them, and hear their identity groups being praised by the Government: African-Americans tuned in on December 18th; the WASP show was on December fourth.

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Swimwear
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1947)

The only big fashion innovation popular enough to share the 1947 headlines with Dior’s New Look involved the evolution in women’s swimwear; most notably the Bikini. The attached single page article pertains to all the new fabrics being deployed in ladies beachwear and all their assorted coverups:

Sand-and-sun fashions for this summer are perter and briefer than ever before. Although the typical bathing suit covers just about 2.5 square feet of a swimmer’s anatomy, a costume-look for the beach is achieved with a companion cape, skirt of short coat… Favored fabrics are those made to ride the waves. Knitted wool shows up in both classic and unusual designs. Colors are softer and muted. Black and blue appear most often, with cider, gray and smudge the ‘high-style’ shades.

Click here to learn about women’s fashions from the Summer of 1934•

FDR’s ”Pack The Court” Proposal
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Attached is a break-down of President Roosevelt’s proposed legislation to rid the Supreme Court of six ornery justices by imposing a mandatory retirement age for the whole of the Federal Government. Failing that, FDR’s legislation would have granted the President power to appoint an additional Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, up to a maximum of six, for every member of the court over the age of 70, in order to assure passage of all New Deal legislation.

Justice George Sutherland
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Justice George Sutherland (1862 – 1942) was consistently on the reactionary side in votes against New Deal legislation. It was he who wrote the decisions invalidating the Guffey coal-control act and the powers of the SEC to interrogate witnesses. His NRA and the Municipal Bankruptcy Act, railroad pensions and hot oil legislation. He voted in favor of the TVA and old-age pensions.

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