The Literary Digest – Old Magazine Articles

‘Making the Immigrant Unwelcome”
(Literary Digest, 1921)

To read this 100-year-old article is to understand that the inhumane conditions of today’s alien detention centers on the Southwest border are a part of a larger continuum in American history. This article addressed the atrocious conditions and brutality that was the norm on Ellis Island in the Twenties.

But it is not the stupidity of the literacy test alone that is to be condemned. It is its inhumanity.

50,000 Klansmen March in Washington, D.C.
(Literary Digest, 1925)

A report on the August, 1925 KKK march in Washington, D.C.:
The parade itself marshaled ‘from 50,000 to 60,000 white-robed men and women’ as the correspondent of the The New York Times estimates, and H.L. Mencken tells us in the New York Sun:

The Klan put it all over its enemies. The parade was grander and gaudier, by far than anything the wizards had prophesied. It was longer, it was thicker, it was higher in tone. I stood in front of the treasury for two hours watching the legions pass. They marched in lines of eighteen or twenty, solidly shoulder to shoulder. I retired for refreshment and was gone an hour. When I got back Pennsylvania Avenue was still a mass of white from the Treasury down to the foot of Capitol Hill – a full mile of Klansmen…

Click here to learn about the origins of the term Jim Crow.

The Missing Confederate Gold
(Literary Digest, 1912)

For many it will come as no surprise that the Confederate States of America entered it’s twilight with the same hubris and cupidity that gave it life. This 1912 article solved a mystery: what had become of the gold and silver from the vaults of the CSA when it finally became clear to all that the rebellion was over.

Click here to read a memoir of the Union victory parade in 1865 Washington.

Italy Condemned
(Literary Digest, 1935)

Any of us born after 1945 have seen this before: the United Nations condemns a dreadful dictator and sends him a mean email and the dictator deletes it (Sadam Hussein was condemned 17 times by the U.N.) – but this was the first time it happened in the Twenties. The League of Nations condemned Mussolini for the Ethiopia invasion, and Mussolini couldn’t have cared less.

The Passive Resistance of the Native Population
(Literary Digest, 1938)

Recently former Viceroy Graziani cabled Mussolini that ‘my surveys demonstrate that tranquility is absolute. The native population is with Italy.’ But a writer in the Tribuna of Rome admitted that ‘nobody must delude himself with the idea that the former Shoan-Galla ruling caste have resigned themselves to the loss of their privileges and have welcomed our Italian Empire.’

‘Ethiopia Smolders”
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Italy’s financial and human resources are being heavily drained, not only by a vast [Roman] road-building program in the conquered kingdom, but particularly by the efforts of 200,000 men who compose the fascist expeditionary force to pacify a warlike population of 9,000,000 natives in a territory larger than France and Italy combined.

The Italian Conquest of Ethiopia
(Literary Digest, 1937)

A column about Mussolini’s Minister of Colonies, Emilio De Bono (1866 – 1944) and his popular book, La Preparazione E Le Prime Operazioni:

Last week, with the appearance of a third printing, following a sold-out second edition (both of which were marked for publication in 1937), Italians at home and abroad noted certain deletions, including the passage which intimated that Mussolini had been on the point of abandoning his campaign in the face of British armed intervention.

‘War Fears in Italo-Ethiopia Rift”
(Literary Digest, 1935)

A report on the start of the Italian adventures in Ethiopia:

The dispute arose over alleged trespasses by Ethiopians on Italian possessions in Eritria and Italian Somaliland, in East Africa.

A solemn declaration of Abyssinia’s peaceful intentions toward Italy was read in broken but emphatic Italian to representatives of the foreign press in Rome by the nervous and impassioned Negradsa Yesus, Abyssinian Charge d’ Affaires. In fervent tones he asserted that Abyssinia’s intentions were so peaceful ‘that if Italy remained without a single soldier and without a single gun in her colonies, Abyssinia would not touch a single stone.’

Mussolini explained why he invaded Ethiopia in this article…

The Terror of the Nazi Stormtroopers
(Literary Digest, 1933)

This piece reported that the Manchester Guardian journalists who were posted to Nazi Germany were, without a doubt, the most reliable sources on all matters involving the violence committed by those brown shirted thugs during the earliest days of Hitler’s reign:

The ‘Brown terror does not exist in Germany, according to the Hitler dictatorship.

Even to talk about it is a penal offense. But the ‘Brown Terror’ goes on.

Read about the German POWs who were schooled in virtues of democracy.

Marijuana in the Thirties
(Literary Digest, 1938)

During the closing days of 1937, Clarence Beck, Attorney General for the State of Kansas made a radio address on the Mutual Broadcasting System concerning the growing popularity of Marijuana:

It Is estimated the Narcotic Bureau of the New York Police Department in 1936 alone destroyed almost 40,000 pounds of marijuana plants, found growing within the city limits. Because of its rapidly increasing use, Marijuana demands a price as high as $60 a pound. (continued)

Japan Rejects the Washington Naval Treaty
(Literary Digest, 1935)

The first successful attempt in world history to limit armaments was marked for the scrap-heap on December 31, 1936, when Hirosi Saito, the slim and smiling Japanese Ambassador to the United States, bowed himself into the State Department building in Washington last Saturday and handed to Secretary Cordell Hull a document that the world has expecting for many months – Japan’s formal denunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty.

Click here to read about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.

The Increased Suicide Rate
(Literary Digest, 1933)

With the arrival of the Great Depression came an increase in American suicides. When this article appeared on the newsstands the Depression was just three and a half years old – with many more years yet to come. As the Americans saw 1932 come to a close, the records showed that 3,088 more acts of self-immolation had taken place than had been recorded the year before.

Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

‘The Battle of the Somme” by Philip Gibbs
(Literary Digest, 1917)

This book review was published in an American magazine shortly after President Wilson and the U.S. Congress declared war on the Germany. The book in question, The battle of the Somme, was written by Philip Gibbs (1877 – 1962). Highly respected among his peers and the reading public, Gibbs was knighted for his efforts at the war’s end but soon he let the world know what he really thought of the war and, in particular, his feelings concerning General Douglas Haig.

Gibbs wrote a number of books that were critical of war, click here to read a review of More That Must Be Told (1921).

No More Parades’ by Ford Madox Ford
(Literary Digest, 1926)

The attached article is a 1926 review of Ford Madox Ford’s (1873 – 1939) novel, No More Parades, his second in a series of four related novels concerning the Great War. Billed as the most highly praised novel of the year, the reviewer lapses into superlatives and exults:

Not since Three Soldiers has a novel of the war made such an impression on reviewers as Ford Madox Ford’s No More Parades… All our ‘intellectuals’ are reading it…our young intellectual novelists will be heavily influenced by it or will attempt to imitate a whole-cloth imitation of it.

Ford was a veteran of the war who served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers; the article is illustrated with a black and white photo of the author standing shoulder to shoulder with Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

Sergeant York’s Side of the Story
(Literary Digest, 1922)

A large part of the American publicity machine has always involved the creation of a memoir; attached herein is the LITERARY DIGEST review of the World War One memoir of American war hero Sergeant Alvin York (1887 – 1964): Sergeant York and His People.

To read an account of Sergeant York’s deification in Gotham, click HERE.

The Victory Parade Down Pennsylvania Avenue
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Here is a reminiscence of the grand parade following the close of America’s bloody Civil War. It took two days; with the Army of the Potomac marching on the first day followed by General Sherman’s Army of the West on the next. The Grand Review was the brain-child of Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton and was attended by (so it was believed) over one hundred thousand people from the victorious Northern states.

From Amazon: Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War

Turning Back The Fashion Revolution
(Literary Digest, 1929)

Periodically we run across articles on this subject and it makes us sit up and recognize that this must have been a constant fear for numerous women (and fashion journalists) during the Twenties. Each article centers on a widespread belief that the Deep State behind the fashion industry had plans afoot to force women back into long skirts and corsets and that women would not be allowed any say in the matter.

Click here to read a similar article and here to read our other article on the subject.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Here is a very simple list of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points can be printed off of a PDF by clicking the title above.

Wilson’s Fourteen Points were ignored at Versailles and the United States withdrew it’s support for the historical conference in favor of two separate peace agreements made with Germany and Austria at a later date.

Click here to read more magazine articles about President Woodrow Wilson.

Read a 1936 article concerning Hitler’s Versailles Treaty violations.

The historian Henry Steele Commager ranked Woodrow Wilson at number 18 insofar as his impact on the American mind is concerned – click here to understand his reasoning…