Articles from The Literary Digest
Published some time after the demise of the NRA, this article presents a thumbnail profile of Hugh S. Johnson (1882 – 1942), FDR’s fair-haired boy who ran that shop from start to finish. He was once again in the news after having compared the New Deal to a fascist dictatorship during the Fall of 1937.
With a clear understanding as to what was coming down the pike, Belgian Foreign Minister Paul Henri Spaak (1899 – 1972) prevailed upon Prime Minister Paul van Zeeland to push through the Chamber of Deputies a bill increasing the military service from twelve to eighteen months for Belgium’s 44,000 conscripts while at the same time, reinforcing the fortifications along the French border.
Over half the article pertains to the fascist party of Belgium, REX, a group that hardheartedly resisted any such defensive posturing. A few weeks following this printing, Léon Degrelle (1906 – 1994), the leader of REX, the Belgian fascist party, marched on Brussels and brought down the van Zeeland government.
Attached is an interesting article that announced the Nazi march into the Rhineland as well as the island of Hegoland. The journalist also listed various other Versailles Treaty violations:
• The treaty said that Germany should have no troops in the Rhineland. On March 7 of this year, they marched in.
• The treaty said that Germany should never have a conscript army. On March 16 of this year, conscription was announced by Chancellor Hitler.
• It said that Germany should have no military aviation. She has it.
• It said that the Great German General Staff should be abolished. It was never disbanded.
*Violations of the Versailles Treaty began, in fact, a week before it was signed.
Click here to read an additional article concerning the Versailles Treaty violations.
The war clouds may have been gathering over Europe in 1933, but in British Palestine the skies were blue and life was good. Just as this 1922 magazine article intimated eleven years earlier, British Palestine was continuing to flourish in ways that neither the resident Zionists or the overseers from the British Colonial Office ever anticipated:
Two years ago, [British] Palestine’s orange crop – its main source of income – filled 2,000,000 cases at most. The forecast for the coming year is 6,000,000. Tel Aviv, a Jewish settlement near Jaffa, had 2,000 inhabitants in 1919. Now it claims 60,000 with 100,000 close ahead…
When Capitol Hill rejected the Versailles Treaty in 1919, Paris and London found themselves having to rely upon each other in ways they weren’t expecting.
The attached article, written in 1928, reported on how heartily sick the Germans were at having to serve as hosts for three occupying armies as a result of a Versailles Treaty clause that mandated the Allied military occupation until 1935. The Foreign Minister of Germany, Dr Gustav Stresemann, made several eloquent pleas to the diplomatic community insisting that there was no need for the continuing encampments before he began submitting his bitter editorials to assorted European magazines, which are discussed herein:
Friendship between France and Germany is impossible as long as Allied troops remain in the occupation area of the Rhineland…
Can we trust him?‘
That is the question asked by some British and French editors as they consider Chancellor Adolf Hitler‘s speech on the disarmament question in which, while he firmly champions the German case for equality in armaments, ‘he broke no diplomatic china’
The German economist who made the Reich’s rearmament possible was named Hjalmar Schacht, click here to read about him…
This magazine article appeared on American newsstands not too long after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor in the office of President Hindenburg (Paul von Hindenburg 1847 – 1934), and presents a number of opinions gathered from assorted European countries as they considered just what a Nazi Germany would mean for the continent as a whole:
‘Whether or not Hitler turns out to be a clown or a faker, those by his side now, and those who may replace him later, are not figures to be joked with.’
With this grim thought the semiofficial Paris ‘Temps’ greets the accession of ‘handsome Adolf’ Hitler to the Chancellorship in Germany. The event, it ads, is ‘of greater importance than any event since the fall of of the Hohenzollererns.’
Click here to read a similar article from the same period.
The attached article is composed of numerous newspaper observations that appeared in print throughout April of 1933; these perceptions all pertain to the goings on that followed in the joyous wake of Prohibition’s demise:
‘The return of beer has really been a remarkable phenomenon,’ says The New York Evening Post.
‘Not one of the bad effects predicted for it actually took place’.
During the action-packed opening months of the F.D.R. administration, Congress addressed the option of repealing Prohibition and allowing each state to decide whether it wished to be dry or wet:
Now the people can decide, after more than thirteen years of Prohibition.
Surprising the country, the lame-duck Congress, hereto staunchly dry, reverses itself ‘in a stampede toward repeal,’ to permit the people to decide Prohibition’s fate.
With the [Prohibition] Repeal, approximately one million people went back to work, making wine, beer and distilled spirits, bottles and barrels; transporting, selling and serving and advertising it. Innumerable industries indirectly connected with liquor, such as printing, building and machinery-making, received a sharp stimulus. With Repeal also, sorely needed tax money started to roll into the public coffers. Since 1933 more than two billion dollars in liquor taxes has gone into national, state and local treasuries…
This article reported on the alarming growth and surprising appeal that the KKK was attaining in 1922. The unnamed journalist described numerous incidences that clearly reflected the Klan’s open contempt for law throughout the country- concluding that the Klan was beyond redemption. The article revealed that the newspaper editors who lived and worked in those regions where the Klan was most active had greater contempt for them than we otherwise might have been lead to believe.
Victor Serge (1890 – 1947) was a devoted Bolshevik writer who was highly critical of Joseph Stalin; he spent five years in the gulag for his subversive activity and would have no doubt died there had not an international mishmash of humanitarians raised a stink about his incarceration. He was exiled from the Marxist-dream-land in 1936 – the attached column is an extract from his gulag writings concerning the cruelties of Stalin’s secret police.
Within twelve months time the following things happen in New York:
• One hundred thousand New Yorkers are born.
• Five thousand of them die.
• Twelve thousand New Yorkers die in car accidents.
• Sixty thousand New Yorkers are married.
• 1,350 New Yorkers commit suicide etc., etc., etc.,
A long program of suggested remedial legislation lies ahead of the 7,500 representatives of the people who gather this year in the halls of Congress and of all but four State Legislatures. The NRA (National Recovery Administration) will come under the closest scrutiny. As the old year waned, the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act)was being attacked and defended.
Click here to see a chart concerning the U.S. urban murder rate between the years 1926 – 1936.
In 1934, the NRA went to Hollywood and performed a task it was not legally obligated to do; click here to read about it…
Rumor has it that when the U.S. Army’s senior staff officers had learned of the victory that the U.S. Marines had achieved at the Bois de Belleau in the summer of 1918, one of them had remarked, Those head-line hunting bastards! When reading this next piece you will immediately get a sense that the army was fed-up with the folks at home believing that the same Marines were responsible for the Army’s success at Chateau-Thierry. The war was already over by the time this piece appeared, making it clear to all that Chateau-Thierry was a feather in the cap for the Army, and no one else.
This 1908 magazine article serves to define the Young Turk movement and present a brief history of those reformers who sought to modernize the government of Turkey and introduce a constitutional form of government that would benefit not only the Turks but also the people who reside within the dominions of the Ottoman Empire:
The program of the Young Turks includes individual liberty to all Ottomans; this liberty is to be inviolable excepting by process of law; the press is to be free, Ottomans may form commercial, industrial, or agricultural associations, so long as no law is infringed. All are to be equal before the law.
The anonymous journalist opened this 1935 magazine article explaining how the Indian caste system took root and reasoned as to why he believed such a system was an inevitability in the United States as well.
With the California Council on Oriental Relations waging an eloquent campaign for repeal of the Japanese Exclusion Act, a quota-basis solution is suggested.
Read another article about Asian immigration to California
Click here to read about the 1921 [anti-]Alien Land Bill in California.
You might also be interested in reading about the Yellow Peril in Canada.
