The Literary Digest – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

He Made the Pictures Move
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Ten million people a day go to the movies in the United States, but how many of them know who made the first movie? The Noes have it. The man who made the first motion-picture, as we know it today, is C. Francis Jenkins (1867 – 1934). Many [actresses] who have not been ‘in pictures’ a month are better known.

C. Francis Jenkins was also one of the brainiacs who contributed his talent to the invention of television.

Marie Dressler Succumbs
(Literary Digest, 1934)

Marie Dressler (b. Leila Marie Koerber: 1868 – 1934) left her mark on stage and screen (both varieties) and by the time she died of cancer in 1934 shed had acquired a sizable fan-base and two Academy Awards.

The Biggest Investor In The War
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Here is an article that deals with the money aspect of the First World War. Illustrated with two tables, the journalist explains that the United States laid out far more money than any of the combatant nations. Albeit the funds extended were in the form of loans to the Entente powers rather than the creation of their own military, in the end the U.S. ended up being the one nation that invested the most in the war.

Sergeant York
(Literary Digest, 1919)

Sergeant Alvin York (1887 – 1964) of the 328th Infantry Regiment, Eighty-Second Division, was one of the great heroes of the First World War. The attached four page article recalled those deeds as well as his glorious trip to New York City where he was luxuriated at the Waldorf Astoria and feted by the swells of Gotham.

Restraining The Terror In Georgia
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Whether Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey (1871 – 1948) was overwhelmed by a sense of humanity or whether he simply wished to reduce the northern flow of African-Americans from his state in the Great Migration – we’ll never know, but the fact stands that in late April, 1921, the Governor stood before the State Committe on Race Relations and spoke of 135 instances in which Black citizens were unjustly treated by White Georgians (The Georgia Government document pertaining to his address can be read here).

The Most Rebellious State
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

A 1921 report on the state that would not go dry: New York.

When New York wants Prohibition it will have it. So long as New York doesn’t want Prohibition there will be wholesale lawbreaking to avoid it.
– The New York World

They Used to Call It the Front
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Old Dame Nature abhors war as much as we do. When the troops left the battlefields, she covered them over with stuble, poppies and weeds… There were no trenches and certainly no shell holes… Two years have passed and now the battlefields are harvest lands once more.

A similar article about touring the old trench line can be read here.

The Iconic ”I Want You” Poster Is Seen for the First Time
(Literary Digest, 1917)

In April, 1917, the call went out to artists of all ages that their talents were badly needed to create new and different sorts of posters that would rally the American masses to the colors. One of the first to answer the call was the celebrated illustrator James Montgomery Flagg; his first effort was the memorable I Want You poster, immediately raised the standards which other artists would have to acknowledge. It was reported that George Creel, the President’s appointee for all matters involving such undertakings in the mass-media, hosted a dinner for American illustrators; the evening ended with much clapping and cheering and the next day, one can assume, the poster campaign began in earnest.

Click here to read about W.W. I art.

Communists in Germany
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Communist uprisings in Germany are blamed on Moscow by a practically unanimous Berlin press, and some newspapers flatly accuse the Russian official representative in Berlin, a Mr. Kopp, and his staff, of being the instigators of these disturbances, and so demand their expulsion.

‘A Plan to Make Chinese Canadians”
(Literary Digest, 1929)

A brief column from an American magazine that lucidly explained the mounting frustrations within 1920s Canada concerning the influx of Chinese immigrants to that country.

Click here to read about the Canadian POWs who collaborated with the Nazis.

Einstein Comes to America
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Professor Albert Einstein, whose theories on space, light and infinity have made his name familiar throughout the world, thinks this small planet on which we live is suffering from narrowness in its point of view. Too much nationalism – that is Professor Einstein’s definition of the ‘disease from which mankind is suffering today.’

Albert Einstein Magazine Interview
(Literary Digest, 1935)

A year and a half after departing Germany, Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) vogued it up for the cameras at a meeting for the scientific community in Pennsylvania where he answered three very basic questions concerning his research.

A small, sensitive, and slightly naive refugee from Germany stole the show at the winter meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science, which closed at Pittsburgh last week. Not only the general public and newspapermen, but even the staid scientists forgot their dignity in a scramble to see and hear the little man, Albert Einstein, whose ideas have worked the greatest revolution in modern scientific thought.

Albert Einstein Magazine Interview
(Literary Digest, 1935)

When Grant was a Colonel
(Literary Digest, 1908)

This Civil War reminiscence was originally printed in a Missouri newspaper and concerned the Union General U.S. Grant (1822 – 1885) when he was a lowly colonel assigned to guard the railroads along the Salt River in Northeast Missouri and how he got along with the local population:

He talked politely in a calm, dispassionate way, and never with heat or anger. Some of those who visited his camp in those days quote him as saying that if he had considered the war merely to free slaves he would have taken his command and joined the South…

Click here to read about
General Grant’s march on Richmond.

Click here to read about the son of General Grant and his memories of his father at Vicksburg.

The American Cemetery at Romagne
(Literary Digest, 1919)

An eye-witness account of the construction of the American Meuse-Argonne Cemetery in Romagne, France:

They are now gathering up the bodies of the 26,000 American boys who were killed on the Argonne-Meuse battlefield, and are burying them in a great cemetery at Romagne, a little town in the heart of the region where the fighting took place. Here and there all over the battlefield are stakes, each marking the grave of an American soldier who was buried where he fell.

In one of the office buildings a large force of clerks is keeping the records of the dead; no banking firm could be more careful of its accounts than are these clerks…and their superiors of their registration of graves.

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.

‘Is the Younger Generation in Peril?”
(Literary Digest, 1921)

The deans who presided over Literary Digest made this article their lead piece, so urgent was the sensation that an onslaught of vengeful modernist women, so fleet of foot and irreverently unhampered by hanging hems and confining corsets, were approaching their New York offices as their first act in disassembling the patriarchy.

Izzy Einstein: Prohibition Agent No. 1
(Literary Digest, 1922)

Here is an interview with Izzy Einstein (Isidor Einstein, 1880 – 1938): Prohibition agent and master of disguise:

A day with Izzy would make a chameleon blush for lack of variation…

He prepared himself to move in high, low and medium circles – on the excellent theory that the taste for liquor and the desire to sell it are no respecters of persons – and in all those circles he has since been whirling with rapidity and a quick-change adeptness.