Articles from The Literary Digest
Four months into the Noble Experiment of Prohibition, three respected British Writers, Hilaire Belloc, G K. Chesterton and Solomon Eagle all sound-off on American Prohibition.
Published at a time when America stood so reluctantly on the doorstep of the Prohibition era, an unnamed editor at The Literary Digest compiled a number of quotes from numerous literary sources as if to illustrate the deep roots the Western world of belles-lettres has invested in the culture of alcohol.
In this interview the Kaiser’s son and fellow exile, Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882-1951, a.k.a. The Butcher of Verdun), catalogs his many discomforts as a refugee in Holland. At this point in his life the former heir apparent was dictating his memoir and following closely the goings-on at Versailles.
Click here to read what Kaiser Wilhelm II thought of Adolf Hitler.
A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, Communism. Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.
The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…
Eventually, unions were outlawed under Hitler.
Click here to read about the Nazi assault on the German Protestant churches in 1935.
Read an Article About the Socialist Aspects of Hitler’s Book, Mein Kampf.
Hitler’s economist admitted the German economy was socialist – more about that can be read here …
Attached is a magazine article concerning the on-going debate regarding women drivers and the continuing balderdash as to which of the genders is the better driver: the issue was decided in 1936 and the men lost:
…according to the report of a university professor who took the trouble to find out. Armed with statistics, he asserts that the female of the motoring species is not nearly so deadly as the male.
Here are the Chief accomplishments of the special Session of the 73rd Congress, March 9 – June 16, 1933
These fifteen pieces of legislation were called the Honeymoon Bills – his critics pointed out that not one of them originated in Congress and added to their argument that Congress had been marginalized during the earliest period of his presidency.
FDR’s critics had a thing or two to say about the first year of The New Deal…
Click here to read about FDR and the press.
A child could do that has been one of the most common utterances in response to the avant-garde movements of modern art. This short article reflects that view and was written in response to the New York Armory Show, which at that time, was attracting a good deal of attention in the press. The Armory Show is well-remembered today as the first art exhibition to introduce European-style modernism to the people (and artists) of that city. Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), as the co-creator of Cubism, is among those lampooned, as is Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) for his painting, A Nude Descending the Staircase.
Last spring the Third Reich recognized a third official state religion: a neo-pagan cult based on Thor, Wotan, Siegfried and the old Nordic gods. It was especially favored by ultranazis and by Hitler’s black-shirted bodyguards, the Schutzstaffel or S.S. corps. The other two official German religions are Catholic and Protestant Evangelical, whose proponents today are deadlocked in combat with the up and coming neopagans.
This article was penned in 1912 by a Mexican editorial writer who shared his countryman’s deep distrust of American motives and believed that the United States is the natural enemy of Mexico:
No other people can have less friendship for this hostile neighbor than the Mexicans.
A profile of Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887 – 1940), Jr.; National Hero of Jamaica. During his lifetime Garvey worked as a publisher, a journalist, and an entrepreneur. A devoted Black nationalist and a black separatist, Marcus Garvey was the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the African Communities League (UNIA-ACL). He rubbed a good many white folk the wrong way and this article from The Literary Digest covers much of his activities leading up to 1922.
Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn’t possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.
This magazine article explains what a unique force in presidential history Eleanor Roosevelt was. She defied convention in so many ways and to illustrate this point, this anonymous journalist went to some length listing fifteen firsts that this most tireless of all First Ladies had racked-up through the years.
Those councilors who advised FDR and the First Lady on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…
E.B. Osborn of the London Morning Post reviewed H.L. Mencken’s book, The American Language
…Americans show superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness; for example, movie is better than cinema…The American language offers a far greater variety of synonyms than ours; transatlantic equivalents for drunk are Piffled, spifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged and burned.
Read about the Canadian Preferences in English…
– from Amazon: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century
When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print. He wasn’t blathering on about the proletariat or the bourgeoisie but rather musing about his pastimes and dreams for the future.
On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. ‘Do you really read it?’ I asked. ‘I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,’ he said.’Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to find them.’
At the request of The Literary Digest editors, a number of Italian-language journalists working in North America were asked to explain the great success that the Italian Fascists were experiencing in 1922 Italy. This article lists an enormous number of Italian language newspapers that existed in the United States at that time; virtually every medium-sized to large American city had one. We were surprised to find that the most pro-Mussolini Italian-American newspaper operating in the U.S. was located in New York City.
In the late Thirties, early Forties the FBI began to monitor the Italian-Americans who adored Mussolini – Click here to read about it
This article was written shortly after the French occupation of the Ruhr and at a time when Adolf Hitler did not have much of a following -he was something of a curiosity to the Western press:
A principal reason why Hitler’s followers have begun to doubt him, it appears, is that the ‘dreaded gathering’ of the National Socialists in Munich came and went without ‘accomplishment.’
Read about the earliest post-war sightings of Hitler: 1945-1955
Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht (1877 – 1970) was the German economist who is credited with having stabilized that nation’s currency following the Wiemar Republic and made possible the Nazi quest of military rearmament:
Germany lacks the stuff of which tanks and guns and explosives are made . It lacks rubber, cotton, silk, copper, tin and iron ore. It lacks food for its 65,000,000 people and fodder for it cattle. So Dr. Schacht has laced German business and industry into a straight-jacket of rigid control, to conserve materials and exchange.
Although he never became a Nazi Party member, he was highly placed in the Reich. In the attached 1937 profile, you will learn that Schacht cautioned Hitler numerous times to remove the Socialist regulations that restrained the German economy from kicking in to high gear.
Click here to read an article that explains in great detail how the Nazi economic system (with it’s wage and price controls) was Marxist in origin.
With the revelation that Britain’s King George VI was left-handed came this column by an uncredited journalist listing all the various unseemly elements that are associated with with left hand usage (most importantly, Lucifer). In light of the fact that a British king is also assigned the title Defender of the Faith in the Anglican Church; steps had to be taken in his youth to train him how to use his right hand. These lessons came at a cost, and the result was his sad stuttering speech – which also involved additional lessons with a speech therapist.
