Articles from The Nation Magazine
A report by Carleton Beals on Italy’s new order:
The strong state has arrived in Italy. It has been on the road ever since the failure of the factory seizures in September, 1920.
A second and far more thorough book review of My Story, by German General Erich von Ludendorff (1865 – 1937).
When the bitterness of these days has passed, historians will very likely classify Ludendorff as first among the military geniuses of his time. But his ‘own story’ will have importance principally because of certain sidelights it casts upon his motives and psychology.
A shorter review of Ludendorff’s memoir can be read here.
Read about Ludendorff’s collusion with Hitler…
James Agee, the film reviewer for The Nation (1942 – 1948), was charmed by the warmth of It’s a Wonderful Life
and believed that it was an admirable and well-crafted piece of film making; he nonetheless came away feeling like he’d been sold a bill of goods and rejected the movie primarily because he believed that films created in the Atomic Age should reflect the pessimism that created the era.
Horace M. Kallen (1888 – 1974) was a deep thinker who questioned the practice of Americanization (ie. assimilation). In this 1915 article, Kallen contended that although immigrants to American shores are required to develop allegiances to certain self-evident beliefs that are embraced throughout our republic – but outside of that, there is no reason that immigrants should not be able to maintain their own ethnic and cultural identities. In the Eighties, those who embraced this line of thinking preferred to call America a salad bowl as opposed to a melting pot.
Not long after the Titanic catastrophe was made known to the world there were many rumors and half truths that had to be sorted out and recognized as such in order to fully understand the full scope of the catastrophe; the editors of The Nation printed this article which contributed to that effort:
…two terrible, damning facts stand out: the first, that the ship was speeding through an ice-field of the presence of which its officers were fully aware; the second, is that every life could readily have been saved had there been boats and rafts enough to keep people afloat in a clear, starry night on an exceptionally smooth Atlantic sea. Both these facts are indisputable.
As for the lifeboats, these expensive affairs that could cost the large sum of $425.00 apiece – there were but twenty of them in addition to a few rafts…
The attached file is a digital facsimile of a classified ad that was once posted in a Georgia newspaper long after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed into law. The editors at THE NATION saw fit to title the notice as an interesting little advertisement when they reproduced it six months later on their pages. Yet, for the Southerners who set the type-face, applied the ink, delivered the paper and subscribed, the ad was typical of so many other classifieds that had appeared during the past one hundred and fifty years, and it was not, as the Yankees put it:
…the request of someone who never heard of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.
This small notice from The Nation marked the death of General John McCausland (1836 – 1927), C.S.A.. Much to the disappointment of the town elders residing in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, McCausland (pardoned by President U.S. Grant) escaped the hangman and outlived every last Confederate general ever put in the field.
The Nation reported in 1912 that a telegram of great historical importance had been put up for auction (N.B.: the Twenty-First Century equivalent of a telegram is a text message). The telegram was addressed to General William Techumseh Sherman and signed by General U.S. Grant and it clearly gives Sherman free reign to ravage the countryside as he marched.
Click here to read the chronologies of the American Civil War.
To read the story behind Lincoln’s beard, click here.
On the first anniversary marking the American intervention into the First World War Charles Payne of Grenell College, Iowa, wrote to the editors at The Nation and cautioned his fellow-Americans to remember the conduct and humility of Civil War General Robert E. Lee.
Click here to read about the heavy influence religion had in the Rebel states during the American Civil War.
The post war period was the time when the press had to start figuring out what was true and what was false in all matters involving the reports that their assorted papers and magazines had printed during the conflict. Admiral Sims of the U.S. Navy caused a stir when he went on record announcing that a particularly odious policy observed by the Germans, widely believed to have been true, was in fact, a falsehood:
I stated…that barring the case of the hospital ship Llandovery Castle I did not know of any case where a German submarine commander had fired upon the boats of a torpedoed vessel…
The Immigration Act of 1924 denied admission to the United States to wives of American citizens if these wives are of a race ineligible for citizenship. Hindus, Chinese and Japanese are ineligible. Hence the curious and cruel fact that while an Oriental merchant with his wife may enter America, the wedded wife of an American-born citizen is held at the coast for deportation.
A short paragraph from 1921 in which the editors of The Nation leveled a charge at the admission departments for both New York University and Columbia for having taken steps that would reduce the number of Jewish students admitted each year.
A couple of years prior to the sinking of Titanic the president of the International Seaman’s Union of America presented a petition before the U.S. Congress declaring that the issue of safety at sea is widely ignored on all levels. In his address he remarked:
There is not sailing today on any ocean any passenger vessel carrying the number of boats needed to take care of the passengers and crew…
An interview with Zhang Zuolin (1873 – 1928), the Chinese warlord who oversaw Manchuria and much of North China during the last fifteen years of his life. The article was written by the old China-based correspondent Randall Gould.
Marshall Zhang, drawn to Peking from his native Mukden ‘to cooperate with the foreign ministers in saving China from Bolshevism’, talks in terms of nations but continues to think in terms of provinces. Anyone who has spent half an hour with him knows this. The Strong Man of Mukden has improved his propaganda vocabulary but he is using the same old brain – shrewd, keen, but sharply limited.
British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (1862-1922) was quicker than most of his contemporaries when he recognized what was unfolding in Europe during the August of 1914, and uttered these prophetic words:
The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.
The anonymous old wag who penned this opinion column came to understand Gray’s words; four years after the war he looked around and found that the world speeding by his window seemed untouched by the heavy handed Victorians. For this writer, the Victorian poet and writer Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888) represented the spirit of that age and it all seemed to come crashing down in 1922:
Granting that the son of Arnold of Rugby was more troubled over the decay of Christian dogma than we are, it should be remembered that the decay symbolized for him a fact of equal gravity to ourselves — the loss of a rational universe in which to be at home. But he never doubted how a new world was to be built — by justice and by reason, not by claptrap and myth.
This article from THE NATION was written by Alfred Von Wegerer in the interest of refuting Versailles Treaty article 231, which reads:
The Allied and Associated Governments affirm, and Germany accepts, the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.
Von Wegerer, like most Germans at that time, got mighty hot under the collar when he stopped to consider that Germany was blamed entirely for the start of the First World War. This article was written nine years after the close of the war when a number scholars on the allied side had already stepped forward to question, what has come to be called, the war guilt clause.
Read about the total lack of war guilt that existed in 1950 Germany…
The following is a very short opinion piece that more than likely served as an accurate reflection the of the opinions held by the Titanic‘s mourning loved ones. In their grief and incomprehension, some of the surviving family members of Titanic‘s victims, no doubt, did lay much of the blame on those who ply their trade at sea:
The Titanic‘s loss has made it clear that things are not going well among seamen. Despite the calmness of many of the crew, some of the facts that are coming out do not redound to the credit of the men of the sea. Like the captains of those near-by steamers that could have saved all but refused, they have made us all ask weather the old ideal of the sailor as a man brave to rashness, ready at any time to risk his life for others, and characterized by many other noble attributes of character, has faded from the sea…
Attached is one of the first American reviews of T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, it was penned by literary critic Gilbert Seldes (1893 – 1970):
In essence The Waste Land says something which is not new: that life has become barren and sterile, that man is withering, impotent, and without assurance that the waters which made the land fruitful will ever rise again.
