World War One – Page 12 – Old Magazine Articles

The Lynching of African-Americans in France (NY Times, 1921)

This disturbing article from 1921 reported on a series of lynchings that took place between the years 1917 through 1919 by U.S. Army personnel serving in France during the First World War. The journalist quoted witness after witness who appeared before the Senate Committee regarding the lynchings they had seen:

Altogether…I saw ten Negroes and two white men hanged at Is-Sur-Tille. Twenty-eight other members of my command also witnessed these hangings and if necessary, I can produce them.

Read about racism in the U.S. Army of W.W. I

The Political Crisis in Post-War Germany (Current Opinion Magazine, 1919)

The Current Opinion foreign correspondent filed this short dispatch about the pandemonium unfolding in post-World War I Germany:

The great fact to the outside world is that a German parliament has actually precipitated a crisis. It threw out the Scheidemann cabinet. It presided over the birth of a Bauer one. It was the German parliament which dictated to the government regarding its composition, instead of meekly obeying the government, as had been the custom…

More about leftists in Weimar Germany can be read here.

Crack of Doom for the Draft Dodgers (American Legion Weekly, 1920)

Doomsday looms just over the horizon for the draft deserters. That wily gentleman who hid behind a tree and chuckled as his neighbor shouldered a gun and marched off to battle is soon to have that chuckle mopped off his face. He will find that no tree vegetates enough to cover from shame the miserable carcass of his manhood…According to the latest reports, 173,911 is the maximum number of draft registrants chargeable with willful desertion.

The Emaciated Germans (Time Magazines, 1923)

Fresh from his trip through post-war Europe, U.S. Senator Robert La Follette (1855 – 1925) declared:

The Germans have been underfed for seven years. They are suffering for want of food, fuel and clothing. Young children and old people are dying from hunger and disease induced by hunger. Emaciated, despairing, they are waiting the end.

Post-War Germany Struggled Under the Versailles Treaty (The Independent, 1921)

A 1921 column that clearly pointed out all the hardships created for Germany as a result of the Versailles Treaty.

The framers of that agreement could never have envisioned that the post-war landscape they designed for Germany would be pock-marked with such a myriad of frustrations – such as the border skirmishes between Germany and Poland, inflation, famine, the Salzburg Plebiscite and such harsh reparation payments that, when combined with all the other afflictions, simply served to create the kind of Germany that made Hitler’s rise a reality.

Another article about the despondency in 1920s Germany can be read here…

Fears of German Treaty Violations (Punch, 1922 and Time, 1923)

These articles makes it clear that Clemanceau and Churchill were not the only ones who feared German duplicty in regards to the rearmament clause. Written a year apart are these two columns from Time and Punch insisting that the German Reichswehr had numerous weapons that were banned under the Versailles Treaty:

My attention had often been called to persistent rumors regarding Germany’s secret army. Whispers had reached me from quite reliable sources of over a million Teuton soldiers, well-officered and disciplined…

Click here if you would like to read about the 1936 Versailles Treaty violations.

The Failures of W.W. I American Press Censorship (Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

Seven and a half months before the second installment of the War-to-End-All-Wars was to begin, George Creel (1876 – 1953), America’s first official censor from World War I, wrote this article for the editors of Collier’s Magazine explaining why he believed that censorship in an open society cannot work:

As many scars bear witness, I was the official censor during the World War. For two years I rode herd on the press, trying to enforce the concealment demanded by the Army and Navy.

The View from the German Trenches (NY Times, 1915)

Originally appearing in the Berlin Tageblatt, this dispatch, written by Bernhard Kellerman (1879 – 1951), was later translated and printed in the The N.Y. Times magazine, Current History. It reported on the hardships and morale of German infantry serving in Flanders during the second year of the war.

Post-W.W. I Society and the New Spirit of the Twenties (The Independent, 1920)

In 1920 there were many articles celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan’s arrival on Cape Cod. This one writer decried the lack of enthusiasm that marked the modern age following the end of the Great War – a world that stood in contrast to the Pilgrim spirit. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced during the war. Shell shocked and traumatized, the world seemed different: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The author of this column, Preston Slosson, was one of the observant souls to realize that the legacy of the First World War was disillusionment and cynicism.

Our stock of idealism has temporarily run low and a mood of cynicism has replaced the devoted enthusiasm of 1918…

Click here to read a 1916 article about life on the German home front.

A Woman War Worker Cartoon (NY Times 1917)

Attached is a cartoon that was created during the third year of the First World War by a British cartoonist who feared that women have, through the years, been loosing their feminine mojo – that charming thing that truly separates them from the males of the species.