Recent Articles – Page 102 – Old Magazine Articles

Much Talk of White Waistcoats, Shoes and Shirts
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

When the smoke cleared following the close of that dreadful unpleasantness that spanned the years 1914 to 1918, there remained much work to do; bodies to be buried, cities to be rebuilt. Men and nations prepared to face the new realities that came with the new social structure; many weighty subjects had to be addressed that had been ignored for so long a time. The most pressing of these topics was deciding which was the proper combination of white waistcoat and dinner jacket? In an age of industrial slaughter, which was more suitable: double-breasted or single-breasted? and what of ties, shoes and overcoats?

Commander of the Lost Battalion
(The Stars and Stripes, 1919)

The following article presented a brief account of the deeds of Major Charles W. Whittlesey of the 308th Infantry Regiment ( Seventy Seventh Division) and why he was nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor. Shortly after the war Whittlesey would commit suicide.

In December of 1918, Lt. Colonel Whittelesey was highly praised in VANITY FAIR …

Samuel Goldwyn, Producer
(Coronet Magazine, 1944)

Screen scribe Sidney Carroll put to paper a serious column about the productive life of Samuel Goldwyn (1879 – 1974) and all that he had accomplished since he co-founded Hollywood (along with Cecil B. De Mille) in 1913:

He has done many remarkable things in 30 years. He has made as many stars as any man in the business; he was the first to make feature-length films; he was the first to bring the great writers to Hollywood… Goldwyn is the greatest maker of motion pictures ever to come out of Hollywood [with the exception of The Goldwyn Follies (1938)].

A Cartoonist with the U.S. Army in Germany
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

A few cartoons by the illustrator George Wright (1872 – 1951) depicting the American Third Army during it’s 1919 occupation of Germany.

Tales of the Mounted German Corpse
(New York Times, 1915)

A ghastly story from a 1914 front is told in this letter written by British trooper S. Cargill as he recalled a skirmish between German Lancers and British cavalry.

The Paris Purses for Autumn
(Vogue Magazine, 1919)

A VOGUE editorial from the Fall of 1919 praising the swank of six nifty Parisienne purses -each created from different materials and each displaying the industrious fingers of skilled craftsmen.

Click here to read about happy Hollywood’s discovery of plastic surgery…

The Rosettis
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

Shortly after the death of William Michael Rossetti
(1829 – 1919), Welsh poet and essayist Arthur Symons
(1865 – 1945) wrote this essay remembering the man, his brother (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the friendship that the two shared with poets George Meredith and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Charles Huard: War Artist in the 1914 Trenches
(Vanity Fair, 1915)

Seven sketches from Soissons by the war artist Charles Huard (1875 – 1965) as they first appeared in a fashionable American society magazine.

Click here to read additional article about the World War I artists.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, Reconsidered
(Literary Digest, 1917)

The 1917 publication of The life of Algernon Charles Swinburne, by Edmund Gosse caused much discussion in the literary world:

A bombshell that struck literary England a little past that last mid-century has been re-echoing in the recently published ‘Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne’ by Edmund Gosse. The shell was the volume called ‘Poems and Ballads’ a cursory knowledge of which probably places it in many minds as one of the bad books of literature…

E-Learning in the Fifties
(Pageant Magazine, 1958)

This article from the late Fifties refers to the educational benefits that existed in the form of tape recordings, television, films and slide shows and what a glorious discovery it was that they came along when they did to aid in the teacher shortages of the time. Today we have decades of studies that show what among these tools has been useful and what has failed.

In the 1940s Color TV was Anticipated as a Tool with Which Art Students Could Learn…

The Well Dressed Man in Winter
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1921)

Illustrations of fashion’s offering from the Fall of 1921: great coats, semi-great coats, overcoats and ulsters; raglan and otherwise.

Chez Poiret: the Hot Social Ticket in the Paris of 1919
(Vogue Magazine, 1919)

The post-war publicity machine of French fashion designer Paul Poiret was in fine form when he saw to it that his minions invited the Paris-based correspondent from American VOGUE to his house for a grand fete, seated her comfortably, drink in hand, right on the fifty-yard line in order that she might be better able to report to her handlers back in New York that Paris was back.

The correspondent who was not invited was the fashion journalist from FLAPPER MAGAZINE; American flappers did not approve of Poiret one bit. Click here to read what they thought of him.

The Duke of Windsor Influences
(Men’s Wear, 1950)

MEN’S WEAR MAGAZINE printed a few paragraphs on the heavy hand that the Duke of Windsor had in the world of manly attire:

No one completely personified English qualities in attire than the Prince of Wales…Whatever he chose to wear was considered correct and in good taste and was accepted by millions of others in America and elsewhere. Following are a few of the styles that can be traced right back to the Duke of Windsor, either because he wore them first or was responsible for their spread…

-they include such fashion innovations as the Panama hat, the spread collar and brown buckskin shoes among others.

More articles about the Duke of Windsor can be found on these pages.

The Business End of Gas Warfare
(Literary Digest, 1917)

The attached article, How Well Our Chemical Industry Has Been Mobilized for War is an abstract from a 1917 issue of THE JOURNAL OF COMMERCE which discussed how readily American chemists embraced their roll after the United States committed itself to the war.

There is much talk of the procurement of potash, toluol and trinitrotoluol which were necessary elements in the manufacture of gas.

The Industrial Visions of Paul R. Meltsner
(Art Digest, 1936)

The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:

Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.

Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.

Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine
(Delineator Magazine, 1935)

Attached is one of the first articles to be written about balletomanes Lincoln Kirstein (1907 – 1996) and his efforts with George Balanchine (1904 – 1983) and philanthropist Edward M.M. Warburg (1910 – 1992) to form the first American ballet company (the corps was later called the New York City Ballet).

Finding the Graves of American Aviators
(Literary Digest, 1919)

The difficult task of wandering the war-torn countryside of Europe in search of fallen World War I American pilots fell to a U.S. Army captain named E.W. Zinn. A combat pilot himself, Zinn had roamed France, Belgium and Germany interviewing the local population to see what they knew of American crash sites:

Many times he has come upon a grave with a rude cross on which was scrawled:

‘Unidentified American Aviator’ or ‘Two Unidentified American Aviators’

Captain Zinn has found that in a great many cases American fliers were buried either by the Germans or by civilians with no mark of identification left on them.

Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.

The Nazis Hated These Guys
(Yank Magazine, 1944)

The attached W.W. II magazine article tells the story of the hard-charging Goums – a detachment of French-Moroccan infantry who appeared to the American GIs as genuine curios (Wikipedia definition: Goumier is a term used for Moroccan soldiers, who served in auxiliary units attached to the French Army, between 1908 and 1956).

The Germans definitely don’t like the Goums. As for the Italians, they’re scared to death of them. In the Mateur and Bizerte sectors, where the Goums were attached to the Ninth Division, three Italian companies surrendered en masse as soon as they heard that the guys in front of them were Goums.