Recent Articles – Page 122 – Old Magazine Articles

Germany Defends It’s Military Build Up (Literary Digest, 1913)

A defense was offered for the growth of German military expenditures based on the spread of Slavik pride and the rise of a great Pan-Slavonic movement due to victory of their kinsmen in the Balkans. German leaders, furthermore, felt a deep uneasiness about the fact that about one-third of the population of the Hapsburg Monarchy consisted of Slavs and therefore felt that military aid from the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not guaranteed in the event of a war with Russia and France.

British Moles Defect (Quick Magazine, 1951)

On May 19, 1951 two officials of the British Foreign Office were reported as missing; their disappearance raised many eyebrows within the intelligence community.
One of the men, Donald MacLean (1913 – 1983) had been working in various trusted positions within the British diplomatic corps since 1934, but his handlers in Moscow called him Homer. The other Englishman, Guy Burgess (1911 – 1963) began working for the Foreign Office in 1944; the KGB called him Hicks. The two men were members of a spy ring that would soon be known as the Cambridge Four (the other two being Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. In later years a fifth spy would surface: Roland Perry. All of them were recruited by the Soviets while attending Cambridge University in the 1930s).

The information that was fed to the journalist who wrote the attached article was clearly meant to disguise the fact that all the Western intelligence agencies were totally freaking out.

Hair Fashions of the Early 1950s (People Today, 1952)

Keep it short: that was the M.O. of the hairdressers of the Fifties (as you, no doubt, gathered from this 1949 article) – and this column, accompanied by eight photos, serves as proof. Much of this column pertains to the men who were active in 1952 hair dressing, and their deep thoughts pertaining to pny tails, perms and poodle-cuts.

Click here to read about the short hair craze of the late Forties.

‘Uncle Ho Strikes Back” (Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

Three years before the total French withdrawal from Vietnam, this one Frenchman summed up his comrade’s frustrations concerning their battles against the Viet Minh:

We can’t win a guerrilla war unless we have the support of the people. Frankly, we have not got it. Hitler or the Russians could conquer this country in two months with mass executions, wholesale reprisals and concentration camps. To fight this war and remain humanitarian is difficult.

More Babies, Please (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Italy, Germany and Russia, leading exponents of Europe’s Fascist and Communist camps, have each asked for more prolific mothers and decreed measures designed to fetch in the bambini, kinder and kodomos. Their dictator’s desires for more babies and still more babies have developed into a population race.

Click here to read about the Nazi struggle to increase their birthrate…

Above Verdun (Cambridge Magazine, 1916)

ARBEITER ZEITUNG, a Viennese newspaper, quoted the following swelled with hubris recalling his flight over crushed French Village in the Verdun sector:

I felt like a king, loaded with my bombs… I flew over Saint Privat quite low, so that I could see all the houses, and if I dropped my bombs there, I should have been able to to destroy half the village…

The Unknown Jackie Kennedy (Pageant Magazine, 1970)

Seven years must have seemed an appropriate amount of time to withhold information concerning the generally unpleasant character traits that were apparent in First Lady Jackie Kennedy – and so in 1970 Washington writers Lucianne Goldberg and Fred Sparks put pen to paper and recalled all the minutiae they could piece together regarding Her Elegance:

Jackie was master of deception. In the White House, she never wore her double-breasted mink coat when she could be photographed. But after her husband died, and she moved to New York, she wore the mink, as one fashion writer put it, ‘to do errands around Manhattan’.

This article appears on this site with the permission of Lucianne Goldberg

Popcorn Finds a Home at the Movies (Quick Magazine, 1952)

Popcorn was introduced as a snack food to American movie-goers as a result of the candy shortages during the earliest years of the Second World War.

Attached is a petite notice documenting the fact that the substitute was a wise one:

By 1952, movie houses accounted for about one-third of the nation’s annual $350 million retail popcorn sales.

Reference is also made to the efforts that were made to secure noiseless popcorn bags.

If popcorn replaced sweets on the home front, what replaced steak?

Leon Trotsky Speaks About FDR and the Great Depression (Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1938)

Two and a half years were left on the clock for the exiled Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) until he would have to keep his rendezvous with an icepick in Mexico – and while living it up on this borrowed time he granted an interview to this one correspondent from a Beverly Hills literary magazine in which he ranted on in that highly-dated and terribly awkward Bolsheviki language about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his social programs.

Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.

The American Springfield ’03 Rifle (U.S. Infantry Drill Manual, 1911)

A black and white diagram depicting the breach of the 1903 Springfield rifle, with all parts named. This rifle was the primary weapon for American troops during World War One and was in use by that army up until 1936. At the time of America’s entry into the W.W. I, in April of 1917, there were roughly 843,239 Springfield ’03 rifles issued; seeing that this was not nearly enough for such an adventure, the Springfield Armory manufactured 265,620 additional rifles. In some photographs from the war, American soldiers and Marines are pictured shouldering the British Enfield rifle, which had been modified to fit the ammunition of the Springfield ’03. Subsequent modifications produced the Springfield 1903A3 and A4 which were issued to American snipers up until the earlier years of the Vietnam War.

Throughout the course of the war the U.S. Army was paying $19.50 for each rifle.