Recent Articles – Page 33 – Old Magazine Articles

The Damage of Prohibition
(The Smart Set, 1921)

Attached is an editorial that was co-authored by George Jean Nathan and H.L. Mencken from their reoccurring column in The Smart Set: Répétition Générale. This brief column sought to expose the damages inflicted upon the country by the guardians of the national virtue and their bastard children, Prohibition and the Volstead Act, which will primarily serve to promote the wide (though illegal) distribution of all the poorest distilled spirits concocted in the most remote frontiers of civilization.

48 Hours With Winston Churchill
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

It is not an interview with the Prime Minister. He is too busy to give interviews and his sense of fairness long ago forced him to make the rule of ‘no interviews’. If he couldn’t give an interview to all, he wouldn’t give an interview to one. But I spent two days with him and this story is of the Winston Churchill I got to know well in forty-eight hours.

Ode to Feminine Knees
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)

When the skirt hems began to rise in the Twenties, it was widely understood that the vision of a woman’s leg was a rare treat for both man and boy; a spectacle that had not been enjoyed since the days of Adam (married men excluded). The flappers certainly knew this, and they generally believed that suffering the dizzying enthusiasm of the male of the species was a small price to pay in order to secure some element of liberty. The flappers liked their hem-lengths just where they were and, thank you very much, they were not about to drop them. Attached are some verses by an anonymous flapper who expressed her reaction regarding all that undeserved male attention her knees were generating.

‘The Strange War the U.S. Is Not Winning”
(United States News, 1963)

It’s a dirty, vicious war that Americans are [waging] in the swamps of South Vietnam. Men forget about the politics of Saigon when they stand gun to gun with the Communist guerrillas…

The U.S. Army’s Cannabis Study
(Newesweek Magazine, 1945)

Posted herein is a report on the seven-month study on the effects marijuana has on military personnel that was conducted in 1944:

A great many of [the participants] attempted to form a compensatory image of themselves as superior people. ‘I could be a general like MacArthur. He looks smooth – like he’s high all the time.’

‘The Oddest Thing About the Jews”
(Scientific Americans, 1935)

When the sun came up in 1935, it found that Jews had been designated a preferred risk by the insurance companies of the day. One member of the medical community looked into their reasoning:

That the Jews are the most nervous of all civilized peoples in the civilized world has been established as almost axiomatic in the medical profession.

There was Illegal Immigration from Mexico Back Then, Too
(Ken Magazine, 1938)

This 1938 magazine article can be filed in the the more things change, the more they stay the same folder. It lists all the assorted means by which Mexicans have attempted to illegally cross over the Southern border, whether to smuggle others, import illegal drugs or for their own gratification.

Marijuana was becoming a problem in 1938, too. Read about it here.

Click here to read about the U.S. Border Patrol.

Mr. Kinsey’s Report
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)

Although much of what Dr. Alfred Kinsey wrote concerning male sex patterns has been debunked in our own age, his conclusions were taken quite seriously in the late Forties and early Fifties. This slender column serves as a summary and review regarding his studies that were published in his 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948).

From Amazon:

Sexual Behavior in The Human Female and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male Two Volume Set

A New Kind of Naval Warfare
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

In the seven months since Pearl Harbor the aircraft carrier has replaced the battleship as the true capital ship of modern naval warfare. The carrier’s rise to power reached a crushing climax in the battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway – the two most decisive naval engagements of the war thus far. Opposing fleets only struck at each other with bomber and torpedo planes and never fired a shot except in self-defense against aircraft.

Kicking God Out of the Schools
(Newsweek Magazine & PM Tabloid, 1945)

A religion-in-the-schools trial, held last week in the Champaign, Illinois Circuit Court, will probably make history. The plaintiff was Mrs. Vashti McCollum, 32, pert, wide-eyed wife of a University of Illinois professor, demanding that the Champaign School Board discontinue a five-year program of religious instruction in school buildings, on the ground that the constitutional separation of church and state is jeopardized.

Posted herein was one of the first of many articles concerning what would come to known as the landmark Supreme Court case McCollum v. Board of Education (1948): the court decided in her favor.

Click here to read about Darwin in the schools.

Dalton Trumbo Brings on the Storm(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946)

Blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (1905 – 1976) did not do himself any favors when he wrote the attached essay outlining his sympathies for Stalin’s Soviet Union at the expense of the United States. A year later he would find himself in the hot-seat in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee (1938 – 1975) where his non-cooperation landed him eleven months in the hoosegow on contempt of Congress charges.

In 1887 the New York Times reviewed the first English edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…

Dalton Trumbo Brings on the Storm
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1946)

In 1887 the New York Times reviewed the first English edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…

William Jennings Byan on Evolution
(Reader’s Digest, 1923)

William Jennings Bryan (1860 – 1925) is best remembered today as the rube who advocated for creationism in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. In this 1923 essay he picks away at Darwin’s evolution theory using many of the arguments that he would (victoriously) deploy two years later.

1941 Fashion
(PM Tabloid, 1941)

Eleven months before America’s entry into the war found sailor suits playing a heavy role in the thought processes of the Great American Fashion Designers.

Click here to read about the military influence on W.W. I fashion…

Modern Political Advertising
(Pageant Magazine, 1970)

The Selling of the President is about the role of television in the Republican efforts to elect Richard Nixon president in the 1968 election. Written over forty years ago by Joe McGinnis (1942 – 2014), the book was an instant classic as it addressed the matter of packaging a candidate for a political contest in the same manner products are promoted for the marketplace:

McGinnis concludes that ‘On television, it matters less that [the candidate] does not have ideas. His personality is what the viewers want to share…’

Jihad Against ‘The New Look’
(See Magazine, 1948)

A former fashion model, Bobbie Woodward, was outraged when she awoke that morning in 1947 to find that the hidden hairy hand that decides which direction the fashion winds will blow had given the nod to some snail-eating Frenchman who stood athwart fashion’s unspoken promise to continue the skirt hem’s march ever-upward. Wasting no time, she quickly marshaled other equally inclined women and formed The Little Below the Knee Clubs, which spread to forty-eight states (as well as Canada) in order to let the fashion establishment know that they would not be forced into wearing this fashion juggernaut known as The New Look.

The attached SEE MAGAZINE article serves as a photo-essay documenting the collective outrage of these women and their doomed crusade against Christian Dior.

One 1947 fashion critic believed that the New Look suffered from a split personality. Click here to read her review.

The King Tiger Tank
(U.S. Dept. of War, 1945)

This article is illustrated with a photograph of the King Tiger tank and accompanied by some vital statistics and assorted observations that were documented by the U.S. Department of War and printed in one of their manuals in March of 1945:

The king Tiger is a tank designed essentially for defensive warfare or for breaking through strong lines of defense. It is unsuitable for rapid maneuver and highly mobile warfare because of its great weight and and low speed…The King Tiger virtually is invulnerable to frontal attack, but the flanks, which are less well protected, can be penetrated by Allied antitank weapons at most normal combat ranges.

The American answer to the Tiger was the M26 Pershing Tank; read about it here.

If you wish to read about the only German tank of World War I, click here.

The Outcast Americans
(American Magazine, 1942)

Economically, the departure of the [Japanese-Americans] presented no particular problem in the cities… But it was different in the country. [They] had owned or controlled 11,030 farms valued at $70,000,000. They had produced virtually all the artichokes, early cantaloupes, green peppers and late tomatoes, and most of the early asparagus. They owned or controlled the majority of wholesale produce markets and thousand of retail vegetable stands. When they disappeared, the flow of vegetables stopped. Retail prices went up. Many vegetables vanished entirely. There were rumors of a food shortage.