Recent Articles – Page 47 – Old Magazine Articles

Inequality For Female Barflies
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

This column concerns a 1937 bill sponsored by New York State Senator Edward Coughlin. The senator’s bill provided for the arrest of any woman who stood at or in front of the bar of any club, hotel or restaurant licensed to sell alcoholic beverages. Coughlin held that any woman found guilty of this pastime should be charged with disorderly conduct. A few other states were also attracted to this legislation; it passed a year later only to be repealed in the early Sixties.

Click here to read about that moment in 1920 when American Women attained the vote.

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…

‘STAY HOME!”
(Hollywood Magazine, 1929)

The advent of talking pictures has enormously increased the number of those who vision a fairyland of fame and fortune if they can only reach Hollywood… Rumor had it that voice was important for the new Talkies, and every female whose misguided family had ‘cultivated’ Mamie’s vocal resources, usually without the faintest reasonable excuse, realized where her destiny lay. The rush was on… Several organizations in Hollywood find it possible to send girls back home before the tragedy point is reached… Periodically the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce broadcasts warnings.

The Largest Abortion Mill
(Pageant Magazine, 1973)

On July 1, 1970, the New York State legislature ruled that all females, regardless of marital status, age or residency, might have an abortion within the state provided she was no more than 24 weeks pregnant. Less than a year later the largest industrial-strength abortion plant in the world opened up in New York City.

Fatty Arbuckle Has Something to Say…
(Motion Picture News, 1919)

An interview with the famous silent film comedian, Fatty Arbuckle, as it appeared in a forgotten Hollywood trade magazine. Accompanying the interview are eight lines of biographical information pertaining to his Hollywood career as it stood in the year 1916. This short profile first appeared in The Studio Directory of The Motion Picture News and will serve to answer some of the questions readers might have concerning his career, before it took it’s tragic turn.

If you would like to read about the films of the Thirties, click here.
Click here to read about physical perfection during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Fatty Arbuckle Has Something to Say…
(Motion Picture News, 1919)

If you would like to read about the films of the Thirties, click here.
Click here to read about physical perfection during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The Crown Prince in Exile
(Literary Digest, 1919)

In this interview the Kaiser’s son and fellow exile, Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882-1951, a.k.a. The Butcher of Verdun), catalogs his many discomforts as a refugee in Holland. At this point in his life the former heir apparent was dictating his memoir and following closely the goings-on at Versailles.

Click here to read what Kaiser Wilhelm II thought of Adolf Hitler.

Cover Girls
(Coronet Magazine, 1948)

By 1948 the business of fashion modeling had developed into a $15,000,000-a-year industry. This article examines just how such changes evolved in just a ten year span of time:

American advertising struck pay dirt when it discovered the super salesgirls whose irresistible allure will sell anything from a bar of soap to a seagoing yacht…Always there was the secret whisper of sex. For women it was, ‘Be lovely, be loved, don’t grow old, be exciting’… For men it was, ‘Be successful, make everyone know that your successful, how can you get women if your not successful?’

The importance of attractive girls in our economy was stressed by John McPartland when he discussed modern advertising in his recent best seller, Sex in Our Changing World (1947).

Legendary fashion designer Christian Dior had a good deal of trouble with people who would illegally copy his designs; click here to read about that part of fashion history.

Fascism At It’s Peak
(Time Magazine, 1923)

A dictatorship can last forever, if properly managed. It is my task to provide a mechanism that will endure and to have the various parts of this mechanism running without friction; then after I am gone it will be able to run itself. A dictatorship must answer the purpose for which it was introduced. Certainly the Fascist regime will last a very long time… Socialism works on the principle that all are equal, but Fascism knows we are far from equal. Take the great masses of human beings. They like rule by the few.

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.

Fake News?
(New Outlook Magazine, 1934)

A writer warns that since the advent of sound in movies, the journalists involved in the production of newsreels had grown absolutely giddy over the possibilities of the new technology being used to bend the truth any way they wanted, and frequently did.

The Life and Death of Trotsky
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

Appearing in the pages of a slightly left-leaning New York paper was this obituary of Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940):

Thus, at 9:25 last night, ended the life of the man who, with Lenin, brought about the world’s most profound revolution and with his death, ended the bitterest of modern feuds – Trotsky against Stalin.

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.

Alternative Lyrics for the National Anthem
(Pathfinder, 1941)

Do you fail to recall the words to our national anthem time and again? You’re not alone – a quick glance at Google’s records indicate that in the silence of their rooms, thousands of your fellow Americans suffer from the same malady (and smirk at others who make their memory loss public). To say that the Americans of today are not as patriotic as they used to be is an understatement to be sure – but some of you will no doubt be relieved to know that the Americans of yore, vintage 1941, didn’t know the lyrics to The Star Spangled Banner any better than we do – as you can tell by the attached verses which were penned over seventy years ago about his fellow Americans and their inability to keep the words of Francis Scott Key in their heads.

Tony Randall: Movie Star
(Pageant Magazine,1964)

In this early Sixties article, celebrity epistolarianne Cyndi Adams recalled her first two encounters with the man who would be Felix Unger:

‘I am definitely neurotic and psychotic,’ cheerily announced Tony Randall (1920 – 2004) the first time we met – ‘he’s an actor-comedian of remarkable skills…he unconsciously reflects, in the way he plays his rolls, so much of the neurotic age we live in…’.

The New York Times would pursue this point to a further degree in their 2004 obituary of the actor:

That’s the force Tony Randall embodied: he represented, in his neurotic grandeur, our national will to unhappiness. Or if not our will, at least our right, which in the 50’s we were only beginning to realize we could exercise.

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.

Thanksgiving and Football
(The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

Peace was eleven days old when this column first appeared.
Anticipating Thanksgiving, 1918, The Stars & Stripes announced that football games, movies and assorted other forms of entertainment had been arranged by the American Red Cross in order to placate the eager American survivors of the First World War who simply wanted to get on those big boats and sail home.

As an expression of gratitude, numerous French families had volunteered to invite American soldiers and sailors to their homes to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday.

The Book that Shook the Kremlin
(Coronet Magazine, 1959)

How Pasternak’s Russian novel, Doctor Zhivago (1957), came to be published was not your standard bourgeois affair involving manuscripts sent by certified mail to charming book agents who host long, wet lunches – quite the contrary. As the journalist noted in the attached article: It is an intriguing story involving the duplicity of one Italian communist who gleefully deceived a multitude Soviets favoring that the work be buried forever.