Recent Articles – Page 51 – Old Magazine Articles

The Great Depression and American Communists
(Click Magazine, 1939)

This photo-essay tells the story of the radical elements within the United States during the later period of the Great Depression – all of them were directed and financed by Georgi Dimitrov (1882 – 1949) in far-off Moscow. The leaders of the American Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, and Ella Reeve Bloor.

In 1944, the city of Seattle, Washington elected a communist to the U.S. House of Representatives, click here to read about him…

Click here to learn how thoroughly the FBI had infiltrated the CPUSA.

Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who pontificated on every street corner during the Great Depression…

Click here to read about the tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression…

From Amazon: Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936,

Andrew Mellon’s Gift
(Art Digest, 1937)

A 1937 news column announced the very generous gift to Washington, D.C. and the nation made by billionaire philanthropist Andrew W. Mellon (1855 — 1937): The National Gallery of Art:

A long, low, classic structure, tailored in lines that harmonize with the neighboring white Beaux-Arts buildings, will house the new National Gallery made possible for the nation’s capital by Andrew W. Mellon. The plans, designed by John Russell Pope have already been accepted by the Fine Arts Commission and construction… will get underway as soon as congressional authorization is made… The cost of the building, which will be borne entirely by Mr. Mellon, is estimated at $9,000,000.

(The cost was actually $10,000,000)

Click here to read additional articles from the Twenties and Thirties about art.

1940s Makeup and W.W. II
(Click Magazine, 1942)

Illustrated with thirteen pictures of the most popular U.S. makeup products used throughout the Forties, this article provides a fascinating look at how World War II effected the American cosmetic industry and how that same industry benefited the American war effort.

The U.S. cosmetics industry was effected in many ways, read the article and find out.

Click here to read a 1954 article about Marilyn Monroe.

‘They Dropped The A-Bomb On Me”
(Tab Magazine, 1958)

During the Cold war, as many as 400,000 American military personnel were forced to witness Atomic explosions. Having been sworn to secrecy, this veteran wrote his testimony under the penname, Soldier X:

Then I saw the true power and fury of nature as a giant fireball sluggishly rolled upward through the thick layer of dust: I estimated its distance at about 1500 feet up. Surrounding the red mass are twisting white snakes of clouds….This is color as few humans have ever seen it, magnificent, threatening and horrible.

It All Began With Madame Curie
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Here is a news article about Madame Marie Curie (1867 – 1934), it concerns the fact that although she discovered Radium, and conducted numerous important experiments upon it, she didn’t possess so much as a gram of the stuff. This problem was remedied by a coterie of American women of science who convened and agreed to provide her with the missing gram.

Jim Crow at Newsweek
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

What a thoroughly outrageous article this is! In my experience reading news pieces from both world wars I have never once come across one in which the journalist pinpoints a particular fighting unit and labels it as substandard – but that is exactly what happens in this article about the all-black 92nd Division. Previously, I never thought such a thing would ever happen with a censored press that sought to preserve the morale of both soldiers and home front – but I was wrong.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Many Firsts
(The Literary Digest, 1937)

This magazine article explains what a unique force in presidential history Eleanor Roosevelt was. She defied convention in so many ways and to illustrate this point, this anonymous journalist went to some length listing fifteen firsts that this most tireless of all First Ladies had racked-up through the years.

Those councilors who advised FDR and the First Lady on all matters African-American were popularly known as the Black Brain Trust…

American English is Better Than U.K. English…
(Literary Digest, 1922)

E.B. Osborn of the London Morning Post reviewed H.L. Mencken’s book, The American Language (1921) and came away amused and in agreement with many of the same conclusions that the Bard of Baltimore had reached:

…Americans show superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness; for example, movie is better than cinema…The American language offers a far greater variety of synonyms than ours; transatlantic equivalents for drunk are Piffled, spifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged and burned.

Read about the Canadian Preferences in English…

– from Amazon: A Decade-by-Decade Guide to the Vanishing Vocabulary of the Twentieth Century

The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse
(PM Tabloid, 1943)

The reason the Nazis banned The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse was that it was a political preachment against Hitler ‘socialism,’ by a man [Fritz Lang] whose films were appreciated by the Germans as true interpretations of the social trends of post-war Germany… Lang’s intention in the film was, in his own words, ‘to expose the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything which is precious to a people so that they would lose all faith in the institutions and ideals of the State. Then, when everything collapsed, they would try to find help in the new order.’

Yvonne De Carlo Arrives
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

A 1945 Collier’s Magazine article about Yvonne De Carlo (a.k.a. Lilly Munster: 1922 – 2007) that appeared shortly after her first big break in Hollywood, Salome, Where She Danced. At the time of this interview the actress had well-over fifteen minor films on her resume but the journalist chose to claim that Salome was her first, just for the unbelievable glamor of it all; he also chose to shave three years off her age.

Yvonne De Carlo was born twenty years ago in Vancouver, British Columbia…She was a featured dancer at Earl Caroll’s and earned the undying respect of the producer by tipping the scales at a svelte 115 pounds, standing on the runway at a mere 5 feet four inches, and by displaying an 11 -/2 -inch neck, a 36 bust, a 24 waist, 32 hips a 7 1/2 -inch ankle, and 15 2/3 -inch wrist.

The Strong Economy and its Effect on Fashion
(Quick Magazine, 1951)

The antidote to the austere fashion deprivations of the 1930s and the wartime fabric restrictions that characterized the Forties arrived in the immediate post-war period when designers were at last permitted to make manifest their restrained cleverness and create an aesthetic style in a mode that was overindulgent in its use of fabric. This fashion revolt commenced in Paris, when Christian Dior showed his first collection in 1947 – couturiers in every style capitol in the West willingly kowtowed and a new era in fashion was born.

Should Movie Stars Be Expected to Fight, As Well?
(Photoplay Magazine, 1942)

We were very surprised to read in the attached editorial that the whole idea of draft deferments for actors and other assorted Hollywood flunkies was not a scheme cooked-up by their respective agents and yes-men, but a plan that sprung forth from the fertile mind of the executive officer in charge of the Selective Service System: Brigadier General Lewis Blaine Hershey (1893 – 1977) in Washington.

Always one to ask the difficult questions, Ernest V. Heyn (1905 – 1995) executive editor of Photoplay posed the query Should Stars Fight? and in this column he began to weigh the pros-and-cons of the need for propaganda and an uninterrupted flow of movies for the home front, and the appearance of creating a new entitled class of pretty boys.

Twenty years earlier a Hollywood actor would get in some hot water for also suggesting that talented men be excused from the W.W. I draft…

The Conversational Lenin
(Literary Digest, 1921)

When Washington D. Vanderlip made his way to the nascent Soviet Union to secure mining rights in Siberia he wrote of his meeting with the nation’s first dictator, Vladimir Lenin, and revealed a Lenin that was seldom seen in print. He wasn’t blathering on about the proletariat or the bourgeoisie but rather musing about his pastimes and dreams for the future.

On his desk was a copy of the New York Times, well-thumbed. ‘Do you really read it?’ I asked. ‘I read the New York Times, the Chicago American and the Los Angeles Times regularly,’ he said.’Through the New York Times I keep track of the atrocities, the assassinations and the new revolutions in Russia. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where to find them.’

Regretting the A-Bomb
(Commonweal Magazine, 1945)

An anonymous columnist at The Commonweal (New York) was quick to condemn the use of the Atomic Bombs:

… we are confronted with an obligation to condemn what we ourselves did, an obligation to admit that our victory has been sadly sullied not only because we used this weapon but because we have tacitly acceded to use it.

Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
(NY Times, 1920)

A remarkable book is this latest by Sinclair Lewis. A novel, yes, but so unusual as not to fall easily into a class. There is practically no plot, yet the book is absorbing. It is so much like life itself, so extraordinarily real. These people are actual folk, and there was never better dialogue written than their revealing talk.

Assemblies of God
(Coronet Magazine, 1958)

The fastest-growing Protestant religion today is the Pentecostal movement… In barely half a century this dynamic young version of old-time fundamentalism has produced spectacularly successful leaders such as Oral Roberts and the late Aimee Semple McPherson, has won the devotion of at least 2,000,000 Americans of every racial and religious origin and through zealous foreign missionary work, has gained thousands of converts on every continent.

The Non-Success of Prohibition
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

Prohibition had been in place for a little over eleven and a half years by the time this uncredited editorial was published. The column is informative for all the trivial events that Prohibition had set in motion and are seldom remembered in our own time – such as the proliferation of private golfing institutions; clubs that intended to appear innocent enough, but were actually created for Wet dues-paying golfers. A recently posted article (1917) that appeared in THE LITERARY DIGEST near the end of 1929 examined the astronomical wealth that had been earned by the gangsters in America’s biggest cities.

Fascism’s Triumph Explained by Italian-American Journalists
(Literary Digest, 1922)

At the request of The Literary Digest editors, a number of Italian-language journalists working in North America were asked to explain the great success that the Italian Fascists were experiencing in 1922 Italy. This article lists an enormous number of Italian language newspapers that existed in the United States at that time; virtually every medium-sized to large American city had one. We were surprised to find that the most pro-Mussolini Italian-American newspaper operating in the U.S. was located in New York City.

In the late Thirties, early Forties the FBI began to monitor the Italian-Americans who adored Mussolini – Click here to read about it