Recent Articles – Page 52 – Old Magazine Articles

The Capture of General Hideko Tojo
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

War correspondent George Burns reported on the momentous day when the American Army came to arrest the former Prime Minister of Imperial Japan, General Hideko Tojo (1884 – 1948). Tojo served as Japan’s Prime Minister between 1941 and 1944 and is remembered for having ordered the attack on the American naval installation at Pearl Harbor, as well as the invasions of many other Western outposts in the Pacific. Judged as incompetent by the Emperor, he was removed from office in the summer of 1944.

This article describes the efforts of Lt. Jack Wilpers who is credited for prolonging the life of Tojo after his amateur suicide attempt and seeing to it that the man kept his date with the hangman. Nominated for the Bronze Star, he was decorated in 2010: read THE WASHINGTON POST article.

Warm Recollections of Marilyn
(Pageant Magazine, 1971)

Nine years after Marilyn Monroe’s death, Hollywood reporter James Henaghan remembered his friendship with the star and their warm, unguarded moments together:

I guess I had known it all the time. I knew that I belonged to the public and to the world. The public was the only family, the only Prince Charming, and the only home I ever had dreamed about.

When FDR Wrote a Script…
(Coronet Magazine, 1947)

Here is an article by one of the foot soldiers of legendary silent movie producer Adolf Zukor, in which she recalled a time in 1923 when the future president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mailed an unsolicited photoplay (ie. script) to their offices in hopes of securing some measure of Hollywood immortality.

Knowing that FDR had tremendous power in both New York and Washington, Zukor instructed her to let him down gently; twenty years later Roosevelt would chuckle about his ambitions with her at a White House party.

President Lincoln had his own dreams and aspirations…

How Much Can the Germans Take?
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

The attached 1941 Collier’s Magazine article reported on how the people of Berlin were faring after one solid year of R.A.F. bombing. By war’s end it was estimated that as many as 580,000 Germans had been killed as a result of the Allied bombing campaign (many of them were children and far more women than men). This article examines what Berlin life was like when the bombs fell.

Click here to read about the bombing of Japan.

The Question of Japanese Youth
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

Far-flung correspondent Max Lerner (1902 – 1992) penned the attached editorial concerning the necessity of reëducation Japanese school children:

The Japanese youth are the key to Japan’s future. There were 12,000,000 of them in the elementary schools before the war, dressed in school uniforms, bowing before the Emperor’s portrait every day on entering and leaving… The values taught to him were feudal and fascist values, but the weapons given him were modern weapons. This is the combination that produced the suicide-squadrons of the Kamikaze.

A similar article about German youth can be read here.

The Quarantined New Yorker
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

New York has a strange exile. She is now in her sixties, this woman has been isolated on North Brother Island, way up the East River, for 17 years and must spend the rest of her life there.

Socialism Bad
(The American Magazine, 1949)

It seems difficult to imagine, but this opinion writer felt America leaning toward socialism as far back as 1949:

While the people look more and more to Washington to do everything under the sun for them, the Federal Government hasn’t been discouraging them at all. On the contrary, the Administration has been repeatedly asking for more and more powers to use when it may see fit.

He is sympathetic to their feelings, but cautions his readers that Marxism looks alluring on the printed page – but it will simply lead to serfdom in the end

Hitler’s Economist
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht (1877 – 1970) was the German economist who is credited with having stabilized that nation’s currency following the Wiemar Republic and made possible the Nazi quest of military rearmament:

Germany lacks the stuff of which tanks and guns and explosives are made . It lacks rubber, cotton, silk, copper, tin and iron ore. It lacks food for its 65,000,000 people and fodder for it cattle. So Dr. Schacht has laced German business and industry into a straight-jacket of rigid control, to conserve materials and exchange.

Although he never became a Nazi Party member, he was highly placed in the Reich. In the attached 1937 profile, you will learn that Schacht cautioned Hitler numerous times to remove the Socialist regulations that restrained the German economy from kicking in to high gear.

Click here to read an article that explains in great detail how the Nazi economic system (with it’s wage and price controls) was Marxist in origin.

Labor Abuses in the South
(Focus Magazine, 1938)

Many of the back-handed dealings that would be addressed in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath are illustrated in the attached photo-essay titled, Slavery in America. This article is about the cruel world of the Deep South that existed in the Twenties and Thirties. It was an agrarian fiefdom where generations of White planters and factory owners practiced the most un-American system of exploitation and feudalism that developed and was perpetuated from the chaos wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction. It was a nasty place where the working people of both races labored under conditions of peonage and bone-crushing poverty with no hope in sight.

Click here to read more about the American South during the Great Depression.

George VI: Corrections were Made that had Consequences
(Literary Digest, 1937)

With the revelation that Britain’s King George VI was left-handed came this column by an uncredited journalist listing all the various unseemly elements that are associated with with left hand usage (most importantly, Lucifer). In light of the fact that a British king is also assigned the title Defender of the Faith in the Anglican Church; steps had to be taken in his youth to train him how to use his right hand. These lessons came at a cost, and the result was his sad stuttering speech – which also involved additional lessons with a speech therapist.

Meet Mao Zedong
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

When this profile first appeared in 1950, the column’s subject, Mao Zedong (1893 – 1976), was generally seen as a tin-horn dictator and Stalinist dupe. It wouldn’t be long before he would be widely recognized as one of the greatest mass-murderers in world history.

JOURNEY’S END by R.C. Sheriff
(Theatre Arts Magazine, 1929)

Robert Littell reviewed the first New York production of Journey’s End by former infantry officer, R.C. Sherriff (1896 – 1975: 9th East Surrey Regiment, 1915 – 1918). We have also included a paragraph from a British critic named W.A. Darlington who had once fought in the trenches and approaches the drama from the angle of a veteran:

Click here if you would like to read another article about the WW I play Journey’s End.

Hitler Gets a Bad Review
(Atlantic Monthly, 1933)

With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the German-speaking Alice Hamilton (1869 – 1970; sister to the classics scholar, Edith) was assigned the task of reviewing Mein Kampf
(1925) for The Atlantic Monthly. She didn’t like it.

He loves rough, red-blooded words – ‘relentless’, ‘steely’, ‘iron-hearted’, ‘brutal’; his favorite phrase is ‘ruthless brutality’. His confidence in himself is unbounded.
The royalties generated by the sales of Mein Kampf made Adolf Hitler a very rich man. To read about this wealth and Hitler’s financial adviser, click here.

Read another review of Mein Kampf.

Although Hitler didn’t mention it his book, German-Americans drove him crazy.

Hitler Gets a Bad Review
(Atlantic Monthly, 1933)

Read another review of Mein Kampf.

Although Hitler didn’t mention it his book, German-Americans drove him crazy.

MoMA Purchased Paintings from the Degenerate Art Exhibit(Art Digest, 1939)

The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.

The article lists the purchased works.

Click here to read about the Nazi Art Battalions…

MoMA Purchased Paintings from the Degenerate Art Exhibit(Art Digest, 1939)

The article lists the purchased works.

Click here to read about the Nazi Art Battalions…

MoMA Purchased Paintings from the Degenerate Art Exhibit(Art Digest, 1939)

The article lists the purchased works.

Click here to read about the Nazi Art Battalions…

In Defense of President Hoover
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)

Attached is a small excerpt from the Pathfinder review of Eugene Lyons’ book, Our Unknown Ex-President (1948). The author outlined the various measures taken by the Hoover administration during the earliest years of the Great Depression in hopes that the flood waters would subside:

He fought for banking reform laws, appropriations for public works, home-loan banks to protect farms and residences. He asked for millions for relief to be administered by state and local organizations… A Democratic Congress refused to heed his suggestions.

Yet, regardless of the various missteps made by Hoover and FDR, the United States remailed an enormously wealthy nation…