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Mark Twain’s Unkind Portrait of Bret Harte (Current Opinion, 1922)

Nasty adjectives fly in this nifty essay concerning the friendship that soured between American writers Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) and Bret Harte (1836 – 1902). The two men were quite close during their younger days as journalists in San Francisco; in 1877 the bond between them was so strong that the two agreed to collaborate on a play, which they titled, Ah, Sin. However, Twain insisted that it was notoriety that killed his friend and it might have been better …if Harte had died in the first flush of his fame:

There was a happy Bret Harte, a contented Bret Harte, an ambitious Bret Harte, a bright, cheerful, easy-laughing Bret Harte to whom it was a bubbling effervescent joy to be alive. That Bret Harte died in San Francisco. It was the corpse of that Bret Harte that swept in splendor across the continent…

The House of Lucile (Hearst’s Sunday American, 1917)

Fashion and Hollywood costume designer Howard Greerstyle=border:none
wrote of Lady Duff Gordonstyle=border:none
(born Lucy Sutherland, 1863 – 1935):

…she was the first to introduce the French word chic into the English language, particularly in relation to fashion. She was the first dressmaker to employ mannequin parades (ie. models) in the showing of clothes…She was responsible for many fads and her clothes made many people famous. She was the most expensive dressmaker of her time, and the most aloof.


Lucile was one of the few souls to survive the TITANIC sinking; click here to read her account of that sad night.

•Read about the 1943 crochet revival•

‘Fascism in America” (Literary Digest, 1937)

With the opening of Camp Nordland (Dorkland?) in Andover, New Jersey, the two streams of American fascism saw fit to convene there and join hands. The Italian side was lead by the American Duce Salvatore Caridi and Yankee Fuhrer Fritz Kuhn stood at the head of the American Bundists.

Amidst much heiling, drinking of imported beer and assorted flag-waving, was celebrated the cementing of the twenty-first link in a chain of camps which has been gradually growing. By car they came and by train, until the countryside was increased by ten thousand inhabitants.

Who Was Mussolini? (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

A semi-flattering profile of Benito Mussolini that explains his difficult childhood and the periodic beatings he suffered at the hands of his Marxist father. No references are made to his favorite pastimes – beating up editors and closing newspapers:

Significantly, his god is Nietzsche, the German philosopher who wrote: ‘Might makes right.’


You can read about his violent death here…


Fascist Rome fell to the Allies in June of 1944, click here to read about it…

For Want of Assimilation (Reader’s Digest, 1923)

If Facebook existed in 1923, their über censor meisters would see to it that the uncharitable opinions of U.S. Representative French Strother (1868 – 1930) would never appear upon their fair pages. Strother’s thoughts on the failure of the immigration system were shared by many of his countrymen and in this column he lists many examples illustrating the collapse of America’s ability to assimilate the new-comers:

In fairness to the aliens, be it said that some of them have brought rich gifts to our civilization. But what shall profit a nation if it gain the whole world, and lose it’s own soul?

The Klansman on the Supreme Court (Pathfinder Magazine, 1940)

When the U.S. Supreme Court gave their decision concerning the 1940 appeal of a lower court’s verdict to convict three African-Americans for murder, civil libertarians in Washington held their collective breath wondering how Justice Hugo Black approached the case. Black, confirmed in 1937 as FDR’s first court appointee, admitted to having once been made a ‘life member’ of the Ku Klux Klan. This column was one of any number of other articles from that era that reported on the Alabaman’s explanation behind his Klan associations:

I did join the Klan… I later resigned. I never rejoined.

The Hobo News (Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

The Hobo News printed poems, cartoons, pin-ups, essays and news items that were useful to that unique class of men who rode the rails and frequent flop-houses. It was established in New York City by Pat The Roaming Dreamer Mulkern (1903 – 1948); the paper was run by hobos, for hobos and printed proudly across the awnings of their assorted offices were the words a little cheer to match the sorrow. Mulkern recognized that no self-respecting litigator would ever stoop to sue a newspaper with such a pathetic name, and so the paper was voluntarily in constant violation of U.S. copyright law by habitually printing the articles they most admired that had earlier appeared in Collier’s, The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post.

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