Recent Articles – Page 66 – Old Magazine Articles

Liberace Arrives
(Collier’s Magazine, 1954)

Attached is a five page interview with the always demure and introverted pianist Liberace (b. Wladziu Valentino Liberace: 1919 – 1987). When this article first appeared on the pages of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE, no living performer was selling more records than he was, his television program was nearing its second year and American women had not yet figured out that he was gay. Life was good.

From Amazon: Liberace: An American Boy

N.Y. Artists Discover Loft-Living
(Pageant Magazine, 1960)

A new day dawned in Manhattan real estate history at the end of 1961 when the city elders agreed to abandon their bureaucratic jihad (a fire code issue) to evict artists from all those assorted run-down ateliers located around lower Broadway.

These were the upper floors of hundreds of old downtown business and manufacturing buildings (most over a century old) that were characterized by their heavy masonry proliferating with faux loggias, balustrades, entablatures and rows of delicately fluted columns – all scattered throughout Tribeca, SoHo and Chelsea. The artists called them Lofts.

As far as we can figure out, this was the first time in history that anybody seemed to care where an artist lived and worked.

VJ Day in an American P.O.W. Camp
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

A short column filed by an eye-witness in Manila who described well the profound sense of melancholy that descended upon the W.W. II Japanese prisoners of war when they had learned of the Japanese surrender.

Click here if you would like to read an article about the Japanese surrender proceedings in Tokyo Bay.

Click here to read more articles about the liberation of Paris in 1944.

The Japanese Surrender Proceedings
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.

Those were the words of General Douglas MacArthur when he opened the Japanese Surrender Proceedings on board the deck of the American battleship, U.S.S. Missouri on the morning of September 2, 1945. This report was filed by Yank correspondent Dale Kramer, who amusingly noted that all concerned were dressed in a manner fitting the occasion, with the exception of the American officers who (oddly) seemed unable to locate their neckties that morning.

Click here if you would like to read about the atomic blast over the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

Click here to read articles about post-war Japan.

Click here to read about August 28, 1945 – the day the American occupation began.

The Police State
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Victor Serge (1890 – 1947) was a devoted Bolshevik writer who was highly critical of Joseph Stalin; he spent five years in the gulag for his subversive activity and would have no doubt died there had not an international mishmash of humanitarians raised a stink about his incarceration. He was exiled from the Marxist-dream-land in 1936 – the attached column is an extract from his gulag writings concerning the cruelties of Stalin’s secret police.

The Enrolled Students at the Internment Camps
(U.S. Government, 1943)

The attached chart shows the total number of elementary and high school students who were enrolled at the ten Japanese-American internment camps during the period leading up to March, 1943.

‘My Two Years In The Red Army”
(American Magazine, 1953)

Is the average soldier in the USSR eager for war with the United States? Here’s the inside story of Russian morale and military spirit, revealed by the first Soviest fighting man to escape his Communist masters and become an American GI.

PR from the Jungles of Cuba…
(Coronet Magazine, 1958)

The last thing the aspiring Communist dictator Fidel Castro needed in the Fall of 1958 was to have the dreaded Yanquees breathing down his neck; and so to buy some time, he penned this seven page article for the easily-bamboozled editors of Coronet magazine and packed it full of hooey, with lines like:
A million unemployed bespeaks a terrible economic sickness which must be cured… lest it fester into communism. It was this article, among other deceptions, that made President Eisenhower believe that the new government of Cuba was deserving of diplomatic recognition in February of 1959. Less than two years later the Kennedy administration severed ties with the Cuban regime and shortly after launched an ill-fated attack on the island kleptocracy.

Who was Kilroy?
(Various Sources, 1945 -7)

The three articles attached herein serve as good examples that illustrate the wide-spread curiosity found in most quarters of the United States as to who was this G.I. who kept writing KILROY WAS HERE on so many walls, both foreign and domestic, during the past three and a half years of war? It was not simply the returning veterans who felt a need to know, but the folks who had toiled on the home front as well.

Is your name Anderson?

Designs of the Italian Futurists
(Current Opinion Magazine, 1919)

Already the young architects of Italy are looking forward to a new renaissance of building, toward the production of a new style based upon modern methods of building and adapted to modern needs. The impulse to this new movement came from the brilliant Futurist Antonio Sant’Elia, who carried the ideas of the Italian innovators into the field of architecture, but whose development was cut short by his heroic death in the war… Nevertheless, his influence upon the younger architects has been great. Fortunately, they have been able to adapt his ideas to the exigencies of practical building, and in some instances to avoid a complete severing with the traditions of the past.

One Year in the Life of NYC
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Within twelve months time the following things happen in New York:

• One hundred thousand New Yorkers are born.

• Five thousand of them die.

• Twelve thousand New Yorkers die in car accidents.

• Sixty thousand New Yorkers are married.

• 1,350 New Yorkers commit suicide etc., etc., etc.,

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Here is a very thorough profile of Mustafa Kamel Atatürk (1881 – 1938), the first president of the Republic of Turkey (1923 – 1938). The article goes into some detail concerning his humble beginnings, his vices and his secret writings for the revolutionary Vatan ve Hürriyet (Motherland and Liberty) underground movement. His rise to power came with his assorted military triumphs in the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan War, the First World War and most notably, the Greko-Turkish War. He came to power in 1922 and began reforming Turkish society in ways that rocked the nation to its very corps.

Click here to read a 1922 article about the Turkish slaughter of Christians.

Prolonging The Vietnam War
(American Opinion Magazine, 1967)

While thousands of American men lay down their lives in a cruel jungle war, our own president is urging us to trade with the Kremlin that is financing this war and providing the main source of supply to the enemy.

Wedlock: Ideal for Men
(Manners, Culture and Dress, 1893)

Wise words from the Victorians regarding the perils of bachelorhood:

There is no tear shed for the old bachelor; there is no ready hand and kind heart to cheer him in his loneliness and bereavement…

Click here to read other Victorian Gems.

‘The Real Yellow Peril”
(The Independent, 1921)

Three cheers for the late Earl S. Parker, long-suffering secretary of the now-defunct American League of Justice (California) who recognized the tyranny inherit in the California Alien Land Bill of 1921! Seeing that the Japanese immigrants had been dealt enough cruelty by being denied citizenship, he was quick to point out that it was wrong to deny them real estate as well.

Click here to read about the Yellow Peril in Canada.

‘The Doughboys”
(The New Red Cross Magazine, 1919)

What we enjoyed about this piece by the Muckraking Ida Tarbell (1857 – 1944) was that it was written some six months after the heavy handed George Creel had ceased influencing Yankee magazine editors into printing pro-American blather, and so we tend to feel that her praise of the American Doughboys was quite sincere – and praise she does! Up hill and down dale, the Doughboys can do no wrong in her eyes.
This essay appeared in print around the same time the French had decided that all the Doughboys were just a bunch of racist hurrah-boys and were becoming increasingly sick of them. The Yanks might have squared their debt with the Marquis de Lafayette, but the recently returned Poilus were not above taking an occasional swipe at Ida Tarbell’s Doughboys…

Click here to read some statistical data about the American Doughboys of the First World War.

The Fear of the ‘Nipponification’
(The Independent, 1920)

Interesting figures revealed by the U.S. Census Bureau in 1920 served to relieve much of the race-conscious anxiety among some of the members of the Anglo-Saxon majority:

The report of the Census Bureau on the number of Japanese residents in the United States shows that the number has been much exaggerated by those panic-stricken persons who affect to dread the rise of a new Japan in America…the Japanese population of the three states on the Pacific coast increased more slowly from 1910 to 1920than it did in the previous decade. There are 70,196 Japanese in California, which has a total population of 3,426,861; in other words about one Californian in every fifty is a Japanese.

The U.S. Census figures for 2011 indicated that the Asian-American population numbered over 17 million, with the lion’s share still residing in the West and the vast majority having arrived after 1965.

Commercial Profits Generated Within the Camps
(U.S. Government, 1944)

Even under the gloomy conditions of the camps the wheels of commerce continued to turn ~and they turned out an impressive $3,526,851.77! As can clearly be seen in the plans of the camps that are offered on this site, the camps all had commercial districts where the interned families could purchase needed goods and services; the ten Japanese-American internment camps had 160 businesses operating within their gates that managed to employ 1,853 souls. The attached chart from the 1944 records of the War Relocation Authority serves to illustrate the productivity of all these assorted commercial operations that had once thrived in the camps.