Recent Articles – Page 8 – Old Magazine Articles

Tommy’s Alphabet
(The B.E.F. Times, 1917)

The front-line Tommy of the First World War, like Fritz, Jock, Sammy and Les Poilu, had a good deal of time on his hands between terrors. Some wrote letters, some made trench art, some slept – and the ones we’re concentrating on were the ones who made this handy alphabetic guide that explained their world:

“Z is for ZERO, the time we go over,

Most of us wish we were way back
in Dover
Making munitions and living in clover
And far, far away from the trenches”

Japanese Home Front Radio Admits Damage
(PM Tabloid, 1945)

“Radio Tokyo indicated inadvertently yesterday that out Superfort offensive aimed at the destruction of Japanese war production had attained a considerable measure of success.”

FDR and his Learning Disabilities
(Liberty Magazine, 1938)

Liberty publisher Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) was a reliable critic of FDR and his economic policies. In this column MacFadden lambasts the President for making error after error and learning from none of them. He points out that the open market economy of the United States has traditionally provided Americans with the world’s highest standard of living, and yet:

“They would like to ignore precedent… entirely cast aside and forget the extraordinary results of our experiences in following the American system. They hate business and everything connected with it.”

Sabbath Challenges
(Christian Herald, 1963)

In the early Sixties, American church attendance was dropping as a new spirit of secularism was sweeping across the fruited plains. More and more merchants and restaurateurs were opening their businesses on Sundays and challenging the age-old Blue Laws as a result. This article examines what the Bible said about “keeping the sabbath holy”, and why Blue Laws were enacted in so many states.

Sticking It to FDR
(Liberty Magazine, 1942)

George Creel (1876 – 1953), the nation’s first and only official censor (1917 – 1918), knew FDR for twenty-five years, and in this wartime recollection he made FDR wish that the two had never met. This is the type of article Creel would never have allowed to be published twenty some years earlier because it sought to reduce confidence in the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, with the war in its eleventh month, Creel gave it to FDR with both barrels:

“No man ever dreamed more nobly or had less skill in making his dreams come true.”

FDR’s Proposal to Limit Personal Income
(PM Tabloid, 1942)

By the end of the war, FDR’s administration had placed taxable personal income as high as 94%(!). His Brain Trust were all big believers in Federal intervention into the economy – offering all sorts of price freezes and wage freezes in order to limit competition during the Great depression (as if that was a good). As the war kicked-in to high gear, FDR installed a low ceiling upon all high-earners and capped their salaries at $25,000.00 per-year.

Click here to read about FDR’s airplane.

Bernaar Macfadden
(New Masses Magazine, 1936)

The Leftists who ran the shop over at New Masses could easily have lived with the muscle-bound posing’s of Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955), but when he grew discontent with mugging it before the cameras and started writing anti-FDR editorials in a popular magazine, they knew they had to shut him down.

FDR and the Business Class
(Liberty Magazine, 1936)

“The attack on business so well popularized by the present administration at Washington unquestionably prolonged the Depression, perpetuated the dole, and added millions to the unemployed”

Feeding American Paratroopers
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

With W.W. II just around the corner, the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps’ “subsistence laboratory” in Chicago was burning the mid-night oil trying to create a nutritious light weight ration with little bulk for the nascent paratrooper divisions.

More About the Seabees
(All Hands Magazine, 1945)

“From the start the naval Construction Battalions were unusual outfits, mostly because of the men in them and because theirs was a new kind of warfare… Every Seabee found himself doubling in various trades. It was thus the construction men developed their most important tools – improvisation, ingenuity and guts. Often parts, materials and equipment had to be manufactured on the spot in shops hastily thrown together from salvaged enemy materials and tools… But as the Seabee organization grew (from an original force of 3,300 to a peak of 247,155, of which 83 percent were overseas) and its activities increased, the battalions picked up plenty of know-how, enabling them to smooth out and speed up operations.”

An American Tank in Tunisia
(American Magazine, 1943)

Here is first-person account of life in an M3 Stuart tank fighting in Tunisia:

“We were ordered to hold, and hold we did. But we took a terrible shellacking. We dodged around, spitting at the Germans with our little 37mm gun. Every now and then one of their heavy tank shells or high-velocity 88s would hit one of our light tanks and smash it. The wounded would crawl out, and those who could walk would carry or drag those who couldn’t… In the afternoon, when we were finally ordered to withdraw, we had only 9 of 18 tanks left, and some of those were damaged. We took what wounded we could into the tanks and held them in our arms.”

What Flappers Stood For
(Flapper Magazine, 1922)

Here is a page listing everything that the Flappers adored and found worth getting up in the morning to pursue.

The Seabees
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

In another article on this site, these words were quoted from the captured dispatches of a Japanese general writing to his superiors:

“[The Yank] is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.”

– he was, of course, referring to the famous Construction Battalions (Seabees) of the U.S. Navy. This article will tell you all about them.

The Seabees
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

In another article on this site, these words were quoted from the captured dispatches of a Japanese general writing to his superiors:

“[The Yank] is a wizard at handling machinery and he can build airfields, roads and advance bases with uncanny speed.”

– he was, of course, referring to the famous Construction Battalions (Seabees) of the U.S. Navy. This article will tell you all about them.

Un-Prepared for the First Six Months
(All Hands Magazine, 1945)

Looking back from a point four months after VJ-Day, this anonymous journalist recalled the first six months of the Second World War, and how ill-prepared the U.S. Navy was to take on the two-ocean war.