Recent Articles – Page 81 – Old Magazine Articles

Repeal + Ten Years (Click Magazine, 1943)

Americans on December 5 [1943] will look backwards to a dramatic night 10 years ago – many will be surprised that a whole decade has passed since the nation abandoned Prohibition… In the early ’30s, Congressman LaGuardia found authorities siphoning an estimated million dollars a day in graft from bootleggers. Cost of the ‘Noble Experiment’ to the government hovered around a billion dollars a year. In the last 14 Prohibition years, the public was figured to have spent more than $36,000,000,000 for bootlegging and smuggled liquor!

William Butler Yeats Interviewed (Theatre Arts Magazine, 1924)

When the writer and editor Montrose J. Moses (1878 – 1934) got some quality time with the fifty-four year old poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939) they discussed Irish theater, contemporary poetry, the collective literary merits of their generation and a good deal more. Unlike their visits in earlier days, Yeats was by then a respected icon in the republic of letters (having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature a year earlier).

Beer Flowed the Week Prohibition Ended (Literary Digest, 1933)

The attached article is composed of numerous newspaper observations that appeared in print throughout April of 1933; these perceptions all pertain to the goings on that followed in the joyous wake of Prohibition’s demise:

‘The return of beer has really been a remarkable phenomenon,’ says The New York Evening Post.
‘Not one of the bad effects predicted for it actually took place’.

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.