I am opposed to wage reductions – a statement made by President Roosevelt at a February press conference in 1938, compelled both economists and industrialists to ejaculate numerous multisyllabic words on the matter. In light of the fact that magazine editors are wage earners, the majority of selected quotes side with FDR.
Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…
Read an article about the 1935 dolar … Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…Read more
The seasoned war correspondent from THE NEW REPUBLIC filed this essay some five months into the war in order to clarify for his American readers the exact nature of trench warfare. His observations are based upon the trench fighting that he witnessed both in France and during the Russo-Japanese War, some nine years earlier:
There is an illusion that the range and effectiveness of modern arms tend to keep armies far apart. On the contrary, there is more hand-to-hand fighting today than at any time since gunpowder was invented… at this rate the French will not drive out the Germans in months, but on the other hand a frontal attack, and every attack must now be frontal, even if successful would cost several hundred thousand men.
The article was written by Gerald Morgan; by war’s end he would serve as General Pershing’s press chief (ie.censor).
A 1941 magazine article by Delbert Johnson that reported on the unprecedented success of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives during the earliest period of the Japanese occupation:
Industrial cooperation in China, which was no more than a paper plan three years ago, today is a nation-wide movement that has cast a blight upon Japan’s economic aspirations in Asia and is providing the people of China a new means of salvation against aggression.
The plan for the Indusco movement came into being during the dark days of the spring and summer of of 1938…Seemingly, China was doomed to economic strangulation if not to military defeat. But a handful of Chinese and foreign visionaries’ thought otherwise. They knew that time, area and population all would work to China’s advantage in any prolonged struggle.
Before the war was hours old, Chiang’s most secret plans were known to the Japs. Again and again Jap actions showed foreknowledge of Chiang’s movements and stratagems, as discussed and decided with his most trusted leaders. This explains many mysterious incidents, and makes China’s apparent ‘spy complex’ fully understandable.
Published four months before Germany’s attack on Poland, this article outlines Hermann Goering’s (1893 – 1946) efforts to build the Luftwaffe from scratch, the creation of various flight schools, the Luftwaffe collaboration with the Hitler Youth organization, and his aspirations to out-class the air forces of the United States and Britain.
It has taken Field Marshall Hermann Wilhelm Goering a little over six years to build the German Air Armada, one of the world’s most formidable offensive forces, out of a magnificent bluff.
By the time this magazine profile of Field Marshall Goering went to print, he had already made his entry on the world stage as the master-mind behind the 1937 bombing of the Basque city of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War (an event that was not mentioned at all in this article).
This printable page from an R.O.T.C. manual concerns the American military efforts in World War I.
Attached is a useful summation in three paragraphs of the Aisne-Marne offensive. The reader will learn which American and French units participated, the dates on which the battle raged and the German defense strategy.
The battle had numerous and far reaching results. It eliminated the German threat to Paris, upset Ludendorff’s cherished plan to attack the British again in Flanders, gave the Allies important rail communications, demonstrated beyond further doubt the effectiveness of American troops on the offensive, firmly established Allied unity of command…
Fingered as the premier Soviet agent working in the United States by a former communist and editor of THE DAILY WORKER and PEOPLE’S WORLD, Gerhart Eisler (1897 – 1968) – was arrested in the Fall of 1947 and charged with espionage.
Standing before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Eisler refused to take the oath, preferring instead to read a prepared statement. The committee refused to play along and the Justice Department soon leveled Eisler with additional charges. By 1949 things were looking dark for Eisler; jumping bail he made good his escape and secured passage across the Atlantic. Welcomed in East Germany as a hero, Eisler was soon named director of East German radio and became a prominent voice for the Communist government.
When the Grant Memorial in New York City was first presented to the public during the Spring of 1897, few could have guessed that one of the places most excited about the monument would be Great Britain. An American journalist posted to that distant isle filed the attached article, quoting from as many as eight British newspapers that saw fit to liberally sprinkle their pages with a variety of laudatory adjectives in praise of General Grant:
He sprang from the people, he was the son of a plain farmer, and had ‘driven team’ in his day. Yet he was also a trained soldier. But, from first to last, he was merely the citizen in arms, and with the mighty array he commanded, he resumed his position in civil life as soon as his work was done…The giants of the Civil War were probably the last of a great race.
Click here to read Grant’s recollection of the first time he met President Lincoln.
A summation of the 1862 Battle of Shiloh:
Bull Run, the first Southern victory of the war, was followed by others. Nor did the tide of battle turn in favor of the North until General Ulysses S. Grant won in Tennessee the hard fought struggle of Shiloh. This was in April of 1862. Grant first besieged and captured Fort Donelson, then advanced until he was suddenly assailed at Shiloh by the entire army which the Confederates had gathered in the West…
It is illuminating to realize that more persons are receiving relief in the United States than there are individuals in such well-known countries as Romania (18,000,000), Mexico (16,500,000), Czechoslovakia (14,800,000) and Yugoslavia (14,000,000); over twice as many as Belgium (8,000,000) and Holland (7,920,000); about three times as many as in Sweden (6,140,000) and to cut theses comparisons short – almost seven times as many in all of Norway (2,800,000)… Clearly, it is not in the least inaccurate to speak of the relief population of the United States as a great nation within a nation… Women and children comprise as much as two thirds of the relief population.
A brief notice reporting on Prince Teh Wang (Prince Demchugdongrub 1902 – 1966), ruler of Inner Mongolia, who, in an attempt to create an independent Mongolia, simply ruled as an appeaser of Imperial Japan:
While Prince Teh’s position, as a Japanese puppet, can scarcely be less comfortable than it was before , Japan has a grip on the bottle-neck controlling a vast, ill-defined hinterland of North China; and has as well a buffer State between her own influence and that of the Soviets.
The brain child of Il Duce, the Four-Power Pact was a diplomatic treaty that was intended to guarantee a greater voice to the four strongest powers in Europe: Italy, Germany, France and Britain.
The chief value of the Mussolini pact is (1) it induces collaboration in Europe and (2) it pledges the disarmament regardless of what the disarmament conference does.
In Italy, every other man is wearing a uniform or just stepped out of one. Every other wife is about to become a mother again. Every boy is lugging a wooden gun and playing at soldier. So it sees to the eye, and amazingly, so it actually is. War, babies, self-sufficiency, poverty, persecution complexes, chest beating, magnetic pride and the most parrotty people in the world. This is the land determined to out-Caesar the greatest Roman of them all. The Italian’s thoughts, eyes, ears, destiny, morals, spaghetti, pocketbook and trigger finger are controlled completely by the whim of one man. And the Italians love him.
Click here to read about life in Hitler’s Germany during the same period…
Here is a 1937 article that reminds us that there wasn’t anything left to chance or improvisation under the old studio system:
One of the oldest newspaper publicity devices is the ‘leg display’. Resorted to chiefly by actresses whose press agents want them to break into print, it consists of nothing more than arriving in New York aboard an ocean liner and letting news photographers do the rest.
The adoration of the Feminine Leg began some twenty yeras earlier with the flappers; click here to read more on this topic…
This new form of illusion cannot be called an art. Without the magic of the human voice, without the reality of the human form, lacking in color sound and poetry the film is purely an ocular illusion, an effect of light.
Another anti-silent film article can be read here…
Click here to read a 1939 article about an alumni organization for the pioneers of silent films.
If necessity can be called the mother of invention, then deep public dissatisfaction can be called the mother of the authoritarian or ‘totalitarian’ state. In Europe, the [First] World War resulted in post-war conditions that walked arm-in-arm with profound social change. The aftermath was a great political and economic headache that grew slowly in intensity until it lead people to embrace anything that promised a cure… In Europe there are no less than 11 nations operating under systems far removed from democracy as we know it in this country.
But today there is no laughter in Germany. There are only smiles of disdain, contempt, conceit and strain. There is no humility, no pity, not much mercy. There is an odd sort of honor, an amazing egotism. But there is no will power nor need there be in a nation that knows but one man’s will.
CLICK HERE to read an article from 1923 about the abitious Adolf Hitler.
