Author name: editor

1945, Post-War Japan, Yank Magazine

Catching Up With Tokyo Rose
(Yank Magazine, 1945)

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The Americans arriving in Japan after the surrender proceedings were hellbent on capturing the American traitor who presided over so many disheartening broadcasts — the woman they nicknamed Tokyo Rose:

…one of the supreme objectives of American correspondents landing in Japan was Radio Tokyo. There they hoped to find someone to pass off as the one-and-only Rose and scoop their colleagues. When the information had been sifted a little, a girl named Iva Toguri (Iva Toguri D’Aquino: 1916 – 2006), emerged as the only candidate who came close to filling the bill. For three years she had played records, interspersed with snappy comments, beamed to Allied soldiers on the Zero Hour…Her own name for herself was Orphan Ann.


Toguri’s story was an interesting one that went on for many years and finally resulted in a 1977 pardon granted by one who had listened to many such broadcasts: President Gerald R. Ford (1913-2006), who had served in the Pacific on board the aircraft carrier USS Monterey.

The Designs of Gustav Jensen (Coronet Magazine, 1940)
1940, Coronet Magazine, Design

The Designs of Gustav Jensen
(Coronet Magazine, 1940)

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High-Ranking in the roll-call of New York’s industrial designer is a six-foot Dane with the voice of a Viking. Gustav Jensen is an artist, whether he is talking, eating, or performing Herculean labors in cleaning out Plebeian Stables. The creed of the industrial designer is that every implement of modern life can be made into a work of art. Jensen has pursued this creed to fabulous extremes. He has designed kitchen sinks, that have been compared to Renaissance caskets, and he meditates for months before he designs a doorknob….


The article is illustrated with eleven photographs; the image on the right shows Jensen’s design for a table model radio: The radio is a miracle. It should look like a miracle, remarked the designer.

A New Deal for Women (The Literary Digest, 1933)
1933, F.D.R., The Literary Digest

A New Deal for Women
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

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This historic article appeared during the opening weeks of Roosevelt’s first term administration announcing that the new president was taking a novel approach in granting various appointments to government positions of leadership by selecting numerous women who had proved their mettle in the fiery furnace of 1920s Democratic party politics.


1924 was a very important year for American women in politics…

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The Advance on the Rhineland and Other Forebodings (Stage Magazine, 1936)
1936, Stage Magazine

The Advance on the Rhineland and Other Forebodings
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

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One of the very few literati who recognized what a German military presence in the Rhineland meant was a one legged American veteran of the last war named Laurence Stallings (1894 – 1968). This article appeared to be about the great benefit afforded to us all by hard working photo-journalists who supplied us daily with compelling images of various far-flung events, but it was in all actuality a warning to our grand parents that the world was becoming a more dangerous place.

I think the unforgettable picture of the month will come from shots stolen near a French farmhouse by Strasbourg, when the French were countering Hitler’s move into the Rhineland…Routine were the crustacean stares of the Italian children in gas masks last week, where they practiced first aid against chlorine and mustard barrages…

Japan Sinks an American Warship (Literary Digest, 1937)
1937, Sino-Japanese Wars, The Literary Digest

Japan Sinks an American Warship
(Literary Digest, 1937)

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Bombs rained like hailstones and churned the waters all around the ship like geysers.’ said Earl Leaf, United Press correspondent in China and eyewitness of the sinking of the United States gunbpat PANAYstyle=border:none, by Japanese aviators, in the Yangtze River about 26 miles above Nanking; ….The British gunboat LADYBIRD and BEE also were fired on, and soon Foreign Minister Anthony Eden was telling an angry House of Commons that:

His Majesty’s Ambassador to Tokyo has made the strongest protest to the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs.’

Click here if you would like to read more about the sinking of the U.S.S. Panay.

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1935, Spying, The Literary Digest

Spies Beheaded in Germany
(Literary Digest, 1935)

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This magazine article was filed during the suspenseful phony war that was waged between Poland and Germany over the Danzig issue. It reported on the beheading of two German women convicted of spying on behalf of a Polish cavalry officer by the name of Baron Georges Von Sosnowski:

In London, THE NEWS CHRONICLE, Liberal Party organ, declared that the beheading of the two women was ‘disgusting savagery’, and was not the first evidence of ‘a strain of sheer barbarism in the Nazi creed…


The Roots of Communist China (The Nation, 1927)
1927, China - Twentieth Century, Pamphlet Produced by the National Park Service

The Roots of Communist China
(The Nation, 1927)

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A dispatch from the old China watcher Lewis S. Gannett was printed in the left-leaning American magazine, THE NATION:

All China has been won to half the Nationalist program – that which is directed to the reestablishment of national independence. The fundamental conflict between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ is, I think, between short-sighted men who think that the Nationalist passion can subside without causing fundamental changes in China’s social fabric, and those who recognize the inevitability of industrialization in China and are determined that their country shall not pass through all the miserable phases of capitalistic industrialism which created a disinherited proletariat in the West.

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Bertrand Russell on American Intervention (Literary Digest, 1922)
1922, Aftermath (WWI), The Literary Digest

Bertrand Russell on American Intervention
(Literary Digest, 1922)

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The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of American society came up and this column is just one example. During his 1922 American speaking tour Russell rambled-on about how prone Americans were to confuse the truth with commercial messages; believing that altruism was seldom a motivating factor behind a single American undertaking. He will have none of the thinking that America’s main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by wounded France and poor little Belgium but was rather an exercise in American self-interest.


Read the thoughts of one W.W. I veteran who regrets having gone to war…

The Old Hollywood Way to Physical Perfection (Literary Digest, 1937)
1937, Cosmetics, The Literary Digest

The Old Hollywood Way to Physical Perfection
(Literary Digest, 1937)

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The old flesh sculptor himself, Donald Loomis, late Physical Director for MGM Studios, let loose with some 1930s tips as to how he was able to make all those movie stars look so utterly fabulous – some are quite useful (some are pathetic).

Symmetry is the objective of Hollywood body sculptors. For bust-reduction, Loomis has a simple formula: Jump up and down with no support. Exercise in which the arms are forced backward and forward horizontally are used to develop the upper chest…


Click here to read an article about the demise of a popular 1940s hairstyle.

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Where Did the Doughboys Board? Where Did They Land? (Pictures of The World War, 1920)
1920, Doughboys, Pictures of the World War

Where Did the Doughboys Board? Where Did They Land?
(Pictures of The World War, 1920)

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A black and white map indicating the Atlantic ports up and down North America where the A.E.F. boarded troop ships, their trans-Atlantic routes and their French and British points of arrival. The map is also accompanied by a few facts concerning this remarkable trip across U-boat infested waters.


Click here to read an article about the sexually-transmitted diseases among the American Army of W.W. I…


When the Doughboys complained, they complained heavily about their uniforms; read about it here.

20th Century Artists Rediscover Woodcut Printing (Art Digest, 1936)
1936, Modern Art, The Art Digest

20th Century Artists Rediscover Woodcut Printing
(Art Digest, 1936)

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An art review concerning a 1936 Brooklyn Museum exhibit of woodcut prints by avant-garde German, Russian and French artists. The reviewer details how the medium was rediscovered.

Before Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was killed in the war he strengthened woodcut design in his departure from pretty and representational decoration toward more rugged abstraction…Almost all of these German, Russian and Frenchmen have concentrated their attention on human life. There is no pretty landscape, no picturesque architectural rendering, no still life, no sporting print. Froma a few prints the actual human form has been abstracted. One of these by Wassily Kandinsky ‘looks like a diagram of the contents of a madman’s waste basket’. The rest of the prints are chiefly tragic, mostly pitiful, occasionally derisive comments on the failure of man as an animal.

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Laurel and Hardy (Photoplay Magazine, 1930)
1930, Hollywood History, Photoplay Magazine

Laurel and Hardy
(Photoplay Magazine, 1930)

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An interview with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy:

They are the comedy sensations of the season. And all because they have learned, by a lucky stroke, that the public likes to see itself caricatured on the screen; that the public can laugh at the maunderings of a fat man who shakes a warning pudgy forefinger at a sensitive simpleton who is prone to weep

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