Author name: editor

Mabel Walker Willebrandt Takes On Prohibition (Collier's Magazine, 1924)
1924, Collier's Magazine, Prohibition History

Mabel Walker Willebrandt Takes On Prohibition
(Collier’s Magazine, 1924)

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An article about Mabel Willebrandt (1889 – 1963), the Assistant Attorney General of the United States between the years 1921 through 1929, her tremendous successes in the past and her ambitions to hold fast in the enforcement of the Volstead Act:

‘Give me the authority and let me have my pick of 300 men and I’ll make this country as dry as it is humanly possible to get it,’ she said without the slightest trace of braggadocio. ‘There’s one way it can be done: get at the source of supply. I know them, I have no patience with this policy of going after the hip-pocket and speakeasy cases. That’s like trying to dry up the Atlantic ocean with a blotter.’

When Mrs. Willebrandt stepped down some seven years after this article went to press, she questioned the willingness of the nation’s law enforcement agencies to see the job through.

Fatty Arbuckle Has Something to Say... (Motion Picture News, 1919)
1919, Motion Picture News, Silent Movie History

Fatty Arbuckle Has Something to Say…
(Motion Picture News, 1919)

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An interview with the famous silent film comedian, Fatty Arbuckle, as it appeared in a forgotten Hollywood trade magazine. Accompanying the interview are eight lines of biographical information pertaining to his Hollywood career as it stood in the year 1916. This short profile first appeared in The Studio Directory of The Motion Picture News and will serve to answer some of the questions readers might have concerning his career, before it took it’s tragic turn.


If you would like to read about the films of the Thirties, click here.
Click here to read about physical perfection during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

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Cover Girls (Coronet Magazine, 1948)
1940s Modeling, 1948, Coronet Magazine

Cover Girls
(Coronet Magazine, 1948)

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By 1948 the business of fashion modeling had developed into a $15,000,000-a-year industry. This article examines just how such changes evolved in just a ten year span of time:

American advertising struck pay dirt when it discovered the super salesgirls whose irresistible allure will sell anything from a bar of soap to a seagoing yacht…Always there was the secret whisper of sex. For women it was, ‘Be lovely, be loved, don’t grow old, be exciting’… For men it was, ‘Be successful, make everyone know that your successful, how can you get women if your not successful?’

The importance of attractive girls in our economy was stressed by John McPartland when he discussed modern advertising in his recent best seller, Sex in Our Changing World (1947).


Legendary fashion designer Christian Dior had a good deal of trouble with people who would illegally copy his designs; click here to read about that part of fashion history.

The Popularity of Italian Fascism 1923 | 1920s Italian History | 1923 Mussolini in Rome
1923, Benito Mussolini, Time Magazine

Fascism At It’s Peak
(Time Magazine, 1923)

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A dictatorship can last forever, if properly managed. It is my task to provide a mechanism that will endure and to have the various parts of this mechanism running without friction; then after I am gone it will be able to run itself. A dictatorship must answer the purpose for which it was introduced. Certainly the Fascist regime will last a very long time… Socialism works on the principle that all are equal, but Fascism knows we are far from equal. Take the great masses of human beings. They like rule by the few.

Labor Unions Under Hitler 1935 | National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers
1935, The Literary Digest, The Nazis

A Socialist Remedy for Nazi-Germany’s Labor Questions
(Literary Digest, 1935)

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A Socialist Workers’ Government has achieved a workers revolution in Germany without resorting to, though in some respects it approximates, Communism. Adolf Hitler has done it by wiping out all class privileges and class distinction, but the economics foundation of property rights and private capital has been left almost intact – for the present time.

The Third Reich, under Hitler, has wiped out corporate trade-unionism by forcing all workers to join one great government union, the National Socialist Union of Employers and Workers…


Eventually, unions were outlawed under Hitler.


Click here to read about the Nazi assault on the German Protestant churches in 1935.

Read an Article About the Socialist Aspects of Hitler’s Book, Mein Kampf.


Hitler’s economist admitted the German economy was socialist – more about that can be read here …

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The Failures of W.W. I American Press Censorship (Collier's Magazine, 1941)
1941, Censorship, Collier's Magazine

The Failures of W.W. I American Press Censorship
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

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Seven and a half months before the second installment of the War-to-End-All-Wars was to begin, George Creel (1876 – 1953), America’s first official censor from World War I, wrote this article for the editors of Collier’s Magazine explaining why he believed that censorship in an open society cannot work:

As many scars bear witness, I was the official censor during the World War. For two years I rode herd on the press, trying to enforce the concealment demanded by the Army and Navy.

The March of Time: Newsreel Journalism (Film Daily, 1939)
1939, Film Daily Magazine, Newsreels

The March of Time: Newsreel Journalism
(Film Daily, 1939)

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The attached magazine article first appeared in the long-forgotten Hollywood trade rag Film Daily and concerns the 1930s newsreel production company The March of Time:

Since the beginning of the motion picture, the newsreel has been recognized as a vital medium of public information. Movie goers demand it. But, by the very nature of its technique and the swiftness with which it brings today’s events to the screen, the newsreel can give little more than headline news. And so it has created among movie-goers a desire to see more.

It was this desire ‘to see more’ that led the founders of ‘The March of Time’ to launch their new kind of pictorial journalism…The first issue appeared in some 400 theaters throughout the United States on February 1, 1935.

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Newsreels at the Movies (Stage Magazine, 1936)
1936, Newsreels, Stage Magazine

Newsreels at the Movies
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

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The journalist who wrote this 1938 piece saw much good in theater newsreels, believing that the newsreel encourages a keener sense of the present and imprisons it for history. He doesn’t refer to any of the prominent newsreel production houses of the day, such as Fox Movietone, Hearst Metrotone, Warner-Pathe or News of the Day but rather prefers instead to wax poetic about the general good that newsreels perform and the services rendered. This newsreel advocate presented the reader with a long, amusing list of kings, dictators and presidents and what they thought of having their images recorded.


Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.

What was Yank Magazine? (Coronet Magazine, 1944)
1944, Coronet Magazine, Magazines

What was Yank Magazine?
(Newsweek & Coronet Magazines)

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Inasmuch as OldMagazineArticles.com is devoted to archiving the articles from the olde Yank, we are also keen on posting article about the magazine and its editorial policies, for few periodicals said as much about that generation and their lot in the Forties better than Yank. Attached is a photo essay from Coronet Magazine, illustrated with some 23 images, that tell the tale of how that weekly operated.


When W.W. II came to a close Yank Magazine was no more, this article was written –

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Life and Death of Leon Trotsky | Trotsky Biography
1940, PM Tabloid, Soviet History

The Life and Death of Trotsky
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

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Appearing in the pages of a slightly left-leaning New York paper was this obituary of Leon Trotsky (1879 – 1940):

Thus, at 9:25 last night, ended the life of the man who, with Lenin, brought about the world’s most profound revolution and with his death, ended the bitterest of modern feuds – Trotsky against Stalin.

The View from the German Trenches (NY Times, 1915)
1915, Trench Warfare

The View from the German Trenches
(NY Times, 1915)

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Originally appearing in the Berlin Tageblatt, this dispatch, written by Bernhard Kellerman (1879 – 1951), was later translated and printed in the The N.Y. Times magazine, Current History. It reported on the hardships and morale of German infantry serving in Flanders during the second year of the war.

Alternative Lyrics for the National Anthem (Pathfinder, 1941)
1941, Americana, Pathfinder Magazine

Alternative Lyrics for the National Anthem
(Pathfinder, 1941)

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Do you fail to recall the words to our national anthem time and again? You’re not alone – a quick glance at Google’s records indicate that in the silence of their rooms, thousands of your fellow Americans suffer from the same malady (and smirk at others who make their memory loss public). To say that the Americans of today are not as patriotic as they used to be is an understatement to be sure – but some of you will no doubt be relieved to know that the Americans of yore, vintage 1941, didn’t know the lyrics to The Star Spangled Banner any better than we do – as you can tell by the attached verses which were penned over seventy years ago about his fellow Americans and their inability to keep the words of Francis Scott Key in their heads.

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1940 Congress Approves Military Build-Up
1940, PM Tabloid, Prelude (WW II)

Congress Approved $5,000,000,000 Build-Up
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

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To fulfill the [Pentagon’s requirements] the President plans to send Congress one more defense message asking for another $5,000,000,000. After that, with machine industries saturated with orders, Congress can sit back and survey the defense picture – provided England doesn’t collapse overnight… Acting Secretary of the Navy Compton announced yesterday the award of contracts for three aircraft carriers and two cruisers to the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co….

Tony Randall Magazine Interview
1964, Hollywood History, Pageant Magazine

Tony Randall: Movie Star
(Pageant Magazine,1964)

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In this early Sixties article, celebrity epistolarianne Cyndi Adams recalled her first two encounters with the man who would be Felix Unger:
‘I am definitely neurotic and psychotic,’ cheerily announced Tony Randall (1920 – 2004) the first time we met – ‘he’s an actor-comedian of remarkable skills…

he unconsciously reflects, in the way he plays his rolls, so much of the neurotic age we live in…’.


The New York Times would pursue this point to a further degree in their 2004 obituary of the actor:

That’s the force Tony Randall embodied: he represented, in his neurotic grandeur, our national will to unhappiness. Or if not our will, at least our right, which in the 50’s we were only beginning to realize we could exercise.

1920, Aftermath (WWI), The Independent

Post-W.W. I Society and the New Spirit of the Twenties
(The Independent, 1920)

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In 1920 there were many articles celebrating the three-hundredth anniversary of the Puritan’s arrival on Cape Cod. This one writer decried the lack of enthusiasm that marked the modern age following the end of the Great War – a world that stood in contrast to the Pilgrim spirit. Religious faith, patriotism, and the belief in human progress had all been called into question by the mass carnage experienced during the war. Shell shocked and traumatized, the world seemed different: the old order had collapsed, replaced by an age of machines. The author of this column, Preston Slosson, was one of the observant souls to realize that the legacy of the First World War was disillusionment and cynicism.

Our stock of idealism has temporarily run low and a mood of cynicism has replaced the devoted enthusiasm of 1918…


Click here to read a 1916 article about life on the German home front.

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