Articles from Collier’s Magazine
Written twelve years after the end of the First World War, this Collier’s Magazine article recalls a number of incidences that serve to illustrate how the ruling class in Washington bungled and mismanaged the war.
Click here to read a short film review of one of Hollywood’s first W.W. I movies: Wings, directed by William Wellman.
An excerpt from a longer article by Winston Churchill in which he praised the virtues of the Anglo-American alliance and the economic leadership forged by the two nations during the Depression. Four paragraphs are devoted to the confusion he experienced when stopping to consider some of President Roosevelt’s economic decisions and the roll played by his National Recovery Administration (NRA).
Like many presidents before and after him, FDR purchased many of his clothes from Brooks Brothers;
click here to read about the history of the store.
Six months after the United States entered the First World War all sorts of issues had to be addressed, such as the matter of the Sam Brown belt. Since 1914 the famous sword belt had been established as an emblem of authority among all the Allied armies along the assorted fronts, but the Americans didn’t like it one bit. The level-headed editors of Collier’s Magazine published the attached editorial pointing out that such matters of military fashion simply don’t matter at a time of national emergency and to illustrate their point they quoted a portion from Under Fire by Henri Barbusse which laid plain how miserable everyone (without exception) looks in the trenches, regardless of their accessories.
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
This is the story of Bomber Harris, also known as Sir Arthur Travers Harris, Marshal of the Royal Air Force (1892 – 1984) between the years 1942 through 1945. He was the daily tormentor of Nazi Germany, striving relentlessly to bring an end to German hostilities by bombing their home front without pity. This article tells the tale of Harris the soldier and Harris the man: his W.W. I experiences, his inter-war training and Washington posting, his W.W. II contributions as Air Marshal as well as his family life.
Click here to read W.W. II articles about life in Harris-plagued Germany.
Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.
Here is the recollection of FDR by a woman who worked closely with the man for nearly thirty five years as political colleague, state governor appointee and Labor Secretary: Francis Perkins (1880 – 1965).
Secretary Perkins and President Roosevelt were a vital team when it came to crafting many of the labor laws that are still enforced today. Click here to read a 1937 magazine article about the creation of the first minimum wage laws…
A printable article by John Nance Garner (1868 – 1967), FDR’s first Vice-President (1933 – 1941), who wrote a number of pieces for the readers of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE in 1948 outlining the various reasons for their contentious relationship.
Cactus Jack Garner bickered with F.D.R. on a number of issues; primarily supporting a balanced federal budget and opposing F.D.R.’s efforts to pack the Supreme Court. Within these attached pages, Garner tells how Roosevelt lost the support of his Democratic Congress.
Read about FDR’s African-American advisers here…
Written by war correspondent Walter Davenport some thirteen months prior to taking the helm as editor-in-chief at Collier’s Magazine, this article gives the reader a sense as to what D-plus-one looked like from the fifty yard line at the Battle of Iwo Jima (Operation Detachment: February 19 – March 26, 1945):
There is no Jap navy here to stop us; no Jap air force, either… So you see Jap? On our way up here to Iwo we flew over more supply ships, more cargo carriers. Those decks carry concrete mixers, Diesel-powered road crushers and rollers. There aren’t many cliffs on Iwo to hide out in, Jap! You can’t live for weeks in the crevices of Suribachi. You can’t grow gardens on that rock. So, while you can still see, look down at what we’re seeing: An American city, a harsh, womanless city is moving in on you.
Davenport’s observations were no doubt a comfort to the Collier’s readers on the home front, but post-war accounting revealed that one quarter of the U.S. Navy’s losses took place at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Click here to read a unique story about the Battle of the Sula Straits…
The standard of living in Russia has never been very high, but even despite his natural stoicism, the average citizen feels he has a good reason to be disgruntled with his life… Like any other totalitarian state, the Soviet state has done its best to paint a larger than life-size picture of its citizens. It likes to describe them as steel-hard heroes with an inflexible will, living for nothing but the great ideal of a Communist future, laughing at difficulties, gaily grasping with hard ship – a continent of Douglas Fairbankses. This is just a bit too good to be true, and the last one to be taken in by it is the average Russian.
This editorial was one of the first of its kind and many more would follow on its heels. The opinions expressed would be repeated in American schoolrooms, barrooms, dinner tables and state houses all the way up to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was not merely the parents of draftees who wondered aloud as to the whereabouts of the U.N. signatories in times of crises, but practically the whole nation:
For two months the American and South Korean ground forces fought it out alone. For two months they fought without even the promise of help from other major powers…
The attached article is about the controversial Cuban President Ramón Grau San Martin (1887 – 1969) and his struggle with the radical elements within Cuba. This COLLIER’S MAGAZINE piece will give you an understanding that the roots of communism on that Caribbean island have a longer history than you might have supposed; when it first appeared on the newsstands in 1945, Fidel Castro (1926 – 1916) was a still a law student.
In 2011 Castro confessed in an interview with an American reporter that the Cuban model [of Communism] had not been successful.
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek stepped up to the plate and answered nine questions that were put to him by COLLIER’S editor Henry La Cossitt, concerning the future of democracy in China.
I have always said that there are no good Jews, but that boy proved me wrong.
-so spake the Nazi king-pin Julius Streicher (1885 – 1946) upon being confronted by the goodness of one American serviceman who went out of his way to be kind and identified himself as a Jew.
This small piece is an excerpt from a longer article; to read the entire magazine article, click here.
Julius Streicher had an IQ that measured 106 – click here to read about the IQs of the other lunatics in Nazi leadership…
Click here to read about the inmate rebellions that took place at Auschwitz, Sobibor and Triblinka.
Having no foresight as to the fashion juggernaut that would commence in one year with the appearance of Christian Dior’s New Look, the journalist puts all her credibility in one basket by declaring that all eyes are on the French fashion designer Madame Marcelle Dormoy. Much ink is spilled concerning the bleakness that clouded fashionable Paris during the occupation and the difficulty all fashion houses experienced in 1946 securing suitable fabric for their creations (at black-market prices).
The writer recovered some of her street-cred anticipating the meteoric career return of the well-loved French film actress Edwige Feuillère (1907 – 1998), who is personified herein as the epitome of French Glamour returned.
Click here to read a 1946 article about Le Corbusier.
Read this unbelievable adventure by a former Afrika Korps Panzer Grenadier who, having been captured and subsequently shipped to the U.S., made good his escape from an Illinois prisoner-of-war camp – whereupon he assumed a fake identity and easily acquired a Social Security number. After having rented an apartment and worked several jobs in Chicago, he started a successful business just two years after his escape, married an American woman, sired a daughter – and he might very well have eluded the FBI entirely if he hadn’t insisted all the while on sending foodstuffs to his mother in war-ravaged Germany.
An article by the W.W. II war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (1908 – 1998) who rode with the crew of a P-61C Black Widow Night Fighter one evening as they made their rounds over what remained of Hitler’s Germany:
COLLIER’S girl correspondent sat on a wobbly crate and flew over Germany looking for enemy planes at night. Her nose ran, her oxygen mask slipped off, her stomach got mad, she was scared and she froze. They didn’t down any Germans, but otherwise that’s routine for the Black Widow pilots.
Click here to read additional articles about the war correspondents of the Second World War.
Click here to read Martha Gellhorn’s article about what she saw at Dachau.
Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.
Henry Wallace (1888 – 1965) was FDR’s second Vice President (1941 – 1945) and as a seasoned Washington politician he must have known that his political career was coming to an end when the attached editorial hit the newsstands in early October of 1948. Written by William L. Chenery, publisher of COLLIER’S MAGAZINE, one of the most staid, middle class news and fiction organs around – it was not the sort of organization that looked upon libel lightly; Chenery meant what he wrote when he slandered the former vice president as the spokesman of Russia.
Wallace, who at the time was taking a licking as the Progressive Party nominee for president in the 1948 race, left politics shortly afterward. In 1952 he wrote a book in which he admitted how wrong he was to have ever trusted Joseph Stalin.
