Articles from Liberty Magazine
Award winning biographer Emil Ludwig takes a crack at profiling Joseph Stalin for the editors of Liberty Magazine. Stalin is portrayed as a cautious, secretive dictator.
Former Lord of the Admiralty (1911 – 1915), Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965) wrote the attached article sometime after the First World war and recalled the tremendous difficulties faced by the Royal Navy when this new form of warfare came to the fore:
“There followed the fourth prime feature of the war — the grand U-boat attack on the Allied shipping and the food ships and store ships which kept Great Britain alive. Here again we were exposed to a mortal risk. Not merely defeat but subjugation and final ruin confronted by our country.”
In 1943, Twentieth Century Fox released a movie that told the story of one of the earlies heroes of the war, The Sullivans. These five Iowa brothers enlisted in the U.S. Navy just three weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. Assigned to the cruiser Juneau, three were killed that summer during the Naval Battle of Guadalcanal (1942), and the two others died the next day. The nation as a whole was very moved by this saga and cherished their memory.
“Five unknown actors play the Sullivan lads. And because their faces are fresh and new, they seem amazingly convincing and real.”
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“Eleven years ago, when Fred Allen, then a vaudeville star, was just starting in radio, somebody urged him to hire – as a screwball character – a certain young girl who weighed about a hundred pounds, stood scarcely five feet tall, and had about as much glamor as a sack of cement.”
– so begins the Liberty article about Minerva Pious (1903 – 1979), the zany comic, well-known back in the day for bringing to life some of the kookiest characters on radio.
The Germans we fought in World War Two were very different from the ones we fought twenty-one years earlier.
“When recruits in the new Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps – commonly dubbed WAACS – reported for training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, women for the first time in American history became members of Uncle Sam’s Army.”
(The title concerning “the first woman in the Uncle Sam’s Army” is believed to go to a lass named Deborah Sampson who served in George Washington’s army in 1781, under the name “Robert Shurtliff”.)
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A Turkish diplomat explains all that he saw in the war-weary Berlin of 1944:
“You see children wildly seeking for their mothers, wives wildly seeking for their husbands. Women carry dead children in their arms and children weep beside their dead mothers.
“The divorce rate took a sharp upswing in all the warring countries after World War I, and another rise after this war is already being foreshadowed… Much of the post-war rise in the divorce rate is expected to come from the untying of knots too hastily tied as a result of [the 1941] war hysteria.”
Photographer Herbert Sonnenfeld (1906 – 1972) was able to escape from his native Germany in the winter of 1939, shortly after the Second World war had just begun. After the initiation of the Nuremburg Laws four years earlier, life for him and his fellow Jews had taken a terrible turn for the worse and he was delighted to be able to depart for New York. The attached photo-essay and the accompanying captions reveal his joy and elation for living in a land of plenty, far away from the Nazi boot.
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Hallett Abend (1884 – 1955) was an American journalist who lived in China for fifteen years. He covered the Sino-Japanese War during its early years and had seen first-hand the beastly vulgarity of the Japanese Army. After Pearl Harbor, the editor at Liberty turned to him in hopes that he would explain to the American reading public what kind of enemy they were fighting:
“In four and a half years of warfare [in China], the Japanese have taken almost no prisoners… Chinese prisoners of war are shot.”
The U.S Marine Corps is not in the practice of sending their oldest members into harm’s way – they aren’t now, and they weren’t in 1942. But when they imparted this information to Gunnery Sergeant Lou Diamond (1890 – 1951), he would have none of it – the mere idea that the world was to be at war, and he would be excluded: not going to happen:
“Lou roared his way through the battles of Guadalcanal and Tulagi and did much to back up the Marine Corp’s contention that he is far and away the the most expert mortar sergeant in any branch of the service.”
“The Nazi center of activity is the Deutsche Bund headquarters in Montreal, controlled by the Montreal Consulate of the German Reich. There are branches of the Bund in every large Canadian city. It maintains its own schools in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Kitchener. Children are taught not only the German language but the German greeting, the Hitler greeting and the Nazi tenets. Their education is completed in the big camps near Winnipeg and Montreal.”
Click here to read about American fascists…
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“If this war is fought to a finish, however, civilization may perish in the holocaust. God grant, then, that it shall be halted in time. But can it be halted while hatred remains in the breasts of men? And if I bear hatred for one man, will not this hatred spread out its roots and grow insidiously into a hatred for all the people of his country?”
Appearing in a few spots on this site are articles from 1937 written by journalists who were all of the mind that the Great Depression had finally reached an end. We all thought this was terribly odd because we all knew that the Depression lingered into 1940. However, this article showed up and explained it all to us: written by a Republican congressman and published in an anti-Roosevelt magazine, the author explained that since 1936, the economy was slowly getting better – and then it all went south during the late summer of 1937, plunging deeper in 1938.
Whether Joan Fontaine (1917 – 1913) was pressured into writing this bitter-sweet article by her studio or some other Hollywood entity – we’ll never know, but this piece recalls her earliest days in Japan, where she was born, and all the sweet smiles and kind words that all of us are peppered with during our formative years. So much for the sweet part of the article – then she recalls her return trip in 1934-35 and what a bunch of Fascist skanks they all turned into (Japanese-Americans also feel her back hand).
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Liberty publisher Bernarr MacFadden (1868 – 1955) was a reliable critic of FDR and his economic policies. In this column MacFadden lambasts the President for making error after error and learning from none of them. He points out that the open market economy of the United States has traditionally provided Americans with the world’s highest standard of living, and yet:
“They would like to ignore precedent… entirely cast aside and forget the extraordinary results of our experiences in following the American system. They hate business and everything connected with it.”
George Creel (1876 – 1953), the nation’s first and only official censor (1917 – 1918), knew FDR for twenty-five years, and in this wartime recollection he made FDR wish that the two had never met. This is the type of article Creel would never have allowed to be published twenty some years earlier because it sought to reduce confidence in the Commander-in-Chief. Yet, with the war in its eleventh month, Creel gave it to FDR with both barrels:
“No man ever dreamed more nobly or had less skill in making his dreams come true.”
“The attack on business so well popularized by the present administration at Washington unquestionably prolonged the Depression, perpetuated the dole, and added millions to the unemployed”
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