Pathfinder Magazine – Page 9 – Old Magazine Articles

KRISTALLNACHT
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

Herschel Grynszpan (1921 – ?) was a Polish-Jewish refugee born in Germany who, on his own volition, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris in 1938. This murder prompted the Nazis to terrorize the Jewish population throughout Germany and Austria the very next day (November 8) in an event that was called Kristallnacht. This article covers the murder and the senseless horror that followed; attention was also paid to the reactions from various capital cities.

In Vienna, Storm Troopers fired 18 synagogues, shot a Polish Jew in his bed, invaded homes and threw the furniture out the windows. Ten thousand Jews were arrested, at least 60 attempted suicide. Restaurants and grocery stores refused to sell to Jewas.

Starvation in the San Joaquin Valley
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Renowned as an earthly paradise from whose rich soil the brilliant sun draws abundant crops of semi-tropical fruits, the Great Valley is today the state’s principal source of wealth. Last week, Californians were acutely conscious that the valley could also produce squalor, misery, disease and death…[The San Joaquin Valley] is host to 70,000 jobless, homeless families living in frightful squalor and privation….hopeless men and women sprawled in the sun as their ill-clad children played in the dirt.

Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…

Palestine Brexit
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1948)

The British reign over Palestine lasted 31 years; attached is an eyewitness account of the orderly withdrawal that took place during the summer of 1948, when the remaining elements of their colonial regiments lowered the Union Jack for the last time and boarded ships for home:

Last week, from gently-heaving transports in Haifa harbor, men of Britain’s 40th Royal Marines in khaki shorts and green berets, took a last look shoreward. Alongside the transports were the aircraft carrier H.M.S. TRIUMPH, a cruiser and five destroyers… From shore came note by note the sound of a bugler blowing Last Post.

The Arms Race
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Stirred by [the] Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and by subsequent German scrapping of the Versailles Treaty, military experts of every nation have been altering the smallest details of army life to make their forces bigger, faster and more deadly than those of their neighbors.

Nowhere was there any indication that the pace of armaments might slacken. No nation gave any sign of dropping out of the race.

The economist who made the German rearmament possible was named Hjalmar Schacht, click here to read about him…

Talk of Repeal on Capitol Hill
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

During the summer of 1932, Democratic Senator Carter Glass (1858 – 1946) turned heads and dropped jaws on Capitol Hill when he introduced a piece of legislation that was intended to water-down the 18th Amendment. Glass, a devoted enemy of the swizzle stick, proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would continue to outlaw saloons nationally while permitting hootch to flow freely throughout the wet states – and cut off booze in the dry.

‘The Madhouse”
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

The party purge had been widened to include the Soviet Secret Police itself, with 50 of its number being arrested.

The End of the NRA
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

During the Spring of 1935 the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously proclaimed FDR’s National Recovery Administration and void – and the names of some 5,300 of its Washington, D.C. functionaries were immediately entered onto the unemployment list. All except one: Diana Rogovin; she was the sole survivor of the bureaucracy. To her fell the task of dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s as the great ship went down. She completed her last duty in February of 1937.

The NRA Shows Its Teeth
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1933)

The National Recovery Administration (1933 – 1935) was just one of the many alphabet agencies that the FDR administration created; his critics at the time, like the historians today, all believed that it was one of the well-meaning Federal efforts that simply prolonged the the Great Depression.

This is 1933 editorial addressed the various violation codes (there were 500 of them) and punishments that the Federal Government was prepared to dish out to all businesses wishing to defy any of the assorted labor laws and price-fixing measures that the NRA was designed to enforce.

From Amazon: Nine Honest Men

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Here is a very thorough profile of Mustafa Kamel Atatürk (1881 – 1938), the first president of the Republic of Turkey (1923 – 1938). The article goes into some detail concerning his humble beginnings, his vices and his secret writings for the revolutionary Vatan ve Hürriyet (Motherland and Liberty) underground movement. His rise to power came with his assorted military triumphs in the Italo-Turkish War, the Balkan War, the First World War and most notably, the Greko-Turkish War. He came to power in 1922 and began reforming Turkish society in ways that rocked the nation to its very corps.

Click here to read a 1922 article about the Turkish slaughter of Christians.

A Most Dangerous Man
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Although Hitler was no mystery to the readers of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE (the editors had been following his trajectory since the early Twenties), the attached article tells of the maniac’s impoverished boyhood all the way up to his exulted status in 1937.

In The Country Illegally
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1931)

[President Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak] placed the number of aliens now illegally residing in the United States at 400,000. Of this number he thought 100,000 were subject to deportation… The illegal entries were made, he said, under the quota laws of 1921 and 1924, the larger part coming through Mexico and Canada, while ship’s deserters amounted to about 11,000>

The Submarine War In The Pacific
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1943)

U.S. submarines toll of Japanese ships reaches 256 since Pearl Harbor . Russell Islands are scenes of bitter dog-fights.

The Free Speech Dilemma
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

The antisemitic radio ramblings of Father Charles Coughlin (1891 – 1979) prompted the brain trust of the nascent radio world to ponder deeply the differences between hate speech and free speech and where their responsibilities rested in the matter.

An American in Kharkov
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1932)

An American woman recalled the difficulties she encountered while trying to set up a household in Soviet Russia.

Air Pollution Becomes a Problem
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1947)

This news article was penned a year and a half after the end of W.W. II and it concerns the steps various industrial cities were taking to limit the amount of pollutants that factories belched into the air daily. A year later, the Republican-lead Congress would pass an important piece of legislation titled the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.

2013 marked the first time that the industrial powerhouse of China finally recognized that air pollution in the Beijing area exists and it is a problem. China regularly emits the lion’s share of green house gasses (a whopping 23.5%).

Korea: The Contributions of the U.S. Navy
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1950)

With no other seafaring nation afloat to oppose them, the United States Navy directed it’s attention entirely to land-based targets on the Korean peninsula. Navy jets pelted the mountainous terrain in support of UN operations ashore while battleships, cruisers and destroyers served as floating artillery batteries:

The miracle-man most responsible for this rejuvenated navy is brilliant, 53-year-old Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, the first air officer to serve as CNO…

Japan On The March
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)

To the colossal giant that is China, furious little Japan delivered a one-two punch last week. Small divisions of the Emperor’s troops first took Canton and then Hankow. So easily did both fall that Britons in Hong Kong declared darkly:’It looks like dirty work.’

Design for Modern Living
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

In an attempt to define modernism for a broad audience, architect/designer Alexander Girard curated the Exhibition for Modern Living that was housed at the Detroit Institute of Arts during the winter of 1949. It was a ground breaking exhibit that brought modernism down from the mountain and allowed people to see that modern design was intended to make life more pleasant:

Modern design implies shape for use, simplicity, new forms to utilize new materials, easier housekeeping, and honest expression of mass production… Up the richly carpeted ramp, viewers walk up to a dining room done by Alvar Aalto; past two studies Bruno Mathsson and Jean Risom and a bedroom and living-room representing a variety of designers; then up another level to a space furnished by Charles Eames; and finally to a small balcony overlooking George Nelson’s living area. The quiet simplicity of the rooms and the gentle tones of symphonic music have people talking in whispers. Sighed one woman: ‘I’d like to live here.’