The Literary Digest – Page 13 – Old Magazine Articles

Congress Discusses the Repeal of Prohibition
(Literary Digest, 1933)

During the action-packed opening months of the F.D.R. administration, Congress addressed the option of repealing Prohibition and allowing each state to decide whether it wished to be dry or wet:

Now the people can decide, after more than thirteen years of Prohibition.

Surprising the country, the lame-duck Congress, hereto staunchly dry, reverses itself ‘in a stampede toward repeal,’ to permit the people to decide Prohibition’s fate.

Repeal + Four Years
(Literary Digest, 1937)

With the [Prohibition] Repeal, approximately one million people went back to work, making wine, beer and distilled spirits, bottles and barrels; transporting, selling and serving and advertising it. Innumerable industries indirectly connected with liquor, such as printing, building and machinery-making, received a sharp stimulus. With Repeal also, sorely needed tax money started to roll into the public coffers. Since 1933 more than two billion dollars in liquor taxes has gone into national, state and local treasuries…

Klan Methods and Customs
(Literary Digest, 1922)

This article reported on the alarming growth and surprising appeal that the KKK was attaining in 1922. The unnamed journalist described numerous incidences that clearly reflected the Klan’s open contempt for law throughout the country- concluding that the Klan was beyond redemption. The article revealed that the newspaper editors who lived and worked in those regions where the Klan was most active had greater contempt for them than we otherwise might have been lead to believe.

The Police State
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Victor Serge (1890 – 1947) was a devoted Bolshevik writer who was highly critical of Joseph Stalin; he spent five years in the gulag for his subversive activity and would have no doubt died there had not an international mishmash of humanitarians raised a stink about his incarceration. He was exiled from the Marxist-dream-land in 1936 – the attached column is an extract from his gulag writings concerning the cruelties of Stalin’s secret police.

One Year in the Life of NYC
(Literary Digest, 1937)

Within twelve months time the following things happen in New York:

• One hundred thousand New Yorkers are born.

• Five thousand of them die.

• Twelve thousand New Yorkers die in car accidents.

• Sixty thousand New Yorkers are married.

• 1,350 New Yorkers commit suicide etc., etc., etc.,

The Forgotten Men and the NRA
(Literary Digest, 1935)

A long program of suggested remedial legislation lies ahead of the 7,500 representatives of the people who gather this year in the halls of Congress and of all but four State Legislatures. The NRA (National Recovery Administration) will come under the closest scrutiny. As the old year waned, the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act)was being attacked and defended.

Click here to see a chart concerning the U.S. urban murder rate between the years 1926 – 1936.

In 1934, the NRA went to Hollywood and performed a task it was not legally obligated to do; click here to read about it…

Chateau-Thierry: Setting the Record Straight
(The Literary Digest, 1919)

Rumor has it that when the U.S. Army’s senior staff officers had learned of the victory that the U.S. Marines had achieved at the Bois de Belleau in the summer of 1918, one of them had remarked, Those head-line hunting bastards! When reading this next piece you will immediately get a sense that the army was fed-up with the folks at home believing that the same Marines were responsible for the Army’s success at Chateau-Thierry. The war was already over by the time this piece appeared, making it clear to all that Chateau-Thierry was a feather in the cap for the Army, and no one else.

Who Were the Young Turks?
(Literary Digest, 1908)

This 1908 magazine article serves to define the Young Turk movement and present a brief history of those reformers who sought to modernize the government of Turkey and introduce a constitutional form of government that would benefit not only the Turks but also the people who reside within the dominions of the Ottoman Empire:

The program of the Young Turks includes individual liberty to all Ottomans; this liberty is to be inviolable excepting by process of law; the press is to be free, Ottomans may form commercial, industrial, or agricultural associations, so long as no law is infringed. All are to be equal before the law.

A Call to Repeal the Japanese Exclusion Act
(Literary Digest, 1935)

The anonymous journalist opened this 1935 magazine article explaining how the Indian caste system took root and reasoned as to why he believed such a system was an inevitability in the United States as well.

With the California Council on Oriental Relations waging an eloquent campaign for repeal of the Japanese Exclusion Act, a quota-basis solution is suggested.

Read another article about Asian immigration to California

Click here to read about the 1921 [anti-]Alien Land Bill in California.

You might also be interested in reading about the Yellow Peril in Canada.

No Citizenship for Japanese Immigrants
(Literary Digest, 1922)

An article that marks the date of November 13, 1922 as a poor one for the assembled masses who happened to have been of Japanese ancestry in the United States. On that date Justice George Sutherland (1862-1942), of the United States Supreme Court, handed down the ruling that the Japanese can not be citizens of this country. The opinions of many American Newspapers are presented herein, among them an excerpt from the St. Louis Star which summed up the opinion just so:

The law which prevents the naturalization of Japanese is plainly intended to exclude the Japanese because they are racially unassimlable and their presence creates economic difficulties.

You can read more about Justice Sutherland HERE…

Citizenship Denied
(Literary Digest, 1922)

This article reported that as of 1922, the United States Government saw fit to deny 19,000 immigrants U.S. citizenship. This number, when added to the other repatriated applicants of the previous ten years, totals up to 760,000 people; which was, at that time, more than the entire population of North Dakota. The Ellis Island based naturalization service classified all rejected immigrants in fifteen different categories, this reporter preferred to name just two: Ignorance and Immoral Character. Immoral Character speaks for itself. And Ignorance covers those who didn’t appear to know enough to exercise the rights of citizenship intelligently. Oddly, there seemed to have been no talk of amnesty.

FDR Takes On the Great Depression
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

All the editorial writers quoted in this 1933 article agreed that FDR was the first U.S. President to ever have faced a genuine economic calamity as that which was created by the Great Depression:

Look at the picture flung into the face of Franklin Roosevelt:

Ships are tied up in harbors and their hulls are rotting; freight trains are idle; passenger trains are empty; 11,000,000 people are without work; business is at a standstill; the treasury building is bursting with gold, yet Congress wrestles with a deficit mounting into the billions, the result of wild and extravagant spending; granaries are overflowing with wheat and corn; cotton is a drag on the market, food crops are gigantic and unsalable, yet millions beg for food; mines are shut down; oil industries are engaged in cutthroat competition; farmers are desperate, taking the law into their own hands to prevent foreclosures; factories are idle; industry is paralyzed…

He Spied on the Bolsheviks
(Literary Digest, 1921)

‘The Wreck of the Word’s Largest Plane”
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Click here to read about the China Clipper.Read more …

Fracture in Moscow
(Literary Digest, 1921)

Sharp encounters between Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Dzerzhinsky and other Bolshevik leaders took place when Trotsky tried to take Warsaw in 1920 and the majority of the committee antagonized his policy, we learn from a letter written by a Bolshevik adherents in Russia, who is ‘presumably‘ high up in the Soviet hierarchy and a partisan of Trotsky.

Israel’s Alarm at Hitler’s Rise
(Literary Digest, 1933)

This is an article that gathered Jewish opinions about the rise of Nazi Germany from many parts of the globe:

There have been European Premiers before this who were surrounded with an anti-Semite atmosphere, but never has such a Jew-baiter as Hitler sat at the helm of the Ship-of-State among Modern civilized people.

This bitter climax is the reward given to the Jews of Germany who poured out their blood for the ‘Fatherland’ during the Great War. Not less than 100,000 Jews took part in the war, which was more than a sixth of the Jewish population of the country including women and children. Twelve thousand fell on the battlefields, and thousands returned home crippled.

Soviet-Approved Poetry
(Literary Digest, 1921)

No liberty of the press exists in Russia and so none but a poet recognized by the Government can get his verses published… In justice to Russian letters it must be said that all talented Russian authors have abstained from writing, or at any rate, from publishing their works during the rule of the proletariat, so that only the official poets, the literati hired by the Government, have their say.

The only Soviet-approved poet they single out for derision is Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893 – 1930), who is quoted liberally.

Harry Hawker
(The Literary Digest, 1919)

An article on the pioneer aviator Harry Hawker (1889 – 1921), written on the heels of his his failed attempt to beat the Yankees in crossing the Atlantic. Australian by birth, Hawker came to Britain specifically to seek a career in the infant aviation industry. His wish was answered in 1912 when he was hired by Tommy Sopwith. Hawker saved his wages to afford flying lessons and acquired his flying permit in the September of that same year. The following month he won the British Michelin Cup with a grueling endurance flight of 8 hr, 23 min. Sopwith was impressed and Hawker was promoted to chief test pilot. The rest is told herein…

from Amazon: Hawker: Aviator, Designer, Test Pilot