Lurker JDN sent in a few pages from the October 27, 1952 Time magazine, which contains gems like this letter to the editor:
This was during the time of Henry Luce, something of the Murdoch of his day, though he specialized in magazines, not tabloids. Time was his right-wing weekly newsmagazine, Life was pretty pictures for everyone, Fortune extolled the virtues of capitalism and Sports Illustrated didn’t have swimsuits when Henry was at his peak. Here’s a good question:
If you want to read three pages, I combined JDN’s scans into one large pdf available here.
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General Stuck
I remember that, even though I was one day old.
Ash Can
“403 Forbidden” error here.
Ash Can
And if Mrs. Walter Rice was pissed at all the damn Commies in the Democratic Party in 1952, I bet she really shit her perfectly-starched-and-ironed self over the Civil Rights Act in 1964.
sharl
On that linked .pdf, some of those editorial cartoons were damn-near inscrutable. Fortunately there are a few modern-day cartoonists who preserve the basic style while improving the clarity of message. I am of course referring to ‘Kelly’ of The Onion.
His works depicting the Statue of Liberty as Damsel-in-Distress tug at my heartstrings the most.
Hoodie
@Ash Can: “Mrs. Walter Rice from Kentucky” makes me think of Mitch McConnell’s gay wife.
c u n d gulag
@Ash Can:
I bet she soiled her garments before rending them a lot earlier than 1964.
Like, say, 1957, when her beloved Ike sent troops into Little Rock.
Pincher
Wow. The first known troll.
BGK
I guess both sides of my family were Bolshevist fifth-columnists, as I never heard any of them speak of Eisenhower in a way that didn’t blister the paint on the damned walls.
Speaking of greatest-generation retreads, what’s with this Tommy Lee Jones MacArthur movie? Did I miss yet another simmering right-wing grievance?
Mike in NC
So TIME hasn’t really changed much in 60 years, has it? Big surprise. Now they have Joe Klein, Mark Halperin, Mike Murphy, and a bunch of other GOP fluffers.
Tripod
Bob McCormick of Chicago Tribune fame was another mid 20th century reactionary nutball.
Obama is soooo much worse than those old timey Republicans…..bleh.
Tokyokie
I remember Henry Luce’s wife, Clare Boothe Luce, being afforded a platform in Time during the ’70s to rail at length against the PCI under that sneaky commie bastard Berlinguer, because, doncha know, she’d been the U.S. ambassador to Rome during the Eisenhower administration and therefore was an expert. Never mind that Berlinguer had publicly broken with Moscow and was probably the target of a failed assassination plot by the Kremlin, she just knew that he was their pawn and Berlinguer’s seeking rapprochement with the Christian Democrats was just a ruse by which the commies would dismantle NATO.
flukebucket
@BGK:
Same here with my daddy (currently 75 years old) He cannot even start to discuss Eisenhower without getting so pissed off that he becomes almost incoherent. Ike was President when I was born so I am not sure what it is that he did that was so terrible. My dad just says, “he is the one that fucked up Social Security” and then it goes down hill from there.
Chris
@flukebucket:
Given the way he rode the Red Scare to power, that’s plenty enough to be pissed off at him already. If you’re a foreign policy nerd, he also fucked up Iran (among other countries).
And the military industrial complex speech, personally, makes me want to punch him in the face. Because he gave it just before leaving office, after having been resolutely part of the problem for the previous eight years. Kind of reminds me of George Washington freeing his slaves on his death bed – the asshole who wants cheap absolution for his sins, but only at the end after he’s gotten everything he could out of said sins.
red dog
As a 10 year old I loved the cartoons and tried to imitate them with my India Ink pen but I guess you need talent. The content was always available at the dinner table along with our weekly air raid drills under the desk at school.
chrome agnomen
the 27% has always, and will always, be with us.
Linda Featheringill
@Ash Can: #3
I had a mil like that.
:-)
The Moar You Know
Mrs. Walter Rice put the letter in the mailbox. She then went inside, opened up the door of her pantry, and, like the compulsives she’d read about, stared at the box of Lipton teabags for a long time. She couldn’t help it. They absolutely fascinated her.
Jay C
@Tripod:
You mean Colonel Robert McCormick of the Chicago Tribune? He of “Dewey defeats Truman” fame?
Now there was your classic wingnut press lord! Though compared to the Colonel, Rupert Murdoch is a self-effacing introvert…..
JoyfulA
I just remember the Eisenhower homestead being pointed out to me many, many times, a stone farmhouse on the way to my aunt’s (about 50 northeast of Gettysburg). Later, it took me a while to get my head straightened out that the house was Ike’s grandfather’s house, that his father had moved west (too many sons or somesuch) so that the ex-president was not a Pennsylvania native even though he lived here and his grandfather lived here.
The Moar You Know
@chrome agnomen: I feel very strongly that this must be the case. It’s the 20-23% that vote along with them that are pissing me off.
Flying Fox
Henry and Claire Luce were good friends of Chaing Kai-shek. Make of that what you will. Its the reason CKS was man of the Year several times.
Redshirt
Cool timing – I’m a 100 pages into Nixonland, and letters like the above resonate more with me now. Scary how the very same forces that dominate our politics today were burbling and gurgling just beneath the surface in the early 1950’s, and it was our good friend Tricky Dick who was the magician who could open up the box and release the demons unto our world.
Seanly
Not much has changed except now the media continues to troll us with Republicans in our continuous election campaign. Just this morning, Headline News (now with MORE Jody Arias coverage!) was showing Romney talking about how he would’ve solved the sequester and oh, why didn’t the blahs vote for him.
mistermix
@Ash Can: I guess we can’t host PDFs so it’s on Scribd now.
Tripod
@Jay C:
That’s the guy. His grandad Joseph Medill was an abolitionist who supported Lincoln.
The 27% is eternal, and so are useless 3rd generation scions of power elites. Yale also seems to be a recurring factor in that dynamic.
chrome agnomen
@The Moar You Know:
i almost added that very thought. the so-called ‘independents’.
maurinsky
My earliest memory is my dad yelling at Tricky Dick on TV. My parents were also pretty much the only people in town who were supporting Carter in 1980. We had a row of Carter signs along our front yard, and we used to get people driving by throwing things at the signs or yelling obscene things.
Irrationalnumb3r
@Pincher, haha, the first concern troll, I love it.
Letters like these can be found every decade from the 1930s on concerned about Social Security too. They all read the same way about how it will go bankrupt. The chicken littles of today sound identical, except they really, really, really mean it this time.
redoubt
@Jay C: Ol’ Colonel McCosmic himself. . .
Frankensteinbeck
@maurinsky:
I take it you live in the South? People yelling obscenities from their cars is such a Southern thing. Ah, less than golden memories…
Pococurante
maurinsky
@Frankensteinbeck: Nope – New England. But people really hated Carter in 1980!
Sherlock Hound
Life Magazine, Mr. Luce’s other magazine is available on Google Books. There are quite a few letters I remembered and remarked on when I read through the whole collection.
In the early days of Life, it was a kind of People Magazine for the upper strata of society, particularly Manhattan society. An interesting sidebar story brought up an 8-year old girl whose father hired a male servant for her household. The guy was fond of the 8-year old. Very fond. One can see where this is going, from modern headlines. Dad caught him “loving” his little girl, and he made sure the servant would do nothing, ever again.
The jury declined to convict.
In 1940, the audience of Life was conservative and isolationist. The Japanese bombed Shanghai in their desire to create “Manchuko”, and the magazine’s photojournalists were there to document the carnage, and document it they did.
A letter in the next issue reads: “That wasn’t real”, of the bombing victims. “Those were mannequins!”
There were stuck-up parents then as well as now; also in the 1940’s, Life ran photos of a very cute, sweet, 3-year old girl from a nice family, playing in a mud puddle! I know neighbors like this letter writer: “How horrible! There are playgrounds for that child!” I’ll bet her mom was shut out of play dates for a while.
During the civil-rights era, Life portrayed a typical African-American family. Right on cue in the letters afterwards was one writer, “That negro has a TV set!” Not a color TV, just a TV, which were everywhere at that time. Looking for countertops then, as today.
It’s well worth going to Google to read a few issues of Life. Very insightful in more than one sense.
Librarian
It’s a bit unfair to compare Time to Fox. Luce’s magazines were not uniformly right-wing; for example,they supported the civil rights movement. MLK was Time’s man of the year for 1963.
gocart mozart
I used to be a Democrat but then Truman was nice to the coloreds and now I’m outraged by FDR’s court packing scheme.