Vintage Pulp

February 12 2011

COPS AND FLAPPERS

Prohibition-era Police Gazette was just a shadow of its future self.

The National Police Gazette began publishing in 1845, and after seventy-five years that encompassed the U.S. Civil War and the dawn of Prohibition it still wasn’t much of a magazine—at least in the sense modern readers recognize. All the subjects the Gazette would later explore in depth are present in this issue published ninety years ago today, on 12 February 1921, but at sixteen pages it’s basically just a pamphlet. That all began to change in the early 1950s when the Gazette began expanding its page count as well as the breadth of its editorial content. The shift probably had to due with the growth of tabloid readership coupled with the need to compete with comprehensive scandal mags like Confidential, but we can’t confirm that just yet, so don’t quote us. Anyway, we’ve posted the entire sixteen pages of this Gazette, just so you can have a look. It wasn’t much yet, but change was coming.

Police Gazette, Confidential, tabloid

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

September 6

1901—McKinley Fatally Shot

Polish-born anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies September 12, and Czolgosz is later executed.

September 5

1939—U.S. Declares Neutrality in WW II

The Neutrality Acts, which had been passed in the 1930s when the United States considered foreign conflicts undesirable, prompts the nation to declare neutrality in World War II. The policy ended with the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to allied nations.

September 5

1972—Munich Massacre

During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, a paramilitary group calling itself Black September takes members of the Israeli olympic team hostage. Eventually the group, which represents the first glimpse of terrorists for most people in the Western world, kill eleven of the hostages along with one West German police officer during a rescue attempt by West German police that devolves into a firefight. Five of the eight members of Black September are also killed.

September 4

1957—U.S. National Guard Used Against Students

The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, mobilizes the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students known as the Little Rock Nine from enrolling in high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

September 3

1941—Auschwitz Begins Gassing Prisoners

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, becomes an extermination camp when it begins using poison gas to kill prisoners en masse. The camp commandant, Rudolf HÃ¶ss, later testifies at the Nuremberg Trials that he believes perhaps 3 million people died at Auschwitz, but the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum revises the figure to about 1 million.