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Iron Lung

I just want to live... Why doesn't anyone else want that?

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LIBERTY was a smaller, pulpier version of the big general-interest weeklies of its time, the likes of COLLIER'S and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. By 1933 it was run by Bernarr Macfadden, the publisher of PHYSICAL CULTURE, TRUE STORY, TRUE DETECTIVE, and the notorious 1920s tabloid, the New York DAILY GRAPHIC. Macfadden set the tone for many magazines to come by publicizing true stories that weren't necessarily so. Politically, he was one of the media moguls who initially seemed game for any measures Franklin Roosevelt might take to end the Depression -- LIBERTY published articles by the Democrat all through the 1932 presidential campaign -- but quickly bristled at FDR's aggressive regulatory measures. Macfadden would be reviled as a reactionary, but opened his weekly to leftist writers like Upton Sinclair, during his 1934 run for governor of California, and, as shown above, the exiled Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky, who contributed frequently throughout the 1930s. In the January 14, 1933 issue, Trotsky addresses a set of questions, many loaded, from the LIBERTY editorial board. Some are silly enough to be softballs (Does Bolshevism turn men into robots? Has the Soviet legalized incest?). His response to a query on propaganda in Soviet schools is worth a closer look:

Most of this issue of LIBERTY is not so serious. Along with snappy movie reviews (THE MUMMY gets three stars), a very snarky letter column, puzzles and Princess Alexandra Kropotkin's "To the Ladies" page, two serials continue from last week, one honestly fictional, one allegedly true.

Dorothy Wayman and Edward Doherty's DARK OF THE MOON is a late- Prohibition melodrama about the hunt for rumrunners off the New England coast. The hero's vendetta against an allegedly murderous smuggler is complicated by his infatuation with a spunky blonde who pilots contraband cargoes and proves to be the villain's daughter. The serial takes the hypocrisy of liquor law enforcement for granted; the hero is no teetotaler, and goes on a delerious bender this chapter when he thinks the blonde has been killed. This is the penultimate chapter, with a twist promised for the end. I don't think this was ever made into a movie (as many LIBERTY stories were) but I can easily imagine a film version.

The French Foreign Legion was the id of European imperialism in the pulp imagination. Its brutalities in fiction, even in romanticized stuff like BEAU GESTE, seemed to belie Europe's civilizing mission, though there was no British counterpart to sully the standing of Anglophone culture. In pulp fiction the Legion is often yet another test and shaper of character, but HELL HOUNDS! concedes no such constructive role. "Ex-Legionnaire 1384," as either an authentic survivor or a narrative device of W. J. Blackledge, has an enduring hatred for the Legion he considers no less savage than the indigenous armies they slaughter.

HELL HOUNDS! is a litany of tit-for-tat atrocities as Muslim tribes indulge their supposed proclivity for torture and the Legion pays them back in kind and more, all the while abusing its own men. Charles De Feo's illustrations make the serial read very much like Pre-Code cinema (think the first half hour of TARZAN AND HIS MATE) in print form. The January 14 chapter is actually a breather, apart from our narrator getting flogged). It focuses in 1384's romance with a Druse princess who wants "John Bull" (1384 is an Englishman) to desert and go with her to America, where one of her brothers is studying business. Everything up to this point (this is chapter six) leads me to expect a nightmarish conclusion to this courtship. This berserk serial is definitely the highlight -- unless you're a Trotskyite -- of this typical issue of one of the era"s most entertaining magazines.