Fine Map from the Excellent and Seldom Seen "PM" Newspaper, May 8, 1945

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

PM  newspaper (active 1940-1948) was a left-leaning newspaper funded by Marshall Field III, and was home to excellent reporting. Among the staff writers was I.F.Stone and staff photographers Margaret Bourke-White.  Other contributors included Heywood Hale Broun, James Thurber,  (the great) Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Lyons, Ben Stolberg, Malcolm Cowley, Tip O'Neill, and Ben Hecht, among many other illuminati.  (PM's stated mission: "PM is against people who push other people around.   PM accepts no advertising. PM belongs to no political party. PM is absolutely free and uncensored. PM's sole source of income is its readers--to whom it alone is responsible. PM us one newspaper that can and dares to tell the truth.)  It so happens though that PM is a difficult newspaper to find, nowadays, and so far as I can tell very little of it lives online, which is why I've decided to post some of the bits of interest from the copies of the paper that I have. Today's installment: a fine and illuminating map of the seat of war in Europe, published at the end of the on May 8, 1945, showing the advance of victory. Whoever their cartographer was did a superior job.  (Note: double clicking into the map will open a very large and bright version of the map.)

Comments

[Frank Wilhoit]

Everything that you say about PM is true, but you fail to mention that it, and its perspective, and its manifesto (which you quote), were the single-handed brainchildren of its founding editor, Ralph Ingersoll, previously of the New Yorker and the Lucempire.

[John F. Ptak]

Yes, that's true, and I should've mentioned that. There is a lot that can be said about "PM", but that was one of those 5- or 10-minute posts, and I just overlooked Mr. Ingersoll. If you ever discover an online source for the run, please let me know! I only have a few issues and a number of articles cut out of the paper, purchased from the estate of that journalist. Elsewhere on this blog is "PM"'s coverage of the Hiroshima bomb, which was an extraordinary and *very quickly* assembled and researched full-issue treatment published the day after. I have no idea how that came to be.