The curtain is rising on the great drama of another year. And not even the actors know what stirring tragedies, what heroic adventures, what high comedies and low deceptions they must play before the curtain falls. No one can foretell what unknown players will strut to sudden fame... or what familiar stars will make their final exit.
On this wide stage nations mightier far than Spain or China may keep a rendezvous with disaster--new banners of Fascism may wave in the New World--and fresh unrest may sweep out across industrial America. Truth is still stranger than fiction, and the great show of 1938 will be as enthralling as the whole struggling world each week can make it!
The curtain is going up now on all this vast excitement; yet in the audience there are millions who will catch only snatches of the action--who will miss the best lines and lose the drama of the plot.
TIME offers you a front row seat for the tremendous, marching pageant of the news. TIME will give you the meaning of every worthwhile act--all the stirring, laughable, heroic, pitiable things that make each year so richly complex and so hard to follow without TIME's help. (January 3, 1938)
The year 1938 was wrought with domestic and international turmoil. Spain was engulfed in a Civil War, China and Japan were locked in a ferocious bombing campaign, and Europe was mobilizing for the Second World War. At home, labor riots and racial segregation were at the root of domestic unrest. However, judging by the covers of LIFE Magazine in 1938, one would think that the "Monogram Craze" was the biggest event of the year: covers depict a society transfixed by fashion trends, athletes, and movie stars. One must question the motive for these candy-coated covers: was LIFE trying to sweep reality under the rug? Were they totally ignoring these rising crises at home and abroad? Or were the saccharine covers simply hiding the disturbing images within? We took our research into the pages of LIFE Magazine to see how the inside content compared to the image on the cover.
Once again LIFE prints grim pictures of War, well knowing that once again they will dismay and outrage thousands and thousands of readers. But today's two great continuing events are two wars--one in China, one in Spain. One Jan. 7, the Spanish civil war reached an historic crisis when the Rebel garrison of Teruel surrendered to the Loyalists, capping the greatest Loyalist victory of the war. On Dec. 18, the Chinese at Tsingtao destroyed the greatest single Japanese investment in China - the cotton mills of Tsingtao.
Obviously LIFE cannot ignore nor suppress these two great events in pictures. As events, they have an authority far more potent than any editors' policy or readers' squeamishness. But LIFE could conceivably choose to show pictures of these events that make them look attractive. They are not, however, attractive events... The important thing that happens in a war is that something or somebody gets destroyed... Pictures of war are therefore pictures of something or somebody getting destroyed... But even the best pictures cannot show war in all its horror and ugliness... Americans' noble and sensible dislike of war is largely based on ignorance of what modern war really is. The trouble with that kind of cloudy idealism is that it can too easily be overthrown and converted into an active will to fight a specific "good" war. The love of peace has no meaning or no stamina unless it is based on a knowledge of war's terrors. Only then, by contrast, can the benefits and blessings of the absence of war be fully appreciated and maintained. Dead men have indeed died in vain if live men refuse to look at them. (January 24, 1938)
Despite this resolution to display the "ugly truth," the fact still remains that covers sell magazines. Our essay examines the disparity between cover and content.