1939

Articles from 1939

Adolf Hitler and Women (Click Magazine, 1939)

This article about Adolf Hitler and women appeared on the newsstands two months prior the start of the Second World War, when the world learned how evil a man the lunatic truly was. The journalist wanted to confirm that there was no truth to the 1939 rumor that Hitler was dead and quickly began musing about other rumors:

More feasible is the theory that the sexless madman of Naziland is still alive and has merely discovered that he gets a vicarious thrill out of having women around him and likes to watch acrobatic dance routines.

Photographed in this article is Frau Scholtz-Klink, who had been dubbed the perfect Nazi woman by the Reichfuehrer, in addition to three curvy American burlesque dancers who performed before Hitler.


Click here to read about the dating history of Adolf Hitler.

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Nazi Indoctrination: the Eighth Grade (Ken Magazine, 1939)

Five months before the Second World War began an American journalist paid a visit to a German middle school and watched an eighth grade German history pageant; these are his observations:

Sitting in Germany’s schoolrooms are 20 million boys and girls. It is the custom, in democratic countries, to think that Hitler is engaged in pulling wool, or at least some cheap non-import substitute for it, over their eyes every school day.
For two years , for instance, all German boys and girls have been exposed to the following clear-cut lesson:

‘Where e’er I gaze, as German,
My soul with pain o’erflows,
I see the German nation
Girt round and round with foes.’

Click here to read about the Allied effort to re-educate the German boy soldiers of W.W. II.

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The Adolf Hitler Schools (Current History Magazine, 1939)

This is a 1939 article about the Adolph Hitler Schools; a (thankfully) short-lived institution that was created to ill-educate the chosen of Hitler’s Germany in order to create a ruling elite.

Their education, in the proper sense of the word, lays emphasis above all on biology, and naturally, on the racial question – on the philosophy of the National Socialist State, on the Common Law, and on the history of Germany and of the Nazi Movement. Foreign languages, literature, and philosophy finds no place.

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Vivien Leigh to Play Scarlet (Photoplay Magazine, 1939)

A short notice from a Hollywood fan magazine announcing that Vivien Leigh (born Vivian Mary Hartley: 1913 – 1967), an actress largely unknown to U.S. audiences, had been cast to play the roll of ‘Scarlet’. Accompanied by two breathtakingly beautiful color images of the actress, this short announcement outlines her genetic makeup, her previous marriage to Leigh Holman, and her thoughts concerning the upcoming roll.


Click here to read magazine articles about D.W. Griffith.

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Gone with Wind Begins Shooting (Photoplay Magazine, 1939)

Jack Wade, one of the many Hollywood reporters for Photoplay, must have let loose a big girlish squeal when he got word from the Selznick-International man that he would not get bounced off the set of Gone with the Wind
if he were to swing by to take a look.

First of all, a report on Vivien Leigh…Hollywood already agreed that she’s the happiest choice any one could have made. Even swamp angels from deepest Dixie put their okay on her accent…Clark Gable looks like the real Big-Man-From-the-South. In a black frock coat, starched bosom and ruffles, he makes a menacing, impressive Rhett, and he’s a little pleased about it, too.

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The Visual Accuracy of the ‘Gone with the Wind’ (Click Magazine, 1939)

This page from Click Magazine contrasts three Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) with three production stills snapped on the sets of Gone with the Wind. The editors refused to weigh-in on the slowly building case regarding Hollywood’s questionable abilities to portray historic events with any degree of accuracy, preferring instead to praise the filmmakers as to how carefully they checked details.


The Matthew Brady images provided on the attached page only serves to condemn the otherwise flawless work of Gone with the Wind costume designer Walter Plunkett (1902 – 1982) who historians and reënactors have slandered through the years for failing to fully grasp the look of the era.

The Visual Accuracy of the ‘Gone with the Wind’ (Click Magazine, 1939) Read More »

The Visual Accuracy of the ‘Gone with the Wind’ (Click Magazine, 1939)

This page from Click Magazine contrasts three Civil War photographs by Matthew Brady (1822 – 1896) with three production stills snapped on the sets of Gone with the Wind. The editors refused to weigh-in on the slowly building case regarding Hollywood’s questionable abilities to portray historic events with any degree of accuracy, preferring instead to praise the filmmakers as to how carefully they checked details.


The Matthew Brady images provided on the attached page only serves to condemn the otherwise flawless work of Gone with the Wind costume designer Walter Plunkett (1902 – 1982) who historians and reënactors have slandered through the years for failing to fully grasp the look of the era.

The Visual Accuracy of the ‘Gone with the Wind’ (Click Magazine, 1939) Read More »

The Producer: David O. Selznick (Film Daily, 1939)

Observers of the career of David O. Selznick see his enterprises this year the culmination of a dream….The most lavish motion picture project ever conceived, Gone With the Wind, is already acknowledged as Selznick’s chef d’oeuvre and the picture destined to mark the peak of cinema progress during the past 50 years. Executives of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which company released the picture, as well as those of Selznick International who have seen it, are unanimous in declaring it the greatest picture ever made, and the most frequent comment heard today from those who have observed it in production is ‘No one could have made it but Selznick.’


Selznick produced blockbuster after blockbuster. He was awarded two Academy Awards during his Hollywood reign for ‘Outstanding Production’: one for Gone With the Wind in 1939 and another one year later for Rebecca.

The Producer: David O. Selznick (Film Daily, 1939) Read More »

The Wonderful World of Adjectives (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

To grammarians, a verb is the strongest part of speech, but not to radio advertisers. In a survey of 15 national radio programs, the entertainment weekly VARIETY has found that adjectives receive the most voice emphasis and the most repetition. On one program, 28 adjectives were spoken in 15 minutes.


Click here to read about how the mass-marketing techniques of the W.W. I era was used to promote KKK membership…

The Wonderful World of Adjectives (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939) Read More »

‘The Tenth Man” (Pathfinder Magazine, 1939)

This is a light history of the African-American people; weak in some spots, informative in others, it’s greatest value lies in telling the story of Blacks in the Thirties.

Because the colored race comprises almost a 10th of the population of the United States, sociologists sometimes refer to the Negro as ‘the Tenth Man.’ As such, he is little known to the other nine. Yet there are 12,500,000 colored persons in the nation – black, brown and some so white that 10,000 pass over the color line every year to take up life as whites.

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