1936 – Page 4 – Old Magazine Articles

The Military Buildup in France and Britain
(Literary Digest, 1936)

This 1936 magazine article reported that Germany had spent a considerable sum on munitions and armaments throughout much of the previous year and was not likely to stop anytime soon. In light of this fact, the French and British governments were moved to do the same:

Winston Churchill, a cherubic reddish-haired Cassandra, bobbed up in the House of Commons again last week to warn his countrymen of the ‘remorseless hammers’ of the world.

Military Buildup in the United States
(Literary Digest, 1936)

At midnight, December 31, the Naval Limitations Treaty of 1930 will expire and, tho a treaty of a sort was negotiated last April, apparently it will not be ratified and put into effect by the end of the year.

With this in mind, Congress authorized the construction of two battleships at the cost of $50,000,000 each.

And is it worth it, in these days of fleet and deadly torpedo planes or great diving bombers clutching demolition bombs weighing a ton apiece? Naval experts think so. The Battleship, they say, is still the backbone of the battle-fleet. In the phrase of the street, the battleship can dish it out.

The Navy would soon learn that they were actually living in the age of the aircraft carrier.

Click here to read more about the expansion of the U.S. Navy.

The Birth of the Green Bay Packers
(American Legion Monthly, 1936)

This is a sports article that summarizes the meteoric course of the Green Bay Packers, from their earliest days in 1918, when Curly Lambeau approached a meat packing plant beseeching their patronage in order that the team could have uniforms, to the high perch they held in 1936.

Consider for a moment the success this team has had, coming as it does from the smallest city in the pro league. After battling first division teams in the National Professional Football League for many years, the Packers finally came through and won three successive world championships in 1929, 1930 and 1931… If you were to ask most college football stars which pro team they would like to play on, most of them would invariably answer, ‘The Green Bay Packers‘.

Fashion Journalism Goes Legit
(Art Digest, 1936)

Keeping abreast with current need, the Traphagan School (New York) offers for the first time a course in fashion journalism, which prepares students for positions on magazines and newspapers in advertising departments and agencies where they will interpret in words what they themselves or some other designer relates. The course is conducted by Marie Stark, formerly associate editor of Vogue…

M.G.M. Casting Director Billy Grady Tells All
(Literary Digest, 1936)

Back in the day, he was responsible for casting 91,000 film actors each year, he was,

Hollywood’s No. 1 casting director, Billy Grady: broad-shouldered, open-faced Irishman, a terror to counterfeits, a down-right softy when he encounters an honest man – or woman.

This article tells much of his life story and provides a blow-by-blow as to what his days were like. One of the more interesting aspects of the article addressed the charities that were designed to aid and comfort those many souls who worked as extras in the movies. Today, extra players (also known as ‘atmosphere) are extended benefits through the Screen Actors Guild – but this was not always the case.

1913 American Films
(”Our Times”, 1936)

As the rosy fingered dawn came upon America in 1913 it found Douglas Fairbanks, the man who would soon be Silent Hollywood’s fair haired boy, wowing the crowds on Broadway. The play, Hawthorne of the U.S.A., starred Fairbanks in the title roll and closed after 72 performances; he was also married to a woman who wasn’t named Pickford – but rather named Anna Beth Sully, who had sired his namesake. Life was good for the actor and he wouldn’t turn his gaze West for another two years. By contrast, his future bride, Mary Pickford (né Gladys Smith, 1892 – 1979) had been prancing before the cameras since 1909 and by the time 1913 rolled around had appeared in well-over 100 short films and earned the nickname Little Mary.

Forgiveness Reigns at the Verdun Reunion
(Literary Digest, 1936)

The attached magazine article is for any sentimental sap who has never crossed the water to walk wander pensively upon that ground where the blood once flowed between the years 1914 and 1918. It concerns the July 14, 1936 reunion at Verdun where many of the old combatants of the Great War were:

Called together at historic Fort Douaumont, captured and retaken a score of times during those dark days of 1916, to swear a solemn oath to work for peace, the disillusioned survivors of their father’s folly found Verdun changed, yet unchanged and changeless.

Click here to read another article concerning peace-loving veterans of World War One.

About Paul Meltsner
(Coronet Magazine, 1936)

To listen to Paul Meltsner one would think that it was fun to be a painter. Looking at his pictures one is compelled to conclude that life is a grim business of industrial strife, with factories shut down or picketed…

A wise-cracker and a wit at the cafe table, Mr. Meltsner is a proletarian artist when he works, and he works hard, he says. Which is what a proletarian artist should do… He exhibits frequently. He sells lithographs when he isn’t selling paintings and is represented in a number of museum collections.

Click here to read a Paul Meltsner review from ART DIGEST.

The Industrial Visions of Paul R. Meltsner
(Art Digest, 1936)

The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:

Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.

Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.

Dada at MOMA
(Literary Digest, 1936)

An amusing, if blasphemous, art review of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 Dada and Surrealism exhibit.
The journalist oddly credited Joan Miro as the author of the Dada movement.

The Marx Brothers of the art world are displayed, in all their unrestrained glory, in an exhibition of Fantastic Art in New York this week.

An exhibition of this type is always easy prey for the practical joker. A similar show in Paris several years ago exhibited a shovel, submitted by a well-known but discontented artist as an example of perfect symmetry.

Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.

‘Some of My Best Friends Are Jewish”
(Literary Digest, 1936)

Jews are like everybody else, only more so.’
So clicked the typewriter of the epigrammatic Dorthy Thompson (1893 – 1961), syndicated columnist and wife of Sinclair Lewis (1885 – 1951)’.

‘Are they?’ queried Robert Gessner (1913 – 1978), twenty-nine-year-old instructor of English at New York University. ‘Then why are they so persecuted?’

‘To answer his own question, the young Michigan-born Jew traveled to Europe, saw Hitler-swayed Jews march from meetings shouting ‘Down with us! Down with Us! Less fantastic were his experiences in Poland, Palestine, the Soviet Union and England…’

The Advance on the Rhineland and Other Forebodings
(Stage Magazine, 1936)

One of the very few literati who recognized what a German military presence in the Rhineland meant was a one legged American veteran of the last war named Laurence Stallings (1894 – 1968). This article appeared to be about the great benefit afforded to us all by hard working photo-journalists who supplied us daily with compelling images of various far-flung events, but it was in all actuality a warning to our grand parents that the world was becoming a more dangerous place.

I think the unforgettable picture of the month will come from shots stolen near a French farmhouse by Strasbourg, when the French were countering Hitler’s move into the Rhineland…Routine were the crustacean stares of the Italian children in gas masks last week, where they practiced first aid against chlorine and mustard barrages…

20th Century Artists Rediscover Woodcut Printing
(Art Digest, 1936)

An art review concerning a 1936 Brooklyn Museum exhibit of woodcut prints by avant-garde German, Russian and French artists. The reviewer details how the medium was rediscovered.

Before Franz Marc (1880 – 1916) was killed in the war he strengthened woodcut design in his departure from pretty and representational decoration toward more rugged abstraction…Almost all of these German, Russian and Frenchmen have concentrated their attention on human life. There is no pretty landscape, no picturesque architectural rendering, no still life, no sporting print. Froma a few prints the actual human form has been abstracted. One of these by Wassily Kandinsky ‘looks like a diagram of the contents of a madman’s waste basket’. The rest of the prints are chiefly tragic, mostly pitiful, occasionally derisive comments on the failure of man as an animal.

Modigliani: Appreciated at Last
(Art Digest, 1936)

In his lifetime Amedeo Modigliani‘s (1884 – 1920) was only honored one time with his own solo showing in an art gallery; many of his paintings were given away in exchange for meals in restaurants and he died the death of a pauper in some unglamorous corner of Paris. In the years that followed the art world began to learn about Modigliani bit by bit through art reviews like the one attached herein. Written sixteen years after his death, this is a review of a Modigliani exhibit at the avant-garde gallery of Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan in New York City:

C.J. Bulliet (1883 – 1952) in ‘Apples and Madonnas’ declared that Modigliani’s nudes may be ranked ultimately with the great ones of all time – with Giorgione’s ‘Sleeping Venus’, Titian’s ‘Venus Awake’, Goya’s ‘Maja’ (nude and even more impudently clothed), with Manet’s sensational wanton in the Louvre.’

NBC and CBS Open Shop on the West Coast
(Literary Digest, 1936)

In order to take advantage of the local talent abiding in the sleepy film colony of Hollywood, the far-seeing executives at NBC and CBS saw fit to open radio and television broadcasting facilities in that far, distant burg.

The trek to Hollywood of the Broadcasting companies began in earnest last winter when the National Broadcasting Company opened a large building – fire-proof, earthquake-proof, sound-proof and air-conditioned.