Articles from 1938
During the pre-dawn hours of November 7, 1918 the German peace delegation crossed through to the American sector at a battle-scared Argonne village named Cunel. A former private in the U.S. Fifth Infantry Division, Amico J. Barone, recalled that night and wrote this essay in 1938.
The attached article is essentially a behind the scenes look at the making of Walt Disney’s 1938 triumph Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
• He employed 569 people who worked all day and frequently all night to finish it.
•The film took three and half years to make and cost $1,500,000.00.
•He concocted 1500 different paints to give it unmatched color.
•He spent $70,000.00 developing a brand new camera to give it depth.
•He threw away four times the drawings he made and the film he shot.
•He made over 2,000,000 separate drawings…
Although Disney’s wife, Lilian, was said to have remarked, No one’s ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture, the movie generated more box office receipts than any other film in 1938.
The attached article is essentially a behind the scenes look at the making of Walt Disney’s 1938 triumph Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs:
• He employed 569 people who worked all day and frequently all night to finish it.
•The film took three and half years to make and cost $1,500,000.00.
•He concocted 1500 different paints to give it unmatched color.
•He spent $70,000.00 developing a brand new camera to give it depth.
•He threw away four times the drawings he made and the film he shot.
•He made over 2,000,000 separate drawings…
Although Disney’s wife, Lilian, was said to have remarked, No one’s ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture, the movie generated more box office receipts than any other film in 1938.
Herschel Grynszpan (1921 – ?) was a Polish-Jewish refugee born in Germany who, on his own volition, shot and killed a German diplomat in Paris in 1938. This murder prompted the Nazis to terrorize the Jewish population throughout Germany and Austria the very next day (November 8) in an event that was called Kristallnacht. This article covers the murder and the senseless horror that followed; attention was also paid to the reactions from various capital cities.
In Vienna, Storm Troopers fired 18 synagogues, shot a Polish Jew in his bed, invaded homes and threw the furniture out the windows. Ten thousand Jews were arrested, at least 60 attempted suicide. Restaurants and grocery stores refused to sell to Jewas.
This 1938 article concerned the gas rationing and and other assorted inconveniences that the Japanese population had to suffer during the Sino-Japanese conflict. The reporter was surprised to discover that the general citizenry was kept in a reasonable state of ignorance as to their military’s intentions in China:
Some attention is paid to the sacrifices made by the Japanese industrial classes, such as the Yasuda, Iwasaki, and Mitsui families.
This is an historic article that introduced the fashion era that we still reside in today.
The attached article from 1938 heralded a new day in the fashion industry where fashion magazines would no longer be relied upon to set the trends in clothing; henceforth, that roll would largely be played by movie actresses in far-off Hollywood:
The greatest fashion influence in America, stylists sadly lament, is the much-photographed, much-glamorized and much-imitated Movie Queen. What she wears is news, eagerly copied, by girls all over the country who want to look like Joan Crawford and Myrna Loy.
The primary bone of contention that the East Coast fashionistas found most objectionable was the fact that movie stars are Californians, and Californians will always prefer comfort over glamor.
Attached is a translation of the text of the Franco-German declaration signed in Paris on December 6, 1938.
Click here to read about the Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact.
To the colossal giant that is China, furious little Japan delivered a one-two punch last week. Small divisions of the Emperor’s troops first took Canton and then Hankow. So easily did both fall that Britons in Hong Kong declared darkly:’It looks like dirty work.’
With the 1938 merging of Austria with Hitler’s Germany came the Nazi coercion of Austrian Christianity. One of the first clerics to rebel against their repression was Cardinal Theodor Innitzer (1875 – 1955) of Vienna who made clear his outrage in a series of open letters criticizing the various Nazi restrictions involving marriage and the removal of nuns and priests from various schools and hospitals.
A dreary news story relaying the violent end that came to one R.C. Williams of Ruston, Louisiana.
Here is an article that discusses the surprising relevance that the music of Irving Berlin (1888 – 1989) was playing in the American music world of the 1930s.
Click here to read about Irving Berlin’s theatrical production during W.W. I…
The American writer Willis Gordon Brown recalled his days as a fighter pilot with the R.F.C. and the curious series of crashes that lead to the discovery of a German saboteur within their midst.
To the Germans this man was a highly respected hero giving his life for the fatherland; to us he became a rat of the lowest order.
If you’ve been wondering how the Academy Awards came to be known more popularly as Oscar and you think that the answer simply has to be bathed in an endless amount of Hollywood Glamour, involving a boat-load beautifully tailored, charming and overly talented matinee idols, you’d better hit the ‘ol back browser button now.
Artist Gilbert Wilson conducted this interview with American socialist cartoonist Art Young (1866 – 1943) which appeared in DIRECTION MAGAZINE during the summer of 1938. In the fullness of time, Art Young has come to be recognized as something of a demi-god in the American poison pen pantheon of graphic satirists and no study of Twentieth Century political cartoons is complete without him:
Art Young has never adopted the policy of tearing into his foe (which is capitalism) with tooth and claw. It simply isn’t his way. He just isn’t capable of hating anyone or anything badly enough to get that angry.
Isn’t it rather the duty of a good radical, as Lenin said, ‘patiently to explain’?
In 1887 the NEW YORK TIMES reviewed the first english edition of Das Kapital by Karl Marx, click here to read it…
When England and France yielded to Germany in the Munich Agreement of last September, a significant change took place. The balance of power in Europe shifted from the democracies to the dictatorships… [and] the United States had to stop thinking of England and France as America’s ‘first line of defense’ in the time of a European war.
A telegraph from Hollywood costume designer Edith Head (1897 – 1981) to the editorial offices of PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE listing various highlights of the 1938 Paris fashion scene. Not surprisingly, it reads like a telegram:
Paris says:
• Long waistlines, short flared skirts, fitted bodices, tweeds combines with velvet, warm colors…
• Hair up in pompadours piles of curls and fringe bangs.
• Braid and embroidery galore lace and ribbon trimmings loads of jewelry mostly massive.
• Skirts here short and not too many pleats more slim skirts with slight flare.
The great Hollywood modiste wrote in this odd, Tarzan-english for half a page, but by the end one is able to envision the feminine Paris of the late Thirties.
Recommended Reading: Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer
Click here to read about physical perfection during the Golden Age of Hollywood.
The following STAGE MAGAZINE article by American playwright Clare Boothe (Clare Boothe Luce 1903 – 1987) appeared in print shortly after the successful opening of her play, The Women:
Of course, writing plays wasn’t exactly a flash of genius. I mean I am shewed in spots…But inspiration or calculation, it was frightfully lucky that I hit on writing plays, wasn’t it? And it was so wonderfully fortunate that quite a lot of people that I’d met socially on Park Avenue, at very exclusive parties, people like cowboys, cooks, manicurists, nurses, hat-check girls, fitters, exchorines, declasses countesses, Westport intellectuals, Hollywood producers Southern girls and radical columnists, gave me such lovely material to write about.
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
Fashion philosophizer and designer Elizabeth Hawes (1903 – 1971) recognized the sham that is fashion – in the attached photo-essay she writes plainly on the matter.
The book is available at Amazon.com:
Fashion is Spinach
