Mussolini – Irked By The Marx Brothers
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)
Read more …
1938
Articles from 1938
Beauty in the Congo
(Click Magazine, 1938)
Fashions these days are simply fraught with Third World influences such as tattoos and piercings and there is no reason to suspect that fashion’s dictators might one day soon decide that the elegant life is best lived with a cone-shaped head. The attached fashion article is illustrated with three pictures of the mode-conscious Manbetu tribe of Northeaster Africa who live life large as the African Longheads.
Mussolini and the Italian Expatriots
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
In September, 1936, when the League of Nations refused to expel the African empire from its membership, Il Duce kept Italian representatives away from League halls. They have never set foot in them since. Last spring British envoys led a successful boycott against diplomatic attendance at a first anniversary celebration of Italy’s conquest. Ill Duce countered with a peeve so wrathful that Italian newspapers made no mention of Great Britain for two whole days.
Meet Joseph Goebbels
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938
Goebbels is the creator of the Hitler legend. He is the white-washer of the Nazi reputation. In the 1920s the party had an unsavory name because its ranks included a clique of of homosexuals. As early as 1922 a Nazi meeting at Munich voted that no woman should ever hold political office. Goebbels twisted the party’s abnormal dislike of women into something ‘respectable’ – the doctrine that a woman’s place was in the kitchen and the maternity ward.
The 1938 Spies
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)
Suddenly last June, a Federal grand jury in New York City hoisted the curtain on ‘America’s most significant spy prosecution since the [First] World War’ by indicting 18 persons for participating in a conspiracy to steal U.S. defense secrets for Germany. Subsequently, only four of the 18 could be found for trial. The others, including two high officials of the German War Ministry, were safe in – or had escaped to – the Fatherland.
Nanking Ravaged
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
The occupation of Nanking by the Japanese army in December, 1937, resulted in the greatest authenticated massacre in modern history.
Fifty thousand blood-crazed beasts in Japanese uniforms roamed China’s fallen capital for four weeks in a mad Saturnalia of butchery, rape and pillage without parallel in modern history. That story, suppressed by the Japanese military who chased news correspondents and foreign officials out of Nanking, is told for the first time by one of the few Americans who remained, a ‘go-between’ for the U.S. Government with 20 years of service in China. He saw roped bundles of humanity saturated with gasoline and ignited for a Nipponese holiday.
The Cult of the Hitler Personality
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
Someone asks why Hitler doesn’t take a wife, as that sort of subject would be bound to come up. The German girl is incredibly shocked:
I shudder to think of any woman thinking of herself as a physical being worthy of being with the Fuhrer. It is sacrilegious to mention it!.
The Merger of Austria With Germany
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
Here is an article about Austria’s Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg (1897 – 1977) and how the merger of Austria and Nazi Germany came about in 1838:
Behind the scenes that hard day at Berchtesgaden, revealing what Hitler said to Kurt Schuschnigg and what the Austrian public never knew about the German plot to stage in Vienna a counterpart of the Reichstag fire, as a pretext for invasion. Schuschnigg spoiled that pretext, only to furnish another one himself. Uncovering the plot in the hope of averting invasion he merely brought it on.
The Nazi Hollywood
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
Written by a fellow who in later years would write a good deal about propaganda films, this article is amusing for the way it reported the total lack of humor and curiosity that Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (1897 – 1945) brought to the subject of film production; how they totally killed the existing German film industry and made film criticism illegal.
Read an article about the banning of all foreign artists in Hitler’s Germany…
The First Congresswomen
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)
This column recalls the earliest women to serve in the House and Senate (although the tenure of Senator Rebecca Latimer Felton was oddly excluded):
In 1916, the first Congresswoman was elected. She was Miss Jeannette Rankin (1880 – 1973), a Republican from Montana. On her first day in the House, war was declared; she voted against it. The next Congress had no women.
Hollywood’s Enigma
(Photoplay Magazine, 1938)
Although this article was written at a time when the television screen was a mere eight by eleven inches square, culture critic Gilbert Seldes addressed the question as to whether or not movies and radio will be voted off the island in favor of the television broadcasting industry.
The Bauhaus Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art
(Art Digest, 1938)
To mark the opening of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1938 exhibition, Bauhaus 1919 – 1928, the over-paid editors at ART DIGEST published this single page review for it’s American readers explaining what the art school was, why it closed and what was in the mind of the school’s founder, Walter Gropius (1883 – 1969):
The Bauhaus program proceeded to teach students manual dexterity, in all the crafts, to investigate the laws of the physical world, to plumb the spiritual world, and to master the machine. Out of the Bauhaus came the first experiments in tubular furniture, in modern typography, in modern lighting, and many significant developments in architecture, photography, abstract art, textile and other crafts.
Click here to read unfavorable criticism about the Bauhaus exhibit.
Social Issues in Movies
(Stage Magazine, 1938)
Aren’t you tired of Hollywood’s socio-political rantings?
•Nuclear power…………….They’re against it (The China Syndrome).
•Antisemitism……………….They’re against it (Gentleman’s Agreement).
•Alcoholism………………….They’re against it (Lost Weekend).
•Racial segregation………..They’re against it, but in 1915 they were for it (Birth of a Nation).
One glance at this 1939 article and you’ll be able to blame it all on the poet Archibald McLeish (1892 – 1982) who clearly advocated for political posturing in American movies.
No doubt, McLeish must have been very happy when Warner Brothers released Confessions of a Nazi Spy in April of 1939; it was the first Hollywood film to take a swipe at the Nazi war machine.
Hollywood’s Case Against Monogamy
(Photoplay Magazine, 1938)
Technologies change, power changes, tastes change, but if anything has remained a constant in the West coast film colony it has been the fickle romantic tastes of all the various performers, directors and producers who toil in the vineyards of Hollywood. An old salt once remarked that if a Hollywood marriage lasts longer than milk it can be judged a success; with this old saw in mind, a wise anthropologist sat down, put pen to paper and seriously attempted to understand mating habits of Hollywood, California.
Click here to read a 1938 memoir by a Los Angeles prostitute.
Censors of the Japanese War Machine
(Ken Magazine, 1938)
The Japanese censorship boards have drafted regulations for the press in territory under their control, and unsuccessful attempts were made to control news dispatches in Shanghai’s foreign-owned newspapers. In Peiping, Tientsin, Tsingtao and other cities where the Japanese are in complete control, foreign editors are having their troubles, as evidenced by the ‘secret’ instructions to the press issued by the Special Military Missions to China, with Headquarters in Peiping… Under the heading ‘Important Standards for Press Censorship’ come the following regulations…
-what follows is an enormous laundry list of DONT’S issued to the officers of the foreign press stationed in Japanese-occupied China.
The Great Depression in the South
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1938)
In the Summer of 1938 the New Deal administration turned its attention to the Southern States in an effort to solve the poverty that had long afflicted the region and was especially keen during the Great Depression:
The War Between the States freed the slaves, but it did not free the South. Old plantations were broken up. Pressed to meet mortgages, farmers leased part of their farms to tenants. Cheap [African-American] labor remained and children were pressed into service on the Southern fields. Cotton and low labor costs stayed in the South.
Read about FDR’s African-American advisers here…
Leon Trotsky Speaks About FDR and the Great Depression
(Rob Wagner’s Script Magazine, 1938)
Two and a half years were left on the clock for the exiled Leon Trotsky (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein: 1879 – 1940) until he would have to keep his rendezvous with an icepick in Mexico – and while living it up on this borrowed time he granted an interview to this one correspondent from a Beverly Hills literary magazine in which he ranted on in that highly-dated and terribly awkward Bolsheviki language about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his social programs.
Click here to read an article about the NKVD agent who murdered Trotsky.
Remembering Alma Gluck
(Stage Magazine, 1938)
Marking the occasion of the untimely death of American soprano Alma Gluck (born Reba Feinsohn; 1884 – 1938), music critic Samuel Chotzinoff wrote this essay in which he recalled witnessing the first meeting between Gluck and her (second) husband Efrem Zimbalist, Sr. (1890 – 1985) at the absolute height of her fame in 1911. The remembrance continues as Chotzinoff labels that era as being the ‘golden age of vocalists’ and recalls many of the finest qualities of her talent.