Articles from 1939
This is a profile of the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White (1904 – 1971). At the time these pages appeared on the newsstand, the photographer’s stock was truly on the rise as a result of her remarkable documentary images depicting the Great Depression as it played out across the land.
Here is an article about one of the most innovative minds in the nascent world of Hollywood makeup design; it belonged to a fellow named Jack Dawn (1892 – 1961). Dawn was under contract at MGM for decades and worked on over two hundred films, his most being the film that is discussed herein: The Wizard of Oz (1939, MGM). The article briefly touches upon the thin, rubbery masks that he created after having made numerous in depth studies of human bone and muscle.
The appeal of James Stewart, the shy, inarticulate movie actor, is that he reminds every girl in the audience of the date before the last. He’s not a glamorized Gable, a remote Robert Taylor. He’s ‘Jim’, the lackadaisical, easy-going boy from just around the corner.
The above line was pulled from the attached article which was one of the first widely read profiles of Jimmy Stewart (James Maitland Stewart 1908 – 1997). Written four years after his arrival in the California dream factory and printed during the same year as his first encounter with the director Frank Capra in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, this article reveals that Stewart had a small town upbringing and was essentially the same character he played in It’s A Wonderful Life.
Booth Tarkington might have created Jim Stewart. He’s ‘Little Orvie and Billie Baxter’ grown up ‘Penrod’ with a Princeton diploma.
From Amazon: It’s a Wonderful Life: Favorite Scenes from the Classic Film
Attached is short report listing some of the highlights of the 11th Academy Awards ceremony that was held on February 23, 1939 in downtown Los Angeles:
• Director Frank Capra received his third Best Director statue for You Can’t Take It with You
.
• Walt Disney was awarded an Oscar for the best animated short film, Ferdinand The Bull – in addition to a special award for his innovative work on
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
• The Best Screenplay Oscar went to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw for his efforts on Pygmalion.
An amusing, if blasphemous, article about the 1938 Oscars can be read here…
Der Fuhrer boasts of his impecuniosity, but the fact is that royalties from his book, Mein Kampf and investments in German real-estate and industrial firms make him one of Germnay’s wealthiest men. This money is deposited throughout Europe in 15 bank accounts under three names…
The attached magazine article first appeared in the long-forgotten Hollywood trade rag Film Daily and concerns the 1930s newsreel production company The March of Time:
Since the beginning of the motion picture, the newsreel has been recognized as a vital medium of public information. Movie goers demand it. But, by the very nature of its technique and the swiftness with which it brings today’s events to the screen, the newsreel can give little more than headline news. And so it has created among movie-goers a desire to see more.
It was this desire ‘to see more’ that led the founders of ‘The March of Time’ to launch their new kind of pictorial journalism…The first issue appeared in some 400 theaters throughout the United States on February 1, 1935.
Although sunglasses had slowly inched their way forward in popularity since the late Twenties, the attached article declared that by 1939 sunglasses were officially recognized as a full-fledged fashion accessory when the Hollywood stars Joan Bennet and Hedy Lamar began to sport them around town.
Like T-shirts and khaki pants, it would be W.W. II that would provide sunglasses with a guaranteed spot on fashion stage for the next sixty-five years.
Click here to read a 1961 article about Jacqueline Kennedy’s influence on American fashion.
A 1939 magazine article that reported on the assorted activities of Japanese spies operating around the Tijuana/San Diego region (their presence was well-documented by the Mexican military in addition to the F.B.I.).
A year and a half before the Pearl Harbor attack, Naval Intelligence sold a Japanese agent some bogus plans of the naval installation – more about this can be read here.
This photo-essay tells the story of the radical elements within the United States during the later period of the Great Depression – all of them were directed and financed by Georgi Dimitrov (1882 – 1949) in far-off Moscow. The leaders of the American Communist Party USA (CPUSA) were William Z. Foster, Earl Browder, and Ella Reeve Bloor.
In 1944, the city of Seattle, Washington elected a communist to the U.S. House of Representatives, click here to read about him…
Click here to learn how thoroughly the FBI had infiltrated the CPUSA.
Click here to read about an American woman who grew heartily sick of the socialists who pontificated on every street corner during the Great Depression…
Click here to read about the tactics that American Communists used in Hollywood during the Great Depression…
From Amazon: Demagogues in the Depression: American Radicals and the Union Party, 1932-1936,
The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.
The article lists the purchased works.
The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.
The article lists the purchased works.
The art that Hitler has exiled as ‘degenerate’ is finding ready homes in other lands that have not yet been culturally crushed beneath the heel of Europe’s twin tyrannies: Fascism and Communism. Because Hitler has embraced the calendar decoration as the supreme art form, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has been able to acquire five works that formerly were housed in prominent museums.
The article lists the purchased works.
A fabulous three page article from STAGE MAGAZINE on the early career of Cary Grant:
Cary Grant appeared in six Broadway productions and twenty-seven Hollywood pictures before anybody took notice. Then he played a dead man.
This article was written by the war correspondent Fairfax Downey (1894 – 1990) for a magazine that catered to American veterans of W.W. I, and it seemed that he simply could not contain his enthusiasm for the U.S. infantry’s newest rifle: the M-1 Garand:
What a gun it is! Its nine pound weight swings easily through the manual of arms. The eight-round clip (three more shots than the we used to have with the ’03 Springfield) slips in easily and the breech clicks closed. The old range scale slide has vanished; range and windage adjustments are made simply by turning two knobs… The new semi-automatic means, among other things, that the fire power of troops armed with it has increased at least two and a half times over the old Springfield.
For further magazine reading about John Garand and his rifle, click here.
The night before [the Miami] citizens went to the polls to decide among 15 candidates for three commissionerships, the old specter of the Ku Klux Klan was raised to scare away the colored votes.
The scheme didn’t work.
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.
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.
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.
