Articles from 1940
Attached is an excerpt from a longer article about the U.S. Border Patrol’s adventures in Texas; it tells of one patrolman’s shocking discovery as to how abusive the growers were to their hired hands – how dreadful were their living conditions.
This is a peculiar article about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull (1871 – 1955); the man who penned the piece was so obsessed with Hull’s hillbilly upbringing that he didn’t get around to writing about the man himself until page six.
In 1940, when a defense plant moved into the Gulfport town of Freeport, Texas, the Great Depression came to a screeching halt. Within three months their population shot up from 3,100 to a whopping 7,500, and the economic blessing was not simply confined to that one region:
In Corpus Christi they have a nice little plum in the form of a $25,000,000 naval air base. Houston is getting a $2,000,000 refurbishing of Ellington Field. Randolph Field at San Antonio is getting a costly going over.
Life in Freeport was good. When a local shoeshine lad had found that his pockets were flush with cash after three day’s labor, he exclaimed –
We’re in high cotton now!
German millionaire industrialist Fritz Thyssen (1873 – 1951) paid the way for the Nazi party from its earliest days all the way up to Hitler’s place in the sun. When Hitler attacked Poland, Thyssen bailed. In this column he confesses all:
I met Hitler for the first time in 1923… Ludendorf arranged my first meeting with Hitler at the home of a mutual friend. What a different character Hitler was then! He was deferential and anxious to learn. You may not believe me, but he had a sense of humor, actually telling many jokes… Hitler as a speaker was amazing. I asked him how he achieved such success addressing people. He said, ‘I don’t know, but after ten minutes, like a band leader, I usually make contact with the crowd, and then everything is all right.’
H.G. Wells and Winston Churchill first met in 1901. Churchill was a deep admirer of Well’s fiction, and he eagerly pursued a friendship. The two enjoyed a spirited exchange of letters that went on for decades – although it seemed to have taken a hit in the Twenties when the two disagreed on the nascent USSR – but their friendship was not seriously shaken. In this 1940 article, Wells stepped up to tell American readers how fortunate Britons are to have such a man of discernment standing at the helm:
I will confess I have never felt so disposed to stand by a man through thick and thin as I do now in regard to him. And I think that, in writing that, I write for a very great number of my fellow countrymen who have hitherto felt frustrated and fragmentary amidst the rush of events.
Paris belongs to Adolf Hitler. Abandoned by the French and declared an open city to prevent its destruction, the capital of France was turned over whole to the Nazi invaders early this morning.
Click here to read about the 1944 liberation of Paris.
We suppose debate will go on for years about whether the Finns or the Russians won their 105-day war of late 1939 and early 1940. We think the Finns won all the phases of the war except those included in the peace treaty – and that the treaty was a minor matter in the long view of it all…As for the predictions that the Russians will be coming back in six months or so to gobble up the rest of Finland – we may easily be wrong, but we can’t picture the Russians tackling the Finns again for another thirty years.
PM (1940 – 1948) was a left-leaning, New York-based evening paper that enjoyed some notoriety across the fruited plane on account of its founding editor, Ralph Ingersoll (1900 – 1985), who liked to believe that his steady mission was to create A tabloid for literates:
Contributors included Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), I. F. Stone, Ad Reinhardt, J.T. Winterich, Leane Zug‐Smith, Louis Kronenberger and Ben Hecht; the photographs of Margaret Bourke‐White and Arthur Felig (aka Weegee) appeared regularly. Occasional contributors included Erskine Caldwell, Myril Axlerod, McGeorge Bundy, Saul K. Padover, Heywood Broun, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene Lyons, Earl Conrad; Ben Stolberg, Malcolm Cowley.
Preferring to rely more on subscribers than advertisers, PM only lasted eight years.
A brief 1940 profile of the man President Roosevelt preferred over 33 other generals of higher grade: General George C. Marshall (1880 – 1959):
His most spectacular military feat occurred during the [First] World War, when, as operations chief of the First Army, he moved 500,000 men and 2,700 pieces of artillery from one battlefield to another without a hitch and without letting the enemy get wind of what he was doing.
One year after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the Navy released its report to the press with updates on all the various repairs that were put into effect.
Here is a profile of the American leftist Norman Thomas (1884 – 1968), who sought the U.S. presidency six (6) times on the Socialist ticket. He was a former clergyman and despite the fact that he wished to ban all private property, nationalize all businesses and put the kibosh on a free press – he still sounded like swell Joe to us.
Just as Lenin had a triumphal military adventure, Stalin, too, believed that he could deploy Soviet forces victoriously. However, when Lenin launched his enterprise against neighboring Georgia in 1921, he had the benefit of skilled military leaders under his command – this was not the case with Stalin, who had seen fit to purge his military of thousands of officers (1934 – 1939). When Stalin’s legions attacked Finland in November of 1939, the Soviet losses that were inflicted by the numerically inferior Finns were far greater than he ever thought possible.
The article appeared during the closing weeks of the war and it reported on the outside aid the Finns were receiving. The attached file also includes an article from 1931 concerning some of the bad blood that existed between the two nations.
Read an article explaining how the Soviets used early radio…
Click here to read more about the campaigns in North Africa during the Second World War. – from Amazon: KEY
A year and a half before Pearl Harbor, many Americans, 10,000 to be exact, were active in welcoming British children, ages 5 – 16, to their homes. This was a time when it was widely believed that a Nazi invasion of Britain was imminent and the Battle of Britain was in full-swing:
Nobody knows how many will be admitted or how many will land in Canada on the first child-refugee ship, due three weeks from now.The quota for British children is 6,500 a-month; for children from other countries quotas are considerably lower.
To read about the short and productive life of New York’s PM, click here…
In one of his other verses poet Ogden Nash (1902 – 1971) wrote that women are not female men. In the attached poem he expanded on that thought to a greater degree as he observed women and their approach to fashion.
The attached article is illustrated with three color photos from the set of the movie, this short article details why The Grapes of Wrath (Twentieth Century Fox, 1940) was such a different movie to come out of Hollywood and explains how thoroughly both the art and costume departments were in their research in depicting the migrant Okies in their Westward flight:
Realism, keynote of the book, was the keynote of the picture. Henry Fonda, who plays Tom Joad, lived for weeks among the Okie farmers from Oklahoma to understand their problems…
As a result of Steinbeck’s literary efforts, medical aid was offered to California’s migrants – Click here to read about it
Click here to read a 1935 article about the real Okies.
Perhaps Steinbeck saw this 1938 photo-essay while writing his novel?
Coca-Cola may be the real thing, but in 1940 Pepsi had launched the ad that made Madison Avenue sit up and realize the true power of radio advertising. It was the famous radio jingle that we still hear today in every play, movie and TV show wishing to create the perfect Forties atmosphere – you know the one: Pepsi Cola hits the spot, etc., etc., etc. A real toe-tapper. The attached article will clue you-in to it’s significance.
