Articles from 1940
This is a portion of a longer article about American children and their collective sufferings during the Great Depression that can be read here. The column attached pertains to a White House conference and the sorry state of American schools in 1940.
From Amazon: Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher
This is a portion of a longer article about American children and their collective sufferings during the Great Depression that can be read here. The column attached pertains to a White House conference and the sorry state of American schools in 1940.
From Amazon: Getting Schooled: The Reeducation of an American Teacher
When the U.S. Supreme Court gave their decision concerning the 1940 appeal of a lower court’s verdict to convict three African-Americans for murder, civil libertarians in Washington held their collective breath wondering how Justice Hugo Black approached the case. Black, confirmed in 1937 as FDR’s first court appointee, admitted to having once been made a ‘life member’ of the Ku Klux Klan. This column was one of any number of other articles from that era that reported on the Alabaman’s explanation behind his Klan associations:
I did join the Klan… I later resigned. I never rejoined.
A seven page recollection of the history of the US Navy Railway Artillery Reserve, penned by W.W I naval veteran Bill Cunningham, who served as an officer on one of her five rail-mounted batteries. The unit was lead in collaboration by a hard-charging U.S. Army artillery officer but commanded by Rear Admiral Charles Plunkett (1864 – 1931), a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Cunningham described his first encounter with the admiral, who he first mistook as a member of the YMCA:
I looked up to see a tall stranger approaching. He wore a pair of black, I said black, shoes beneath some badly rolled puttees. He didn’t have on a blouse, but wore an enlisted man’s rubber slicker open down the front, and badly rust-stained around the buckles. His battered campaign hat had no cord of any sort He was strictly the least military object we’d seen in a couple of years, if ever.
Click here to read about the woman who entertained the U.S. troops during the First World War.
A black and white photo-essay of a New York that is gone with the wind, written in that wonderfully irreverent slang-heavy patois so reminiscent of the movies of that era. We posted this piece to please that New York archivist in all of you: you will see images of the watering holes preferred by the high and the low, the museums, Fifth Ave., Harlem, and the Fulton Fish Market.
We shall fight until the terror of the plutocracies has been broken.
– so blathered Adolf Hitler in a radio address from early 1940 in which he attempted to clarify the Nazi war aims. Never forgetting that the zi in Nazi is derived from Sozi for socialist (Compare with ‘Commie’ for ‘Communist’) – the dictator was heard here doing what he did from time to time in his speeches; borrowing the street hustle of the proletarian underdog (many thanks to WIKIanswers).
Click here to read another article on the same topic.
This is an interesting article that indicates just how profoundly elections had changed after 1920, when women began to vote. Previously, when the voting booth was a gender-specific domain, the victory margins were seldom greater than 10%; yet, beginning with the 1920 presidential election and continuing through the election of 1936, dramatic differences could be seen between the winners and losers that had never existed in prior contests.
The journalist believed that the advent of radio broadcasting also played a contributing factor in these elections.
Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.
On February 29, at the Academy’s twelfth annual dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood, Gone with the Wind surpassed [1934’s ‘It Happened One Night’] by winning eight out of sixteen possible prizes and garnering two special awards for good measure.
In 1940, when America stood on the precipice preparing to enter another enormous conflict, the heretofore secret papers of Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State, Robert Lansing (1864 – 1928), were released – shedding light on the government’s reasoning as to why they felt U.S. intervention in the European war was necessary.
A Phony War magazine article by Major General George Ared White (1880 – 1941) in which he muses wistfully (as Oregon men are wont to do) as to all the various, dreadful choices that were spread before Herr Hitler in the early months of 1940.
As varied as Hitler’s military options were, the General believed that France’s Maginot Line was impregnable and he did not think that Hitler would commit to such an undertaking. General White believed Hitler had six options before him which are all illustrated on the attached cartoon map.
Fashion Modeling Czar John Powers once said of model Georgia Carroll:
She is the most terrific thing that ever hit this business.
In respect to their economic status, it has been estimated that one-half to two-thirds of the city children of America are in homes where annual income is too low to permit the family to buy items called for in an ordinary ‘maintenance’ budget – a budget of about $1,261 to meet the normal needs of living in a family of four.
CLICK HERE to read about African-Americans during the Great Depression.
What a Time It Was!: Leonard Lyons and the Golden Age of New York Nightlife KEY WORDS: 1930s NY High
There, to a coterie of Lincoln addicts on Abe’s 131st birthday, U.S. Patent Commissioner Conway P. Coe displayed a model of a device Lincoln patented in 1849, when he was still an unknown congressman from Illinois. Commissioner Coe read the patent application, in Lincoln’s own handwriting, for a gadget to float flatboats in shallow water.
In 1940 Mickey Rooney (né Joe Yule, Jr.; b. 1920 – 2014) had replaced Shirley Temple as the number one box-office draw, after having steadily performed before the cameras from the age of six onward. Rooney had been jockeying for first place since he began playing the title roll in the Andy Hardy films just two and a half years earlier.
With the onslaught of the Second World War the sands of Hollywood shifted beneath his feet, creating a plethora of new stars and the need for different sorts of films – from that point on he only appeared in supporting rolls. In 1982 Rooney remarked:
When I was 19 years old, I was the number one star of the world for two years. When I was 40, nobody wanted me. I couldn’t get a job.
American political parties have not been the only folks to visit Beverly Hills – hat-in-hand; Soviet-backed Reds have done it, too. This 1940 article goes into some detail explaining all the various false fronts that American Communists would erect in order to attract Hollywood’s empathetic pretty boys – a tribe that is so easily separated from their wealth. Once an actor was hooked, they were steadily relied upon by the Reds to cough-up the do-re-mi without question; if they didn’t – they got the works.
Walter Winchell has already passed on to Washington documentary evidence proving that thousands of dollars contributed by Hollywood to innocent-sounding organizations eventually wound up in the hands of Communist leaders. Police and other investigatory groups have gone about accumulating evidence of the conspiracy.
One of the many Communist-front advocacy groups that milked Hollywood of much of its wealth was called theIndependent Citizen’s Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions; actress Olivia de Havilland was one of their willing dupes until she worked with the FBI and helped to bring them down.
Attached is a Phoney War magazine article by Major General George Ared White (1880 – 1941) in which he mused wistfully (as Oregon men are wont to do) as to all the various horrible choices that were spread before Herr Hitler in the early months of 1940. The General believed that France’s Maginot Line was impregnable and he did not think that Hitler would commit to such an undertaking.
Here are the results of PATHFINDER MAGAZINE‘s 1940 poll concerning FDR’s controversial run for a third term. The pollsters were interested in discovering the voter’s thoughts on the third term as a concept for future presidents – rather than gaining a better understanding as to the popularity of President Roosevelt.
The poll considered the opinions of citizens who voted for FDR in 1936 and those who sided with Republican Alf Landon in the same election. They concluded that 68.6% of poll’s participants were against a third presidential term.
