Articles from 1941
It seemed to have made no difference to the editors of PIC MAGAZINE how dark and thick the clouds of war were that encircled the United States one month prior to the Pearl Harbor attack – they ran yet another puff piece on Jane Russell five months after they had published their last puff piece on Jane Russell.
This article will cue you in to a 1941 dust-up between the FCC and the biggest radio broadcasters in America.
Apparently CBS, NBC and the Mutual Broadcasting System were in cahoots, united behind a scheme to fix the prices they had to cough-up in order to pay all the various assorted musicians and acting talents they needed to hire if they were to attract their radio audiences. The feds got wind of the plan and smelled a rat:
The big radio networks are currently worried by the Federal Communication Commission’s accusation that they are talent monopolists, part of the FCC’s blanket charge that the radio chains constitute a trust within the broadcasting industry…
Attached are pictured six straw hats from a 1941 color ad promoting the Stetson Straws that appeared on the glossy pages of one of the more bourgeois American magazines just seven and a half months prior to the day when the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor and the bad-old days of World War II kicked-in for that rare breed of man known as homo-Americanus.
There can be no doubt that the fun-loving fashion-fan who was pictured sporting these organic chapeaus would soon find himself wearing one of Uncle Sam’s over-laundered denim stitch-brims, peeling potatoes and remembering wistfully the day that this ad was shot.
We hope he survived the carnage.
A 1941 magazine article by Delbert Johnson that reported on the unprecedented success of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives during the earliest period of the Japanese occupation:
Industrial cooperation in China, which was no more than a paper plan three years ago, today is a nation-wide movement that has cast a blight upon Japan’s economic aspirations in Asia and is providing the people of China a new means of salvation against aggression.
The plan for the Indusco movement came into being during the dark days of the spring and summer of of 1938…Seemingly, China was doomed to economic strangulation if not to military defeat. But a handful of Chinese and foreign visionaries’ thought otherwise. They knew that time, area and population all would work to China’s advantage in any prolonged struggle.
The children whose pictures you see on the advertising pages of national magazines often launch their careers when they are scarcely larger than their social security numbers. Blonde or brunette, freckled or glamorous, these famous boys and girls help sell you everything from automobiles to safety pins. As accustomed to to a camera as a top-flight movie star, they enjoy their work partly because it satisfies their fondness for ‘make-believe’.
Nice work if you can get it. But the maestros of the modeling agencies, John Robert Powers and Harry Conover, emphasize the fact that finding juvenile models is a difficult assignment.
Attached is a history article concerning the various organizations that made up the French Colonial Army in Africa:
Before and during the World War, all the different races serving in the French Army were excellently officered by subalterns and non-coms born in North Africa, but of European ancestry: by sons of immigrated colonists of French, Spanish and Italian extraction.
The late Marshal Lyautey used to say of these sons of European settlers: ‘Their knowledge of the ways of the natives is priceless, because they have assimilated it from childhood. In the native regiments, they constitute a human concrete, which keeps together men of antagonistic races and beliefs’
The attached six page article about Cab Calloway (1907 – 1994) makes no mention whatever of the three movies he had appeared in prior to 1941, but it answers many other questions you might have had about the musician’s first thirty-one years.
Although our friends in Asia, Europe and Canada had been fighting the Axis for at least a year and a half, American corporations continued to trade with the fascists all the way up until the U.S. declaration of war. This 1941 article, published seven months prior to that day, goes into some detail on the matter; although corporations are not named, it is pretty easy to identify them by their products.
One reason why America today is short of ships to fill Britain’s desperate needs is [due to] the fact that for six years or more, Japan and her scrap agents bought almost every American cargo vessel placed on the auction blocks, using them for scrap to feed the blazing steel mills of Nipon.
When these eight pictures of Hollywood actress Jane Russell (1921 – 2012) were snapped in the spring of 1941, she wasn’t up to much. She was studying acting at Max Reinhardt’s Theatrical Workshop in Los Angeles and more than likely waiting for her seven year contract with Howard Hughes to expire. The film that she’d made with him the previous year, The Outlaw, would not [be widely] distributed for some time and so we imagine that she jumped at the chance to put on a bathing suit and clown around on the beach when she got the call from the boys at PIC MAGAZINE. With the onslaught of the Second World War, she would be doing much of the same sort of posing for the pin-up photographers.
In the attached photo-essay, the PIC editors went out on a limb and called her one of America’s greatest beauties.
Adorned with photos of the famous movie-monster-actor mowing his lawn and kissing his wife, this COLLIER’S MAGAZINE article tells the tale of how an English boy named William Henry Pratt became a famous Hollywood actor named Boris Karloff (1887 – 1969). This piece was originally conceived in order to promote the actor’s appearance on Broadway in the roll of Jonathan in Arsenic and Old Lace. The writer makes it quite clear to all that the show-biz career did not in any way come easily to Karloff and involved years of truck driving and traveling about performing in summer-stock theaters throughout the whole of North America before he was able to make a name for himself as a bit actor in the silent films of Hollywood.
Click here to read about the vulgar side of Erroll Flynn.
