1941 – Page 4 – Old Magazine Articles

The German Resistance
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

The Free German Movement is vigorously gnawing away at the very roots of Naziism with teeth filed to needle sharpness. Our organizations are fighting Hitler, at home or in South America with his own weapons. We have consolidated earlier gains against Hitler with important new gains.

So wrote Dr. Otto Strasser (1897 – 1974) who oversaw the Free German Movement, the Black Front and other Nazi resistance organizations. He must have been pretty effective, the Nazis put a half-million dollar price on his head.

‘Man on the Street Solidly Approves of War Declaration”
(St. Louis Star-Times, 1941)

This report appeared in the evening edition of the St. Louis Star-Times on December 8, 1941 and it serves as an eyewitness account as to how the St. Louisans reacted both during and after listening to the President’s declaration of war broadcast before Congress:

In downtown restaurants and taverns, people paused to listen to the dramatic broadcast from Washington. Work was at a standstill for those minutes in many office buildings and stores. Pedestrians crowded around newsboys to obtain the latest ‘extras’ and along the streets groups could be seen collected about radio-equipped automobiles.

Civil Defense Insignias
(The American Magazine, 1941)

Here are the sleeve insignia by which you can identify the various groups of U.S. Civilian Defense Workers – men and women, boys and girls, who volunteer for home duty to protect you in war [emergencies]

Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

This unprepossessing place is the American survivor of a great international movement, the Bauhaus of Dessau, which filled the world with tubular chairs and sectional sofas. The Bauhaus, like so many other things German, drew Hitler’s ire because it was too intellectually independent. Hitler dissolved it in 1938…Some fragments of Bauhaus fled to America. Dr Laszalo Moholy-Nagy escaped with some remnants of students’ work and saught refuge in Chicago. There, in his concrete warehouse, Moholy-Nagy’s movement has taken root.

They do the oddest things…A chair might just be a double loop of shellacked plywood. It is steamed and shaped so that it has a seat, and a back, and stands on the floor…It doesn’t look like much of a chair. It will do the job for which chairs are sold.

Living Under the Bombs
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

Here is one of the reviews of Pattern of Conquest, a book by Joseph C. Harsch (1905 – 1998) – a CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR correspondent who had been posted to Germany during the earliest years of the war:

Harsch says that German morale is ‘fundamentally unsound’ however, and that it took a bad beating when the RAF first bombed Berlin, which Marshal Goering had said would happen only ‘over his dead body’. (‘Have you heard the news?’ Berliners asked each other, after the first raids. ‘Goering’s dead.’)

Click here to read about the 1943 bombing campaign against Germany.

A Patriotic Argument for Shorter Skirts
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

Months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Washington was gearing-up for the fight by restricting the availability of certain fabrics to the fashion industry and diverting these materials to the defense industry. This started an open discussion in fashion circles as to whether it would simply be best to raise the hemlines until the national emergency was over.

The Fashion Originators Guild termed shorter skirts silly and added that dresses ‘are just as short today as decency and grace will permit.

The Soviets Bombed Berlin, Too
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

This Newsweek article reported on the first Red Air Force bombing raid on the city of Berlin (August 11, 1941). The Soviets kept the pressure up for a few more weeks until their airfield was overrun in September.

The Partisan War
(PM Tabloid, 1941)

A Red Army officer, who said the German Army was being constantly harassed behind its lines by partizan activities and guerilla warfare, told me details of a number of recent incidents in White Russia. He said almost every village in German-occupied territory had supplied one or more groups of partizans who lived in the woods and used every opportunity to waylay detachments of infantry patrols and tanks.

Japan Could Not Afford to Go to War
(St. Louis Star-Times, 1941)

The day following Japan’s debut performance at Pearl Harbor found American economists assessing the economic strength of that country in an effort to understand how long their military would be able to exert power:

Government economists doubted today that Japan’s economy could withstand a long war with the United States.

Four years after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese newspaper editorial expressed deep regret for Japan’s aggressiveness in the Second World War, click here to read about it…

Novelty ”Victory Fashion” Makes An Appearance
(Newsweek Magazine, 1941)

It’s hard to believe – but Victory Fashion hit the American home front before it was even called the home front. However by mid-1941 Americans were pretty outraged by fascist aggression: the U-boats, London bombed, Nanking ravaged, France invaded – the list goes on. When this article went to press, we were not in the war but we were firmly on the Allied side. The word victory made its way into fashion circles and the nation’s couturiers began turning out novelty accessories and garments. Even the hairdressers contributed.

The John Powers Modeling Agency
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

They sip your favorite coffee, drive your dream car, display the latest fashions, show you how to cook a waffle: they are potent forces in the scheme of American advertising. Their faces and figures adorn the covers of countless magazines…often they develop into stars of the cinema. They come from all over America to an office on Park Avenue, New York, where a quiet, discerning man named John Robert Powers appraises their charms and schools them for the job of selling sables to society or groceries to the great American housewife.

Beginning in the mid-Twenties and spanning the years leading up to the late Forties, John Robert Powers (1892 – 1977) created and maintained the first modeling agency in New York City (if not the world) and during the Forties, the Powers Agency grossed over five million dollars a year. Attached are nine photos of the most popular fashion models he represented in 1941; a unique breed of woman known at the time as Powers girls.

The Failures of W.W. I American Press Censorship
(Collier’s Magazine, 1941)

Seven and a half months before the second installment of the War-to-End-All-Wars was to begin, George Creel (1876 – 1953), America’s first official censor from World War I, wrote this article for the editors of Collier’s Magazine explaining why he believed that censorship in an open society cannot work:

As many scars bear witness, I was the official censor during the World War. For two years I rode herd on the press, trying to enforce the concealment demanded by the Army and Navy.

Alternative Lyrics for the National Anthem
(Pathfinder, 1941)

Do you fail to recall the words to our national anthem time and again? You’re not alone – a quick glance at Google’s records indicate that in the silence of their rooms, thousands of your fellow Americans suffer from the same malady (and smirk at others who make their memory loss public). To say that the Americans of today are not as patriotic as they used to be is an understatement to be sure – but some of you will no doubt be relieved to know that the Americans of yore, vintage 1941, didn’t know the lyrics to The Star Spangled Banner any better than we do – as you can tell by the attached verses which were penned over seventy years ago about his fellow Americans and their inability to keep the words of Francis Scott Key in their heads.

Adolf Hitler and the German-Americans
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

This is a fascinating article not simply for what you’ll learn about Hitler, but for what you’ll additionally learn about the manner in which many Germans tended to view that queerest of hybrids, the German-Americans.

This article was written by Rene Kraus, who had been a German diplomat during the Wiemar Republic and a refugee under Hitler.

Click here to read about the German-Americans who called themselves Nazis.

Click here and you will learn that Kaiser Wilhelm was also bugged by German-Americans.

College Fashion
(Look Magazine, 1941)

Dusty, Peggy and Jean were just three of the co-eds that made up the six percent of American women who attended college in 1941 – and that’s all that was required of them in order for the trio to sample fashion’s latest wares and sound-off in the attached Fall fashion review. Go figure.

‘America’s No. 1 Negro”
(The American Magazine, 1941)

Paul Robeson (1898 – 1976) was a multi-talented man and this article lays it all out.

Paul Robeson thinks of himself as conclusive proof that there is no such thing as a backward race. Given a few generations of equal opportunities, he believes, any people – Eskimos, Malayans, Fijians or the Untouchables of India – can produce as talented statesmen, scientists, educators, inventors and artists as the whites.

In Search of the Average New Yorker
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

A well-known writer consulted many different sources about that rarest of species, the New Yorker – he came away with these many different replies:

Yeah. New Yorkers are suckers, all right. They think they are so much smarter than anybody else, but they’re the biggest suckers of them all.

New York Beneath a Bombsight
(Coronet Magazine, 1941)

When this article hit the newsstands, W.W. II was in full swing throughout many parts of Asia, Europe and North Africa. America had not yet committed itself to the war, but the grim, far-seeing souls who ran New York City recognized that it was inevitable – and much to their credit, they had been studying the possibility of New York City air raids since 1939.

Another article about wartime N.Y. can be read here…

Click here to learn about the New Yorkers who volunteered to fight the Germans and Japanese in W.W. II.