Recent Articles – Page 42 – Old Magazine Articles

‘The Grapes of Wrath”
(Click Magazine, 1940)

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?

John Steinbeck became a war correspondent in 1943.

The Silent Movie Producers of 1919
(Vanity Fair, 1919)

In three short pages this article outlines the growth of the film industry beginning in 1909 to the time of this printing, in 1919.

In 1930 Adolf Zukor was listed as one of the most powerful men in Washington…

Restraining The Terror In Georgia
(The Literary Digest, 1921)

Whether Georgia Governor Hugh M. Dorsey (1871 – 1948) was overwhelmed by a sense of humanity or whether he simply wished to reduce the northern flow of African-Americans from his state in the Great Migration – we’ll never know, but the fact stands that in late April, 1921, the Governor stood before the State Committe on Race Relations and spoke of 135 instances in which Black citizens were unjustly treated by White Georgians (The Georgia Government document pertaining to his address can be read here).

Paris Exults After Four Years of War
(The Stars and Stripes, 1918)

A very moving column from the front page of the November 15, 1918 Stars and Stripes describing the joyous pandemonium that characterized the city of Paris when World War I came to a close:

And all Paris laughed the laugh of happy children after a day’s glad play. And the next day, and the next night, Paris sallied forth to romp and play again.

Click here to read about the W.W. II liberation of Paris.

‘Why I Live in Paris” by a Former American Soldier
(American Legion Monthly, 1927)

This piece was penned by an anonymous expatriate, a former American soldier of the Great War who went into some detail comparing life in 1920s Paris to the life he knew in America, and he is quite funny about it. He described a Paris that Hemingway, Stein and Fitzgerald didn’t talk about.

Back in America I sincerely thought that my hometown had the worst telephone system in the world. This was a colossal error…

Click here to read about the fall of Paris…

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.

The Invention of the Car was Revolutionary
(Vanity Fair Magazine, 1920)

As early as 1920, the number of automobiles was quickly growing throughout the Western world. In this very brief article, a journalist lays out how rapidly life was changing in the United States as a result of the horseless carriage.

The village smithy is no more. In the place of that interesting relic of a bygone day, there stands a substantial concrete building marked ‘Garage’…

Dachau
(Collier’s Magazine, 1945)

Attached is Martha Gellhorn’s (1908 – 1998) very disturbing eyewitness account of the Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Poland:

Nothing about war was ever as insanely wicked as these starved and outraged naked, nameless dead. Behind one pile of dead lay the clothed healthy bodies of the German guards who had been found in this camp. They were killed at once by the prisoners when the American Army entered.

The man primarily responsible for delivering the innocent into the ovens of the death camps was Obergrupenfuehrer Albert Ganzenmüller click here to read about him…

The Faith of Mahalia Jackson
(Pageant Magazine, 1964)

In this 1964 article, the cherished Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911 – 1972) explained for the reader the relationship she had with the Almighty and further remarked that this relationship was the exact one God required from Christians:

– you have to have a made-up mind. You don’t straddle the fence serving God; we must put our all on the alter and let God abide.

The Archbishop Did His Bit
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1947)

A small notice from 1947 that reported on the archdiocese of St. Louis standing up in favor of racially integrating their school system – while simultaneously threatening excommunication to all members of the flock who contested the decision.

The State of African-Americans in 1929
(The Book League, 1929)

This book review of Scott Nearing’s Black America
was published on the eve of the Great Depression and it provides a very accurate account of that community.

There are in the United States today, if statistics do not lie, some twelve million Negroes. The population of the Argentine is not so large, nor that of Holland, nor that of Sweden. Eight million of these dark Americans live in the South. In Georgia alone there are more than a million colored people…How do they live – these blacks in a country controlled by whites.

Author Scott Nearing (1883 – 1983) was an American naturalist, educator and civil rights advocate.

Click here to read an article by Ralph Ellison concerning Black writers of the 1930s.

The Ice was Thawing…
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1949)

Starting in the 1940s, small articles like the one here began appearing in magazines and newspapers across the nation – snippets indicating that the American people (ie. whites) were slowly catching on to the system of racial injustice they had inherited – and wondering aloud as to the tyranny of it all:

To 13 co-eds at Uppsala College, East Orange, N.J., democracy is something more than a worn text-book theory. It is a living, though thorny, reality. Shortly before school’s end, they formed one of the nation’s first interracial, interfaith college social sororities.

Another article about segregation’s end can be read here.

King’s March in Washington
(United States News, 1963)

Although the attached article is indeed about the famous civil rights march on Washington that took place in August of 1963, the journalist made his primary concern the political gains and losses that remained after all was said and done.

‘The Girl Who Started the Civil-Rights Breakthrough”
(Pageant Magazine, 1964)

This article recalls the story behind the 1954 Supreme Court case Brown vs. the Board of Education.

The Beginning of the End for Jim Crow
(Washington World, 1963)

By citing numerous examples of American jurisprudence spanning the early to mid-Fifties, this uncredited journalist illustrates that the era of Jim Crow was being disassembled brick-by-bigoted-brick:

All across the South, the segregation wall is cracking. The hammer is being wielded by the courts… The executive branch is also moving into the civil rights field.

The Crew of the Enola Gay Fifteen Years Later
(Coronet Magazine, 1960)

The men of the Enola Gay were hand-picked experts, chosen for intelligence, emotional stability and discipline, qualities they have put to good use in their post-war careers. Four remained in the service (one died in 1953) and the others are all successful in their business carees. They earn above-average salaries, all but one are married and they have 26 children among them. None of them has been to Japan since the war, and few have met since separation.

Walt Disney’s Artists and the Making of ‘Bambi’
(Collier’s Magazine, 1942)

For the production of Snow White (1938), the Disney artists had gone to great lengths in order to properly portray the manner in which young women move; these efforts were rewarded at the box-office to such a high degree that the same devotion was applied to the study of deer anatomy in their efforts to create Bambi (1942).

We had to remember, that Disney has a ruthless fidelity to the physical scene, to the truth of nature, even when he may seem to be distorting nature.

Click here to read more articles about Disney animation.

A Most Memorable Jingle
(PM Tabloid, 1940)

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.