Articles from 1940
German school children in Bad Wilsnack as elsewhere look like American kids, study the same arithmetic, discuss the same current events in a regular ‘press period’. But they sneer at democracy and tolerance, deliver serious, bitter impassioned orations in regular Fuhrer style against liberty and freedom…Youth is not youth, but a servant of the state.
Many a movie of the deep South has come out of Hollywood studded with ‘you-alls’ and trailing jasmine blossoms. Never before, however, has any studio had Gone with the Wind, already the most heavily publicized picture of the era, which, at long last, makes its film debut…For over two and a half years casting difficulties had beset the producers of Gone With The Wind. Most difficult was the part of Scarlet O’hara, green-eyed vixen around whom the 1,307 page novel revolves. With every leading lady in Hollywood under consideration, the studios tested and re-tested Norma Shearer, Miriam Hopkins, and Paulette Goddard. Even the 56,000,000 people reported by the Gallup poll to be waiting to see the picture began to get tired…
Another great Hollywood movie from 1939 was The Grapes of Wrath – click here to read about it…
In this article from a 1940 fan magazine, Clark Gable puts to rest some disturbing concerns numerous fans had concerning the human affairs that existed on the set during the production of Gone with the Wind. He additionally expressed some measure of gratitude for having landed the juiciest role in Hollywood at that time:
‘Rhett’ is one of the greatest male characters ever created. I knew that. I’d read the entire book through six times, trying to get his moods. I’ve still got a copy in my dressing room and I still read it once in a while, because I know I’ll probably never get such a terrific role again. But what was worrying me, and still is was that from the moment I was cast as ‘Rhett Butler’ I started out with five million critics.
A proud daughter of Georgia, Susan Myrick (1893 – 1978) worked the sixteen hour days in Hollywood policing the Southern accents and manners of every performer who passed before the camera.
A year and a-half before Pearl Harbor American law enforcement agencies got serious about the domestic fascist groups. This article pertains to a twenty-five page Federal order instructing the FBI and local authorities to tap phones and monitor the movements of all groups sympathetic to Axis philosophies.
Attached is an article by the noted war correspondent Frederick Palmer (1873 – 1958) who observed the French and British as they attempted to hold-off the Nazi juggernaut of 1940. In this article, Palmer referred a great deal to walking this same ground with the American Army during the 1914 – 1918 war just twenty-one years earlier; he found the French to be confident of a decisive victory. The column is complemented by this 1940 article which reported on the wonders of Blitzkrieg and the fall of France.
Click here to read the observations of U.S. Army lieutenant Louis L’Amour concerning 1946 Paris.
An article about director Gabriel Pascal (1894 – 1954) and all the assorted difficulties set before him, his cast and his crew while filming George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara during the bombing of England in 1940.
Much of the article is composed of diary entries by an anonymous member of the cast:
After dinner we had a script conference off the lot and kept on working through the air raid sirens, relieved to be away from the studio discipline. Tonight the sky was one vast blaze of searchlights, and no sleep for anyone. It’s tough staying up all night and trying to work between raids all day…
1940 was a pretty good year for Adolf Hitler, but then the L.A. Times review of Mein Kampf came out:
It is obviously the book of an ignorant man, unaccustomed to logic or literature. It is sincere, and done in the style of the soap-boxer, the rabble-rouser. And it is Red; redder than any of the utterances of Emma Goldman or the I.W.W. street speakers. What Hitler calls National Socialism seems to us, although the man denies it on page after page, merely another form of Stalinistic Communism, only this is the German variety…his system blots out the businessman, banker, manufacturer, professional man, teacher, writer, and artist – just as effectively as Stalin’s [Soviet’s]; property goes to the state in both cases; and all freedom of press, church and person dies as wholly in Germany as in Russia.
Finally, to an American, a lemon by any other name, is just as sour.
•You might like to read a more thorough review of Mein Kampf•
In the Spring of 1940, Leo Kober, devoted reader of CLICK MAGAZINE and former crew member of one of the Kaiser’s airships during the First World War, felt compelled to send his personal snap-shots of his zeppelin days to the editors of his fave mag with a few notations; and now we pass them along to you.
A quick read about the return of prosperity by economist turned journalist Ralph Robey:
Majority opinion among government economists at present, according to all reports, is that the current decline of business has another six or eight weeks to run and then there will be an about-face which will start us on an upgrade that by the end of the year will wipe out all the recent losses and bring production back to the high level of the final quarter of last year.
The optimistic year-end forecast – numerous authorities predicted at least a 25 percent rise in residential contracts and officers of the John Manville Corp. forecast the erection 400,000 privately financed homes, largest volume since 1929 – have been buttressed by several important developments since the turn of the year.
Hundreds of thousands of people regard me, I believe, as something of a success: A well-dressed, well-fed young writer, famous for his ties, who has moved upward and forward in the world of letters with a speed veering on the imperceptible; an Oriental whose name has become a word in the English language.
SAROYAN, n., one with money, a gentleman, a scholar, an artist; v., to slay, butcher, club, strafe, bombard, or cause to spin; adj., pleasing, ill-mannered, gallant; prep., near-by, within, over, under, toward.
What, however, is the inside story? What is the truth? Who is the real Saroyan? Is he a success or a failure? I will go over the entire saga from there to here chronologically…
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.
