Articles from 1942
Side by side with with the fighting men who ride to battle goes an army of men who fight with tools and machinery, instead of guns and tanks… That army of fighter-mechanics has grown in importance with the increase in the Army’s dependence on motorized equipment. They operate beyond the glow of headlines – but without the aid of mechanics the Army’s wheels would never turn.
In the attached PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE article, Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911 – 2004), the Hollywood actor who would one day become the fortieth president of the United States (1981–1989), gives a tidy account as to who he was in 1942, and what was dear to him:
My favorite menu is steaks smothered with onions and strawberry short cake. I play bridge adequately and collect guns, always carry a penny as a good luck charm…I’m interested in politics and governmental problems. My favorite books are Turnabout, by Thorne Smith, Babbitt, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the works of Pearl Buck, H.G. Wells, Damon Runyon and Erich Remarque.
A good read and a revealing article by a complicated man.
Click here to read about a Cold War prophet who was much admired by President Reagan…
The Nazis quickly extended the dread Nuremberg laws to the occupied territory. Jews lost jobs, businesses, property, liberty, even their lives. They were flung into primitive concentration camps and deported to Polish ghettos. And with them the Nazis brought the usual wave of Jewish suicides.
Schwab’s Pharmacy was like many other well-heeled American pharmacies of the Forties – it filled prescriptions, sold cigars, served three squares a day at their counter and cracked-wise with the clientele. What made it different was that many of the customers were among the most glam movie stars of the time. Located on Sunset Boulevard, west of Hollywood, in an area known as Sherman:
It’s the one place in Hollywood where screen biggies like Robert Taylor, Gene Tierney and Marlene Dietrich drop in and out all day and make themselves at home.
If you ever wondered why The National W.W. II Museum is located in New Orleans rather than West Point, Annapolis or the nation’s capitol – the answer can be spoken in two words: Andrew Higgins. Higgins was the innovator who designed and manufactured the landing crafts that made it possible for the Allied forces to land on all those far-flung beaches throughout the world and show those Fascists dogs a thing or two. His factory, Higgins Industries, was located on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans and it was for this reason that the museum board of directors chose to doff their collective caps, and erect their repository in his home town.
Attached is a five page photo-essay about Higgins and all that he was doing to aid in the war effort.
A 1946 article from Script, a semi-chic Beverly Hills magazine (it went belly-up in 1949), explaining just how it came to pass that a sweet, little Brooklyn girl named Margarita Carmen Cansino became Rita Hayworth (1918 – 1987):
Then came reincarnation. Rita discarded her Spanish name, gave away her dancing costumes, did something to her hairline, stuck a y into her mother’s family name (Joseph Haworth, same family, toured with Edwin Booth) and so on to the big time and ‘Cover Girl’ and ‘Tonight and Every Night’.
So the girl with a Spanish father and an Anglo-Saxon mother becomes the typical American girl to thousands of American soldiers abroad, and that, too, is as it should be.
Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.
Attached is a eye-witness account of the Los Angeles Issie and Nisei populations after having been removed from their homes and detained at Santa Anita racetrack prior to their transfer and subsequent incarceration at Manzanar, California.
There are more than 6,000 Japanese housed in the stables which once accommodated 2,000 horses…Each stall has had a room built on in front with doors and windows and the floors have been covered with a layer of asphaltum which seems to have killed the odors.
This article, laced throughout with subtle undertones of condemnation, was written by a Hollywood screenwriter named Alfred Cohn (1880 – 1951) who is largely remembered today for having written the adaptation for the Al Jolson movie The Jazz Singer (1929).
Paulette Goddard (1910 – 1990) is pictured in color wearing an all-purpose uniform designed by the Hollywood stylist Irene (Irene Lentz, 1900 – 1962). The actress was a sporadic volunteer, having appeared in four films throughout 1942.
When LIFE MAGAZINE ran a cheese cake picture of Diana Barrymore (1921 – 1960) on the cover of their July 31, 1939 issue
The literati have all agreed: there is no doubt that if Shakespeare were alive today he would live in Beverly Hills, California. He would dwell in a 1930s split-level Persion-conversion, probably on Palm or Roxbury. As a well-compensated screenwriter he would churn-out the standard plots that were expected of him: fish-out-of-water dramadies, romcoms, and (under assorted pen names) a few reality shows; and like the poet whose work is attached, he would write about matters unique to Southern California -valet parking, Cobb Salads -and in this case the Hollywood agent.
This poem was written by Sydney King Russell (1898 – 1976), who, like Shakespeare, knew that if you’re going to write a poem about Hollywood agents, you’ll need to crack open the ol’ rhyming dictionary to see what rhymes with ten percent.
Within the toasty-warm confines of the attached PDF lie the text of a speech that Chaplin delivered over the war-torn airwaves in 1942. Wishing only to encourage the citizenry of London and Washington, D.C. to be of stout heart in their battle against the Fascist powers, Chaplin’s address was titled, Give Us More Bombs Over Berlin.
During the opening months of 1941 Nazi Germany was positively drunk with power; their army seemed able to march wherever it chose and all of Europe was trembling. Foreign correspondent for the Hearst papers, H.R. Knickerbocker (1898 – 1949), pointed out that on April 29, 1941 the Axis forces had printed, what he termed, a trial balloon on the pages of The Japan Times Advertiser that clearly indicated the peace terms that were acceptable to them.
An interesting look at the beauty products used by American women during the Second World War and how that war effected the cosmetic industry. Students of history will be reminded that when a nation commits itself to a state of total war, all available elements within a government’s grasp will be picked over by that country’s military; even makeup.
If you’re following a routine of ‘beauty as usual’ with qualms of conscience, believing that cosmetics and toiletries use materials essential to the war machine, know for certain that if Uncle Sam needed your lipstick for bombs and bullets, he’d have gotten it first.
The U.S. cosmetics industry was effected in many ways, read the article and find out.
Click here to read an article about a popular 1940s hairstyle.
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…
Joseph Cummings Chase (1878 – 1965) was an American painter who’s name is not likely to be associated with World War I artists but, like Sir William Orpen, he had a comfortable place within fashionable circles and he, too, was commissioned to paint portraits of the anointed within his nations military establishment. This article appeared in 1942 and primarily concerns the W.W. I portrait that Chase painted of Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur during the closing days of the war:
Joseph Cummings Chase is without doubt one of the world’s greatest portrait painters, and as luck would have it, he was in Paris when World War I began, at which time the Government commissioned him to paint the Distinguished Service Cross men, both enlisted men and officers, wherever he could catch up with them; some in dugouts, some in trenches, and some behind the lines.
Click here to see a few trench war images by German Expressionist Otto Dix.
Click here to read a 1942 article by Rockwell Kent on the proper roll of American artists during wartime.
Attached is a decidedly pro Lilian Gish (1893 – 1993) article concerning the silent film actresses‘ meteoric rise under the direction of D.W. Griffith, her mediocrity when paired with other directors and her much appreciated march on Broadway.
Lilian Gish is the damozel of Arthurian legend, tendered in terms of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her heroines perpetually hover in filtered half-lights, linger in attitudes of romantical despair. They forever drift farther from reality than the dream, and no matter how humble their actual origins, the actress invariably weaves them of the dusk-blues, the dawn-golds of medieval tapestries.
Click here if you would like to read an article in which Lillian Gish recalls her part in Birth of a Nation.
Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.
Attached is a decidedly pro Lilian Gish (1893 – 1993) article concerning the silent film actresses‘ meteoric rise under the direction of D.W. Griffith, her mediocrity when paired with other directors and her much appreciated march on Broadway.
Lilian Gish is the damozel of Arthurian legend, tendered in terms of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Her heroines perpetually hover in filtered half-lights, linger in attitudes of romantical despair. They forever drift farther from reality than the dream, and no matter how humble their actual origins, the actress invariably weaves them of the dusk-blues, the dawn-golds of medieval tapestries.
Click here if you would like to read an article in which Lillian Gish recalls her part in Birth of a Nation.
Click here to read articles about Marilyn Monroe.
The U.S. had only been actively engaged in World War II for five months when the American artist Rockwell Kent (1882 – 1971) felt the impulse to write about the unique roll an artist must play when a democracy goes to war:
The art of a democracy must be, like democracy itself, of and by and for the people. It must and will reflect the public mood and public interest…Awareness of America, of its infinitely varied beauties and of its sometimes sordid ugliness; awareness of the life of America, of its fulfillments and its failures; awareness, if you like, of God, the landscape architect supreme – and political failure: of the promise of America and of its problems, art has been, or has aimed to be, a revelation. It is for the right to solve these problems our way that we are now at war.
