1939

 

Gone with the Wind was a hint in print and on screen.

____________________

 

“Somebody doesn’t always come right up to you and say, ‘You can’t have this, you can’t have that.’ It’s just as though there is a hair that blows across your face. Nobody sees it, but it’s there and you can feel it.”

 

Marian Anderson on encountering racism

____________________

 

 

January 1: According to Propaganda Analysis, there are 800 organizations in the United States that could be called pro-fascist.

 

Some of them had “Fascist” in the name of the organization. Most of them resorted to at least some of the flummery of fascism, using the swastika, or something approaching it, as part of their insignia. The members wore colored shirts with a paramilitary cut; the leaders mimicked the insufferable posturings of the European dictators. All of them posed a threat (some more than others), despite their claims to the role of savior: to save democracy, to save Christianity, to save individualism and free enterprise, to save the country from something or other. Their anxieties about The safety and preservation of the Bible, the faith of their fathers, the Constitution, and “the American way of life” meant, in translation, an anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-Roosevelt campaign that, for sheer lunatic intensity, was without parallel in the American experience.

 

On the right, fascism was in bloom. One native-born fascist warned that “the crippled Jesus would betray America with a kiss.” Included in this crew would be Gerald B. Winrod, “the Jayhawk Nazi,” William Dudley Pelly of the Silver Shirts, George W. Christians of the White Shirts, Harry A. Jung of the American Vigilante Intelligence Federation, George Deatherage, fuehrer of the Knights of the White Camellia, which used the swastika for its symbol, and James True, of America First, Incorporated, whose group’s stated goal was frustrating “the Jew Communism which the New Deal is trying to force on America.” (1127-89)

 

*

 

The Batman character is first introduced in Detective Comics no. 27. The artist Bob Kane teams up with the writer Bill Finger.

 

 

*

 

April 9: Having been blocked by the Daughters of the Revolution from singing in Constitution Hall in Washington D.C., Marian Anderson is offered a spot at the Lincoln Memorial. Eleanor Roosevelt has helped arrange the Easter Sunday arrangement, and Anderson sings before 75,000. She performs a number of what American Heritage (“An Interview with Marian Anderson,” by Barbara Klaw) once described as “Negro spirituals,” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria.”

 

As Klaw notes in her article, Conductor Arturo Toscanini once said that Anderson had “a voice one hears once in a hundred years.” She grew up in Philadelphia, got her first taste of singing in the church choir and eventually made her debut at the Town Hall in New York City. Reviews were unfavorable and “she almost dropped the whole idea of a singing career. Yet, she persisted. One critic later compared her contralto to “velvet,” and in the 1930s she traveled Europe, performing to acclaim – but not in Germany, of course. American Heritage notes: “Early in the Hitler regime, she was asked to sing there, until a singularly uninformed manager wrote asking for assurance that she was 100 per cent Aryan. That concert was quickly cancelled.”

 

The comparison – Daughters of the American Revolution – Hitler’s regime – was obvious. Mrs. Roosevelt, for one, resigned her membership as a result.

 

Anderson told Klaw how she got started in music, at age six, as part of a church choir.

 

And also about then somebody took me to a concert, and this was a Negro orchestra and the violinist came forward and played a solo, and I thought, that’s for me. The big thing then for making money was scrubbing steps, so I scrubbed steps and I would get five or ten cents, or whatever. I did steps for four or five different people. Finally I saw a violin in a pawn shop and my aunt [Mary Prichard] went with me and I think it cost all of three dollars or a little more. But in any case, I happen to have saved that much money at the time, and I – how naive can you get? – I asked the man in the pawn shop if it was a good violin. Of course he said yes.

 

Well, I’ll tell you, I didn’t have a teacher for it, I never had even one lesson, but I learned to play so many things on it – sometimes all on one string. I’d go up as high as I could go and as low as it could go, and strings would break and I almost lost the bridge. …From the time I was a very small child, music always got my attention.

 

Klaw asked about that failed concert debut. Anderson remembered:

 

My teacher put together a program in which there were four German lieder. I sang this German phonetically, and the notices were not very good. The critics said Marian Anderson sang her German as if by rote. And I was extremely disappointed. I took it very much to heart, I suppose because I knew that they were absolutely right, you know. It was a great shock. Anyway, I didn’t sing in public for more than a year after that.

 

I was really that much discouraged. I was trying to get rid of everything that pertained to music as much as possible. I just said, alright, that part of my life is finished.

 

My mother said to me, you must remember that nobody has one hundred per cent acceptance of what they do. No one is perfect. If there were people who were perfect they would have been taken up above long ago.

 

Then came the time when I couldn’t stand it any longer and I just absolutely had to go back to singing.

 

Anderson also remembered her experience when she first applied at a Philadelphia music school, in the city where she grew up:

 

It was a tremendously great shock, and I was very unprepared. I went into this music school to see about applying. There at the window was this beautiful girl, and I thought, she has everything, she has beauty, she is here in a school where she hears music every day, it’s just wonderful. I was standing in line and when I got almost to the window she looked past me to the person in back of me. Then she did this again. Finally she said, “What do you want?” I said, “I would like to have a brochure, please.” And she said, “We don’t take colored.” And she said it as if… she liked saying it, you know.” So you learn. I don’t say you ever accept, but you learn that there are people who are like that.

 

Even as her career took off, travel in Jim Crow America could be difficult. Anderson told Klaw,

 

Well, there were certain places on trains where my people were supposed to stay that were not conducive to sleeping or anything else. If the porter was friendly enough or knew the Pullman porter, they might at night, when people were already in bed, give you a lower berth if they had an extra on the train. So I could get to sleep. But I was always anxious to get out of it in the morning before other people were up.

 

Sometimes they would give you berth 13. Berth 13 was a drawing room. That was special treatment. The thing is you had your own bathroom in berth 13. In the regular berths, the bathroom at the end of the car took care of two or three people at the same time, and you would probably be in there when someone else came in, and I don’t know what unpleasant incidents could or would take place. …

 

Somebody doesn’t always come right up to you and say, “You can’t have this, you can’t have that.” It’s just as though there is a hair that blows across your face. Nobody sees it, but it’s there and you can feel it.

 

What you did then was to change trains in Washington. Somebody would come through the train and make an announcement: “Coming into Washington, coming into Washington.” In Washington you got on another train to go south and there was a special coach on there for my people. It’s all so unbelievable that other human beings can be so small. One doesn’t change as a person from Philadelphia to Washington!

 

Anderson added that, of course, she could not get a hotel room in the South. 

I always had to have the manager seek somebody in the Negro section who had enough room so that I might be a guest while I was there for the concert. These families were as lovely to me as they could possibly be, but I didn’t, of course, have the peace and quiet that I would have had in a hotel.

 

This interview was conducted in 1977, but the famous singer still remembered how it had once been – despite her fame, even then. Audiences in the South were segregated. “Yes, I sang before segregated audiences for a while,” she told Klaw. “And then I didn’t do it anymore. I said I wouldn’t come back until things were different.” Then she added, “We lost a few concerts. When seats were made available anywhere in the hall for anyone who had the money to pay for them, then we went back.”

 

Klaw wondered. With her success in Europe, before the war, had she ever considered staying there? What made her come back? 

It’s home. My mother was a wonderful, unassuming person. She was not a fighter, she didn’t talk loud. I never heard her voice raised in anger, but all through the years, Mother was always there. One of the things that made me happiest in my life was that I could eventually tell Mother, who worked hard every day, that she didn’t have to work anymore. She was a cleaning lady at Wanamaker’s, and she had been ill, and the doctor suggested that she stay home one particular morning. So I called up the head of the department and I said, “This is Marian Anderson, and my mother will not be coming in any more to work.” My mother was a person on whom they put the hardest things to do. I used to come from high school down to Wanamaker’s, and Mother would be digging in some little corner, feeling that the existence of the store depended on how clean she got that corner.

 

I would have come back from anywhere to my family.

 

Anderson told Klaw that her manager, Sol Hurok, tried to shield her from some of the affronts that would come on account of her race, sometimes simply not telling her about them. In reference to the D.A.R. concert at Constitution Hall, she told Klaw, “I was not aware of what was going on until one morning” she saw a newspaper headline about Mrs. Roosevelt’s decision to resign.

 

Wasn’t it very upsetting, Klaw asked?

 

Well, when I first knew about it, it was. Music to me means . so much, such beautiful things, and it seemed impossible that you could find people who would curb you, stop you, from doing a thing which is beautiful. I wasn’t trying to sway anybody into any movements or anything of that sort, you know.

 

            How did you feel, performing at the Lincoln Center, Anderson was asked?

 

It was a tremendous thing and my heart beat like mad – it’s never beat like that before – loud and strong and as though it wanted to say something, if you know what I mean. I don’t like to use the word protesting but my reaction was, what have I done that should bring this onto my heart? I was not trying to cut anybody down. I just wanted to sing and to share.

 

(Anderson, of course, had a fantastic career – and sang at the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, another important moment, symbolically.)

 

*

 

“I walked out a free man.”

 

For another take on the incidents of Anderson’s life, The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects: Ossie Davis, then a student at Howard University, is in the audience when Anderson performs. It was a cold and dreary day, he recalled, and she was wearing a mink coat. “All of a sudden,” Davis said, “something in her singing, something in her voice, something in her demeanor entered me and opened me up and made me a free man….Marian Anderson, on that particular day, opened the doors of my prison, and I walked out a free man.”

 

Anderson (1897-1993) was born and raised in Philly; she was close to her grandfather, who had been freed from slavery. After she was turned down for entrance to the music academy in Philadelphia:

 

She studied with a private tutor and in 1925 won a chance to perform with the New York Philharmonic. She performed at Carnegie Hall three years later; but entrenched racism forced her to head to Europe where she had greater opportunities to sing. In the 1930s it was said Scandinavian and Russian fans had “Marian fever.” …

 

Refused accommodations in Princeton, New Jersey, she stayed with Albert Einstein. They became lifelong friends.

 

In 1939 she wanted to sing in D.C. Permission to use Central High School was denied because the city was still segregated. This raised outrage – compounded when the DAR blocked her at Constitution Hall. As noted, the First Lady resigned from the DAR in protest. Anderson commented, “I am not surprised at Mrs. Roosevelt’s action because she seems to me to be one who really comprehends the true meaning of democracy. I am shocked beyond words to be barred from the capital of my own country after having appeared almost in every other capital in the world.”

 

Hundreds of other members also withdrew from the DAR. Of course, others offered vocal support for the decision to bar Anderson.

 

Nevertheless, a rising tide of disgust helped advance the cause of equality. A reporter wrote, “Out of the narrow-minded mixture of red tape and prejudice that has kept Marian Anderson, the great negro contralto, from the concert state in this capital of democracy, is growing as if with divine justice one of the most memorable tributes of recognition ever accorded a member of this long suffering race.”

 

At 5:00 p.m. that afternoon (April 9) Harold Ickes spoke into the microphone to the huge crowd: “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”

 

Anderson took off her mink coat and began her performance. The first song was America. “My country ‘tis of Thee/Sweet Land of Liberty/of thee we sing,” she intoned. That song, in that setting, moved many in the audience to tears.

 

Anderson did sing at Constitution Hall in 1943 as part of a Red Cross benefit.

 

*

 

April 30: The Smithsonian’s History of America in 101 Objects: Vladimir Zworykin emigrated to the U.S. in 1919 from Russia; he was one of the early inventors of television. RCA was first on the air in a meaningful way, on this date, broadcasting the opening ceremony of the New York World’s Fair, including a speech by FDR. That made him the first president ever to appear on TV. The TRK-12 was on display at the Fair, in “the living room of the future,” a device RCA was selling for $600. On May 17, RCA used a single camera to broadcast a college baseball game between Princeton and Columbia. About 7,000 sets were sold in the next two years; programs were limited only to New York and Los Angeles. CBS “began two fifteen minute daily newscasts, which featured hard-to-discern commentators running pointers over impossible-to-decipher maps.”

 

The TRK-12 had a tube 5 x 12 inches; the view was reflected in a mirror. By 1946 six thousand sets were being sold in one year. In 1951 the figure rose to 12 million.

 

*

 

“On every front America in 1960 knows more about unleashing the best energies in its citizens.”

 

April 30: The New York World’s Fair opens, the largest international exposition ever. Nicknamed, “The World of Tomorrow,” fairgoers are thrilled to see such marvels as television, nylon stockings, and a robot named Elektro, who can talk and puff a cigarette. The fair attracted 45 million visitors, including two million who paid to float from a 250-foot tall parachute jump. “You could even take in a skin show and ogle an innocent (nearly nude) maiden as she wrestled with Oscar the Obscene Octopus in “Twenty Thousand Legs Under the Sea,” according to Time-Life. Various countries had their own exhibits, including Russia, which featured a 30-ton statue of a worker brandishing a red star, and nicknamed, “Big Joe.” By comparison, the National Cash Register Building, featured a gigantic red, revolving cash register on top, which rang up the fair’s daily attendance. Admission was 50 cents, a steep price. (1129-268)

 

June 5: General Motors’ exhibit, “Futurama,” is one of the biggest attractions at the New York World’s Fair, offering fairgoers a view of what the world would look like in 1960. Life magazine gives this description:

 

America in 1960 is full of a tanned and vigorous people who in 20 years have learned how to have fun. They camp in the forests and hike along the upcountry roads with their handsome wives and children. The college class of 1910 is out there hiking, half its members alive and very fit. These people do not care much for possessions. They are not attached to their own homes and hometowns, because trains, express highways (and of course planes) get them across America in 24 hours.

 

When Americans of 1960 take their two-month vacations, they drive to the great parklands on giant express highways. A two-way skein consists of four 50-m.p.h. lanes on each of the outer edges; two pairs of 75-m.p.h. lanes and in the center, two lanes for 100-m.p.h. express traffic. Cars change from lane to lane at specified intervals, on signal from spaced control towers which can stop and start all traffic by radio. Being out of its drivers control, each car is safe against accident. The cars, built like raindrops, are powered by rear engines that are probably improvements of the Diesel. Inside, they are air conditioned. They cost as low as $200. Off the highway, the driver dawdles again at his own speed and risk.

 

The highways skirt the great cities. But the happiest people live in one-factory farm-villages producing one small industrial item and their own farm produce. Strip planting protects the valley fields against erosion. The land is really greener than it was in 1939. Federal laws forbid the wanton cutting of wooded hillsides. Dams and canals prevent freshets and floods. Fewer acres, intensively and chemically cultivated, feed all the citizens of the U.S. More of the surface of the land is forest and park.

 

Behind this visible America of 1960, hidden in the laboratories, are the inventors and engineers. By the spring of 1939 they had cracked nearly every frontier of progress. Liquid air is by 1960 the source of power. Atomic energy is being used cautiously. Power is transmitted by radio beams, focused by gold reflectors. The Lanova Cell has made all gasoline motors Diesels. These great new powers make life in 1960 immensely easier. Such new alloys as heat-treated beryllium bronze give perfect service. Great telescopes show 100 times more of the cosmos than the men of 1939 saw in the sky. Cures for cancer and infantile paralysis have extended man’s life span and his wife’s skin is still perfect at the age of 75. Architecture and plane construction have been revolutionized by light, non-flammable, strong plastics from soybeans. Houses are light, graceful, easily replaced. Electronic microscopes literally see everything.

 

On every front America in 1960 knows more about unleashing the best energies in its citizens. Nearly everyone is a high-school graduate. The talented get the best education in the world. More people are interested in life, the world, themselves and in making a better world. Politics and emotions still slow progress, but these obstructions are treated with dwindling patience in 1960. (1129-279-280)

 

*

 

June 5: The story goes, that five students from Middlebury College, in Vermont, were driving through Kansas when they suffered a flat tire on their car. While two fixed the tire, a third found a discarded pie tin from the Frisbie Pie Company, founded in Connecticut in 1871, by William Russell Frisbie. The student hurled the tin, yelled, “Frisbie!” and history, later in the form of the Frisbee, was made.

 

A statue on Middlebury College now commemorates the moment. So: you get Hitler invading Poland, and a silly toy at almost the same moment in human history (Time, 6/5/1989.)

 

 

 

*

 

September 1: Hitler’s plan in invading Poland, and later Russia, was that the Slavic population would be deported our kept as slaves. Those allowed to live would be taught only enough “to understand our highway signs.” (Time, 4/6/92, p. 68)

 

*

 

Billie Holiday records the great protest song, “Strange Fruit.” 

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

 

   

*

 

In 1939 only 1,350,000 Americans attend college; by 1974 that figure will reach 10,137,065 (Breach of Faith; p. 46). College enrollment was projected to reach 19.9 million in 2018.

 

*

 

“I think that’s what every woman wants to live for.” 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: In the novel Wickford Point by John P. Marquand, Cousin Clothilde explains the role she believes she has in life. Young ladies today might have an interesting reaction. Her younger, male cousin asks:

 

“Well, I wonder what you live for,” I said.

 

Curiously, my remark did not disturb her in the least.

 

“Now, that’s easy to answer,” Cousin Clothilda said. “I live for Archie [her husband] and the children and for other people, dear. I don’t do it very well. I’m a very careless manager, because no one could ever teach me to add or subtract in school. Nearly all my teachers were very disagreeable people, but I try all the time to make Archie and the children and other people happy. That’s what I live for, dear and I think that’s what every woman wants to live for. You would understand if you were a woman. I suppose it may be different with men.”

 

 

*

 

“You cannot hold them down.”

 

Dr. Roland B. Scott was the first African-American to ever pass the pediatric board exam, in 1934. When he applied for membership to the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1939, his application was denied and then denied several times more. Minutes from a meeting five years later, make the objections of the Academy executive board to the admission of African Americans clear. “If they became members they would want to come and eat with you at the table,” one academy member said. “You cannot hold them down.” 

Dr. Scott and his professor at Howard University, Dr. Dr. Alonzo deGrate Smith, were finally admitted in 1945, but for “educational purposes” only. They were not allowed to attend meetings in the South. 

In September 2020, the Academy formally apologized and changed its bylaws to prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity.

 

* 

December 15: Gone with the Wind premieres in Atlanta. Fans of Margaret Mitchell’s novel are outraged that Vivien Leigh, an English actor, has been chosen to play the part of Scarlett O’Hara. 

Then came the world première. The theater had been rebuilt to resemble a mansion featured in the film, and pretty usherettes wore hoop skirts. And when Miss Leigh appeared on the screen, the old outrage turned to adoration. The feeling quickly spread to the other stars and to the show itself. After the show was over, the president-general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy announced: “No one can quarrel now with the selection of Miss Leigh as Scarlett. She is Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett to the life. The whole thing has me overcome.” (1129-207)

 

In the margin, this blogger wrote simply, “Gag!” Hattie McDaniel, who played the role of Mammy, had been barred from the showing. 

In fact, the whole image portrayed of the South, and slavery, is drivel – albeit the novel is well-written, and the movie still has many fans.

 

* 

By this time there were already rumors that J. Edgar Hoover might be gay – which in 1939 could have destroyed his career. 

A book review in The New Yorker notes:

 

It’s true that, in the absence of more direct evidence, we can’t know. But Gage, who handles the question deftly and thoughtfully, will leave most readers with little doubt that Hoover was essentially married to Tolson, a tall, handsome Midwesterner with a G.W. law degree who went to work at the Bureau in March of 1928, and whom the press habitually referred to as Hoover’s “right-hand man.” Neither of them ever married, or, it appears, had a serious romantic relationship with a woman. After Hoover’s mother died, in 1938—he had lived with her in the family home until then—it was bruited about that now, in his mid-forties, he was marriageable at last. Hoover half-heartedly fanned the embers of a convenient rumor that he just might be engaged to Lela Rogers, the age-appropriate, fervently anti-Communist mother of Ginger. In 1939, he gave an interview in which he claimed to have been searching in vain “for an old-fashioned girl,” adding that “the girls men take out to make whoopee with are not the girls they want as the mother of their children.” Meanwhile, the only person with whom he seems to have enjoyed a documented flirtation, though it was chiefly epistolary, was an F.B.I. agent he had assigned to hunt down Dillinger, a young man named Melvin Purvis. In a correspondence from the thirties that Purvis, not Hoover, saved, the director dwelled admiringly on his agent’s swoon-worthy Clark Gable looks; as Purvis’s boss, he alternately promoted him and punished him for showboating and other infractions. (After forcing Purvis out of the Bureau, Hoover never spoke to him again; he did not even acknowledge his death, by suicide, in 1960.)

 

Beginning in the mid-nineteen-thirties, Hoover and Tolson, confirmed bachelors, as my grandparents would say, were almost inseparable. Though they did not live together in Washington, they took a car to work together every morning and lunched every day at a restaurant called Harvey’s. They went to New York night clubs, Broadway shows, and the horse races à deux, and vacationed together—Miami in the winter and La Jolla for the entire month of August every year. (Gage offers a close reading of photographs Hoover took in Miami one year, which included tender shots of a shirtless Tolson at play on the beach, and asleep in a deck chair.) Social invitations and holiday greetings from anyone who knew Hoover at all well and wanted to stay on his good side were addressed to them both. When Hoover died, he left the bulk of his estate to Tolson. 

* 

December 29: Millennial sects thrive during the Great Depression. That includes the “I Am” group, founded by Guy Ballard. I Am “flourished until its leader…who claimed immortality, died of cirrhosis of the liver.” (1127-148) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: Students interested in the occult, and religions, generally, might find Ballard’s story compelling. (This blogger would call him a kook, but in a classroom would let students come to their own conclusions.) 

The Wikipedia entry explains how the “I Am” movement began:

 

Living at the base of the California volcano Mount Shasta in 1930, Ballard frequently hiked on the mountain, where he reported the following to have occurred.

 

It came time for lunch, and I sought a mountain spring for clear, cold water. Cup in hand, I bent down to fill it, when an electrical current passed through my body from head to foot.

 

I looked around, and directly behind me stood a young man who, at first glance, seemed to be someone on a hike like myself. I looked more closely and realized immediately that he was no ordinary person. As this thought passed through my mind, he smiled and addressed me saying:

 

“My Brother, if you will hand me your cup, I will give you a much more refreshing drink than spring water.” I obeyed, and instantly the cup was filled with a creamy liquid. Handing it back to me, he said: “Drink it.”

 

The young man later identified himself as the Count of St. Germain. Ballard provided details of his encounters with St. Germain and other Ascended Masters in the books Unveiled Mysteries and The Magic Presence, using the pen name Godfré Ray King.

 

Guy Ballard, his wife Edna, and their son Edona Eros “Donald” Ballard (1918-1973) claimed to be the sole “accredited messengers” of Saint Germain. Their teachings constitute the original nucleus of what are today called the “Ascended Master Teachings” and are still used in “I AM” Sanctuaries all over the world.