What Are You Reading

I got an unexpected donation today to my vast archives from a librarian friend -- a large stack of deaccessioned bound volumes of "Life" spanning much of the 1940s. The volumes currently repose on my sun porch, until I figure out where to put them, but I've got a couple of volumes in the house for random thumbing. While I'm no fan at all of the Lucean worldview expressed in "Life" editorials and many of its articles, the magazine is always a worthy window into the fads and foibles of its time.

Picking up the volume for April-June 1945 I note in the June 11th issue a fascinating bit of pop sociology exploring the lives of teenage boys in Des Moines, Iowa -- who, according to the article, build their lives around rigorous conformation to a "pattern of sloppiness" in all that they do. The "classroom uniform" depicted on one boy shows an outfit that wouldn't be out of place on a modern hipster -- he's going to school wearing a baggy, loud, oversized flannel shirt with the tails hanging out, rolled "dungarees," heavy white athletic socks, disreputable moccasins, and what appears to be some kind of a knit hat. Stick a beard on him and a couple of tattoos, and you couldn't pick him out of a crowd in 2017.

This same boy is shown later on sprawled in bed drinking a Pepsi while eating from a box of Cheez-Its while reading a paperback copy of "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." This lad is also a member of a "teenage club" known for wearing a large letter "M" painted across the backside of their blue jeans, that M standing for the name of their society, "The Molesters." The club's main activities seem to consist of loafing in front of drugstore magazine racks, and peeking in the windows of girls' homes at night.

Turning the page, I expected to see the young fellow standing in front of a night-court magistrate with a couple of black eyes, but instead there's a long article about Harry Truman, so I guess we'll never know how the young man in Des Moines turned out. But if he went to school wearing dungarees, you can bet he came to a bad end.

LizzieMaine said:

I got an unexpected donation today to my vast archives from a librarian friend -- a large stack of deaccessioned bound volumes of "Life" spanning much of the 1940s. The volumes currently repose on my sun porch, until I figure out where to put them, but I've got a couple of volumes in the house for random thumbing. While I'm no fan at all of the Lucean worldview expressed in "Life" editorials and many of its articles, the magazine is always a worthy window into the fads and foibles of its time.

Picking up the volume for April-June 1945 I note in the June 11th issue a fascinating bit of pop sociology exploring the lives of teenage boys in Des Moines, Iowa -- who, according to the article, build their lives around rigorous conformation to a "pattern of sloppiness" in all that they do. The "classroom uniform" depicted on one boy shows an outfit that wouldn't be out of place on a modern hipster -- he's going to school wearing a baggy, loud, oversized flannel shirt with the tails hanging out, rolled "dungarees," heavy white athletic socks, disreputable moccasins, and what appears to be some kind of a knit hat. Stick a beard on him and a couple of tattoos, and you couldn't pick him out of a crowd in 2017.

This same boy is shown later on sprawled in bed drinking a Pepsi while eating from a box of Cheez-Its while reading a paperback copy of "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." This lad is also a member of a "teenage club" known for wearing a large letter "M" painted across the backside of their blue jeans, that M standing for the name of their society, "The Molesters." The club's main activities seem to consist of loafing in front of drugstore magazine racks, and peeking in the windows of girls' homes at night.

Turning the page, I expected to see the young fellow standing in front of a night-court magistrate with a couple of black eyes, but instead there's a long article about Harry Truman, so I guess we'll never know how the young man in Des Moines turned out. But if he went to school wearing dungarees, you can bet he came to a bad end.

Click to expand...

As we talk about here often, anything that is associated with a period - teenage culture / "rebellion" in the '50s, in this case - had its antecedents in several preceding decades (at minimum) as your '40s "Life" article shows.

And nice add to your collection.

One of my favorite books is The Special by J.E. Pendleton, set just before WWII and ending near the end of the war. A real page turner. Superb character development and an amazing story with a haunting ending that left me, an old curmudgeon, crying like a baby. But the story was well worth it.

I have been reading and enjoying several historical fiction series set in the 1920s through the 1950s, here are three of them.
Edward Hackemer writes the Throckmorton Family novels.
Great slice of life style, superb character development. A writing style that reflects the time period, lots of references to things I'd forgotten about.
http://edhackemer.info/index.htm

For lovers of the Golden Age of Hollywood, Martin Turnbull writes the Garden of Allah novels set in Hollywood from the 1920s through the 1950s. Garden of Allah refers to Alla Nazimova, one of the top stars of the early days of the flickers. She built a mansion and went bankrupt. The mansion became apartments and many Hollywood and literary icons of the day lived there. The series story centers around three fictitious people, Kathryn, Marcus and Gwendolyn who each want to make it big in Hollywood, and as always, becoming an overnight success takes a long time. They interact with stars, writers, hangers-on and the dish on celebrities is worth the price of admission. You can get Turnbull's first two ebooks free on his website https://martinturnbull.com/

Then of course there are my own novels, set in the Prohibition era from Chicago to Napa/Sonoma Wine Country to Hollywood and on the railroads all over the U.S. featuring the sex and violence of the Twenties. The series is The Roaring Road, third book coming out titled Road Trip Blues. http://www.theroaringroad.com/
The RoadTripDog only gives each of the above series of books five stars, and that's because he can't give them ten or twenty!
I have other recommendations that I'll post from time to time.

"Fashion is Spinach" - a Lizzie recommended 1938 personal account of the fashion business by American couture designer Elizabeth Hawes.

To the book's subject itself in a minute, but first, this is a great example of why reading contemporaneous accounts of a period is valuable to understanding the period's mindset, values, norms, attitudes, politics and outlook. I have read several modern period novels recently and they all read "engineered" to feel like the period they are set in (words, phrases, references of the historical time are all there - and have been well researched), but the mindset, politics and outlook are all colored by a 2017 worldview.

Having read "Fashion is Spinach," I have a more intimate understanding now, not only of the fashion world in the 1930s, but attitudes of the 1930s in general, better than any modern period novel gives you. For example, all the modern period novels I've read treat the Great Depression as one continuous event - '29 to WWII and, often, the characters seem to know that when it is over, the economy will do well for a long time - great foresight (with the advantage of hindsight). However, in this book and in other contemporaneous-to-the-period novels (and many economic papers) I've read, most thought the Depression was over several times in the '30s (when the economy had a brief upturn) and most worried greatly about another depression coming back soon even when the current one was fully over. A very different view than the modern period novels give you. The same for the politics - but that's too much to go into now.

The book itself is a pretty strong denunciation of the fashion industry / of fashion period - by an insider. Hawes basically says:

• Fashion is an entirely made-up construct to sell more clothes than people would buy otherwise. It is nothing dressed up as something special.

• Style in clothing is form meeting function in a visually pleasing way that evolves as people's needs and tastes evolve over long periods.

• France had the monopoly on "fashion" owing to historical circumstance and aggressive marketing. (Hawes saw this as a false construct and correctly predicted it would break down in time. She was less prescient when it came to her belief that women would ultimately reject fashion for style.)

• Seventh Avenue (at that time, America's clothing manufacturing and design center) is a cutthroat business driven by copycats and cheats that produces cheap knock-offs of French fashion for a manipulated public that would be better served by practical and stylish clothes that no manufacturer makes or wants to (as it would reduce the demand for "new" each year that drives the business).

Away from the business insights, the real joy of this book is the author's adventures themselves. From covering fashion as a freelance reporter in France, to work in clothing manufacturers, department stores and couture shops - at several levels and at different times in her career (and she bluffed her way into many of those jobs) - you enjoy bouncing along with her career while truly "living" the life of a college-educated American woman in the '30s trying to make a place and living for herself in fashion.

I only read this because Lizzie sold me on it and I am a sucker for contemporaneous-to-the-period books, as women's fashion in the '30s is not high on my interest list, but that doesn't matter as the real joy of the book is the window into the world of the '30s (very Fedora Lounge- worthy) and the verve of the author that comes through even her, sometimes, confused syntax.

I suspected you might enjoy that -- glad you did! She also wrote a book on menswear -- which I haven't read -- but which I bet is well worth anyone's time: "Men Can Take It," published in 1939. I know from reading other articles and essays of hers that she absolutely *loathed* neckties, and thought the mens' suits of her day were drab, unbecoming uniforms poorly worn by a nation of cowed men who had no sense at all of what actually looked good. I suspect the book, on that level, is profoundly entertaining.

Her single funniest book is "Anything But Love," her double-barrelled attack on "manufactured femininity," written as a ferociously snarky parody of all the "how to be lovely and charming" bilge turned out by the Boys in the years after WWII. Her "advice" to teenage girls, digesting what she perceived as the tone of the marketing directed to that demographic group, sums up the tone of the book: "You all have thin, dull, straight hair. Your eyes are lustreless with pale brittle eyelashes. Lips are a disgusting shell pink. Your skin is terrible by anything but candle light. You have great ugly protruding ears, a hideous thick short neck, pig bristle hands with gnawed fingernails, and you smell. But do not despair! You are a potential beauty!"

RE: the Elizabeth Hawes book . . . I suspect the title comes from that New Yorker cartoon, "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it"?

LizzieMaine said:

I got an unexpected donation today to my vast archives from a librarian friend -- a large stack of deaccessioned bound volumes of "Life" spanning much of the 1940s. The volumes currently repose on my sun porch, until I figure out where to put them, but I've got a couple of volumes in the house for random thumbing. While I'm no fan at all of the Lucean worldview expressed in "Life" editorials and many of its articles, the magazine is always a worthy window into the fads and foibles of its time.

Picking up the volume for April-June 1945 I note in the June 11th issue a fascinating bit of pop sociology exploring the lives of teenage boys in Des Moines, Iowa -- who, according to the article, build their lives around rigorous conformation to a "pattern of sloppiness" in all that they do. The "classroom uniform" depicted on one boy shows an outfit that wouldn't be out of place on a modern hipster -- he's going to school wearing a baggy, loud, oversized flannel shirt with the tails hanging out, rolled "dungarees," heavy white athletic socks, disreputable moccasins, and what appears to be some kind of a knit hat. Stick a beard on him and a couple of tattoos, and you couldn't pick him out of a crowd in 2017.

This same boy is shown later on sprawled in bed drinking a Pepsi while eating from a box of Cheez-Its while reading a paperback copy of "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo." This lad is also a member of a "teenage club" known for wearing a large letter "M" painted across the backside of their blue jeans, that M standing for the name of their society, "The Molesters." The club's main activities seem to consist of loafing in front of drugstore magazine racks, and peeking in the windows of girls' homes at night.

Turning the page, I expected to see the young fellow standing in front of a night-court magistrate with a couple of black eyes, but instead there's a long article about Harry Truman, so I guess we'll never know how the young man in Des Moines turned out. But if he went to school wearing dungarees, you can bet he came to a bad end.

Click to expand...

I have several LIFE editions from the '40s, as well.

For those interested, all of the LIFE magazines are online from 1935 to 1970: https://books.google.com/books?id=9lAEAAAAMBAJ&dq=K-9&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Fading Fast said:

"Fashion is Spinach" - a Lizzie recommended 1938 personal account of the fashion business by American couture designer Elizabeth Hawes.

To the book's subject itself in a minute, but first, this is a great example of why reading contemporaneous accounts of a period is valuable to understanding the period's mindset, values, norms, attitudes, politics and outlook. I have read several modern period novels recently and they all read "engineered" to feel like the period they are set in (words, phrases, references of the historical time are all there - and have been well researched), but the mindset, politics and outlook are all colored by a 2017 worldview.

Having read "Fashion is Spinach," I have a more intimate understanding now, not only of the fashion world in the 1930s, but attitudes of the 1930s in general, better than any modern period novel gives you. For example, all the modern period novels I've read treat the Great Depression as one continuous event - '29 to WWII and, often, the characters seem to know that when it is over, the economy will do well for a long time - great foresight (with the advantage of hindsight). However, in this book and in other contemporaneous-to-the-period novels (and many economic papers) I've read, most thought the Depression was over several times in the '30s (when the economy had a brief upturn) and most worried greatly about another depression coming back soon even when the current one was fully over. A very different view than the modern period novels give you. The same for the politics - but that's too much to go into now.

The book itself is a pretty strong denunciation of the fashion industry / of fashion period - by an insider. Hawes basically says:

• Fashion is an entirely made-up construct to sell more clothes than people would buy otherwise. It is nothing dressed up as something special.

(IMHO, the scene in "The Devils Wear Prada" [a very enjoyable silly movie] where Meryl Streep's character as Vogue's fashion editor gives a "deep and heartfelt" speech about how important fashion is, for example, because it drives the particular color blue of even a humble belt in a discount store, said it all for me - fashion is vacuous, what it does matters only inside its silly bubble. Enjoy it if you will, but recognize it is meaningless in any sense of the word.)​

• Style in clothing is form meeting function in a visually pleasing way that evolves as people's needs and tastes evolve over long periods.

• France had the monopoly on "fashion" owing to historical circumstance and aggressive marketing. (Hawes saw this as a false construct and correctly predicted it would break down in time. She was less prescient when it came to her belief that women would ultimately reject fashion for style.)

• Seventh Avenue (at that time, America's clothing manufacturing and design center) is a cutthroat business driven by copycats and cheats that produces cheap knock-offs of French fashion for a manipulated public that would be better served by practical and stylish clothes that no manufacturer makes or wants to (as it would reduce the demand for "new" each year that drives the business).

Away from the business insights, the real joy of this book is the author's adventures themselves. From covering fashion as a freelance reporter in France, to work in clothing manufacturers, department stores and couture shops - at several levels and at different times in her career (and she bluffed her way into many of those jobs) - you enjoy bouncing along with her career while truly "living" the life of a college-educated American woman in the '30s trying to make a place and living for herself in fashion.

I only read this because Lizzie sold me on it and I am a sucker for contemporaneous-to-the-period books, as women's fashion in the '30s is not high on my interest list, but that doesn't matter as the real joy of the book is the window into the world of the '30s (very Fedora Lounge- worthy) and the verve of the author that comes through even her, sometimes, confused syntax.

Click to expand...

Great review, as always, FF!

Benzadmiral said:

RE: the Elizabeth Hawes book . . . I suspect the title comes from that New Yorker cartoon, "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it"?

Click to expand...

Yep. The cartoon itself is reproduced on the flyleaf.

Benzadmiral said:

RE: the Elizabeth Hawes book . . . I suspect the title comes from that New Yorker cartoon, "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it"?

Click to expand...

You are spot on sir. The cartoon is actually reproduced in the forward of the book.

Edit add: Just saw that, as always, Lizzie beat me to the punch.

Looking for something else on my shelf, my attention was diverted by the 1943-44 edition of the National Radio Artists Directory, which is exactly what it sounds like: a casting guide used by radio producers and directors. Hundreds of actors and actresses are listed, divided by whether they're based in Chicago, New York, or Hollywood, and sorted into long lists of "character types" and "dialects."

Versatility was essential for a jobbing performer in radio, and some of these folks outdo themselves. Actor Jackson Beck -- best known as the breathless announcer on "The Adventures of Superman" -- is listed under every dialect category given, including Swahili, which I have to say I never heard him speak and I feel that I must've missed out on something. Other catageories reveal a long list of women who spent their radio careers specializing in playing little boys, crying babies, or "screamers."

The bulk of the directory is devoted to individual listings of performers, which usually follow a standard format -- a headshot photo, a listing of recent credits and character/dialect specialities, and a contact phone number. Most of the listings also include the performer's Social Security number, which seems bizarre in today's identity-theft society, but was a way in 1944 of proving one's eligibility to work.

Some of the listings display a bit of personal flair. Actor Stefan Schnabel, a German exile to the United States, declares in his listing that he specializes in playing "BLOODY NAZIS AND THEIR BLEEDING VICTIMS," which in fact he did. Comedy actor Elmore Vincent -- best known as "Senator Frankenstein Fishface" -- offers, instead of a standard headshot, a drawing of the goofy "what, me worry?" face that would later be named "Alfred E. Neuman." Actress Rosaline Greene, one of the most experienced women in radio, announces boldly "I DONT DO RURAL HOUSEWIVES. I DONT DO OLD WOMEN. I DONT DO MAIDS." Actress Ruby Dandridge, on the other hand -- one of the few African-Americans in the directory -- lists as her speciality "Maids and Mammies."

Among all the everyday jobbing actors and actresses are quite a few folks who would become very well known for a very long time. An impossibly young and slim Art Carney advertises a long list of radio credits, and declares his skill at "American, European, and Oriental" dialects. Mel Blanc is equally slim, with a debonair pencil moustache, as he advertises himself as "The One Man Crowd." And toward the back of the book there's a brooding young man named "Myron Wallace," whose short list of credits include stints as announcer for "Vic and Sade" and as "The Voice Of The Dairy Farmer." He would fare much better after he took up chain-smoking and changed his name to "Mike."

I really want to hear Jackson Beck speaking with a Swahili accent. Damn.

LizzieMaine said:

Yep. The cartoon itself is reproduced on the flyleaf.

Click to expand...

Ah. I wasn't sure if the cartoon predated the Hawes book. Without that phrase, the title of the book would make no sense unless the author connected "fashion" and "spinach" somehow. Fortunately there was already what we today call a "meme" in place for it.

There was even a pop tune inspired by that cartoon, written by Irving Berlin in 1932 for the Broadway show "Face The Music."

(Verse)
We must keep smiling and play the game
While life keeps hurrying on
For there was trouble before we came
'Twill be here after we're gone
So we'll just have to prepare
To snap our fingers at care

(Chorus)
Long as there's you, long as there's me
Long as the best things in life are free
I say it's spinach and the hell with it
The hell with it, that's all!

Long as I'm yours, long as your mine
Long as there's love and a moon to shine
I say it's spinach and the hell with it
The hell with it, that's all!

There must be rain to pitter-patter
Things don't come on a silver platter
What does it matter?

Long as there's you, long as there's me
Long as the best things in life are free
I say it's spinach and the hell with it
The hell with it, that's all!"

Fred Waring and his Pennsylvanians made a good recording of this song for Victor -- it was one of a number of "just keep on keeping on" type songs that came out during the worst pit of the Depression.

Just started Empress of the Night: A Novel of Catherine the Great by Eva Stachniak.

I've long been interested in Catherine the Great, not least because my grandmother's side of the family are Germans from Russians. They left Germany in 1767 after Catherine the Great invited them to settle in Russia. They settled in a small village called Rosenberg in the Volga River region and some came to America in the early 1900s.

Reading David Grann's The Lost City of Z again. Interesting book. Fawcett was a fairly fascinating character.

Getting Augustine Wrong, R.R. Reno, First Things; April 2017

Continuing to work thru a stack of George Seldes' famous muckraking newsletter "In Fact" from the 1940s, I'm encountering one fascinating bit of underreported or suppressed news after another. The April 13, 1942 issue hits especially close to home for me -- it contains an expose of war-effort sabotage undertaken by the Jarka Corporation, a stevedoring contractor that controlled most of the shipping docks along the Eastern Seaboard. Seldes produces evidence that ships containing lend-lease goods bound for Russia are being deliberately delayed or short-loaded by Jarka crews, acting at the instance of Jarka management. He also produces evidence tying company founder Franz Jarka to various elements of the German government. As it happens, Jarka was the largest employer in my hometown when I was growing up, and had a very bad reputation for its connections to organized crime -- but I had no idea of its wartime activity (or inactivity.)

Another remarkable piece appears in the September 28, 1942 issue, discussiong the defection of Chicago Tribune European correspondent Donald Day to Finland, where he has joined the pro-Nazi Finnish Army. Seldes knew Day extremely well, dating back to their experiences in Europe in the early 1920s, and exposes him in this article as "America's Leading News Faker," offering evidence that his reporting over the previous two decades has been riddled with stories falsified or manufactured outright out of whole cloth to meet the political demands of Tribune publisher Robert McCormick -- stories involving places Day never visited, people he never interviewed, and events that never happened. Seldes also notes that when Day's editors discovered this and attempted to halt the practice, they were overruled on the direct orders of McCormick himself. This article moves on into a fascinating discussion of the prevalence of "fake news" -- and that's exactly the term used -- in the early months of WWII, with Day and the Tribune standing in the forefront of the practice. Day would go on from his Finnish adventure to become a shortwave propaganda broadcaster for Dr. Goebbels, broadcasting from Berlin in the late months of the war, and escaped being tried for treason by offering US Military Intelligence "secret information" the Nazis had accumulated on Soviet agents operating in the US. One wonders how much of that he made up.

What makes the Day expose so fascinating is that it's far from a dead issue today. The fraudiulent writings of Donald Day are among the sources most frequently cited by modern-day revisionist/neo-Nazi/white nationalist authors in support of their particular slant on the events of the 1930s and 1940s, and they have even been cited by more "respectable" authors who don't seem to be particularly aware of exactly who Mr. Day was. It's especially ridiculous when the authors who work themselves into a high dudgeon over the journalistic failings of Walter Duranty quote from Donald Day to support their arguments.

⇧ I'm coming to the conclusion that no source, the one you cite above - a liberal one, a conservative one, the NYT, the WSJ, Consumers Report, the Cato Institute, National Review, Drudge, Daily KOs - or any other is definitive about anything (even if it happens to be spot on) because ten more other reasonable sounding stories in reasonable sources will come up.

All one can do is read a lot from a lot of sources - contemporaneous and historical study - and make sure those sources are all over the political continuum (hence, I need to read left and far left - which I do - and you, for example, need to read right and far right) and arm wrestle with all of it until you feel you have a handle on it.

One small example - I used to believe that a greatly outnumbered Royal Air Force held off the German Air Force in the Battle of Britain in WWII because of the British pilots' superior flying skills and courage and the Chain Home radar systems advance warning. It was the dominating narrative for the first forty or so years of my life.

It always seemed a bit odd to me that Britain was able to do that as the German Air Force was more modern, had more experience and greater numbers - but "facts are facts." More recently, I've read that the casualty numbers were about equal on the two sides and Britain only "won" because Germany decided to use its resources elsewhere because invading England could wait.

Which is it? I don't know, but I do know I'll need to put some serious work into finding out and not just by reading a respectable book that aligns to my prejudice. It's exhausting and demoralizing as what you "know" seems to change overtime with the more you read / or as more comes out / or as you read from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

I think the most reasonable conclusion is that history is far more malleable than people want to believe it is. We want to believe in absolute truths about historical facts -- but we're at the mercy of the sources from whom we learn those facts. But the deeper you delve into contemporary sources the more manipulation and chicanery you find -- Brother Seldes devoted most of a very long life to trying to make people aware of the fact that the American "free press" was in fact anything but free -- and the less you can let yourself rely on the currently-fashionable interpretation of those sources.

Along with my pile of "In Fact" I'm also continuing to work thru those volumes of "Life," and it's fascinating to juxtapose the two -- very often an article in Life will smell funny, and you can turn to a contemporaneous issue of "In Fact" to see Seldes pointing out exactly where the propaganda is coming from. It makes for quite an education in the area of just how manufactured the mass media of the Era really was.

I don't often agree with Henry Ford on much of anything, but you can make a good argument that history, or at least what we believe history to be at any particular moment of time, is, in fact, bunk.

"Neptune's Inferno" (The US Navy at Guadalcanal) by James D. Hornfischer

This author also wrote "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors"