1939 General Historical Events

General Historical Events

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March 3

*In Durban, South Africa, the Timeless Test between England and South Africa began, the longest game of cricket ever played. It is abandoned twelve days later when the English team has to catch the last ferry home.

March 28 

*The Spanish Civil War ended as Madrid fell to Franco's troops.  Spain would remain neutral in the European war (World War II), having lost 410,000 men in fighting or by execution and further 200,000 by starvation and disease. 

April 1

*James Martin, an American photographer known for his work documenting the American Civil Rights Movement in 1965, specifically Bloody Sunday and other incidents from the Selma to Montgomery marches.

James "Spider" Martin (b. April 1, 1939, Fairfield, Alabama – d. April 8, 2003, Blount Springs, Alabama) was born in Fairfield, Alabama.  Whilst working as a photographer for The Birmingham News he created a notable photograph of the civil rights era, known as Two Minute Warning, during the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement. His photograph showed Alabama state troopers about to attack the first peaceful Selma to Montgomery March with batons and tear gas whilst it attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.  Hosea Williams and John Lewis were leading the 54 mile march to the Alabama State Capitol in protest at unfair treatment of African Americans and discriminatory voting rights practices. The incident, known as Bloody Sunday, the media coverage of it and the national outcry that ensued, were influential in the course of civil rights in the United States.

His photographs were published in Life, Saturday Evening Post, Time, Der Spiegel, Stern, Paris Match, Birmingham Weekly, and The Birmingham News.

April 4

*King Ghazi of Iraq was killed in a car accident and was succeeded by his three year old son Faisal II.  The British Consul was killed by rioters who suspect that the British may have arranged the car accident.

May 29

*The United States Supreme Court decided the case of Perkins v. Elg. 

Perkins v. Elg, 307 U.S. 325 (1939), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States that a child born in the United States to naturalized parents on U.S. soil is a natural born citizen and that the child's natural born citizenship is not lost if the child is taken to and raised in the country of the parents' origin, provided that upon attaining the age of majority,  
the child elects to retain United States citizenship and to return to the United States to assume its duties.

Marie Elizabeth Elg was born in the Brooklyn section of New York City in 1907 to two Swedish parents who had arrived in the United States some time prior to 1906.  Her father was naturalized in 1906. In 1911, her mother took the four-year-old to Sweden. Her father went to Sweden in 1922, and in 1934 made a statement before an American consul in Sweden that he had "voluntarily expatriated himself for the reason that he did not desire to retain the status of an American citizen and wished to preserve his allegiance to Sweden."

In 1929, within eight months of attaining the age of majority, Marie Elg obtained an American passport through the American consul in Sweden, and returned to the United States. In 1935 she was notified by the United States Department of Labor that she was an illegal alien and was threatened with deportation.  

Elg sued to establish that she was a citizen of the United States and not subject to deportation. Frances Perkins was listed as the nominal plaintiff in the case, being the Secretary of Labor during the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when the case was appealed to the Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Hughes wrote for the Court noting that

(1) Elg became a citizen of the United States upon her birth in New York since the Civil Rights Act of 1866  had specifically addressed the issue of a child born in the United States to alien parents;
(2) When a citizen of the United States who is a minor has parents who renounce their American citizenship, the minor does not lose his American citizenship as a result, "provided that, on attaining majority he elects to retain that citizenship and to return to the United States to assume its duties";
(3) Some provisions of the Naturalization and Convention Protocol of 1869 between the United States and Sweden, which provided for the loss of United States citizenship by any United States citizen who chose to "expatriate" — to become a naturalized citizen of another country, live there, and lose their United States citizenship — did not apply to minors, as the minor's move out of the United States was not to be considered a voluntary act; and
(4) The acquisition of "derivative Swedish citizenship" by a minor likewise does not force the minor to lose his American citizenship.

The Court's first holding, that Elg was a citizen upon birth within the United States, was a reaffirmation of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898).

The case was argued for the United States by Robert H. Jackson, who later became a Supreme Court justice. This was the only Supreme Court case that Jackson lost in his two years as Solicitor General.

The case is a landmark decision on expatriation.

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July 26

*Joel Spingarn, the president of the NAACP, died in New York City, New York.  He was succeeded by his brother Arthur.

Joel Elias Spingarn (b. May 17, 1875, New York City, New York – d. July 26, 1939, New York City, New York ) was born in New York City to an upper middle-class Jewish family. He graduated from Columbia College in 1895. He grew committed to the importance of the study of comparative literature as a discipline distinct from the study of English or any other language-based literary studies.

Politics was one of his lifetime passions. In 1908, as a Republican he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the United States House of Representatives.  In 1912 and 1916, he was a delegate to the national convention of the Progressive Party.  At the first of those conventions, he failed in his attempts to add a statement condemning racial discrimination to the party platform.

Spingarn served as professor of comparative literature at Columbia University from 1899 to 1911. His academic publishing established him as one of America's foremost comparativists. It included two editions of A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance in 1899 and 1908 as well as edited works like Critical Essays of the Seventeenth-Century in 3 volumes. He summarized his philosophy in The New Criticism: A Lecture Delivered at Columbia University, March 9, 1910. There he argued against the constraints of such traditional categories as genre, theme, and historical setting in favor of viewing each work of art afresh and on its own terms.

From 1904, his role in academic politics marked him as an independent spirit — too independent for the university's autocratic president Nicholas Murray Butler.  His differences with the administration ranged from personality conflicts to educational philosophy. Things came to a head in 1910, when he offered a resolution at a university faculty meeting in support of Harry Thurston Peck, a Columbia professor who had been summarily dismissed by Butler because of a public scandal involving a breach-of-promise suit. That precipitated Spingarn's dismissal just five weeks later. He became part of a distinguished series of prominent academics who resigned or were dismissed during Butler's tenure as president, including George Edward Woodberry, Charles Beard, and James Harvey Robinson.

Without an academic appointment but of independent means, Spingarn continued to publish in his field much as he had before, writing, editing, and contributing to collections of essays. He was commissioned in the United States Army and served as a major during World War I. In 1919, he was a co-founder of the publishing firm of Harcourt, Brace and Company. 

He also took up the other cause of his life, racial justice. An influential liberal Republican, he helped realize the concept of a unified black movement by joining the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) shortly after its founding and was one of the first Jewish leaders of that organization, serving as chairman of its board from 1913 to 1919, its treasurer from 1919 to 1930, and its second president from 1930 until his death in 1939. In 1914 he established the Spingarn Medal awarded annually by the NAACP for outstanding achievement by an African American. During World War I, he was instrumental in seeing that a training camp for African American officers was established at Des Moines, Iowa, where about 1,000 African American officers were ultimately commissioned.

Always interested in gardening, in the years following 1920 he amassed the world's largest collection of clematis (buttercup flowers) — 250 species — and published the results of his research on the early history of landscape gardening and horticulture in Dutchess County, New York.  He served as a member of the Board of Managers for the New York Botanical Garden.

He lived with his wife, Amy Einstein Spingarn, in Manhattan and at their country estate which later became the Troutbeck Inn and Conference Center in Amenia, New York. They had two sons and two daughters. He died after a long illness on July 26, 1939. His will included a bequest to fund the Spingarn Medal in perpetuity.

August 8

*The historical adventure film Stanley and Livingstone starring Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke premiered at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

August 15

• The musical fantasy film The Wizard of Oz had its official premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.^[27]

September 1

*German troops and aircraft invade Poland.

September 3

*Britain and France declared war on Germany.

September 17

*Soviet troops invaded Poland from the east.  Charles Lindbergh made a speech on United States radio arguing that Stalin was as much to be feared as Hitler.

September 21

*Armand Calinescu, Premier of Romania, was murdered by members of the pro-fascist Iron Guard.

September 27

*Warsaw fell to the Germans.

September 28

*Poland was partitioned between the U.S.S.R. and Germany.

October 1

*Churchill said in a radio broadcast, "I cannot forecast t you the action of Russia."

December 13

*The Battle of the River Plate occurred in the South Atlantic.  The British cruiser Exeter was badly damaged by the German pocket battleship Graf Spee, which was then driven into Montevideo Harbor by the Ajax and the Achilles.

December 18

*The Graf Spee was scuttled in Montevideo Harbor.

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*The World's Fair opened in New York City.

*The United States declared ist neutrality when war broke out in Europe.

*John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize.

*Pan-American Airways began regularly scheduled commercial flights to Europe.