Also in April 1939…
1st: Three days after his Nationalist troops have entered Madrid, General Francisco Franco proclaims victory in the Spanish Civil War, bringing to an end a bloody conflict that has raged for 32 months. Franco soon takes action against those who have opposed him, while hundreds of thousands of Republicans flee abroad.
13th: Performed by a choir of around 40 singers and a small ensemble of violins and traditional Chinese instruments, Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata is premiered at the Shanbei Gongxue Hall in Yan’an, China, with Mao Zedong in the audience. The cantata’s words come from a patriotic poem written by Guang Weiran as a call to arms during the ongoing Second Sino-japanese War.
14th: US president Franklin D Roosevelt writes a letter to Adolf Hitler in which he urges the German chancellor to avoid war and asks for his assurance that 31 named countries will not be invaded. Such an assurance, he adds, must be applied ‘to a future sufficiently long to give every opportunity to work by peaceful methods for a more permanent peace’.
14th: John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is published. ‘I’ve done my damnedest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags,’ says the author about the novel which, set during the Great Depression, tells of the Joads, a tenant farmer family forced to leave Oklahoma and head to California to find work. An instant bestseller, it later wins him both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
20th: Billie Holiday heads to the studio to record Abel Meeropol’s ‘Strange Fruit’, whose words express horror at the growing number of lynchings of African Americans, mainly across the southern US. Though Columbia, Holiday’s label, will not touch the song for fear of how retailers in some states will react, the singer is at least given a break from her contract that allows her to record it for Commodore instead.