Articles from 1932
The Saturday Review of Literature discussed a number of World War One books while in the course of reviewing Shoot And Be Damned
by Ed Halyburton and Ralph Goll, a wartime memoir which recalled time spent in a German prisoner of war camp.
Prisoner of War (Saturday Review of Literature, 1932) Read More »
Just weeks before the U.S. presidential election of 1932 this article appeared in a political magazine that indicated how the Depression-tossed voters were feeling after three years of economic set-backs. The article consists of 21 pithy little paragraphs that sum up their feelings:
I BELIEVE it possible to feel hungry under either major party, but that under the Republicans it seems to hurt more.
Click here to read about the extensive press coverage that was devoted to the death of FDR…
The Temper of the Electorate (The New Outlook Magazine, 1932) Read More »
Prohibition had been in place for a little over eleven and a half years by the time this uncredited editorial was published. The column is informative for all the trivial events that Prohibition had set in motion and are seldom remembered in our own time – such as the proliferation of private golfing institutions; clubs that intended to appear innocent enough, but were actually created for Wet dues-paying golfers. A recently posted article (1917) that appeared in THE LITERARY DIGEST near the end of 1929 examined the astronomical wealth that had been earned by the gangsters in America’s biggest cities.
The Non-Success of Prohibition (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
New York has a strange exile. She is now in her sixties, this woman has been isolated on North Brother Island, way up the East River, for 17 years and must spend the rest of her life there.
The Quarantined New Yorker (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
A profile of Hitler that appeared some seven months before he grabbed the big brass ring. It is written soullessly and without judgment and is based mostly on Nazi press releases.
Hitler On The Brink Of Power (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
The author of this brief paragraph points out that prior to the Great Depression that commenced in 1929, there were as many as five other economic slumps that existed in America’s past. He remembered that in each case something unexpected has come along to not only put us back on our feet again but to boom things in addition.
Will it be the sudden perfection of television? Or further development of electrical appliances, particularly air-conditioning and cooling? Or some new novelty?
What Will Save Us? (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929 it was generally recognized by the red-meat-eaters on Madison Avenue that the rules of the ad game had been re-written. There were far fewer dollars around than there were during the good ol’ Twenties, and what little cash remained seldom changed addresses with the same devil-may-care sense of abandon that it used to. Yet as bleak as the commercial landscape was in 1932, those hardy corner-office boys, those executives with the gray flannel ulcers remembered that they were in the optimism business and if there was a way to turn it around, they would find it.
Ad Man: Heal Thyself… (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
What is to be said of an era which produced ‘speak-easy frocks’ and ‘bargain day’ in the Federal courts; battalions of snoopers abroad in the land, legal homicides by dry agents, sopping wet public dinners throughout the Republic and ‘the man in the green hat’ filling the lockers of dry statesmen in the House and Senate office buildings?…What political, sociological and emotional changes the silently resisting mass wrought. We passed from the period when only prohibitionists were regarded by the general public as respectable. We came finally to the time, within twelve years, when the reverse was true.
An Era’s End (New Outlook Magazine, 1932) Read More »
One of Reverend Martin Luther King’s most poignant observations involved the sad fact one of America’s most segregated institutions was the church. This article is about the New York Episcopal Archdioceses and their efforts to remedy that in the early Thirties:
All Souls Episcopal Church is in Harlem, New York’s ‘black belt’. This once lily white congregation has been engulfed by the spreading colored population. Opposition to negro parishioners reached a point when an element of the white vestry asked the rector, Reverend Rollin W. Dodd, to resign…
A Racial Dust-Up in Harlem (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
The very funny Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869 – 1944) diagnosed many of the character traits that make Americans what they are. Although written eighty years ago, many of these observations are still true to this day:
Americans are a queer people: they can’t read.
They have more schools, and better schools, and spend more money on schools and colleges than all of Europe.
But they can’t read.
They print more books in one year than the French print in ten.
But they can’t read.
They cover their country with 100,000 tons of Sunday newspapers every week.
But they don’t read them.
They’re too busy. They use them for fires and to make more paper with.
They buy eagerly thousands of new novels at two dollars each. But they only read page one…
But that’s all right. The Americans don’t give a damn; don’t need to; never did need to.
That is their salvation.
Americans Are A Strange People (Characteristically American, 1932) Read More »
