Articles from 1932
Eight months before the Congress passed the Glass–Steagall Act (aka the Banking Act of 1933) this unsigned editorial appeared in a Washington-based news magazine pointing out that the economic downturn in the country had created a need for such legislation.
Click here to read another 1932 article about the banks.
Reform The Banks! (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
2013 Anno Domini marked the 100th anniversary of the Hollywood film industry. With this in mind it is entirely fitting and proper that we post this thumbnail history that outlines how it all got rolling, as told by the jaded Robert Sherwood, an early film critic who witnessed much of it (although he incorrectly dated the first Hollywood feature film to 1912).
Hollywood history begins with four men: Jesse Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille, Dustin Farnum and a silent film called The Squaw Man…
(The fourth name in Sherwood’s list was that of Samuel Goldwyn – who, in fact, had nothing to do with the production, but whose name in Hollywood had such staying power it seemed difficult to imagine that he didn’t.)
Read a 1951 profile of a future First Lady: the young Nancy Reagan.
The Birth of Hollywood Filmmaking (America, 1932) Read More »
Three years into the Great Depression a citizen of Chicago realizes that there is nowhere he can go to escape the uneasy presence of the hungry poor in his city:
They’re on the boulevards and in the parks. They’re on the shady streets in nice neighborhoods and around the corner from expensive restaurants. You can tell they’re starving by looking at them. Their nerve is gone – they don’t even beg. You see thousands every day… Young men and old women never begged in this country before.
The Poor Are Everywhere (The Chicagoan, 1932) Read More »
By the early Thirties the anointed of Europe realized that there would be no economic recovery for the continent if Germany was not a part of it. With this in mind, a delegation convened in Lausanne, Switzerland where it was decided by representatives from France, Britain and Germany that the reparation payments imposed upon the defeated countries by the Treaty of Versailles would be suspended. Hitler’s followers were of the mind that Germany should not have signed the agreement unless the war-guilt clause was removed from the Versailles Treaty. This article addresses the general political climate in Germany as 1932 came to a close.
The Political Climate in Germany (New Outlook Magazine, 1932 Read More »
Some people have maintained that doctors weren’t hit so hard by the economic slump. The claim was that people couldn’t help getting sick and their misfortune was the doctor’s gravy. But the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care, a non-governmental committee, of which Secretary Wilbur is chairman, reports a rapid decline in the income of doctors during the Depression… In 1930, the first [full] year of the Depression, physician’s incomes decreased 17% and they have been decreasing ever since.
The author also included some other elements gleaned by the committee – such as the average sum paid by the families in their study, the approximate cost of the nation’s medical bills and an approximation concerning the number of medical professionals at work in 1931.
During the Depression, many doctors and nurses worked entirely for free; to read about that, click here…
When the Depression Caught Up With Doctors (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
Abuses were all too common in most Southern penitentiaries up until the Fifties. This article chronicles one prison in Florida and their practice of placing the prisoners in 60-gallon barrels when they stepped out of line.
Abuses at Sunbeam Prison (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
During the summer of 1932, Democratic Senator Carter Glass (1858 – 1946) turned heads and dropped jaws on Capitol Hill when he introduced a piece of legislation that was intended to water-down the 18th Amendment. Glass, a devoted enemy of the swizzle stick, proposed an amendment to the Constitution that would continue to outlaw saloons nationally while permitting hootch to flow freely throughout the wet states – and cut off booze in the dry.
Talk of Repeal on Capitol Hill (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
An American woman recalled the difficulties she encountered while trying to set up a household in Soviet Russia.
An American in Kharkov (Pathfinder Magazine, 1932) Read More »
Attached is the 1932 review of Woman: Theme and Variations by Major A. Corbett-Smith:
There is no mystery about women, he announces…she is never quite sure of herself in comparison with other women; but she is well aware of her superiority to man…
Click here to read about feminine conversations overheard in the best New York nightclubs of 1937.
There is much that can be said about those unfortunate men whom life does not treat properly and to whom only death gives the glory they had so wanted to know…One finds them on thrones, in society, among artists, among bourgeoisie, and in the lower classes. Modigliani has his place on this list of grief. His name follows hard upon those tragic ones, Van Gogh and Gauguin.
A convergence of unhappy circumstances compelled Modigliani to live poorly and to die miserably.
The Ill Fated One (Creative Art Magazine, 1932) Read More »
