1937

Articles from 1937

Military Buildup in Switzerland (Literary Digest, 1937)

Little Switzerland will not be caught as Belgium was in 1914. The ‘Isle of Peace’, home of the League of Nations that was to forge all nations of the world together into a chain of amity, is fortifying her frontiers to the tune of war-rumbles. The army and air forces are being expanded in preparation for that ‘inevitable’ war Europe seems to be resigned to. She realizes that the only way to preserve her peace is to be prepared to fight for it.

A Swiss statesman, in an interview with correspondents, summed up his individual reaction, which probably holds good for the majority of the population, when he said:
War will come. We will try to stay out at any price, save our liberty. The moment a foreign soldier crosses our border, we will fight.
And you may rest assured that we shall fight to the last man.

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Federal Housing (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

At present the Federal Housing Administration is sponsoring the building of more than 1,000 small demonstration houses in as many cities, with the cost to range from $2,500 to $3,500. It is the belief of the belief of the FHA that 71.2 percent of American families have incomes permitting the purchase of homes costing less than $5,000.


Yet, regardless of the degradation of the Great Depression, the United States was still an enormously wealthy nation…

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The Hollywood Leg Gag (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

Here is a 1937 article that reminds us that there wasn’t anything left to chance or improvisation under the old studio system:

One of the oldest newspaper publicity devices is the ‘leg display’. Resorted to chiefly by actresses whose press agents want them to break into print, it consists of nothing more than arriving in New York aboard an ocean liner and letting news photographers do the rest.


The adoration of the Feminine Leg began some twenty yeras earlier with the flappers; click here to read more on this topic…

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The Era of the Dictators (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

If necessity can be called the mother of invention, then deep public dissatisfaction can be called the mother of the authoritarian or ‘totalitarian’ state. In Europe, the [First] World War resulted in post-war conditions that walked arm-in-arm with profound social change. The aftermath was a great political and economic headache that grew slowly in intensity until it lead people to embrace anything that promised a cure… In Europe there are no less than 11 nations operating under systems far removed from democracy as we know it in this country.

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Farmers in Flight (Pathfinder Magazine, 1937)

A report from the regional directors of the Resettlement Administration (an arm of the FDR’s Department of Agriculture) stated that:


15,000 farmers have moved out of the Dakotas, Western Kansas and Eastern Montana, leaving soil which because a aridity or exhaustion could not yield any crop… [Having moved to the states of the Pacific Northwestern] Some of them are squatting in shacks and makeshift dwellings made of tree branches, stray boards [and] strips of tin.

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Her Favorite Movies (Photoplay Magazine, 1937)

The cinematic tastes of ER II are, like the sovereign herself, deep and complicated. A vast number of geeks employed by this website were sent forth far across the deep green sea in order to find out what her favorite movies are, and we were not at all surprised to learn that she favors the James Bond films. Contrast those movies with the earliest of her film choices and you will be able to trace her development through the years – another article on this page makes clear that she enjoyed the Shirley Temple series – but hold the phone: the attached article from THAT SAME YEAR indicates that she enjoyed A DIFFERENT MOVIE AS WELL!

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