Articles from 1933
“Now, therefore, I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America,…do hereby proclaim that the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was repealed on the 5th day of December, 1933…”
Writing Prohibition’s obituary during the Winter of 1933, Bertrand Russel (1872 – 1970) came away thinking that the best thing that could ever be said about Prohibition was that it served to put an end to that line of Victorian thinking that held up women as morally superior to men.
What was to be done with all the racketeers who dominated the Twenties once Prohibition was prohibited? Organizing the collective labor of truck drivers seemed to have been the most obvious project for the kingpins, but what of the average foot soldier?
“Even the rank and file have not been driven to the breadline. Current quotations for gunmen have fallen from $300 a week to as low as $100. Plain sluggers command even scantier wages. A fancy pineapple job once cost $250; by 1933 you could get a good workman for $50.”
“The Eighteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution made the criminal career pay – for the first time, perhaps, in the
When economic opportunity disappeared from the American landscape during the Great Depression, it was replaced by numerous unheard-of options that would have been judged unthinkable in previous decades. Among these was the scheme to burn your own house down in order to collect the insurance premium check(s).
This piece reported that the Manchester Guardian journalists who were posted to Nazi Germany were, without a doubt, the most reliable sources on all matters involving the violence committed by those brown shirted thugs during the earliest days of Hitler’s reign:
The ‘Brown terror does not exist in Germany, according to the Hitler dictatorship.
Even to talk about it is a penal offense. But the ‘Brown Terror’ goes on.
Read about the German POWs who were schooled in virtues of democracy.
With the arrival of the Great Depression came an increase in American suicides. When this article appeared on the newsstands the Depression was just three and a half years old – with many more years yet to come. As the Americans saw 1932 come to a close, the records showed that 3,088 more acts of self-immolation had taken place than had been recorded the year before.
Read about the the mood of the Great Depression and how it was reflected in the election of 1932 – click here…
The New York Times war correspondent Arthur Ruhl (1876 – 1935) reviewed a book that would later be seen as a classic piece of World War One fiction: Company K
by William March (born William Edward Campbell 1893 – 1954). Awarded both the French Croix de Guerre and the Distinguished Service Cross, March gained an understanding of war and the frailties of human character as a member of the Fifth Marines fighting at Belleau Wood and participating in the big push during the San-Mihiel Offensive:
The outstanding virtues of William March’s work are those of complete absence of sentimentality and routine romanticism, of a dramatic gift constantly heightened and sharpened by eloquence of understatement.
A look at What Price Glory? and Journey’s End and the new spirit that created these dramas.
When R.C. Sheriff, nearly ten years after the Armistice, sat down to write an easy play for the amateurs of his boat club, he seems to have had no fixed notion as to what a play ought to be. The script of Journey’s End shows a complete absence of strain…
Click here to read an additional article concerning Journeys End.
Generations before satellite photography, and long before the T.V. cameras were placed on the moon, an American astronomer named V.M. Slipher (1875 – 1969) figured out the predominate color of our planet when seen from afar. Read on…
