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United States of America,…do hereby proclaim that the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was repealed on the 5th day of December, 1933…”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…
During the Spring of 1933 articles like this one began to appear in the magazines and newspapers across the country serving to inform their readers about the creation of an additional Federal agency that was designed to help take some of the sting out of the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal intended to take a hefty percentage of unmarried young men off the streets of 16 American cities, feed them, clothe them and line their pockets with $30.00 a month for their labor. W.W. II created a host of other demands requiring Federal funding, and so Congress voted to dissolve the C.C.C. in 1942.
Click here to read about the end of the Great Depression…
In certain quarters it is asserted that Mr. Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ is nothing other than the first stage of an American movement toward Fascism. It is said that, although the United States has not yet adopted the political structure of Italy and Germany, the economic structure of the country is rapidly being molded upon the Fascist pattern.
FDR’s D-Day prayer can be read here
If President Roosevelt were a Caliph in ancient Baghdad, he would disguise himself as a Congressman and wander about the country asking the man at the filling station, the hitch-hiker, the farmer and his wife, the local chairlady of a woman’s club – he would ask them what they thought of FDR, the NRA, [General] Hugh Johnson, Brain Trusters, Jim Farley and the entire set-up in Washington… He would be startled. Mr Roosevelt is growing exceedingly unpopular – not so much the President himself as his Administration.
More about New Deal problems can be read here…
The attached Collier’s article was written by two post-debs of the Boston/Manhattan variety who were both products of what they called the approval mill of America’s upper-crust. Having been run through the right schools and the right summer camps, they attended the right parties and made charming with all the right people; looking back in their 20s, they were able to see how this long-treasured practice prepared them poorly for life – tending to perpetuate the spiraling vortex of women who were educated and polite, yet unable to think.
Here are the Chief accomplishments of the special Session of the 73rd Congress, March 9 – June 16, 1933
These fifteen pieces of legislation were called the Honeymoon Bills – his critics pointed out that not one of them originated in Congress and added to their argument that Congress had been marginalized during the earliest period of his presidency.
FDR’s critics had a thing or two to say about the first year of The New Deal…
Click here to read about FDR and the press.
We were interested to learn that two of the most semi-popular queries on Google are, 1930s wedding theme decorations and 1930 wedding dress styles – yet to read the attached article is to learn that the most accurate step that any contemporary wedding planner assigned this theme can recommend is that the happy couple forego the nuptial ceremony entirely and simply move in together. During the Great Depression very few couples could afford to get married, much less divorced.
This article appeared a few weeks after Hitler came to power and it lucidly explains how Handsome Adolf had first gained notoriety in Germany.
Click here to read about Ludendorff’s association with Hitler.
With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the German-speaking Alice Hamilton (1869 – 1970; sister to the classics scholar, Edith) was assigned the task of reviewing Mein Kampf
(1925) for The Atlantic Monthly. She didn’t like it.
He loves rough, red-blooded words – ‘relentless’, ‘steely’, ‘iron-hearted’, ‘brutal’; his favorite phrase is ‘ruthless brutality’. His confidence in himself is unbounded.
The royalties generated by the sales of Mein Kampf made Adolf Hitler a very rich man. To read about this wealth and Hitler’s financial adviser, click here.
Read another review of Mein Kampf.
Although Hitler didn’t mention it his book, German-Americans drove him crazy.
