1933 – Page 3 – Old Magazine Articles

Norman Bel Geddes
(Creative Art Magazine, 1933)

Norman Bel Geddes (1893 – 1958) was one of the prominent industrial designers to practice a style known as streamline modern. Always mentioned in the same breath as Henry Dreyfuss and Raymond Lowey, Norman Bel Geddes opened his office in 1927 and helped to give the 1930s a defining look. He was the first of his kind to recognize that American manufacturers were sincerely interested in the marketing of modern design.

The sleek, aerodynamic lines of 1930s streamlining can clearly bee seen in the thirteen images illustrating the attached article about his work, which was written by Douglas Haskell, a well-known design critic active throughout much of the period spanning the mid-Twenties through the mid-Sixties; the column was intended to serve as a review for Geddes’ 1932 book, Horizons.

The Economic Collapse of the World
(Literary Digest, 1933)

Published in May of 1933, the attached article concerned the much anticipated London Economic Conference which was scheduled to convene the following month in London. The world leaders who agreed to assemble were all of one mind in so much as their shared belief that collectively they would stand a better chance in defeating the economic depression that was bedeviling all their respective countries. It was their intention to meet and review all existing international trade and tariff agreements and to make an effort at stabilizing the currency exchange rates.

Nazism and Bolshevism: the Similarities
(Literary Digest, 1933)

A look at the observations made by a correspondent for The London Observer who compared the two dominate tribes found in 1933 Berlin and Moscow. The writer was far more distracted by the similarities in their street hustle and their sloganeering rather than their shared visions in governance and culture; for example, both Nazis and Communists were attracted to restrictions involving speech, assembly and gun ownership while sharing an equal enthusiasm for May Day parades and the color red. Additionally, both totalitarians had their preferred dupes:

Absolute ideas invariably demand victims; and the ruthless treatment which is deliberately meted out to Jews in Germany is closely paralleled by the creation in the Soviet Union of a sort of pariah caste of Lishentsi or disenfranchised persons.

Germany never celebrated May Day with public parades until Hitler came to power; May Day was made a national holiday and all employers were given the day off with pay.

Click here to read an article that explains in great detail how the Nazi economic system (with it’s wage and price controls) was Marxist in origin.

Read another article that compares Communism and Nazism…

The Flaws of the NRA
(Collier’s Magazine, 1933)

An excerpt from a longer article by Winston Churchill in which he praised the virtues of the Anglo-American alliance and the economic leadership forged by the two nations during the Depression. Four paragraphs are devoted to the confusion he experienced when stopping to consider some of President Roosevelt’s economic decisions and the roll played by his National Recovery Administration (NRA).

Like many presidents before and after him, FDR purchased many of his clothes from Brooks Brothers;
click here to read about the history of the store.

The Bounteous Land
(Literary Digest, 1933)

The war clouds may have been gathering over Europe in 1933, but in British Palestine the skies were blue and life was good. Just as this 1922 magazine article intimated eleven years earlier, British Palestine was continuing to flourish in ways that neither the resident Zionists or the overseers from the British Colonial Office ever anticipated:

Two years ago, [British] Palestine’s orange crop – its main source of income – filled 2,000,000 cases at most. The forecast for the coming year is 6,000,000. Tel Aviv, a Jewish settlement near Jaffa, had 2,000 inhabitants in 1919. Now it claims 60,000 with 100,000 close ahead…

What is Next for Europe?
(Literary Digest, 1933)

Can we trust him?‘

That is the question asked by some British and French editors as they consider Chancellor Adolf Hitler‘s speech on the disarmament question in which, while he firmly champions the German case for equality in armaments, ‘he broke no diplomatic china’

The German economist who made the Reich’s rearmament possible was named Hjalmar Schacht, click here to read about him…

1933: Hitler Comes to Power
(Literary Digest, 1933)

This magazine article appeared on American newsstands not too long after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor in the office of President Hindenburg (Paul von Hindenburg 1847 – 1934), and presents a number of opinions gathered from assorted European countries as they considered just what a Nazi Germany would mean for the continent as a whole:

‘Whether or not Hitler turns out to be a clown or a faker, those by his side now, and those who may replace him later, are not figures to be joked with.’

With this grim thought the semiofficial Paris ‘Temps’ greets the accession of ‘handsome Adolf’ Hitler to the Chancellorship in Germany. The event, it ads, is ‘of greater importance than any event since the fall of of the Hohenzollererns.’

Click here to read a similar article from the same period.

Beer Flowed the Week Prohibition Ended
(Literary Digest, 1933)

The attached article is composed of numerous newspaper observations that appeared in print throughout April of 1933; these perceptions all pertain to the goings on that followed in the joyous wake of Prohibition’s demise:

‘The return of beer has really been a remarkable phenomenon,’ says The New York Evening Post.
‘Not one of the bad effects predicted for it actually took place’.

April 7, 1933: 3.2 Beer Returns
(Stage Magazine, 1933)

This cartoon was created to mark April 7, 1933 – the day real beer was once again permitted to be sold across the country; from sea to shinning sea, one million barrels of the amber liquid was consumed by the citizens of a grateful nation.

Click here to see how weird the first car radios looked.

Congress Discusses the Repeal of Prohibition
(Literary Digest, 1933)

During the action-packed opening months of the F.D.R. administration, Congress addressed the option of repealing Prohibition and allowing each state to decide whether it wished to be dry or wet:

Now the people can decide, after more than thirteen years of Prohibition.

Surprising the country, the lame-duck Congress, hereto staunchly dry, reverses itself ‘in a stampede toward repeal,’ to permit the people to decide Prohibition’s fate.

The NRA Shows Its Teeth
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1933)

The National Recovery Administration (1933 – 1935) was just one of the many alphabet agencies that the FDR administration created; his critics at the time, like the historians today, all believed that it was one of the well-meaning Federal efforts that simply prolonged the the Great Depression.

This is 1933 editorial addressed the various violation codes (there were 500 of them) and punishments that the Federal Government was prepared to dish out to all businesses wishing to defy any of the assorted labor laws and price-fixing measures that the NRA was designed to enforce.

From Amazon: Nine Honest Men

The NRA Shows Its Teeth
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1933)

From Amazon: Nine Honest Men

FDR Takes On the Great Depression
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

All the editorial writers quoted in this 1933 article agreed that FDR was the first U.S. President to ever have faced a genuine economic calamity as that which was created by the Great Depression:

Look at the picture flung into the face of Franklin Roosevelt:

Ships are tied up in harbors and their hulls are rotting; freight trains are idle; passenger trains are empty; 11,000,000 people are without work; business is at a standstill; the treasury building is bursting with gold, yet Congress wrestles with a deficit mounting into the billions, the result of wild and extravagant spending; granaries are overflowing with wheat and corn; cotton is a drag on the market, food crops are gigantic and unsalable, yet millions beg for food; mines are shut down; oil industries are engaged in cutthroat competition; farmers are desperate, taking the law into their own hands to prevent foreclosures; factories are idle; industry is paralyzed…

Israel’s Alarm at Hitler’s Rise
(Literary Digest, 1933)

This is an article that gathered Jewish opinions about the rise of Nazi Germany from many parts of the globe:

There have been European Premiers before this who were surrounded with an anti-Semite atmosphere, but never has such a Jew-baiter as Hitler sat at the helm of the Ship-of-State among Modern civilized people.

This bitter climax is the reward given to the Jews of Germany who poured out their blood for the ‘Fatherland’ during the Great War. Not less than 100,000 Jews took part in the war, which was more than a sixth of the Jewish population of the country including women and children. Twelve thousand fell on the battlefields, and thousands returned home crippled.

The Earliest Airline Stewardesses
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

By the time this article hit the newsstands, the airline stewardess job was no longer a novelty and there were twenty-five women working in relays on the trans-continental run between Chicago and Oakland. The woman who held the record as the first airline stewardess, Ellen Church (1904 – 1965), was hired two and a half years earlier.

In addition to other restrictions, the earliest flight attendants of the Thirties were all required to be no older than 26, weigh no more than 118 pounds, stand no taller than 54 and hold nursing degrees in order that they be prepared to soothe the frayed nerves of the flight-fearing passengers.

With the birth of passenger airlines came the need for those who had particular set of culinary skills: read about them here.

Roosevelt Takes Charge…
(The Literary Digest, 1933)

This 1933 magazine article anticipating the reign of FDR appeared on the newsstands on the same day as the man’s first inauguration. The article is composed of various musings that had been published in numerous papers across the economically depressed nation as to what manner of leadership might the Americans expect from their new President.

No President has ever inherited such a load of problems and responsibilities as Roosevelt.

Click here to read President Hoover’s
farewell warning to the nation.

1933: A Lynchless Year?
(Literary Digest, 1933)

This article was published during the opening days of 1933 and reported on the deep spirit of optimism that was enjoyed by the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, and their executive director, Mrs. Jessi Daniel Ames (1883 – 1972). This group of Southerners were hoping that, through their efforts and those of other like-minded Southern organizations, 1933 would be a year without a single lynching:

If Mississippi can have a lynchless year, a lynchless South is a possible and reasonable goal…

The reporter dryly noted that a few days after the above remark was recorded, a lynching was committed – one of the twenty-eight that took place throughout the course of 1933.

Japan and the Road to War
(Literary Digest, 1933)

A collection of opinions gathered from the newspapers of the world concerning the belligerency of Imperial Japan and its poor standing in the eyes of the League of Nations:

Feeling grows among the Japanese that events are shaping toward a second world war, with Japan in the position that Germany occupied in 1914…A Canadian Press dispatch from London, in THE NEW YORK TIMES, estimated war supplies sent from England to China and Japan. According to statistics of the British Government for 1932, the largest individual items were 7,735,000 small-arms cartridges for China and 5,361,450 for Japan…Japan also purchased 740 machine guns.

Four years after the Pearl Harbor attack, a Japanese newspaper editorial expressed deep regret for Japan’s aggressiveness in the Second World War, click here to read about it…

Click here to read about a 1925 novel that anticipated the war with Imperial Japan.