Articles from 1933
The first half of this article succinctly summarizes the German political experience that took place between 1919 through 1933; the second half anticipated a new, stable beginning for Germany. The German correspondent seemed not be bothered at all about their incoming chancellor.
A similar article can be read here…
An article about Governor Floyd B. Olson (1891 – 1936) of Minnesota who allowed his emotions to get the better of him one day in the early Spring of 1933 when he threatened to impose martial law throughout the state in order to confiscate private wealth should his proposed relief legislation fail to pass the Minnesota Senate:
Was former Democratic vice-President Henry Wallace a dirty Red?
In his review of contemporary Broadway costume design for the Autumn of 1933, the fashion journalist asked the pressing question:
What is the well-dressed play wearing these days?
There was much talk of Chanel, Schiaparelli and the House of (Elizabeth) Hawes as he heaped the praises high and deep for the the rag-pickers who clothed the ungrateful actresses for such productions as Men in White, Undesirable Lady, Her Master’s Voice and Heat Lightning.
The fashions in the plays are vivid, authentic, and wearable. They have sprung from the gifted brains and fingers of the cream of the crop of designers, Schiaparelli and Chanel in Paris, and our own industrious Americans who, themselves, are becoming hardy annuals. The silhouette is lengthening into slim height but even in sports clothes corners are rounded and curves are accentuated…
This is an early Thirties profile of a young American sculptor named Isamu Noguchi (1904 – 1988). In the years to come, Noguchi would become well known for his innovative designs for lamps and furniture; but when this article first appeared he was admired for simply having served as an apprentice to Constantin Brancussi.
Click here to read a 1946 art review concerning the paintings of French architect Le-Corbusier.
Hitler wasted little time in securing control over the Christian churches in Germany: within six months of taking power he began to put the screws to the Protestant churches. This article devotes much column space to the pastors who had no problem with any of Hitler’s commands.
The issue, then, is broader than the Reich. Jews, Protestants and Catholics the world over have seen another scrap of paper torn up in Hitler’s repudiation of his pledge on taking office that the Nazi regime would respect the freedom and legal rights of German churches… Hitler modified an order requiring all Protestant pastors on a recent Sunday to display Nazi banners from their church spires…. The Nazis have also suppressed the German branch of International Bible Students’ Society, outlawed the Boy Scouts, and, to make their program more effective – given a Nazi cast to the Lord’s Prayer.
Noël Coward (1899 – 1973) was simply the best all-rounder of the theatrical, literary and musical worlds of the 20th century. He invented the concept of celebrity and was the essence of chic in the Jazz Age of the 20s and 30s. His debonair looks and stylishly groomed appearance made him the icon of ‘the Bright Young Things’ that inhabited the world of The Ivy, The Savoy and The Ritz. No one is totally sure when and why it happened but following his success in the 1930s he was called ‘The Master’, a nickname of honor that indicated the level of his talent and achievement in so many of the entertainment arts. -so say the old salts at NoelCoward.net, and they should know because they have a good deal more time to think about him than we do.
The attached article was no doubt written by one of his many groupies for a swank American theater magazine following the successful New York premiere of his play Design for Living:
Click here to read about Cole Porter.
Elsa Maxwell kept the party going during the Great Depression…
Here is one of the earliest reports from Hitler’s Germany on the the Nazi hierarchy butting-heads with the Christian churches. As the fascists forced the Catholic and Protestant clergies to coerce, the churches reminded the new government of the autonomy they have always enjoyed (more or less).
…since the Depression began one out of every six banks has failed, one out of every forty-five hospitals has closed, one out of every twenty-two business and industrial concerns has become bankrupt…
– for those living in the digital age, the quote posted above is simply another mildly interesting, stale line from American history – but when those words were written in 1932 it meant for those who read it that there world was falling apart. So much of what they were taught to believe in was collapsing before their very eyes and as a result they felt a need to know God – and know Him they did; half way through 1932 churches and other religious bodies showed a total net gain of 929,252 members thirteen years of age or over – one of the largest gains ever recorded – and the total membership, thirteen years or more of age, reached the record figure of 50,037,209.
Click here to read about the American South during the Great Depression.
Shortly after Adolf Hitler took charge in Germany, a law was passed that forbid the hiring of foreign artists, composers, writers and performers. As the attached article clarifies, there were exceptions, but all concerned recognized that it was a new day in Germany but not necessarily a better one. Writing for the New York-based magazine, MODERN MUSIC, German arts critic Hans Heinsheimer (1900 – 1993) wrote:
The aim of the National Socialist is to push us back into the Middle Ages. Their politico-culture demands are radical… They set us up as the German Superman against the ‘inferior foreigners.’
Shortly after that infamous day when Hitler was sworn into power in the offices of Paul Von Hindenburg, this article hit the newsstands in North America about the new mood that was creeping across Germany:
At no time since the war – not even during the occupation of the Ruhr – it is said, has there been so much militarist and nationalist propaganda in Germany as there is now.
Anti-militarist newspapers, it appears, are afraid, in Berlin at least, to raise their voice in protest because of the continual and ruinous suspensions by the authorities…
During the summer of 1938 the Nazis allowed one of their photo journalists out of the Fatherland to wander the American roads; This is what he saw…
Attached is a profile of Hitler’s director of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), and their political differences that led to his resignation.
Hitler was hard hit when Gregor Strasser
(1892 – 1934), one of his ablest and oldest supporters, broke away from him. It happened in one of the fights between rival factions in the Hitlerite movement which followed losses sustained in the November Reichstag elections.
Profound gratitude is due Strasser from Hitler because when Hitler was released from jail, there was at least a nucleus of his party left, so that its reconstruction did not have to begin in a void. Gratitude was expressed on Hitler’s part for he made Strasser chief of his propaganda work.
He was murdered in his prison cell during the Night of Long Knives (June 30, 1934).
Read about the German POWs who were schooled in virtues of democracy.
The Nazis were very adept at eating their young; here is but one of many stories from assorted German and Austrian newspapers that illustrated that point:
The Hitlerites, it alleges, have their own Army, police, and courts functioning independently of the constituted authorities, even defying those authorities, and passing death sentences by secret tribunals.
In Dresden dwelt a ‘shock-troop division’ man named Herbert Hentsch whose body was found not so long ago.
Various circumstances suggest that comrades of the dead young man within the Nazi ranks put him out of the way…
CLICK HERE to read about the beautiful Blonde Battalions who spied for the Nazis…
Shortly after Hitler had assumed power came the eyewitness accounts concerning all the assorted government sanctioned murders, public beatings, and confiscations that characterized the Third Reich.
This article appeared on the newsstands just three months after Hitler’s coronation and is offers numerous repudiations, abnegation and disavowals all composed by the polished pros of the regime; such as Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, Reichsbank Chairman Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, newspaper editor Fritz Klein of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, and the editor from the Nazi organ in Munich, the Voelkischer Beobachter, who opined
We hereby nail this shameless lie. The accusations remain unexampled in the history of any cultured nation.
Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.
Click here to read about the similarities and differences between communism and fascism.
Economist Robert R. Doane (1889 – 1961) presented numerous charts and figures amassed between 1929 through 1932 to argue that America was still a wealthy nation despite the destruction wrought by the Great Depression:
In 1929 the United States held 44.6 percent of the total wealth of the world. In 1932 that proportion has increased to almost 50 percent. We still have half the banking-power of the world. We still have half the income. In all of the items of economic importance and efficiency, the United States still stands supreme.
Although the author of this article, educator Cedric Fowler, does not offer a name for the subject he is proposing, it will not take you very long to recognize it as social studies. Fowler argued that the text books available at that time were more suited to the Nineteenth Century than the tumultuous Thirties, ignoring all the various hot topics of the day that would have made subjects such as history, geography and civics come alive for those students who were enrolled at the time of the Great Depression.
Life has become more complex for young Americans since the time of their fathers and grandfathers, and educational method has become more complex and more comprehensive with it… The work of Dewey, Thorndike and a score of other authorities has liberated the schoolroom from its stuffy atmosphere, has made it possible for it to become an ante-room to adult life.
The total amount of retail trade in 1929 was approximately $50,033,850,792 in net sales, but the ten percent of chain stores did $10,771,934,034 of this trade – or twenty-one and a half percent of the total! In the miniature department store field, selling articles for nickles, dime, quarters and dollars, earning charts show an average return on capital invested in 1920 of nearly fourteen percent. In 1925, this percentage rose to twenty-five. In 1930, after trade had begun to suffer, earnings still were in excess of of thirteen percent.
Some were called Lishentsi, some were called land lords, Romanov lackies, the rich, the elite or simply the middle class; no matter what the ruling Soviets labeled their preferred bogeymen, they wanted them out of the way. The attached article goes into some detail as to how this was done.
Attached is a 1933 interview of Walter Lippmann (1889 – 1974) that covers many of the successes and influences of his career up to that time. Lippmann was, without a doubt, one of the most respected Pulitzer Prize winning American columnists of the Twentieth Century and a sharp critic of FDR’s New Deal.
Working as one of the earliest associate editors at The New Republic, he was there at the magazine’s birth (1914), and returned to those offices following his service as a captain in army intelligence and aid to the U.S. Secretary of War when the First World War ended. It was at this point that his career as columnist took flight when he assumed the position as lead commentator at The New York World. The article was written by historian James Truslow Adams (1879 – 1940) who wrote of him:
This phenomenon of Walter Lippmann is, it seems to me, a fact of possibly deep significance, and the remainder of his career will teach us not a little as to what sort of world we are living into…his intellectualism is tempered for the ordinary reader by his effort to be fair and by his fearlessness.
