Articles from 1935
“The Brain Trust’s very lack of practical experience was its chief asset. Unhampered by tradition and fairly drunk with the opportunity of translating college dreams into realities, they leapt to the battle, careless of obstacles and without fear of frustration.”
Any of us born after 1945 have seen this before: the United Nations condemns a dreadful dictator and sends him a mean email and the dictator deletes it (Sadam Hussein was condemned 17 times by the U.N.) – but this was the first time it happened in the Twenties. The League of Nations condemned Mussolini for the Ethiopia invasion, and Mussolini couldn’t have cared less.
A report on the start of the Italian adventures in Ethiopia:
The dispute arose over alleged trespasses by Ethiopians on Italian possessions in Eritria and Italian Somaliland, in East Africa.
A solemn declaration of Abyssinia’s peaceful intentions toward Italy was read in broken but emphatic Italian to representatives of the foreign press in Rome by the nervous and impassioned Negradsa Yesus, Abyssinian Charge d’ Affaires. In fervent tones he asserted that Abyssinia’s intentions were so peaceful ‘that if Italy remained without a single soldier and without a single gun in her colonies, Abyssinia would not touch a single stone.’
Mussolini explained why he invaded Ethiopia in this article…
When the sun came up in 1935, it found that Jews had been designated a preferred risk by the insurance companies of the day. One member of the medical community looked into their reasoning:
That the Jews are the most nervous of all civilized peoples in the civilized world has been established as almost axiomatic in the medical profession.
The first successful attempt in world history to limit armaments was marked for the scrap-heap on December 31, 1936, when Hirosi Saito, the slim and smiling Japanese Ambassador to the United States, bowed himself into the State Department building in Washington last Saturday and handed to Secretary Cordell Hull a document that the world has expecting for many months – Japan’s formal denunciation of the Washington Naval Treaty.
Click here to read about FDR’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull.
A printable chart calculated in millions of U.S. dollars (evaluated prior to the 1934 value), which lays out the military spending as it increased between the years 1908 through 1913. The nations taken into account are Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, Japan and the United States.
Numerous articles about military spending prior to W.W. II in this section…
If you were planning to use your time machine to travel back to 1935 so you could work as a Hollywood extra – you might want to read this article about what a bad hand was dealt to that crowd back in the day. It was written by Campbell MacCulloch, General Manager of the Central Casting Corporation – and he knew all about it:
In Hollywood dwell some ten or twelve thousand misguided folk who cling tenaciously to a couple of really fantastic illusions…
When the 20th Century Fox executive Joseph Schenk (1876 – 1961) opened his big fat pie hole and blathered-on about what he really thought of Hollywood extras, he soon discovered that this minority had champions in the press corps who would come to their aid when needed.
‘SOAK THE RICH!’ has been a popular slogan for generations. President Roosevelt knows the people and he knows that this cry is even more popular now than it ever was before. Taxes which increase the cost of living and hang so heavily on the poor cannot be popular… But pick some taxes that bear down on the rich and – and then you have something which everyone will hurrah for. The number of rich are comparatively few, and hence their votes and influence can be disregarded entirely.
President Roosevelt’s plan was to tax this minority for 75 percent of their income.
To read about the dwindling good fortune of the rich, click here…
Along with the host of other forgotten items in this historic age of trouble, to be classed with Sumner’s forgotten man and Uncle Sam’s forgotten Constitution, is the forgotten dollar.
– so saith Edwin Myers of NEW OUTLOOK MAGAZINE. His gripe was typical of most Americans who struggled to get by during the Great Depression – but FDR was not neglectful of the dollar; one of his first acts was to make American exports more attractive abroad – and he devalued the dollar to this end. Much to his credit, exports did indeed increase – but the decreased purchasing power of the dollar domestically contributed to the misery of the American consumer.
