Chapter 5: The 1920's, the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal

Europe, with its complex alliances and geography where boundaries changed frequently before, during and after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, was the setting for World War I. Between 1792 and 1815, the major powers of Europe were Great Britain, France, Austria, Tsarist Russia, Prussia with its many principalities, and Hungary. Poland and Italy were the victims of the many wars fought by these major powers. Spain was a major player in Europe, but its boundaries on the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees protected it from invasion. However, Spanish troops had occupied the Netherlands and Belgium at one time or another and had to convey them to some other power, usually after a defeat.

In this immensely complicated disposition of power and changing geography, Prince Clemens Lothar Metternich was named Foreign Minister of Austria in 1808. For various reasons not relevant in 1995, Prussia had to declare war on Napoleonic France in 1813, and Metternich saw the opportunity to salvage some political advantage for Austria by acting as mediator in this war. Napoleon, devastated by his defeat at the hands of Russia and his retreat from Moscow during a cruel winter, reluctantly rejected Metternich's peace proposal; Napoleon knew it meant defeat. So Austria joined the alliance against France. And Napoleon was finally defeated in France and exiled to the island of Elba. Napoleon escaped and returned to lead French troops that finally lost at Waterloo on June 20, 1815 just before the meeting arranged by Metternich. This momentous meeting, known as the Concert of Vienna, brought peace to Europe for almost one hundred years. World War I began in 1914.

Prince Metternich was a pragmatist. Rather than deal with nationalism, he simply ignored it. For example, he treated Italy as a geographic concept without any attention to the fact it was, among other factors, united by a common language. At the heart of the Concert of Vienna was the German Confederation created just before the Congress -- the many sovereign states present at the Concert of Vienna -- adjourned. The German Confederation was actually a union of sovereign states, not a federal government. Each of its thirty-nine member states had one vote, and several states each had a one-half vote. This would lead eventually to dissolution, but not before some serious problems surfaced.

For the Austrian territories, membership in the German Confederation was based on historic, not ethnic considerations. Thus, the alliance function of the German Confederation did not extend to Hungary, Poland, or the principalities of Lombardy or Venice in Italy. Accordingly, Austria might become involved in a war with Russia over Polish territory, and with France over Italian territories without any guarantee of support from the German Confederation. In such a war, part of a national group -- Italians or Poles -- might have to fight in the service of the Confederation and part might have to fight against it. Metternich had to ignore nationalism, not fight it to get what was a fatal flaw incorporated into the Concert of Vienna. Trying to deal with nationalism at the time might have brought the disaster that finally occurred. In fact, Metternich's brilliantly conceived Concert of Europe began unraveling in 1852. One of the central problems was the diversity of Austria-Hungary. It had large minority groups within its boundaries, all intensely nationalistic. These included the Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Serbs, Poles, Rumanians, and Ukrainians, while the Hungarians were in the majority.

In fact, at one time the Habsburgs decreed that German was to be the official language. Czech, for example, almost became a dead language, and was resurrected by Czech linguists in the late nineteenth Century.

Metternich's belief in the balance of power might not have ended in war, as it did, even though they were really local wars of independence. However, he prevailed on Tsar Alexander I not to intervene openly on behalf of the struggle for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821-30. Great Britain and Russia agreed in 1826 to divide the eastern Mediterranean into spheres of influence. Thus, with British support, Greece declared its independence in 1830. About this time Prince Metternich had to decide whether to support Russian intervention in France or recognize the lesser evil of the French revolution. It produced the Orléans regime of Louis Philippe replacing the Bourbon monarchy. He chose the latter rather than dealing with the consequences of Russian troops marching through Germany to subdue France. Then, there were uprisings in Italy that required Austrian intervention. Finally, Austria's dominance began its slide with its loss of the German and Italian positions. Both of these occurred because of a break with Russia brought about by the Crimean War in 1854. A year earlier, Russia had gone to war with Turkey by attempting military moves to double the length of the common frontier between Austria and Russia, a maneuver unacceptable to France and Great Britain. When Russian forces moved across the Danube River, France and Great Britain declared war on Russia. It was seen as a move which would give Russia a role in controlling the Dardenelles ruled by Turkey. In September, 1854 British and French troops began the siege of Sebastopol, and Russian casualties were over 100,000 in all. The British did not fare well at Gallipoli. The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson memorialized this gallant and tragic effort.

In that year, after many conspiracies, coups, and counter-coups, Napoleon III was declared Emperor of France defeating the republicans in a popular election. However, the constitution of the republic was scrapped in the process. For the next sixteen years, Napoleon engaged in adventurism in Poland and Mexico. In 1866, Austria fought Prussia and was routed in the Battle of Königgrätz in 1866, reducing Austria to a second rate European power. Then, in 1870 Napoleon III tried appeasing Count Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany and a Prussian. This misbegotten policy led to the Franco-German War of that year, and German troops marched into Paris. France lost Alsace-Lorraine as a result of this German invasion. This French defeat made it clear that Germany was the only genuine ally of Austria, and France was no longer a feasible ally of the Hapsburg Empire.

Emperor Franz Josef only slowly grasped the significance of this military calculus and began looking at expansion in the Balkans. This meant potential conflicts with Turkey, and a new source of friction with Russia. Tsar Alexander had made it clear on several occasions that the warring nationalities of the Balkans, Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bosnians was a matter of special concern to Russia. This combination eventually led to the outbreak of World War I. Approaching the 20th Century, Europe was a continent still undergoing change and turmoil, but with both Germany united by Bismarck and Italy united by Guiseppe Garibaldi.

In 1867, Great Britain's Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli presided over the opening of the Suez Canal, a new route to the Far East and the British Empire with oil not yet discovered in any quantities in the Middle East. Nonetheless, Great Britain had staked out its sphere of interest at the northern point of the Persian Gulf. Martin Gilbert's Atlas of World War I was published by the Oxford University Press in 1994. This book has extensive maps with the positions of each country, the extent of its armed forces, and many other details of interest to the war historian.

The British Empire had worldwide scope in 1914. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were members of the British Commonwealth, and a royal presence in India with a Viceroy. In the Middle East, Aden, Oman, Bahrain, and what is now Kuwait were either ruled or controlled by Great Britain. In Africa, its empire included Egypt, Sudan, British Somaliland, Rhodesia, and the Union of South Africa. Britain also ruled Cyprus and Malta. The French Empire in Africa included all the Mediterranean shore territory from Gibraltar to the boundary with Egypt, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Sierra Leone, and Madagascar. The German colonies in Africa included the Cameroons, German Southwest Africa, and German East Africa. Belgium ruled the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II having slyly conspired to acquire what forty years later was found to contain a great deal of the world's uranium.

The Turkish Ottoman Empire began with European Turkey and across the Dardenelles all the way around the Eastern Mediterranean shore in land that later became Lebanon, Syria, and Israel down the shoreline of the Red Sea to Yemen and from the boundary with Bahrain north through what is now Iraq and Armenia. By 1914, Germany had just about completed the Berlin-Baghdad railroad in an effort to extend its commercial interests. By 1914, Great Britain and Russia had signed a convention settling outstanding differences in Central Asia and dividing Persia (now Iran) into spheres of influence. Great Britain controlled the oilfields in what is now southern Iraq, beginning with the Persian Gulf.

Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was a grandson of Britain's Queen Victoria, and in 1910 he visited London for the funeral of King Edward VII. Nine kings rode horses three by three out of Bukingham Palace. Barbara Tuchman wrote in her Guns of August that "the muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cort”ge left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a blaze of splendour never to be seen again."

The future source of tragedy, tall, corpulent and corseted, with green plumes waving from his helmet, Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the old Emperor was in the parade leaving Buchingham Palace. Franz Josef rode on the right of Belgium's King Albert.

By 1914, Europe was a seething mass of minorities all wanting their independence. Capital cities like Berlin, Paris, Rome, Budapest, Vienna, Moscow, Belgrade, and London had more than the European share of vain generals, ambitious diplomats and incompetent politicians. All that was needed to launch a war was a single spark.

On July 12, 1914 a Serbian anarchist named Princip supplied that spark by assassinating Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo.Within weeks, mobilization occurred following rejections of ultimatums that were merely empty formalities. The armies of Germany and France were on a collision course. Italy did not declare war until 1915; it had not been notified of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia in violation of its treaty with Austria. Following the Schlieffeln Plan designed by a Prussian in 1907, Germany attacked Belgium and Luxembourg on the route to Paris.

Fire Railway Gun Railway Gun
Men of the 80th Division fire a railway gun at German positions, at Meuse, France, in September, 1918.

In the first battle of the Marne (1914) the British and French forces succeeded in blocking the German advance. Each side had 500,000 casualties. However, the German armies advanced within twenty-three miles of Paris. With that failure, what might have been a six weeks victory was turned into a four year war in which 5.2 million of the Allied Powers were counted as War Dead. In 1995, Phillip Warner's book, World War One: A Chronological Narrative, was published. In it, Warner gives the horrifying nature of the war and the casualties (dead and wounded) of the many battles fought between 1914 and 1918. American casualties were about 265,500 for the period they were in action with almost two full-scale armies.

The Central Powers -- Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Turkey -- lost 3.5 million, but the nature of the trench warfare was so terrible, that with respect to Russia and Turkey, the figures are only conjectural. No accurate figures exist. Some twenty million died of hunger and disease related to the war. Not one person has ever been able to show that the war brought any gain for humanity. The rhetoric of American Socialists that it was an imperialist war alienated many people. The countries of Europe were fighting over boundaries, colonies, and spheres of influence; they were fighting for the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East.

Trench Warfare Trench Warfare in WWI
British officer leads a raiding party to harass the German lines.

In Washington, Woodrow Wilson campaigned for reelection in 1916 on the promise that "he kept us out of war." Barely three months after his inauguration in 1917, the United States was sending troops to Europe. German submarines attacked shipping carrying arms to Britain. Wilson believed in freedom of the seas. However, Wilson had an overriding interest in trade. Gradually, trade shifted from Germany and Italy to England and France. By the end of the war, Europe's reserves of gold had virtually disappeared winding up in the United States. In April, the United States declared war on the Central Powers, Germany, Hungary and Austria. Congress approved budgets that allowed the rapid mobilization and outfitting with weapons over 3 million men, of which about 1.3 million actually went to Europe. General John Pershing commanded these troops which tipped the balance in favor of the Allied Powers. On November 11, 1918 Germany surrendered.

The war had not been universally approved by Americans, many of whom were recent immigrants and had relatives in Germany, or were politically opposed. In fact, Congress enacted a Selective Service Act when only 75,000 volunteers had responded to the call to arms. George Creel, a veteran newsman, was made director of the Committee on Public Information. Its function was to whip up enthusiasm for the war. It did so by sending thousands of speakers to organized rallies, where each gave a five-minute canned pep talk. At President Wilson's request, Congress enacted the Espionage Act in June, 1917. This outrageous law made it a crime to criticize the government for its conduct of the war.

One month after passage of the Espionage Act, the Postmaster General ordered a magazine, The Masses, suppressed. This monthly magazine described itself as "a monthly revolutionary journal." The Postmaster General said that some articles and political cartoons in the issue of August, 1917, attacking the war and the military draft would violate the act. Judge Learned Hand enjoined the Postmaster General from acting against the magazine by invoking the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedom. He was reversed on appeal to the Court of Appeals. Masses Publishing Company v. Patten, Postmaster General, 246 F. 24 (2nd Cir. 1917).

The Germans surrendered in 1918, but Tsarist Russia was on the verge of becoming the Soviet Union. V. I. Lenin, the leading theoretician of the new ideology of Communism was relentless in applying its principles, ordered the execution of the Russian royal family. Leon Trotsky later had a disagreement with Lenin that led to his departure to Mexico, and Stalin established a Soviet Union that was to continue until its collapse in 1989. Assassins paid by Stalin finally tracked Trotsky in Mexico and killed him in 1930. The Allied Powers, in fact, continued their war against the Bolsheviks until 1919, when the anti-Bolshevik forces withdrew. They included British, American, and Italian troops entering Bolshevik territory from Archangel in the very north of Russia. Poland continued its war against Russia which had partitioned Poland years earlier. Polish troops defeated Russian forces at the Vistula River. Poland regained some of its old territory from Russia pursuant to the Treaty of Riga in 1920 and seized some land from Lithuania in the same year.

All the Allied Powers gathered in Paris to consider what was finally known as the Treaty of Versailles. This treaty redrew the map of Europe, creating states like Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia dismembering the Austria-Hungarian Empire in the process. Additionally, the Turkish Ottoman Empire was dismembered, and the diplomats created new states such as Lebanon and Syria. Palestine became a British Mandate ruled in accordance with the League of Nations also created by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Unfortunately, the Senate of the United States declined to ratify this treaty when Senator Cabot Lodge, a Republican, worked against it, describing it as internationalist. Accordingly, the United States never joined the League of Nations.

Among other things, the Allied nations demanded that Germany pay them reparations for war damages. Articles 231 to 236 of the Treaty of Versailles covered the amount and the timing for these payments. Article 235 states:

In order to enable the Allied and Associated Powers to proceed at once in the restoration of their industrial and economic life, pending the full determination of their claims, Germany shall pay in such installments and in such manner (whether in gold, commodities, ships, securities or other wise) as the Reparation Commission may fix, during 1919, 1920 and the first four months of 1921, the equivalent of 20,000,000,000 gold marks. Out of this sum the expenses of the armies of occupation subsequent to the Armistice of November 11, 1918, shall first be met, and such supplies of food and raw materials as may be judged by the Governments of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers to be essential to enable Germany to meet her obligations for reparations may also, with the approval of the said Governments, to be paid for out of the above sum. The balance shall be reckoned towards the liquidation of the amounts due for reparation.

The 20 billion gold marks was only the beginning of reparations from Germany. The Allied and Associated governments were looking at a total of 269 billion gold marks. Notwithstanding these harsh demands, some Germans saw the need to establish a working government to replace the Prussian edifice that collapsed with the surrender of Germany and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He had taken refuge in Holland. Thus on August 11, 1919 the Constitution of the Weimar Republic was proclaimed. Friedrich Ebert was its first Chancellor. Ebert inherited some postwar problems.

The German navy had a mutiny at Kiel, and the Spartacists (Communists) formed worker and soldier councils. Between January 5 and 12, 1919, there was a general strike and Spartacist uprising in Berlin. The Spartacus League was founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and developed as an offshoot of the more moderate Social Democratic Party. Its members accepted the Bolshevik Revolution and saw in the unstable post World War I political climate an opportunity to energize the international proletarian revolution. It was not peaceful.

There was fighting in the Ruhr and central Germany, and a Soviet Republic formed in Munich. It was crushed by Prussian and German Freikorps forces. In early 1920, the German Workers Party held its first meeting where Adolf Hitler announced the party program. The Communists initiated further uprisings in central Germany, and their Red Army was defeated by the Reichswehr. In 1921, Hitler became the first chairman of the National Socialist Workers' Party, later shortened to the Nazi Party. In the same year, the SA (Sturmabteilung -- Brown Shirts) were established. Perhaps worst of all, the value of the Gerrman mark began its precipitous decline. By September 3, 1923 a ticket on a Berlin streetcar cost 400,000 marks. By October, 4 billion marks was equal to one dollar. Only the wealthy survived this ruinous inflation, and the people began to listen to Adolf Hitler. Only issuance of the Rentenmark with a value of 4.2 marks to the dollar finally stabilized the economy, but the damage had been done.

On November 8, 1923 the so-called Beer Hall Putsch led by Hitler took place in Munich, while Communists attempted to seize power in Hamburg. There were separatist movements in the Rhineland. Hitler was released from prison after serving nine months of his sentence for participating in the Beer Hall Putsch. In early 1924, the Nazi Party was re-established, and General Field Marshall Paul von Hindenberg was elected president of the Weimar Republic. In November, 1925 the Nazi paramilitary organization, the SS (Schutzstaffel -- Black Shirts) was formed, and the first volume of Hitler's Mein Kampf was published. Hardly anyone outside Germany paid any attention to this book, but, in it, Hitler told the world just what he was going to do and finally did, by attacking Poland in 1939, thus launching World War II. In 1933, however, Dachau 2 concentration camp was opened, the first of many such camps used to imprison Jews while awaiting execution during the war. In March, the Reichstag, the German parliament enacted Enabling Laws making Hitler a dictator, and burning of "Un-German" books by Nazi students began.

Some writers like Thomas Mann had tried in vain to appeal to moderates. In his book, The German Republic, Mann had endorsed the idea of a republic. In October, 1930 he issued an "Appeal to Reason," at a meeting in Berlin. Only police protection prevented the Nazis from turning the meeting into a brawl. A year later, Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann's brother warned that were Hitler not stopped blood was sure to flow. Lion Feuchtwanger concluded in 1931 that the battle against Nazism was all but lost. Berlin, he wrote was "a city full of future emigrés," meaning Jews. One of them was Margot Jacoby, the wealthy wife of a successful patent lawyer in Berlin. She sent her husband and son to Palestine in 1936, saying "there was no other way." She was one of those appearing in Studs Terkel's great book, Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who Lived It. Here is what she said about herself:

I left [penniless] in 1938, just a few days before "Crystal Night," when they [the Nazis] destroyed all the property of the Jews. A Swiss banker friend of mine said, 'When are you leaving?' I said 'Maybe in a month.' He said, 'No, you are leaving the day after tomorrow.' Outside of Germany, people knew better than we in Germany."

Some German writers were published in the United States. Alfred Knopf, for example, made it a practice for him and his wife, Blanche to spend enough time in Germany or other parts of Europe to sign up promising authors. In 1926, this husband-wife team agreed to publish Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Viking found Stefan Zweig in Germany, where he was a pacifist. Zweig wrote seven books, of which The World of Yesterday is perhaps the best known in the United States. Bertolt Brecht was widely known in Europe, and Alfred Knopf was enthusiastic about Brecht who, with Kurt Weill, wrote The Threepenny Opera in 1928. His Bertolt Brecht Journals of 1993 was a sensation among scholars because of its candid comments about his life, colleagues, friends, literature, and politics.

The America of the 1920s was not scarred by the Great War that ended for Americans on November 11, 1918. The return of its soldiers was welcomed by a paper-strewn parade up Fifth Avenue. The Jazz Age was off and running, even before the war ended. The 1920s was also a period of prolific new writers who had "experienced" war and could do so with a new dimension. There were publishers who saw the potential and opened for business. Simon & Schuster opened their doors in 1923, but its first product was not really a book, but the first Cross Word Puzzle Book in 1924. Its sales plus the sales of dictionaries geared to the puzzle put Simon & Schuster in the black quickly. Charles Scribner & Company was one of the post-Civil War publishers and G. P. Putnam was one of the pioneers.

American publishers opened offices in London, and British publishers followed suit but for different reasons. The Americans were in London to find European authors, while UK publishers like the Oxford University Press and Macmillans were in New York for the business available and the profits to be made. After the Civil War and the end of American expansion westward, people began reading even more than ever, probably because of the growth of public libraries.But censorship was a problem for publishers. Anthony Comstock was a self-appointed arbiter of literary excellence without the intelligence to support his status. However, he met his match in George Bernard Shaw. In 1905, Man and Superman was taken off the general circulation shelves of the New York Public Library and placed in the reserve section. When Shaw heard about this he described "Comstockery" in a published letter as the world's standing joke. It confirmed for Europe the deep-seated conviction that America is a provincial place. Comstock retaliated by suggesting that the police ban the opening of Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession. A court held the play was not actionable in a court, and it opened to crowds so large that police reserves had to be called out. Even today in 1995, some librarians have surrendered to the stupid by withdrawing Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from classrooms and libraries.

While Europe had been devastated by four years of war against the Central Powers, America was all but exempted from its economic consequences. Republican Warren G. Harding occupied the White House beginning in 1921. Scandals would turn up in his administration, and the press reported them, particularly the Teapot Dome scandal. It resulted in Harding's Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall imprisonment. Politics, however, played a small role in the years from 1920 to 1928. Culture drove America during this period, and New York was as Dorothy Parker said, an "Arrangement in Black and White." This city had been a mecca to the hundreds of thousands of black Americans emigrating from South to North in the years after Reconstruction right up to the Great War in Europe. W.E.B. Du Bois said they brought with them "their gift of story and song." No other city in America during the 1920s was as receptive to black talent as New York. As Ann Douglas wrote in her book, Terrible Honesty, uptown Manhattan became Harlem and produced the cultural and literary movement called the Harlem Renaissance, celebrated by whites and blacks alike. Postwar America had other problems. The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920, and the country was officially dry. Congress passed the Volstead Act over Wilson's veto, and any beverage containing more than .5 percent alcohol effectively banned beer and wine.

On the surface, New York was dry, since Frances Willard had lobbied nationally for abstinence. Prohibition was worse. It devastated the previously legal liquor business, the seventh largest industry in the country. The industry, however, never missed a beat. It sold its whiskey as medically necessary, and all a thirsty person had to do was find a friendly doctor to prescribe it. The Eighteenth Amendment also prohibited the importation of liquor. In short order, smugglers replaced ships that offloaded liquor outside the three-mile limit off the shores of New York and New Jersey to speed boats capable of outrunning the Coast Guard. The operation of speakeasies was a growing business, and one could discreetly order any sort of drink in the better clubs of New York. The '21 Club' was perhaps the best known of these clubs. Canada was a great supplier of liquor to the thirsty of America; its border was a sieve for smugglers. The truly ingenuous made "bathtub gin," said to be of poor quality by those who sampled it.

For those fortunate enough to have anticipated Prohibition, the rewards could be worth something, the pleasure of sipping wine denied to others, or even sharing it with friends. Street v. Lincoln Safe Deposit Co.et al, 254 U.S. 88 (1920). Street proved he had lawfully acquired wine and liquor and stored it in the defendant warehouse as a lessee, all before the effective date of the Volstead Act. Street alleged that the wine and liquor stored by him were "in his exclusive possession and control and were intended to be and were used only for personal consumption by plaintiff and members of his family or bona fide guests." The Internal Revenue Service was charged with enforcement of the Volstead Act and wanted to confiscate the wine and liquor as "a threat to plaintiff." The Supreme Court held the Volstead Act enacted pursuant to the Eighteenth Amendment did not apply to the warehousing of lawfully acquired wine and liquor. In effect, the court suggested that he enjoy what he had lawfully acquired.

The decade of the 1920s got off to a good start. Fiorella LaGuardia was a prominent New York City politician who served several terms in the House of Representatives. He was an outspoken critic of Prohibition. In hearings before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. LaGuardia testified against continuing Prohibition. "It is my calculation," he said, "that at least a million dollars a day is paid in graft and corruption to Federal, State, and local officers. Such a condition is not only intolerable, but it is demoralizing and dangerous to organized government. The Government even goes to the trouble of facilitating the financing end of the bootlegging industry. In 1925, $286, 950,000 more of $10,000 bills were issued than in 1920, and $25,000,000 more of $5000 bills were issued. What honest business man deals in $10,000 bills? Surely, these bills were not used to pay the salaries of ministers. The bootlegging industry has created a demand for bills of large denominations, and the Treasury Department accommodates them."

For a while, Jimmy Walker was Mayor of New York and probably got political support from the Tammany Hall political machine. Walker was very good with the quick quip. When a delegation of Swiss admirers presented Walker with a 500-pound cheese at City Hall, he thanked them and asked, "Will someone run out and get me a cracker." New Yorkers loved Walker, even with some of his shortcomings. New York also offered the country's biggest circulation tabloid, the Daily News, with a circulation of about a million daily. The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild were founded in 1923 and 1926 respectively. Both were dedicated to marketing bestsellers to their members. Some of its publishers included Farrar Strauss Giroux, the Harper Brothers later Harper & Row, and now HarperCollins, Doubleday Publishing Company and Scribner's. Random House was not founded until 1933. New Yorkers had their magazines, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker. Time Magazine, founded by Henry Luce and a colleague was published in New York first in 1923 and is still in business.

New York was the nation's music capital in the 1920s, primarily because of the sales of sheet music. This was later the foundation of the nascent recording business centered in Manhattan. The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) began operations in 1926. The theater flourished as did the nightclubs. Dwight Deere Wiman was one of the early producers, coming out with The Little Shows and later, musicals with artists like Ray Bolger and Vera Zorina, a lovely ballerina, in "On Your Toes."

Some of the great composers got their start in New York. George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Lorenz Hart and Eugene O'Neill, a playwright, were all in New York. Other luminaries included Alexander Woollcott, Duke Ellington, Bix Beiderbecke, James Thurber, Al Jolson, Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Babe Ruth, Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Walter Lippman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe. These names were widely familiar in America. They created a culture which was then exported it to the rest of the country. They include stars of the theater, music, books, poetry, actors and actresses on the stage, musicians, playwrights, and architects, and newspaper columnists like Walter Lippman and Franklin P. Adams (FPA).

Carnegie Hall Carnegie Hall
New York City

Conductors come and go, but Walter Damrosch stayed in New York as conductor of the New York Philharmonic. On Saturdays, at the old Carnegie Hall he would summon the entire orchestra to perform for children, usually brought in struggling and kicking by their parents. When Damrosch waved his baton imperiously, the music stopped with one gesture. He would then turn around and tell the children all about what they had just heard. Children loved it, and as adults probably loved Leonard Bernstein.

Dr. Walter Damrosch Listen here


Dr. Walter Damrosch
Conducting the New York Philharmonic playing Brahms Symphony No. 2. on the NBC Music Appreciation Hour

For residents of New York who needed a rest from its cultural merryground, the years between 1923 and 1931 saw the construction of the Bronx River Parkway, the Hutchinson River Parkway, the Saw Mill River Parkway, and the Cross Country Parkway. The Holland Tunnel was completed in 1927, and the George Washington Bridge was opened in 1931. New York probably had the first of the modern skyscrapers. The Chrysler and Empire State Buildings were completed in 1929. Robert Moses took over later parkway and bridge construction much to the dismay of some. He was an autocrat with power to build. Lewis Mumford, an urban planner par excellence lived in New York, but even Mumford could not convince Moses to be moderate. Mumford is the author of some 25 books, including The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, & Its Prospects published in 1968 by Harcourt Brace & Company. Immediately after World War I and the early 1920s the publishing community was centered in New York City. Simon & Schuster, for example, was organized in 1923, and other publishers were preoccupied with survival. For that reason alone, the publishers did not respond collectively to the Red Scare, although individual editors may have done so. The newspapers, however, carried stories of Communism in Europe, particularly in postwar Germany.

The war ended in 1918, but Congress and the courts read the stories of the breakdown of German order with Communist uprisings in many German cities, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and creation of the Communist International to operate around the world. All this fear led to the Red Scare of 1919-23. President Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, scoured the country for subversive aliens, and Palmer personally led some raids in New York City. The State Legislature tried to expel from its ranks duly elected Socialists. These members of the legislature were successfully defended by Charles Evans Hughes, who in 1930 would become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Gitlow v. New York, 168 U.S. 652 (1925) was a setback for civil liberties. Gitlow was convicted for violation of the Espionage Act. He had written and circulated some 16,000 pamphlets urging strikes and class action in any form. Clarence Darrow defended Gitlow, arguing that his client had only urged abstract doctrine and that this was protected by the First Amendment. Justice Sanford wrote for the majority, saying that "A state may punish utterances endangering the foundations of organized government and threatening its overthrow by unlawful means."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented. "The only difference between the expression of an opinion and an incitement is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result. Eloquence may set fire to reason. But whatever may be thought of the redundant discourse before us, it had no chance of starting a present conflagration." Thus did Holmes limit the clear and present danger rationale in the Schenck case. Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). However, it was not until Stromberg v. California, 283 U.S. 359 (1931) that the court actually ruled a state law unconstitutional on constitutional free speech grounds. The freedom to criticize press comments exposing crime and other corrupt conduct was upheld in Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 797 (1931). However briefly the period of fear of Communism lasted, it was replaced with the Great Depression and the poverty created throughout America in 1929.

The 1920s may have begun on a note favoring the consumption of wine, but it also opened on a threat to liberty and capital punishment for political syndicalism. In the spring of 1920, a typesetter and anarchist named Andrea Salsedo was arrested in New York City and held without counsel for eight weeks. This was a violation of the 5th Amendment. Salsedo was denied counsel during his incarceration without any charge. He was not allowed to contact his family or a lawyer. His crushed body was found on the street fourteen floors from where the FBI was holding him. The FBI said he had committed suicide. Two friends of Salsedo began carrying guns fearful of the same fate as Salsedo. They were arrested in Brockton, Massachusetts and charged with armed robbery and murder that had taken place in a shoe factory. Nicola Sacco and Bartelemeo Vanzetti went on trial, were convicted, and spent seven years in prison while appeals went on, and while people all over the country became involved in their case. The pair had been ably defended by a Massachusetts lawyer named Thompson. He had argued to the trial judge that these men were being sentenced to death because they were anarchists and foreigners. Actually, there was evidence presented that Vanzetti was insane at the time of the crime. Commonwealth v. Sacco and Vanzetti, 255 Mass. 369, 151 N.E. 839 (1926). However, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held that the Superior Court had no jurisdiction to grant a new trial because the motion was not timely. Both defendants were electrocuted in August, 1927.

Two years later, Black Friday, October 24, 1929 signalled the end of one era and the beginning of another. The Great Depression had begun with the precipitous decline of the Dow-Jones averages for 65 stocks listed on the New York Stock Exchange which listed the stock of about 1,200 companies then. Excessive credit, not enough margin requirements, and the effects of high tariff protectionism had made their contribution to this financial débacle. In 1923, a Republican Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, had recommended a huge tax cut. Against stiff opposition the tax cut was enacted. In 1928, New York's Mayor LaGuardia toured the poorer districts of the city and said: "I was not prepared for what I actually saw. It seemed almost incredible that such conditions of poverty really exist." This tour of the Mayor's took place when Ann Douglas's New York was throbbing with cultural activity. In her book, Terribly Honest, she observed: "Imports [during 1918] dropped dramatically, but the economy, stimulated by the demands of foreign nations at war, filled its own needs effortlessly. This imbalance between American and European accounts was one of the precipitating causes of the Crash of 1929, and it persisted long after the Depression was over."

The Crash of 29 The New York Stock Exchange

Herbert Hoover, a Republican, was president from 1928 to 1933. He was unfairly blamed for the Great Depression. Unfortunately, he kept telling the public that "Prosperity was just around the corner," a claim that exposed Hoover to ridicule as the economy got worse. Kenneth Galbraith had a different view. He said in his book The Great Crash, that behind the excessive speculation was the fact that "the economy was essentially unsound." He also said there was a "bad distribution of income." This condition has become even worse in 1995, and more people are aware of this unequal distribution of both income and wealth.

Whatever the reasons were for the Crash of 1929 were, the Great Depression established its own environment, and people had to survive any way they could. There may have been enough food to feed those in need, but the system that allowed distribution to work, was itself not working. Landlords were used to getting rent on time, but the growing number of unemployed ran out of money, They were soon evicted. In agricultural areas, banks began to foreclose on unpaid loans and acquired the land itself in foreclosure proceedings. Industry closed down without orders for their products, so management fired more employees. In April, 1931, Henry Ford fired 75,000 workers, and there was no unemployment compensation then. People ran out of hope, housing, and money. Very much the same sequence occurred in Europe, and depletion of investment capital reduced the buying power of the European consumer. The American export market weakened, and there was really not much European industry could export to acquire dollars. American industry needed help.

Within months of the Great Crash of 1929, industry demanded protection. They got it in the form of the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act of 1930. By imposing a stiff tariff on imports, business theorized that the tariff would protect American business weakened by the market's loss of liquidity, ie., no cash. A staggering European market could not absorb its own productivity, much less that exported to it from the United States. Furthermore, some European governments retaliated by imposing high tariffs on American exports. The Great Depression rapidly became a worldwide disaster.

Agriculture was hit the hardest. In 1915, farmers produced slightly over one billion bushels of wheat on 60 million acres, the largest yield in history. Sales at this price sparked a frenzy of land speculation during and after World War I. The wartime Food Control Act set a price of $2.00 a bushel, more than double what the farmers had been getting. The land speculation frenzy was financed by mortgaging and re-mortgaging their land. By 1920, the debt load rose to $8.4 billion with $574 million of annual interest. The price of wheat did not remain at its high of $2.19 in 1919. Instead, it declined to less than a dollar a bushel in 1922. Other commodities suffered similar price declines, while other fixed costs increased.

While labor productivity increased by an astonishing 43 percent from 1919 to 1929, wages increased only slowly during the same period, not anywhere near the rate of production. As a consequence, more and more American workers could not afford to buy what they produced, nor could a significant amount of production be exported. Unions were not much help. The AFL under Samuel Gompers was conservative, dominated by the craft unions. Union membership declined from a high of 5.1 million in 1920 to 3.4 million in 1929. Corporate America blossomed. In the period between 1919 and 1929, some 1,200 mergers swallowed up more than 6,000 previously independent companies. By 1929, some 200 corporations controlled almost 50 percent of all American industry.

As usual banks financed business expansion, but they also financed land speculation. In the general frenzy of the Roaring '20s, banks acquired some bad habits. Management was often corrupt, made too many loans without security, particularly to companies in which bank officers were interested, and promoted speculative enterprises. The banks, said one banker, had "provided everything for the customers but a roulette wheel." In 1929, they had to face the music, just like everyone else.

The survivors now had to sift through the wreckage to see what was left to salvage. Not all the wreckage was caused by the Depression. In 1927, the Mississippi Valley suffered from terrible floods, and the Red Cross stepped in and brought relief to hundreds of thousands who had lost their homes. In 1930, President Hoover asked the Red Cross to help again by providing food to the survivors of the looming financial depression, but on this occasion help was needed nationwide. In the South, local Red Cross volunteers thought people should rely on their own resources. The real reason was quite different. Local chairmen were mostly planters who did not want their workers to avoid picking cotton by being somewhere else when food might be distributed.

Drought refugees from South Dakota Drought refugees from South Dakota

Not all farmers engaged in land speculation, but those who did got burned. They could not even pay interest on their bank loans, so the banks foreclosed in an effort to acquire the land themselves at foreclosure sales. Other farmers created a protective ring around one of their own and by threats, prevented anyone from buying the property at more than a token amount. Farmers who lost their land, either to a bank by foreclosure, or to the deadly loss of rich topsoil in the drought and winds of 1934, left for California by the hundreds of thousands. Migrants from the Dust Bowl of Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma and other Mid-West states picked up what little was left of their meager possessions and left for California by the thousands. Eventually, over a million "Okies" and "Arkies" moved west. John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath was the story of what one family from Oklahoma found in California. Alan Brinkley wrote an article in Past Imperfect: History According to Hollywood. Here's an excerpt of what he wrote about the book, later made into a film.

There were signs of hopelessnes, to be sure: The main characters [in The Grapes of Wrath], the Joads, came to the end of their long ordeal in worse shape than when they began it -- the family dispersing, their possessions washed away in a flood, their prospects bleak. There were signs, too, of anger -- in the unvarying harshness of Steinbeck's portraits of bankers, landowners, local sheriffs, and other capitalist flunkies; in the bitter commentary on the human costs of industrial 'progress' (explicit in the novel, implicit in the film); and in the radicalism of Tom Joad, who, having killed a policeman (justifiably, Steinbeck suggests), leaves the family late in both the novel and the film to join an unspecified movement committed to social struggle. He promises his mother: 'Wherever they's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there.

The mood of the country was one of anger; the unemployed, evicted for non-payment of rent, and without enough food for their children or their entire family, threatened to take food from stores unless they were given food at no cost. Most of the people in bread lines had lost everything, including cash. For a while, 5,000 homeless people sold apples on the streets of New York City.

Bread Line Depression bread line

In the spring of 1932, veterans of World War I were without work, and a hungry family marched to Washington to demand the war bonus then, not years in the future.These foot soldiers of the Bonus Army demanded that Congress pay them now. The Bonus Army consisted of about twenty thousand veterans from all over the country. Congress heard the message, and the House authorized payment of the war bonus, but the Senate rejected the measure authorizing payment. Discouraged, some of the veterans left, but most of them stayed, living in shacks made out of packing crates and discarded newspapers. President Herbert Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. General Douglas McArthur was in command of the cavalry, tanks and infantry charged with removing these homeless veterans. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower, later a president of the United States, was McArthur's aide. The Army used tear gas to disperse the veterans, injuring 1,000 of them in the process. Shots were fired killing two veterans. This shameless use of force surely influenced the outcome of the election a few months later. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat from Hyde Park, New York defeated Herbert Hoover in a landslide. Roosevelt got 57.4 percent of the total popular vote of 39,759,000 and 472 electoral votes to Hoover's 59 electoral votes. Norman Thomas, a Socialist candidate, got 885,000 votes, while William Foster, the Communist candidate got 103,000 popular votes.

 Roosevelt accepting nomination at the convention, 1932. Roosevelt accepting nomination at the convention, 1932.
Roosevelt broke tradition in coming to the convention to accept the nomination in person.

Roosevelt was elected Governor of New York in 1928. Friends urged him to at least see for himself what damage the Great Depression had created. According to one of his many biographers, he was so affected by the sight of misery, hunger and utter despair that he said he would run for president. This suggestion seems too simplistic. Roosevelt was not unfamiliar with Washington, having served as an Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Wilson's Cabinet. As a young man, he had been crippled by polio, and it was an exercise of sheer will that allowed him to even get out of a chair. Roosevelt was sworn in as president on March 4, 1933 and almost immediately sent measures to Congress to stabilize a shattered economy. Amongst these measures was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). In this act approved by Congress, business, labor, and government all agreed to various codes fixing prices and wages, and limiting competition. The general public, those most affected by the policies of the NIRA, had no voice in developing this instrument of business power.Two years later, it was held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Schechter Poultry v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935). In a unanimous opinion, the court held that the act was an unconstitutional delegation of lawmaking power to the executive branch of the government. Writing for the court, Chief Justice Hughes first warned the government that "Extraordinary [economic] conditions do not create or enlarge constitutional power...Such assertions of extraconstitutional authority were anticipated and precluded by the explicit terms of the Tenth Amendment -- "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Other problems spawned by the depression included the wholesale loss of homes and farms through foreclosure of delinquent mortgages. Even though the Supreme Court was considering a state law enacted in Minnesota, Roosevelt's New Deal got a boost from the court in Home Building & Loan Association v. Blaisdell, 290 U.S. 398 (1934). By a 5-4 vote, the court held that the state moratorium on foreclosure of mortgages did not violate the Contracts Clause of the Constitution. Chief Justice Hughes ruled for five members of the court that contracts were subject to the reasonable exercise of the police power which encompassed the authority to provide temporary relief from extraordinary economic distress. In another 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court upheld a milk control law as a reasonable means of stabilizing milk prices. Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934). This ruling signaled an important shift away from economic due process and judicial supervision of state regulatory legislation. Writing for the court, Justice Roberts emphasized that a state could "validly adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote the general welfare." He added that "The Constitution does not guarantee the unrestricted privilege to engage in a business or to conduct it as one pleases." This sentence probably signaled there would be further limits on laissez faire constitutionalism.

The agricultural practice of mortgaging farm property for slightly more than 50 percent of its appraised value during the 1920s was one example of land speculation dealt with in Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford, 295 U.S. 555 (1935).

In 1933, Congress enacted the Frazier-Lemke Act adding Section 75 to the Bankruptcy Act. Amongst other things, this amendment provided that a farmer who had failed to obtain the consent of his creditors to a composition for their benefit might obtain favorable treatment in resolving his bankruptcy problem.This meant that the bankrupt might be able to buy his property back at the appraised value acquiring title and the right of possession. If the bank refused to assent, the bankrupt could stay the bankruptcy proceedings for five years and remain in possession of the property with an option to purchase it at any time during the five-year period. On these facts, which were quite common in the 1930s during the depression, Congress tried to help the farmers who were in desperate straits. The Supreme Court held the act was void and represented a "taking" of property without compensation was not consistent with the Fifth Amendment. Justice Brandeis wrote for a unanimous court that "however great the nation's need, private property shall not be thus taken even for a wholly public purpose without just compensation."

Congress tried to stabilize the agricultural market as part of Roosevelt's New Deal. It passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. It authorized subsidies to farmers in exchange for reducing the amount of acrerage on which they could plant crops. Overproduction, it was thought, would reduce commodity prices for all farmers. To raise revenue for this scheme, Congress imposed a "processing tax" on the first processor of such commodities. In United States v. Butler, 297 U.S. 1 (1936), the court invalidated this tax, concluding that the ostensible tax was in fact a means of regulating agriculture at the state level in violation of the Tenth Amendment.

It was in 1936 that Franklin Roosevelt sought reelection to carry on the New Deal program that the Supreme Court had left almost in tatters. In 1936, the Republican candidate was Alfred Landon. Roosevelt won in another landslide. He got 60.8 percent of the popular vote of 45,655,000 and 523 electoral votes to Landon's 8 votes in the electoral college. Some voters remembered the rash of widespread strikes in 1934. Longshoremen in the San Francisco Bay Area went on strike in a rank-and-file insurrection against their own union leadership. They demanded termination of the shape-up, an early morning exercise in dividing the work and loathed by union members. The teamsters cooperated, and maritime workers went on strike. Police violence left two strikers shot and killed. and a general strike was called by the union. About 130,000 workers heeded the call, and San Francisco was immobilized. In a strident editorial, the Los Angeles Times denounced the strike as a "Communist-inspired revolt against organized government." It was nothing of the sort. Most of those on strike were not paid enough to buy even the necessities of life -- food, housing, and health care. Finally, threatened by more police and heavily armed National Guard personnel. Harry Bridges longshoremen accepted a compromise settlement rather than the risk of more violence. In the same summer of 1934, the teamsters went on strike in Minneapolis, and two strikers were killed by the police. Fifty thousand people attended the funeral, and a march on City Hall followed. Finally, the employers capitulated and agreed to the teamsters' demands.

In the fall of 1934, 350,000 textile workers went on strike in the South, declining to accept policy from their own union leadership. Seven strikers were killed by police. Armed strikebreakers were hired by the company for use against the workers. However, the strike spread to Massachusetts and Rhode Island. By September, some 420,000 textile workers were on strike throughout the entire country.

In the rural South, the Great Depression left farmers poorer than ever. Roosevelt's Agricultural Adjustment Act forced tenants and sharecroppers to leave the land where, even then, they had farm income of about $300 a year. Some historians note that union organizers in the South were often labeled Communists. However, it may be doubted that these organizers were even remotely familiar with the dialectics of Communism from Marx and Lenin. Even though some of them actually joined a party identified as Communist, they did little more than nourish the grievances of the poor, white and black alike.

Depression in the South Depression in the South

One of labor's tactics was the sit-down strike, and union members literally occupied the plant in which they were working. A major example of this tactic appeared in the 1936 strike against Firestone Tire & Rubber in Akron, Ohio. In the midst of the Great Depression, their wages were too low to pay the rent and buy food for the family. When management saw how its entire operation might be shut down, it capitulated. A few days later, there was a sit-down strike at Goodyear's plant. A court issued an injunction that was ignored, and police deputies were sworn in for service against the striking workers. In a month the strike ended; the police were unwilling to take on the 10,000 workers around the plant supporting those inside. In late December, 1936 there was still another sit-down strike against the Fisher Body plant a part of General Motors in Flint, Michigan. This sit-down strike ended forty-six days later, when General Motors recognized the United Auto Workers -- Congress of Industrial Organizations (UAW-CIO). In Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century By Those Who Lived It, Studs Terkel interviewed Victor Reuther.

Remember, with the memory of the early 30s depression was still fresh in their [the workers on strike] minds and they had only a few weeks of steady paychecks under their belts. They didn't want to stand in long hiring lines all over again. Their only hope was to build a union in which they'd have a voice -- the right to sit down with corporate heads and say, 'These are our minimal demands covering work and wages.' Democracy, if put in words ordinary people understand, has a powerful appeal. It is not enough to have a political democracy where you get to cast a vote every two years -- if you bother to. You must have the democratic right every day and every hour of your working life to shape the conditions under which you work.

Victor Reuther and his brother Walter were founding members of the UAW-CIO. Subsequently, Walter Reuther served as president of the UAW, until he died in a plane crash. However, he lived long enough to see enactment by Congress of the National Labor Relations Act, sometimes known as the Wagner Act, and pushed by President Roosevelt as part of his New Deal. This act guaranteed the right of workers to organize unions both in businesses operating in interstate commerce and in businesses affecting interstate commerce, and prohibited employers from dismissing or otherwise discriminating against their employees because of union membership or activities. The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, held the act was a valid exercise by Congress of its power to regulate interstate commerce. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937). By upholding the National Labor Relations Act on this basis, the court signaled that it would no longer veto the national government's attempts to regulate the economy. Frustrated by the court's earlier invalidation of so much of his New Deal legislation, Roosevelt threatened to get the power from Congress to appoint more justices to the Supreme Court, thereby getting a majority for New Deal proposals. His "court-packing" plan was defeated in Congress, but some legal scholars attribute the court's new views of regulation to Roosevelt's threat to enlarge the membership of the Supreme Court.

After taking office in 1933, the Roosevelt Administration sent a bill to Congress that authorized the largest hydroelectric project in history, the Tennessee Valley Project (TVA). Three years later, a legal challenge to TVA reached the Supreme Court, and it was held to be a constitutionally valid exercise of Congressional power to provide for national defense. Ashwander v. Tennesse Valley Authority, 297 U.S. 288 (1936). The sale of electricity to private companies was authorized by Article IV of the Constitution, Section 3. During the years of World War II, the TVA produced the power used by the Manhattan Project. It was this very secret project that designed the atomic bomb, and later, the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki used at the end of World War II.

Other, less militant projects helped artrists and people in the theater. The New Deal provided federal funds to put thousands of writers, artists, actors, and musicians to work. Murals appeared both outside and inside of public buildings. Plays were put on for working-class audiences who might not have ever seen a play, and people may have heard a symphony for the first time. These projects during the 1930s were a continuation of the artistic impulse Ann Douglas described in her book, Terrible Honesty, published in 1995. In 1935, George and Ira Gershwin wrote the great American opera, Porgy and Bess. Some observers saw Bessie Smith, a great black singer of the 1920s, as the model for Bess in the opera, an enduring musical still performed today.

Porgy & Bess Porgy & Bess
Scene from the 1959 film version

The 1930s were a creative period for music and the legitimate stage. Cole Porter was a brilliant, prolific composer of music for the stage and screen. He was the composer of the music showcasing Gay Divorcée (1932), Anything Goes (1934), and Red Hot and Blue (1934). This show featured Ethel Merman and Bob Hope. Porter wrote the glittering music of "Night and Day," "I Get a Kick Out of You," "Begin the Beguine," "Just One of Those Things," "Love for Sale," and "In the Still of the Night."

Cole Porter Cole Porter

On the more serious side, the 1920s and 1930s produced a Nobel Prize winning playright, Eugene O'Neill. By the time Beyond the Horizon was produced in 1920, O'Neill already had a solid repuatation as playwright. Later dramas included Anna Christie, Strange Interlude, Long Day's Journey Into Night, and Mourning Becomes Electra. O'Neill's only comedy was Ah, Wilderness. The others all explored the tragic theme and Anna Christie dealt with the "whore with a heart of gold" theme. In 1936, O'Neill was awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. His writing was liked by Sweden. It identified with August Strindberg whose plays with tragic themes influenced O'Neill.

The playwright Arthur Miller's classic drama was Death of a Salesman which opened in New York in 1949. Willie Loman was the salesman. Of Loman, it was said "He is a person; attention must be paid." Death of a Salesman was a classic American story of a small man destroyed by false values that in large part were the values of Miller's society during the 1930s. The Crucible, produced in 1953 was based on the Salem witchcraft trials of the seventeenth Century. This period was considered relevant during the early 1950s because of Joseph McCarthy's witchhunting of subversives. Miller refused to name ten people he had seen at a meeting of alleged subversives and was convicted of contempt of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, On appeal, his conviction was reversed.

Just after the end of World War II, Tennessee Williams opened in New York with his play, Glass Menagerie. In later years, Williams wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Streetcar Named Desire, Night of the Iguana, and many others. By 1983, the year of his death, Williams was internationally acclaimed. One of his plays, Orpheus Descending had been performed in Moscow for seven years. Russians considered Williams as great as Chekhov. His novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone, was produced as a very successful film by Hollywood.

One of the most talented musicians of the 1950s was Alan Jay Lerner. In the 1930s, he was learning his trade at a private school in Connecticut. Lerner organized the school jazz orchestra and wrote original music for it. Like his contemporaries, he served in the military during World War II. After negotiating for the rights to George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, he and Fritz Loew went to work on the music and lyrics of what is today probably considered one of America's greatest musical shows, My Fair Lady. It opened on Broadway in 1951 and became an instant success. Rex Harrison played the lead, Henry Higgins, and Julie Andrews was the poor florist, Eliza Doolittle, who was taught by Harrison -- he played the role of Henry Higgins, a speech therapist -- to speak in proper English instead of with her Cockney accent. The music and lyrics were pure poetry. In 1964, the film version was released, and Sir Rex Harrison revived the stage version in 1980. At one point, Lerner was being paid about $10 million a year in royalties for My Fair Lady and other musicals he wrote. Camelot was one of them.

My Fair Lady My Fair Lady
Julie Andrews as Liza Doolittle

As usual, Hollywood was busy revising both history and stereotypes in the 1930s. Jewish songwriters were not really free of the antagonism found in all immigrant groups. Irving Berlin, for example, did not appreciate the black sources of some of his music. And Tin Pan Alley, the center of a musician's life in New York, didn't always like the Jewish-Negro connection. Berlin wrote the music and lyrics for Alexander's Ragtime Band. Hollywood's Darryl Zanuck produced it in 1935. As Ann Douglas wrote "Alexander was nothing like the coon shouter portrayed in the song but rather a well-bred Wasp violinist played, laughably, by Tyrone Power."

The Glen Miller Band
Playing at the Great lakes Naval training station in 1942.
The Glen Miller Band

The Big Band Sound was a musical culture that originated in Manhattan -- it went national in the 1930s -- Benny Goodman with his clarinet and "Sing, Sing, Sing, Sing" with Gene Krupa on the drums, Glen Miller with "String of Pearls," Tommy Dorsey and "Marie, I Hear You Calling," and Bunny Berrigan with "I Can't Get Started With You" on his great trumpet. There was also a social artifact, the dé but of the Social Register children. Almost every day during Christmas and Spring Holidays, there were tea, dinner, and supper parties for the débutantes. Brenda Frazier was perhaps the best known for her 1937 party at the old Ritz Carlton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. It ended in the small hours of the next day. Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Houston adopted the dé but with enthusiasm before and after World War II.

Benny Goodman in 1937 Benny Goodman in 1937

Harlem was still the center of black musical culture. It produced musicians like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the voices of singers like Bessie Smith, Billie Holliday, and Pearl Bailey. These and other artists dominated the musical culture. These and other performers lived in Harlem which suffered from the Great Depression.

In 1932, in Harlem Hospital proportionately twice as many people died as in its downtown counterpart, Bellevue Hospital. In spite of the New Deal, blacks in Harlem rioted, doing considerable damage to the shops of white merchants who profited from black misery. With significant exceptions, black Americans were left out of the New Deal; in both North and South they were virtually invisible. Roosevelt might have made some progress in the South, but he could not afford to alienate Southern senators or members of the House. By 1940, labor unions, the whites of the South and New Deal liberals were Roosevelt's core constituency. Roosevelt even declined to move an anti-lynching bill for fear of alienating the South. Lynchings were not the only form of intimidation in the South. Every black American was afraid to vote for fear of violence.

The Social Security Act of 1935 was another New Deal program criticized by some historians for those it omitted to help -- farmers, domestic help, and the elderly. However, from time to time, Congress amended this act to provide greater benefits, including the cost of living adjustment. At the time the Social Security Act was passed, its meager benefits were probably the only money some people saw for years. Roosevelt's New Deal also provided an early version of the Food Stamp program. It was administered by the Department of Agriculture and might be terminated in 1996 by a Republican Congress, unless vetoed by President Clinton. During his campaign for the White House in 1992, Clinton made an unfortunate promise "to end welfare as we know it." The welfare system may not be a gem, but the GOP argued that it caused family breakdown. It doesn't, says James Carville in his new book, We're Right, They're Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives.It's an answer to widespread poverty even worse than the poverty that sparked Roosevelt's response.

In an unprecedented move, Franklin Roosevelt sought reelection to a third term in 1940. His opponent was Republican utility lawyer, Wendell Wilkie. The total popular vote was 49,900,000, and Roosevelt won with 54.7 percent of this vote. Roosevelt got 449 electoral votes to Wilkie's 82 votes. World War II had begun a year earlier on September 3, 1939, and the world was about to change.

Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. Heinrich Himmler, a notorious anti-Semite, convened a press conference on March 20, 1933 at which he announced the establishment of the first formal concentration camp. Initially, it was used to imprison political dissidents, such as Communists, Social Democrats, and trade unionists. Dachau was located only a few miles from Munich. It became the model and training center for all other SS-organized camps. During World War II, it became the first and most important camp at which doctors had laboratories in which they performed cruelties beyond measure in the guise of medical experimentation using involuntary inmates, principally Jews. After the war, the doctors from Dachau and other camps were tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Seven of them were sentenced to death.

Dachau Dachau
Survivors of Dachau, the worst concentration camp in Germany. They line the electric fence to cheer the liberation forces.


Buchenwald
Liberated prisoners eating scraps at Buchenwald
Buchenwald




All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York