Articles from 1937
When FDR sat down and planned whose voice on the Supreme Court he would most like to nullify, it wasn’t always that of Justice Van Devanter. Although Willis Van Devanter was a conservative, he was a thoughtful jurist who was known to, from time-to-time, vote in support of some of the New Deal legislation.
Bingo! Justice James Clark McReynolds was the stick-in-the-mud FDR wished to have disappeared from the court. This journalist observed that McReynolds “seemed to regard himself as the last Bulwark of a social order which Woodrow Wilson deemed too antiquated in 1914”. Indeed, he was cranky and crusty and disliked Jews and black people equally and didn’t seem to care who knew it.
FDR was right.
Appearing in The American Legion Monthly some nineteen years after the end of the war was this nifty article written by a German veteran. The article explains quite simply how his forward listening post operated in the German trenches North of Verdun during the early Autumn on 1918.
The author of this 1937 column pointed out that the Equal Rights Amendment had been submitted before Congress for passage each and every year since 1923, and each time it received a nay vote.
Published one month before her disappearance, this is one of the last interviews Amelia Earhart was to give.
Late last week 30 prominent Ethiopians were tried as ringleaders in the attempted assassination [of Marshal Rodolfo Graziani]. They were to serve as public examples of Italy’s determination to rule over her new African domain. All other natives found in possession of arms were shot by Fascist firing squads, more than 1,000 terrified men being mowed down in a bloody Mussolini-ordered revenge.
Italy’s financial and human resources are being heavily drained, not only by a vast [Roman] road-building program in the conquered kingdom, but particularly by the efforts of 200,000 men who compose the fascist expeditionary force to pacify a warlike population of 9,000,000 natives in a territory larger than France and Italy combined.
A column about Mussolini’s Minister of Colonies, Emilio De Bono (1866 – 1944) and his popular book, La Preparazione E Le Prime Operazioni:
Last week, with the appearance of a third printing, following a sold-out second edition (both of which were marked for publication in 1937), Italians at home and abroad noted certain deletions, including the passage which intimated that Mussolini had been on the point of abandoning his campaign in the face of British armed intervention.
This well-read writer recalls the great novels leading up to the publication of Gone With The Wind (1936). Along the way, she lists some of the many foibles of The Great American Reading Public – in the end she recognizes that she shouldn’t have been surprised at all that the historic romance was an all-time-best-seller and that Margaret Mitchell was awarded a Pulitzer.
This is one of the most enjoyable early television articles: an eye-witness account of one the first T.V. broadcasts from the R.C.A. Building in New York City during the November of 1936. The viewing was set up strictly for members of the American press corps and the excitement of this one journalist clearly could not be contained:
In the semi-darkness we sat in tense silence waiting to see the premiere demonstration of television… Television! What would it be like?
By the year 1937 it became a concern that an eighth of all those admitted to the nation’s state-run mental hospitals were between the ages of 15 through 24. On a similar note, it was revealed that 40% of employable youth were entirely unable to secure positions during this this same period. These matters were made known as a result of the efforts put forward by the Youth Commission of the American Council of Education – a group that began compiling such data in 1935.
I always knew that I would one day find a reminiscence of the Great Depression – what I didn’t expect is finding it in a magazine from 1937. As mentioned in another part of this site, 1937 saw some measure of economic recovery (until it didn’t) and this reminiscence was penned by a fellow who wanted so badly to believe that the whole thing was finally over. He wished so earnestly that the Depression had ended that he listed just what he was missing about it already. Little did he know he had three more years to go.
