1932

 

__________

 

“This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs. It means deciding the direction our nation will take over a century to come.”

 

President Herbert Hoover

__________

 

A GLUT of crude oil, in the wake of huge discoveries in Texas and Oklahoma, drives the price down to 10 cents per barrel, vs. $3 a few years before.

*

 

THE UNITED STATES PUBLIC HEALTH SERVICE begins the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, with 600 participants, two-thirds of whom are already infected. The subjects are told only that they are being treated for “bad blood.”

 

Approximately a hundred later die, even though there were eventually drugs that could have been used to treat them.

 

 

*

 

“Athletics is today the religion of the United States.”  

(John R. Tunis)

Babe Ruth.

 

In the 20s and 30s, Babe Ruth becomes the “first sports god.”

 

This quote is from 1932: “The rise, the existence, the being of Ruth is purely an American phenomenon, like…crooners…million dollar prizefight purses… skyscrapers …and freedom of the press.” Paul Gallico, in Vanity Fair (quoted in a September 2018 issue.)

*

E.Y. Harburg and Jay Gorray publish the following song: 

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime”

 

They used to tell me I was building a dream

and so I followed the mob

When there was earth to plow or guns to bear

I was always there right on the job,

 

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

 

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

 

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it’s done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

 

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell

full of that Yankee Doodly Dum
Half a million boots went sloggin’ through hell
And I was the kid with the drum

 

Say, don’t you remember? They called me “Al”

It was “Al” all the time

Don’t you remember? I’m your pal

Say buddy, can you spare a dime? 

Jean Harlow is making big money in the movies.

* 

March 1: The Lindbergh baby, their 20-month-old son, is kidnapped, in the “Crime of the Century.”

 

The intruder climbed through a second story window and took the sleeping infant, Charles Augustus, Jr., from his crib. On an isolated ridge about five miles away, he took the child into the woods, smashed in its head, removed its sleep suit (to be used later) and buried the body in a shallow grave.

 

He left a note on the nursery window which read:

 

Dear Sir

 

Have 50000$ ready 25000$ in 20$ bills and 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000 $ in 5$ bills. After 2-4 days we will inform you where to deliver the money. We warn you for making anyding public or for notify the police. The child is in gut care.

 

Instructions for how the Lindberghs could retrieve the boy, the note added, would follow.

 

The first real “lead” came through a retired school teacher, to be known only as “Jafsie” in the papers. He had received a mysterious note from “John.” saying that he (Jafsie) would receive instructions thorough coded newspaper ads.

 

With full consent from the Lindberghs and the police, “Jafsie” demanded a token of authenticity. He received a package containing the sleep suit. A week later “Jafsie” held a midnight cemetery meeting with “John,” turned over the money and received a note in return saying the child was safe in a small sailing boat, “the Nelly,” off Martha’s Vineyard in the care of two “inosent” persons.

 

Of course, there was no boat. This was the first hoax. Others, even more cruel ones, were to come … friends were filched out of thousands of dollars and hopes raised and dashed again and again.

 

Wealthy widow, Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, gave a shady confidence man, Gaston B. Means, $100,000 in cash on his promise to have the baby released. Of course, his larcenous negotiations never materialized.

 

Another “intermediary” presented A detailed plan – through information supplied by a bootlegger – for a rendezvous at sea where Lindbergh cruised for days until he learned by ship’s the radio that the infant’s body had been found in its New Jersey grave.

 

Finally, one September day in 1934, a Bronx service station attendant was given a $10 gold certificate for ninety-three cents worth of gas by a customer with a German accent. Because gold currency had recently been taken out of circulation, the service man noted the customer’s license number on the back of the bill.

 

Five days later, a mild-mannered, silent German carpenter with a wife and child of his own was arrested at his home.

 

His name was Bruno Richard Hauptmann!

 

He was brought to trial in January 1935. It is improbable that it was an impartial jury who convicted him. However, the evidence was conclusive. A $20 gold certificate of the ransom money was in his pocket when he was arrested. Other notes he had passed turned up. Later the police found $13,750 of ransom bills in tens and twenties and they also learned he had $24,000 to $25,000 on deposit with a brokerage house.

 

He was convicted of first degree murder, and after exhausting appeals all the way to the Supreme Court, he was electrocuted in New Jersey on April 3, 1936.

 

The kidnapping led to the passing by Congress of the Lindbergh Act, which makes kidnapping across state lines a federal offense, and therefore within the province of the FBI.  (300/26)

 

*

 

“I had flown Atlantics before.”

 

May 20-21: Once again, Amelia Earhart, captures the nation’s attention, and becomes the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. In fourteen hours and fifty-four minutes, she flies 2,026 miles.

 

Source: Amelia Earhart by Virginia Morrell, NG (January 1998) 

 

   The log covers only five pages of a two-by-three-inch 1932 date book. Earhart’s writing, scribbled in pencil, worms raggedly across the page, suggesting that she wrote it while balancing the booklet on her knee. Here are her key legible entries: 

Left 715... Over fog 7:40 and rain... 7:57 8500 feet... icebergs... 9:05 fish boat... altimeter out.” Then a storm closed in. She wrote nothing more until morning. 

“8:00 a.m. 13 hours on the way. If anyone finds the wreck know that the non success was caused by my getting lost in a storm for an hour and then the exhaust manifold, resoldered at St. John, burned out and I have crawled near the water for hours dreading fire.” 

   Translated, the log tells a grueling tale. For the first time in her years of flying, Earhart’s altimeter stopped working, so that in the dark she could only guess at her altitude. She flew through fog, then a storm that caused ice to form in her tachometer, sending its needle spinning. With her equipment failing and the storm bringing visibility to zero, she was no longer certain if she was on or off course – or how far she had flown. 

   Then the exhaust planes exhaust manifold cracked, shooting flames into the night; with all that fuel on board, it seemed likely the plane would burst into fire. In the next instant a drowning death seemed more certain: the Vega’s wings iced up, sending Earhart into a spin. She pulled out of it but by then was so close to the water that she could see the waves breaking below. 

   “That was a bad moment,” Amelia later told a reporter. “A crack in the sea wouldn’t be very pleasant, would it?” She flew on in a seesaw course, climbing high enough to use her instruments, then descending toward the sea when ice grew thick on her windshield. After dawn she flipped the reserve fuel-tank switch and discovered that the cabin fuel gauge was leaking. Gasoline began dripping down her neck. She had no idea how much fuel remained.

    When she spotted a ship and then a fishing fleet, she decided to land as soon as she could. A green field presented the handiest spot, and Earhart brought the injured Vega down smoothly. “Where am I?” She asked an astonished Dan McCallion, out herding cows. “In Gallagher’s pasture,” he answered, and then asked the question of his own. “Have you come far?” 

   “From America.” 

   “Holy mother of God,” said McCallion, unsure about what was most shocking – that there was a plane in Gallagher’s field or a woman dressed in pants. 

   Why had she done it? reporters asked. “I just wanted to see if I could fly the Atlantic alone,” she answered. “That was all.” 

   Later Earhart elaborated about her self-imposed challenge: “My particular inner desire to fly the Atlantic alone was nothing new with me. I had flown Atlantics before. Everyone has his own Atlantics to fly. Whatever you want very much to do, against the opposition of tradition, neighborhood opinion, and so-called ‘common sense’ – that is an Atlantic. … 

    “I flew the Atlantic because I wanted to. … To want in one’s heart to do a thing, for its own sake; to enjoy doing it; to concentrate all one’s energies upon it – that is not only the surest guarantee of success. It is also being true to oneself.” (127-130) 

 

    During a banquet with King George V, Amelia offered him a toast with buttermilk – she didn’t drink. 

   Her Lockheed Vega was a single-engine craft. She would not fly again, long distances, with an aircraft that had only one chance to remain aloft. In aviation, she once explained, “it is ability, not sex, which counts.”

* 

June 2: Nineteen-year old George Washington Perry goes fishing on Montgomery Lake, in Georgia. All morning, he fishes with little success. That afternoon he casts his line near a half-submerged dead tree. At first, he explained, “I thought I’d hooked a log.” Instead, he had hooked a 22 pound, 4 ounce, largemouth bass, a world record that stands to this day. 

It was the Depression. So he took it home and his family ate it.

 

* 

October 29: Mae West premiers in the movie “Night After Night.” West doesn’t appear on screen for the first 37 minutes, but when she does, at a nightclub, men part before her like the Red Sea parting for Moses.

 

Within her first minute onscreen, she has tossed off one of her signature lines, as a coat check girl coos, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds,” and West replies, slyly, “Goodness had nothin’ to do with it, dearie!” West didn’t just take over the movie – she took over the movies, period.

 

The New York Times has this to say:

 

In “I’m No Angel” … [the following year], West is advertised as a “Marvel of the Age,” and that’s as good a description as any. Born Mary Jane West in Brooklyn, daughter of a prizefighter turned private investigator, she began performing in talent competitions as a child and hit the vaudeville stage in her early teens, eventually graduating to burlesque shows and Broadway revues. But West’s career didn’t take off until she began writing, producing and directing her own Broadway vehicles: lurid comic melodramas with attention-grabbing titles like “Pleasure Man,” “The Constant Sinner” and, simply and most memorably, “Sex.”

 

 

She was pushing 40 when she first appeared on screen. This is before enforcement of the Hays Code became the rule. As the Times critic explains, “The women she played were not just sexually independent; they were sexually voracious, unapologetic in their appetites (and their forthrightness about them).” 

Censors hated her because she covered herself from attack with comedy and could suggest something racy with nothing more than a raised eyebrow, or a wink, using her sultry voice.  

* 

Herbert Hoover warns, “This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs. It means deciding the direction our nation will take over a century to come.” (1127/113)

President Herbert Hoover.

 

* 

    Only 36,000 immigrants enter the U.S. during the year; meanwhile, 103,000 return to their homelands. (1127/14)

 

*

 

    Walter B. Pitkin publishes his best-seller, Life Begins at Forty. “With better technology and working conditions,” he believed Americans could expect to live well, even into their sixties. (In 1965, his son would follow up with a similar version, Life Begins at Fifty, as life expectancy continued to increase.)