1933

  

June 5: The U.S. goes off the gold standard.

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“Stall for time. Trade dollars for time. Time. Time for the country to collect its wits. Time for the people to pull themselves together, shake their fears, recover their sense of humor, take heart. Time so that America would not default to madmen and lunatics and their wicked dreams.”

 

Wolfskill and Hudson on FDR’s battle to save the country

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March 4: Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated. George Wolfskill writes:

 

It was bitter cold – the penetrating cold of despair. Cold for the throngs already beginning to gather; cold for the troops manning the machine guns strategically located – just in case. Everywhere there was a sense of foreboding, heavy and oppressive, as New York Times reporter Arthur Krock wrote later, “comparable to that which might be found in a beleaguered capital in wartime.” (1127-2)

 

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Samuel Grafton, writing in the New York Post, would later explain FDR’s immediate impact: “He had no answers that were good for a hundred years. But in a six-month crisis he always had a six-month answer.”

 

Wolfskill and John S. Hudson put it this way in All but the People, written in 1969. Roosevelt’s approach:

 

Stall for time. Trade dollars for time. Time. Time for the country to collect its wits. Time for the people to pull themselves together, shake their fears, recover their sense of humor, take heart. Time so that America would not default to madmen and lunatics and their wicked dreams. Time so that honest men could find solid answers to pressing problems that the country had been ignoring and fending off for years. Time to vindicate Roosevelt’s dream of the middle way. (1127-189)

 

As Harry Hopkins once put it, “I am for experimenting… trying out schemes which are supported by reasonable people and see if they work. If they do not work, the world will not come to an end.” (1127-192)

 

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When Black Lives Clearly Didn’t Matter.

 

April 10: In an article titled “Scottsboro Shadow,” in Christian Century magazine, Renwick C. Kennedy tells the story of Alexander Pruitt, 40, a World War I veteran who had seen combat and “thought it probable that he had killed a few Germans.” One October morning, as he took “his tenth drink from a jug of Pensacola Rye,” Kennedy says, Pruitt got to thinking about all the “niggers,” and it got him all riled up. At 2:00 p.m. he took his .38 revolver from a drawer.

 

Ten minutes later he was down in the cotton patch behind the house where Long Son Gilmore and Henry Jeter, two Negro men, were picking cotton. Both were Alexander’s tenants and his friends, and had made good crops for him that year. Ordinarily too kind to them. This afternoon his justice and kindness were paralyzed with the most potent whisky available in southern Alabama.

 

The Negroes continued to pick cotton as they watched him stumble and fall along the cotton row.

 

“Cap’n’s sho’ drunk,” said Long Son.

 

“He sho’-God is,” said Henry. “He’ll be cussin’ us, drunk as he is.”

 

“Niggers,” said Alec solemnly, “you ain’t done nothin’ since ten o’clock. Git to work. Git this dman cotton out.”

 

The men said little in return, but continued to pick the cotton and stuff it in the large bags each carried from a shoulder.

 

Alec stood behind them, cursing. He stepped closer to Long Son, pulled out the .38, and shot him in the back of his head. The bullet smashed Son’s brain and came out of his left eye. As Henry later said, Son never knew what hit him. Henry threw his bag down and ran. Alec fired the remaining five cartridges at him, but his drunken aim was no good, and Henry escaped to the village to tell the story.

 

An hour later a deputy sheriff came from the county seat, and that night Alec slept off his drunk in the county jail. The next morning he said he did not remember anything that had happened since ten o’clock of the previous day, and that he was astonished to find himself in jail.

 

Bond was set at $1,000, and Pruitt hired a lawyer. There was a time when Pruitt could have expected to walk out free; but times, in Kennedy’s telling, were changing. “You ain’t got no case,” Pruitt’s lawyer tells him, “except that it was a nigger.” He promises to pack the jury with other veterans.

 

He told the jury how Alec had defended his country in the world war, and had been wounded. His health was hopelessly broken and in recognition of this the government had given him a monthly pension. His nerves were shattered and he was often in pain. He drank whiskey, yes; but he had to drink to quiet his nerves and to still the pain. Tortured with pain one day, he drank too much, and in a state of total irresponsibility he, a white man, a white man let the jury member, went out and killed a nigger. Let the jury consider the circumstances and conditions and set free this poor broken wreck, this man who was rather to be pitied than censured for what had happened, this white man who had offered his life in defense of his country and who at best had but a few more years to live.

 

The solicitor stated the facts of the case, called it cold-blooded murder and asked for the death penalty.

 

The judge charged the jury as to its duty and its possible findings and those twelve worthy men filed into the jury room.

 

Thirty minutes later they reported. The foreman stood forward to read the verdict.

 

“We the jury find the defendant not guilty,” he read.

 

Alec rose up by the table in the bar where he sat. His face beamed with happiness. He had been vindicated. He spoke up in court and asked the judge for permission to shake hands with the members of the jury. The judge replied rather harshly that that was no concern of his, but to step outside if he wished to do it.

 

That night a member of the jury explained how it was. He believed that “by rights” Pruitt should have had ten years in jail. He said he tried to get the others to sentence the defendant to three years. “but when I seen they wouldn’t do it I said we ought to give him ten days and $50 just to be givin’ him somethin’.” Other members of the jury got to “talkin’ about the Scottsboro case. They said they couldn’t convict no white man for killin’ a nigger in Alabama after the Scottsboro case. I reckon’ they’re right, too White people have to stick together somehow, or we’ll have to git out and let the niggers have the state.”

 

*

 

“Is the Negro in a Trap?”

 

April 19: The fate of the Scottsboro boys hangs with the U.S. Supreme Court again. As Christian Century magazine reports, in an editorial, pp. 520-522, “Is the Negro in a Trap?”

 

After twenty hours of deliberation the Alabama jury sitting on the first of the Scottsboro cases to be retried brought in a verdict of guilty. The verdict carried a jury vote in favor of death. It is expected that the state will now press for quick trials of the other six defendants. Since the cases are identical, it is impossible to hope for different verdicts. These Negro boys will again be sentenced to die for an alleged attack upon two white girls, one of whom now denies that any such attack a occurred. …

 

The consequent retrial in the case of the first defendant hinged on the testimony of the girls. This was absolutely contradictory. Although both agreed that they were together during the period when the attack was alleged to have taken place, one denied and the other affirmed the actuality of the incident. If ever a condition of “reasonable doubt” can arise it would seem to be under such a confusion In vital testimony, yet the jury is reported to have reached its verdict immediately and to have been delayed only in fixing the punishment.

 

…

 

It is good to feel that the final hope for these young Negroes is not lost with the verdict of this rural Alabama jury. But to those who study the Scottsboro cases as parts of the most baffling social problem in American life, a problem that is growing more dangerous every year, there is slight comfort in the possibility of another reversal by the supreme court. Undoubtedly The general feeling in Alabama __ and throughout the South –is that the Decatur trial is significant, not because of its outcome, but because of its demonstration of the lengths to which the state would go (under pressure) to grant a Negro the benefit of the forms of law. The tendency is now to turn to the rest of the nation – and to Negroes everywhere – and say, “What more could be done to insure due process of law?” Too few will be those who sense even faintly the despair in the Negro heart at the growing conviction that what this Decatur trial really signifies is, that whatever the forms observed, the fate of the Negro turns out to be unchanged.

 

…the Decatur verdict, and what has gone with it, has revealed once more a condition within the nation of terrible menace. … One-tenth of our American population lives constantly under a sense of jeopardy. It believes that it is trapped. It feels no more certain of justice, opportunity, fair dealing than an animal at the mercy of an irresponsible hunter. A life of rectitude may lead to a measure of community approbation; it may just as well lead to death at the hands of some irresponsible mob. Booker T. Washington was almost beaten to death for the crime of looking at the names on an apartment house mailbox. (That, be it noted, happened in New York City!) …

 

…But always the Negro has remained at the mercy of the mob – in Chicago as much as in the South. And that has meant not only jeopardy of life (that, thank God, is growing less as the years pass!) but jeopardy of occupation, jeopardy of residence, jeopardy of opportunity for children, jeopardy in court. (It would be revealing to discover over a ten-year period, how large a proportion of the persons actually executed in northern prisons are friendless Negroes.) No white man can fully enter into this black man’s world of jeopardy. But no white man with social imagination could fail to understand, at least dimly, how insecure it renders the future of American life. One American in every ten living under the tension produced by this ceaseless gnawing fear!

 

In the years after Emancipation, the editorial notes, philanthropic whites tried to lead the Negro race. “Then came the leadership of the Booker T. Washington school,” which focused on economic gains.

 

Latterly, however, there has emerged a more radical type of leadership, dating from the rise of Dr. DuBois, proclaiming itself disillusioned as to the readiness of the white man to do justice until the Negro organizes to demand and compel justice. It is this new leadership, intensely scornful of what it calls the “Uncle Tom” sort of Negro who is obsequient in the white’s presence, that has set rumbling deep undertones of anger and desperation in American Negro life since the war. Today, even Dr. DuBois is on the edge of being displaced by a still more radical leadership within his race.

 

Christian Century refers to the defendants as “heedless, moronic young drifters,” “pawns” in the battle for justice, and notes that they have been caught up in questions of Marxist class struggle. “The prosecuting attorney even called upon the jury to hang the accused as a rebuke to the machinations of ‘Jew money.’”

 

That latter note in the prosecutor’s speech is worth pondering in these days when so much indignation is being registered in the United States over the anti-Semitism of Adolf Hitler. We have no doubt but that Hitler and his nazis will do incalculable harm to Germany if they continue in their course. But it is by no means sure that the open and calculated brutality of their program will do more harm to Germany, in the long run, then will the hypocrisy and callousness of our Nordics to America. Hitler is blasted by our scorn for putting under jeopardy less than one per cent of the population of Germany; it is to forced back the advancing claims of a tenth of the people of the United States that the racial, sectional and social prejudices of the whites are mobilized in such eventualities as the Scottsboro affair.

 

But to return to the main issue, the principal national significance of these Decatur trials is going to be the increase in the Negro’s sense of desperation. What the Negro will see is not the carefully observed forms of the law; what he will see is the (to him) foreordained verdict. His is becoming the psychology of the trapped. Most of the South – no, we believe that the truth compels it to be said that most of the whites of the nation – when confronted with the desperation of the trapped turn instinctively to the tightening of the trap.

 

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Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken in 1895. Her father abandoned the family when she was 12. A childhood bout of polio, according to The New Yorker, left her with a lifelong limp. Lange said it “formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.” In 1918, she and a friend were planning a world tour; but those plans ended in San Francisco, when they were robbed. Lange found patrons, opened up a photography studio, married Maynard Dixon, and they had two children. 

White Angel of the Breadline.

Lange: Ex-Slave with Long Memory.

Lange. Gunlock, Utah, Mormon.

Lange. Hopi Indian.

Her picture, “White Angel of the Bread Line, San Francisco,” in 1933 became a sensation. Three years later, she took her most famous photo, “Migrant Mother.” Her subject for that photo was Florence Owens, a Cherokee woman, although Owens was not identified until 47 years later. 

She was not a “pea picker,” as Lange believed, but she and her family had stopped at a pea field in Nimpomo, California to await a car repair. That picture, one writer said, revealed the “rock-hard realities” the displaced faced. 

 

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December 25: Sears, Roebuck and Company’s catalogue has helped shoppers decide on gifts for friends and loved ones. Time (12/20/1982) gives some of the prices listed, with a dollar in 1933, worth in 1982, $7.58. Silk stockings: 78 cents; two-pound fruitcake, 49 cents; man’s cotton broadcloth shirt, $1.69. Black leather oxford shoes for women were $1.98. An 18-karat white gold ring could be purchased for $54.90. A Kenmore upright vacuum was $17.45, a Lionel electric train set was $12.79, a 15-in. Teddy bear cost $1.79. A Mickey Mouse watch was $2.29, and Mickey wore white gloves. 

In 1932, the average household income was $32 per week, compared to $497 in 1981, and (when I checked) $1,321 in 2019.

Babe Ruth's career is on the down slope.

For the first time in eight seasons, he fails to hit at least 40 homeruns.