1935

February 18: The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph runs the headline: AMERICAN PROFESSORS TRAINED BY SOVIETS TEACH IN U.S. SCHOOLS. (Fred Friendly, p. 20; see also: Television entry.)

 

Americans flocked to the movies to watch Shirley Temple,
and forget their problems.

 

* 

Summer: Two brothers, S. Prestley and Curtis Blake open up an ice cream shop in Springfield, Massachusetts. They use a $547 loan from their parents to get up and running. 

The New York Times describes what followed:

 

The shop was an instant success, with a line out the door on opening night, and profits started rolling in — enough for the brothers to buy a used Model A Ford, which they could easily share, since one of them was always at the shop.

 

“Those first days, our work never seemed to end,” Mr. Blake wrote in his autobiography, “A Friendly Life” (2011, with Alan Farnham), adding, “There was no such thing as a day off.”

 

The Blake brothers were different from each other but complementary. Mr. Blake, who dealt with the finances, was a by-the-numbers businessman; his brother, who handled ice cream production and employees, had a gentler way with people.

 

Mr. Blake wrote that he learned valuable lessons early on, like keeping stores immaculate and customers always first, even if one dropped a cone.

 

“Don’t even think about trying to charge for a replacement cone!” he wrote in his memoir. “This was part of a larger philosophy: Never try to pull any fast ones on customers, to gouge them or shortchange them.”

 

In time, they opened a second store, and eventually had hundreds of locations across the eastern states. The menu also grew to include “extravagant sundaes; specialties like the Fribble, an ice cream frappé that had once been known as the Awful Awful (for ‘awful big, awful good’); and diner fare like hamburgers, chicken fingers and French fries.” They sold out to the Hershey Company in 1979 for $164 million (roughly $620 million in 2021 dollars). 

Prestley lived to be 106. 

 

* 

August 21: As Time-Life explains in This Fabulous Century; 1930 to 1940, what Benny Goodman and his band manage to do on this evening, is reintroduce authentic jazz to a wider, white audience, which had never heard the kind of material played by black musicians of the 20s. At age 24, Goodman and his band were nearing the end of a cross-country tour, which had been “a string of disasters.” Audiences were not ready for real jazz – or so it seemed – and  Goodman and his sidemen had returned to playing a “tame orchestrated version of jazz.”

 

By the time the group had reached California, it had returned to playing innocuous dance music. At the end of an evening at the Palomar Ballroom in Hollywood, however, Goodman was so disgusted with syrupy music that he told his sidemen to swing for one set to close the evening. The room was filled with a strong beat of drums, the resonance of brass, the dramatic precision of saxophones and the improvisation of hot soloists. The audience went wild. After that, the swinging sound took the country by storm, and within months this revived form of jazz passed into the mainstream of American culture.

 

Younger listeners went wild for what became known as “swing music,” in an era when girls wore saddle shoes, jukeboxes sat on counters at drug stores and at tables in ice cream parlors and diners, and a song could be played for a nickel. “Swing” music touched off a dance craze, with the jitterbug popular, and young “shiners” performing to applause at dance exhibitions. On Saturdays, listeners good tune in to Your Hit Parade, to hear the top ten songs from the week. 

As always, with swing, and later rock, and later still, rap, older folks were not sure what to make of the music now popular with the young. The New York Times suggested that the swing craze was getting out of hand, quoting a psychologist on the “dangerously hypnotic influence of swing, cunningly devised to a faster tempo than seventy-two bars to the minute – faster than the human pulse.” 

White musicians like Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller spread the new sound. Count Basie and Duke Ellington, African American band leaders often jacked up the sound, with Ellington, for one, referring to what his group played as “jungle music.” Almost all of the bands featured female vocalists, with Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald making music still loved today. 

 

The new music inspired new slang: 

Alligator: a devotee of swing.

Canary: a girl vocalist.

Cats: musicians in a swing orchestra.

Corn, Mickey Mouse, Schmaltz: uninspired music good only for sedate dancing. 

(The kind of music liked by parents of that era!)

 

Platter: a recording.

Eighty-Eight or Moth Box: a piano.

Hepcat: a very knowledgeable swing fan.

Hide or Skins: drums.

In the Groove: carried away by good swing.

Knocked Out: to be engrossed in the music as to blot out all else.

Licorice stick: a clarinet.

Liver Lips: a trumpet player.

Plumbing: a trumpet. 

Scat Singer: a vocalist who improvises lyrics, substituting nonsense syllables for words.

Sent: to be stirred up, or thrilled by the music. 

Truckin’: a finger-waving, hip-tossing walk, index finger raised and shaken. (1129-230, 233, 238)

 

* 

October 11: Jimmy Carter, the future president turns eleven. For the first time, in 1935, his family home in Plains, Georgia has running water. (It will be three more years before the family has electricity.)

 * 

“The new Russian alphabet has thirty-four letters.” 

November: Herbert Hoover takes a shot at Roosevelt, warning: “There are only four letters of the alphabet not now in use by the administration. When we established the Quick Loans Corporation of Xylophones, Yachts, and Zithers the alphabet of our fathers will be exhausted. But, of course, the new Russian alphabet has thirty-four letters.” (1127-37)

 

* 

By this point, American business types are reading socialism into everything FDR attempts. 

TVA, PWA, CCC, social security, and all the rest were giant strides toward a collectivist state. The so-called soak-the-rich tax bill of 1935 was described in the monthly letter of the New York National City Bank as “based upon the principles of Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto.” The New Deal, asserted Merle Thorpe, “headed down the same road as Communism.” America, he wrote, “was concerned about Communist agitators with whiskers and bombs but was in reality accepting their program under the brand of a new order guaranteed on the label to save democracy.” “We have,” Thorpe exaggerated, “given legislative status, either in whole or in part, to eight of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto of 1848.” (1127/98) 

The Liberty League argued that New Deal measures endangered the Constitution. FDR’s programs, and the centralization of power tended toward tyranny and dictatorship, and most New Deal measures were socialistic or fascistic, or both. (1127-99)

 

* 

December:  A poll in the Literary Digest indicates that 57.69 percent of the people are dissatisfied with the New Deal. 

Republicans are optimistic about their chances in the next election, having painted the contest against FDR as a battle to save the U.S. Constitution. House Minority Leader Bert Snell warns that in flouting the limits, “Mr. Roosevelt has come perilously close to what some people call impeachable grounds.” 

Wolfskill notes, “The air became thick with Republican charges of collectivism, socialism, dictatorship, and even communism – at least by implication.” (1127/37) 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: This poll is famously inaccurate – since most of the people hurting most in 1935 were unlikely to subscribe to Literary Digest. Polling bias should be explained to students. An example I sometimes used: Suppose you sat beside a busy hiking trail all day and observed those passing. You might say, “Based on my observations, most Americans are in very good shape.” 

Clearly, you would have a sampling error.

Hikers at the top of Old Rag Mountain 2021. Author's collection.

 * 

December 11: “Roosevelt is the greatest leader since Jesus Christ. I hope God will forgive me for voting for Hoover.” Quoted in The New Republic. (1127-70)

 

* 

December 31: The game Monopoly is patented in the name of Charles B. Darrow, by Parker Brothers. A similar game called the “Landlord Game” was first created in 1904, by Elizabeth J. Magie but never manufactured. In 1931, Darrow was invited by neighbors to play a similar Atlantic City version. American Heritage notes (loose item in my  files on the fiftieth anniversary), 

“He took a long time catching on, the neighbor testified. But Darrow wasn’t so stupid. He asked for a copy of the rules and board – and took it from there, in the best spirit of the game Time reviewed in 1936 as being “generally calculated to appeal to the baldest acquisitive instincts.”

 

Darrow retired a millionaire at forty-six. The game he claimed to have invented has long since become the best-selling privately patented board game in history.

 

*

Tarzan, Jane, their son Korak, and Cheetah.

 

“Me Tarzan, you Jane.” 

During the Depression, radio and film entertainment offer escape from the problems that confront them. Radio was “everybody’s ticket to adventure, laughter, sweet music and romance.” (1129/30) 

Heroes and heroines mostly proved, even in cartoons, that “good, clean living held unlimited rewards.” Both children and adults found comfort in “ an inexpensive and wonderful world of make believe, during hard times when the real world often seemed to be no fun at all.” Even Orphan Annie fought to protect ordinary folk from “treacherous foreigners, mortgage holders and crimelords,” often with the help of her wealthy foster father “Daddy” Warbucks. In the 1930s, Howard Gray, the creator of the strip, was earning $100,000 a year; and his conservative views became clearer. “Leapin’ Lizards,” as Annie liked to say.  

Other heroes and heroines included Buck Rogers and his “luscious co-pilot Wilma Deering,” who blasted off into space to “save the whole universe,” and Flash Gordon and Dale Arden, the former a handsome Yale-bred polo player, the latter a beautiful blonde, both kidnapped and taken aboard a spaceship, where they helped battle the “yellow-skinned, almond-eyed Ming the Merciless,” who ruled Planet Mongo. (Cue the “Yellow Peril” fears of that era.) Cartoonist Alex Raymond could have Flash say: “This may be a Tournament of Death, but it was still to be fought by heroes imbued with the ideals of sportsmanship and fair play.” In the cheesy movies based on the story, Buster Crabbe played a “peroxided Flash,” with special effects including a toy spaceship bobbing on a clearly visible string. 

When Macy’s department store in New York City advertised it had toy versions of Buck Rogers Disintegrator Guns, the next morning 20,000 people lined up before the store even opened. (This would be similar to the mania for Cabbage Patch Kids that swept the country in 1982.) 

Another hero, pure-in-heart Jack Armstrong, “The All-American Boy,” battled bad guys and helped Hudson High win games. In one episode, a Tibetan monk delivers a message for Jack to share:

 

Tell the boys and girls of the United States this world is theirs. If they have hearts of gold, a glorious new golden age awaits us. If they are honest, riches shall be theirs. If they are kind, they shall save the whole world from malice and meanness. Will you take that message to the boys and girls of the United states, Jack Armstrong?

 

Tarzan was popular in books and movies – able to summon the animals of the jungle to his aid with his famous call, “Simba, Simba.” In his first film, Tarzan, the Ape Man, he announces to a surprised jungle visitor, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.” He also introduces his “fearful jungle yodel, a mixture of five sounds that included his own scream, a soprano singing high C and a recording of a hyena’s howl played backwards.” 

Then there was Tom Mix, radio cowboy hero, and his Wonder Horse Tony, who also appeared in more than 180 feature films. In one typical scene, Mix gets the draw on the outlaws, barking, “Reach for the sky! Lawbreakers always lose, Straight Shooters always win!! It pays to shoot straight!!!” In real life, “the old Straight Shooter was an old roue who ran through three wives and four million dollars. Nevertheless, he guarded his image as a nonsmoking teetotaler.” 

Finally, in a decade of rampant crime, Dick Tracy, cartoon cop, cleaned up on criminals. In one panel, standing outside an apartment door, he announces grimly, “Open up in there! I’ve got a tommy gun in my hand and it’s in a barking mood!” 

For escapist fun, you also had the movie adventures of Shirley Temple, who rose to fame at age five, singing and dancing in Stand Up and Cheer. By 1935, Temple had become the number one box office draw, a position she retained through 1938. Her salary was $300,000 annually, and boosted by royalties on all kinds of products, including, of course, dolls. (1129/76, 82, 84, 86, 88, 90, 94) 

For comic relief, many turned to Amos ‘n’ Andy, a huge radio hit, including with FDR. The two main characters – supposedly two African Americans who had left Georgia in search of a better life up North – were played by white men, Freeman Gosden as Amos, Charles Correll as Andy. 

The show, which ran nightly, was first set in Chicago, later in Harlem. Two other main characters are the Kingfish, and Lightnin’, one the head of a Harlem lodge, the other the clean-up man. In once scene, Kingfish informs Lightnin’ that he is behind on his dues to the lodge. 

The language is stereotypical and insulting in many ways, but even white folks could appreciate this dilemma:

 

Lightnin’: Well, I just ain’t got it. If yo’ would loan me some money, I would pay the lodge.

 

Kingfish: Whut yo’ mean, me lend yo’ money? I is flat as a pancake. I got about fifteen cents, an’ I gotta git a dollar by tonight somewhere. We goin’ have comp’ny to supper. De butcher done tighten up on me. I gotta git a couple o’ po’k chops in dat house some way. Yo’ can’t ast de people comin’ to supper to eat gravy all the time.

 

Lightnin’: Yessah.

 

Kingfish: Can’t you go to some friend?

 

Lightnin’: I ain’t got no money friends – all my friend is sympathy friends – dey listens an’ feels sorry fo’ me, but den dey’s gone. (1129/38) 

 

Edgar Bergen, with his dummy Charlie McCarthy, was a hit, so much so, that when Bergen and Charlie met Winston Churchill, he extended his hand to the puppet. Kate Smith, known as “The Songbird of the South,” opened performances with a cheery, “Hello everybody!” 

In one show Charlie faces off against W.C. Fields. Bergen assures Fields, “Charlie doesn’t really feel good. Look how pale he is.” 

Fields retorts, “He needs a new coat of pain and a little furniture varnish.” The dummy and the comic trade barbs, with Fields finally warning, “Go ‘way – or I’ll sic a woodpecker on you.” (1129/41) 

In One Man’s Family, the radio announcer explains that the show “is dedicated to the Mothers and Fathers of the Younger Generation and to their Bewildering Offspring. (1129/42)

 

“The religion of escape.” 

Time-Life refers to movies as “the religion of escape,” with its own icons: Shirley Temple dolls and “rubber statuettes of Disney’s dwarfs.” Every week, 85 million Americans went to the movies, paying 25 cents for a ticket, 10 cents for children. The National League for Decency cleaned up the shows: “Long kisses, adultery, double beds, words like ‘damn’ and ‘hell’ and even nude babies were banned from films.” (I think that sentence is poorly worded – and double beds were always show.) “Criminals could no longer triumph over decent citizens. A hoyden like Mae West could no longer croon ‘I Like a Man Who Takes His Time.’ The day of ‘family movies’ was ushered in, featuring adorable youngsters like Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Jane Withers.” (1129/180)