1937

  

The Dust Bowl:  Thousands of families are driven from their land.

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“I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt

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January 20: In his Inaugural Address, FDR asks if the nation has reached “the goal of our vision.” He answers this way: 

I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager…..

 

I see millions whose daily lives in the city and on the farm continue under conditions labeled indecent….

 

I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot….

 

I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory….

 

I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished. (1127-41)

 

* 

“Bastards laid on our doorstep.” 

A GOP congressman, Rep. Herron Pearson of Tennessee, complained that only 18 of 77 major bills passed by Congress in FDR’s first term had  originated in that body, “where all ought to have originated.” The rest, “had an illegitimate birth, conceived in sin and sharpened in iniquity somewhere downtown, and were brought up here and the bastards laid on our doorstep with the command of the Executive that we acknowledged parentage.” (1127/-42)

 

* 

Time-Life notes that not all Americans were suffering. But economic changes did come. More people kept their cars longer, and the number of auto repair shops and gasoline stations doubled during the Depression. 

The five-day work week was spreading, and people found they had more time for leisure. Bridge-playing and even stamp-collecting became popular. Listening to the radio filled many hours – and, as E.B. White wrote – when rural folk spoke of “The Radio,” they meant “a pervading and somewhat godlike presence which has come into their lives and homes.” 

Sundays were still slow days, with Tom Wolfe describing men, women and children leaving a church in Ohio: “People talking, laughing, streaming out from the dutiful, weekly … disinfection of their souls,” moving “into bright morning-gold of Sunday light again, and standing then in friendly and yet laughing groups upon the lawn outside.” 

“On Sunday afternoon,” Sherwood Anderson added, “the small town man gets his car out.” A drive in the country and a picnic might be planned. (1127/252, 256, 262)

 

* 

Spring: Production finally exceeds levels not seen since the “Great Crash,” but, “The moment Roosevelt attempted to cut back on spending and relief and to balance the budget in 1937, the economy began going sour again, wiping out most of the gains that had been made since 1933.” (1127-43) 

The Neutrality Act continues the policy of “cash and carry,” at the urging of FDR. In effect, it aids England and France, which have the hard currency and shipping to purchase supplies – including oil. One historian later says, it was the only way the United States could “remain economically in the world and politically out of it.” The U.S. continued its “passive role” through the next year – at a time when even England and France were trying appeasement. (1127/54-55)

*

In production for three years, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is finally released by Walt Disney. As Time-Life notes,  financiers were reluctant to loan Disney “the nearly $2 million” needed to make the film. “Friends and enemies warned Disney that the public would never pay to sit through an 80-minute fairy tale. … The movie quickly broke all previous attendance records, grossed eight million dollars and was translated into 10 languages.” (1129/203)

 

* 

A close call for a seven-year-old child. 

In a review of a new book on Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, The New York Times notes,

 

In 1937, the family moved to a white neighborhood — the story she revisits in “Raisin.” A segregationist landowners’ association challenged the sale of the house. White mobs harassed the family, on one occasion throwing a concrete mortar through the window. It narrowly missed Hansberry, who was 7 years old.

 

These years taught Hansberry the necessity of fighting on all fronts. Her father filed a lawsuit, and Hansberry recalled her “desperate and courageous mother,” home without him, “patrolling our house all night with a loaded German Luger, doggedly guarding her four children.” (See: 1959, for more on Hansberry’s life.)

  

*

 

June 4: A dust storm, driven by fifty-mile-per-hour winds sends a “roller” two miles high, and a hundred miles wide, sweeping over Goodwell, Oklahoma.

 

*

 

June 16: Marc Blitzstein, a 32-year-old composer begins his rise to fame with production of his pro-labor “opera,” The Cradle Will Rock. At this point, his wife of three years has died, and Blitzstein’s homosexuality is no secret to his friends. A choral opera on Sacco and Vanzetti he had completed had never been performed – due to Blitzstein’s left-wing political beliefs. (He later admits, when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, that he was a communist from 1938 to 1949, although he refused to name names.) 

A review of a book on Blitzstein’s life in The New York Times, includes this explanation of what happened:

 

This pro-labor opera, which opened under the direction of Orson Welles, became a landmark of Broadway history: government security guards padlocked the theater; the cast, crew and audience staged a spectacular exodus to another theater, secured at the last minute; Blitzstein sat alone on the stage at a rented upright with Welles at a desk off to the side, setting the scenes; cast and musicians performed from the audience.

 

A limited run in late spring 1937, a performance for steelworkers over the summer and a full Mercury Theater production were all overwhelming successes, and Marc Blitzstein became a marquee name. After Bernstein led the Boston-area premiere in 1939 while still a Harvard undergraduate, playing Blitzstein’s score by heart, the two became friends for life.

 

When World War II came, he renounced his draft deferment, and at age 37, joined the Eighth Army Air Force. He composed music related to the war, for example, Airborne Symphony,” and coached the U.S. Army Negro Chorus. 

 

*

 

Summer: Harold Ickes writes that FDR, “is punch drunk from the punishment that he has suffered recently.” (1127/44)

*

Amelia Earhart.

 

“Women must try to do things, as men have tried.,”

 

July 2: Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappear, during her attempt to be the first female pilot around the world. “Flying made her famous,” Virginia Morrell once wrote, “disappearing made her legendary.” 

 

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

 

    No man had yet flown a plane around the world at its widest point, the Equator, as Earhart was doing, nor had any woman pilot ever circumnavigated the globe. At the end of her 29,000-mile journey, she would have these records to add to an already impressive list of aviation firsts, including being the first woman to solo the Atlantic. It would be her last such “stunt” too, she’d confided to reporter at the beginning of the flight. Afterward she’d like to live a quiet life. (112) 

 

    “The love of flying is the love of beauty,” Earhart once explained. “It was more beautiful up there than anything I had known.” For sixteen years, she would experience that beauty. “But much of her durability as a legend comes from the fact that Earhart is one of the few American heroes whose reputation has remained virtually untarnished.” (114, 116) 

 

    Amelia's niece, Amy Kleppner “remembers in poignant detail filigree and spun-glass bracelets Amelia sent from Asia for her sixth birthday. The gifts arrived days after Earhart vanished.” (117) 

 

        Morrell writes, 

 

    Earhart (who’d flown the Atlantic with scarcely more than a scarf, a toothbrush, and a comb) and Noonan each traveled with one small bag so as not to add extra weight to the plane. For the Lae to Howland Island leg they eliminated every extraneous thing, from parachutes to Earhart’s lucky elephant-hide bracelet, which weighed next to nothing. 

    That bracelet, embellished with silver, lies today in a display case at the Oklahoma City headquarters of the Ninety-Nines, the international organization of women pilots Earhart helped found in 1929, named for its number of charter members. Holding the bracelet in my hand, feeling its feather-like weight, I was struck by what it meant for Earhart to have removed it, how anxious she must have been about the journey to Howland Island.

 

    Wiley Post had circumnavigated the globe twice, once with a navigator (1931), and once solo (1933). 

 

    For this flight, Earhart wanted a two-engine plane that could stay aloft if one failed, “just in case.” She would fly a Lockheed Model 10E Electra, “a sleek, all-metal plane.” It was designed to carry ten passengers.

 

    Her first plan was to fly west from California. She’d take navigators with her as far as Australia, then continue alone.

 

“For once, if all goes well, it will be the males, in a manner of speaking, who do the walking home,” she wrote. The flight from California to Hawaii went smoothly, but the takeoff from Hawaii was a near-fatal disaster. 

Earhart ground-looped the plane on takeoff. With 900 gallons of fuel on board, she started down the runway and was racing along when the Electric swerved violently. The right wheel blew and the strut gave way, ripping off the landing gear. The plane spun more than 180 degrees and slid backward down the runway, spewing fuel. Earhart and her two navigators were unscathed. (132)

 

     Two months later with her plane repaired, she headed east from California, instead. 

   She’d dropped her plans for a solo fight too. Fred Noonan, a highly regarded navigator, would guide her from his seat at a table in the rear of the Electra, where he could spread out his celestial navigation books. To communicate in the noisy plane (the soundproof insulation had been removed to reduce weight), Noonan and Earhart used a bamboo fishing pole to pass notes back and forth.

 

   The cockpit of the Lockheed was only 5 x 5 x 5. After leaving Miami, they made 24 hops, covering 19,000 miles, in only 30 days. Twenty hours, and fourteen minutes into that last hop to Howland Island, Amelia sent her last message.

 

    Her route now took her from Oakland, to Miami, to Brazil – where at 3:15 a.m., before takeoff, they scouted the runway in the dark, using flashlights. A 13-hour hop over the South Atlantic, saw them land in Senegal. This time, her trip over the ocean was “uneventful,” the Atlantic having been flown now, “so many, many times.” At one point, gas fumes filled the cockpit, and nauseated her, and rainstorms and headwinds shook the aircraft. They flew across the continent, north of the Equator, “across stretches of country barren beyond words, a no-man’s-land of eternal want.” 

In Eritrea, after a particularly long day, Earhart suddenly realized that as usual she had eaten nothing. Now pilot and navigator had a set pattern: up before 4:00 a.m., in the air before dawn, on the ground by early afternoon. After seeing local officials and tending to the plane, they were lucky to get five hours of sleep a night. “The most important thing,” Earhart wrote, “was seeing that our faithful sky steed was well groomed and fed. … So the geography of our journey likely will remain most clearly memorized in terms of landing-field environments; of odors of baking metal, gasoline and perspiring ground crews; of the roaring of warming motors and the clatter of metal-working tools. Of the other sites around her, “the delectable perfumes of flowers, spices and fragrant countryside; the sounds and songs and music of diverse peoples … we clutched what we could.”

 

    It was on next to India, Siam, Malaya, and on June 29, after six weeks, they reached Lae, New Guinea. “This evening,” Earhart wrote wistfully, “I look eastward over the Pacific. … I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”

 

   Ahead: an eighteen-hour hop to Howland Island, a tiny speck in a vast Pacific. Then a jump to Hawaii, and finally, home to California. “Fred Noonan and I are sitting here looking out across 7,000 miles of Pacific Ocean,” Earhart wrote in her last dispatch. “It is the last ditch I must hop before I can get back to tell George, my husband, ‘There you are, I’ve done it.’” (132) 

Her final radio transmission – describing their search for the island – was received by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca, standing off Howland Island, at 8:44 a.m. on July 2 (across the International Date Line). “We are on the line of position 157-337. Will repeat this message. … We are running north and south.”

 

 

    Nothing. A massive search. Nothing. Putnam had his wife declared dead a year-and-a-half later. In the rumors of that era, she lived on. There was a story that she had been seen in an isolated area in Japan. Another: that she was on a spying mission for the government. The Japanese had forced her down or fished her out of the ocean – and taken her secretly to Tokyo to be Emperor Hirohito’s mistress.

 

    After the war, one story went, she returned to this country, underwent plastic surgery, and “ended her days selling Tupperware in New Jersey.” 

   In fact, Elgen Long, who had spent a quarter century investigating the disappearance, told Morrell, “You either believe her, or you don’t. And if you do, then her last words indicate that she was doing exactly what a lost pilot should have been doing: flying a search pattern, looking for that island.”

 

   The real problem, Long insists, was that charts of that day had Howland Island in the wrong location.

 

    “I’m sure Noonan got them near where the island was supposed to have been, according to their charts. That’s why Earhart said in a radio transmission to the Itasca at 7:42 a.m., “We must be on you but cannot see you.”

 

   Long believes they went down in 17,000 feet of water in an area of 2,000 square miles, west of the island.

 

    “When I go,” Earhart often told her husband, “I’d like best to go in my plane. Quickly.” 

 

 

    As Morrell explains, “The public loved her … for her smile, her courage, and her grace.” After a failed takeoff attempt damaged her first plane, when she was first learning to fly, her flight instructor turned to see Amelia, compact in hand, powdering her nose.

 

   “Women must try to do things, as men have tried,” Amelia once wrote to George Putnam, her husband. “When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.” (122)

 

    “It is so good to think she was known and loved over so much of the world and deserved it,” her mother wrote to a friend, after her daughter vanished, “for she was straight and simple.” (135)

 

 

*

 

August 6: The movie, “The Good Earth,” based on Pearl Buck’s book about Chinese farmers struggling to get by, is released. All the main actors are whites, in “yellow face.” Asian extras are hired to add “atmosphere.”

 

Anna May Wong, a successful Chinese American actress, refuses to take part in this project. “I do not see why I, at this stage of my career, should take a step backward and accept a minor role in a Chinese play that will surround me entirely by a Caucasian cast,” she grumbled.

Tilly Losch, left, and Paul Muni, right, starred.
Muni was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. 
Losch was born in Vienna.

Ms. Wong's parents were both Chinese.

 

*

 

“The epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading.”

 

October 5: Speaking in Chicago, FDR gives what is called his “Quarantine Speech.” In it, he correctly noted, “vast numbers of women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.”

 

To paraphrase a recent author “perhaps we foresee a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, will rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing will be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, Every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless – all will be  Laast are wrecked or utterly destroyed.

 

If those things come to pass in other parts of the world, let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics in the arts of civilization.

 

If those days come “there will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. The storm will rage till every flower of culture is trampled and all human beings are leveled in a vast chaos.”

 

If those days are not to come to pass – if we are not to have a world in which we can breathe freely and live in amity without fear – the peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort to uphold laws and principles on which alone peace can rest secure.”

 

FDR speaks of “interdependence…which makes it impossible for any nation completely to isolate itself from economic and political upheavals in the rest of the world.” He adds that the U.S. has been lucky, able to put its money to work rebuilding roads and bridges and dams – and on reforestation. Yet,  “I him am compelled and you are compelled, nevertheless, to look ahead.” 

He warns, “the epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading.”

 

War is a contagion, whether it be declared or undeclared. It can engulf States and peoples remote from the original scene of hostilities. We are determined to keep out of war, yet we cannot insure ourselves against the disastrous effects of war and the dangers of involvement. … America hates war period America hopes for peace. Therefore, America actively engages in the search peace.

 

Loose pages in my files, from a chapter of book titled, The Decline of Neutrality, 1937-1941, pp. 2168-2170).

 

 

*

 

    The talented flutist, Frances Blaisdell is refused an audition with the New York Philharmonic because she’s female. She has had to overcome similar attitudes all along, despite her talent.

 

    Her father was a talented flutist himself, but had hoped for a son, and called Frances “Jim.” He trains her, regardless, and at age sixteen, when she says she wants to be a musician, he gives her two years to prove it might be possible. Otherwise, she can become a teacher, nurse, or secretary. Her father asks a professional flutist to work with “Jim,” but when Frances shows up, at first, he refuses to work with her, saying there was no future for women trying to play the flute in orchestras. Recognizing her talent, soon after, he relents.

 

    Her success built slowly, but surely, and she learned to adapt to “the show business side of classical music,” as well. She even did vaudeville. At one point, she admitted, she wore a beautiful gold lamé dress at Radio City Music Hall for five shows a day in 1934 or 1935.

 

    She had two Rockettes on each side of her. Still, she was deathly frightened the first time she            gazed into the immense black space, which looked, she said, like the “caverns of hell.” 

        A Rockette nudged her and said, “Get going, kid, and smile.”

       Ms. Blaisdell did. After a couple of shows, it was easy.

 

    Despite her rejection by the Philharmonic, her career took off. When she stopped performing later, she taught other flutists at Stanford, for thirty-five years. In the process, Ms. Blaisdell helped pave the way for future generations of women in the orchestral world.