Gluyas Williams – Page 2 – A New Yorker State of Mind

Something Frivolous

And what can be more frivolous than a Busby Berkeley musical, with scores of leggy showgirls tap-dancing in perfect rhythm, or dressed in identical white gowns while playing flying pianos. Make sense? No, and that was the whole point.

March 23, 1935 cover by Peter Arno. The color, contrast and composition are striking; it looks more like a cover from the 50s or 60s.

“In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery…” Berkeley once remarked. “I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour.” Gold Diggers of 1935 was Berkeley’s second “Gold Digger” picture (he choreographed or directed four; there were six in all, including one silent), and it was the first in which he served as sole director. Critic John Mosher didn’t know what to make of the film, likening it more to an earthquake than an entertainment.

SOMEONE HAS TO DO IT…**Busby Berkeley** (1895-1976) works with dancers (left) during the production of 1933’s *42nd Street*; right, at work on one of his lavish sets, circa 1930s. (IMDB)

The “harmless jingle” Mosher referred to, Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s “Lullaby of Broadway,” received an Oscar for Best Original Song (it also gave me an earworm for a week).

GOLDEN GIRLS…Clockwise, from top left, **Alice Brady** as the parsimonious Matilda Prentiss and Adolphe Menjou as the conniving Russian dance director Nicolai Nicoleff in *Gold Diggers of 1935*; a scene from the dancing pianos sequence; **Dick Powell** and Gloria Stuart as the film’s sweethearts. (Wikipedia/YouTube/IMDB)

Amid the frivolity, Mosher noted the juxtaposition of the jingly “Lullaby of Broadway” with the haunting, two-minute sequence of Wini Shaw singing “Lullaby” as her disembodied face emerges from the blackness toward the viewer.

The scene continues as the woman (Shaw) turns onto her back, her head slowly dissolving into the nighttime city…after a raucous, mass tap-dancing scene, she falls to her death, and the sequence is reversed, her face disappearing into the blackness. The blog Acidemic gives an interesting take on this part of the film, which is more reminiscent of a German avant-garde film than Berkeley’s usual fare…

…Mosher found the scene “terrifying.” Perhaps Shirley Temple helped calm his nerves with her precocious antics in The Little Colonel…

NO FLOATING HEADS HERE…**Shirley Temple** and **Bill Robinson** doing the famous staircase dance in *The Little Colonel* (1935). (TCM)

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Up In Smoke

In “Notes and Comment” E.B. White considered the possibility that cigarette smoking might be harmful to unborn babies, and wryly suggested that embryos could replace grandmothers as a new growth market for big tobacco:

…White referred to the advertisement below, which appeared in the Feb. 9, 1935 issue of The New Yorker:

…White also commented on his recent visit to Madison Square Garden’s winter skating carnival…

THE DOUBLE AXEL was still thirteen years in the future when Swedish skaters **Gillis Emanuel Grafström** (left) and Vivi-Anne Hultén delighted E.B. White at Madison Square Garden. Photos are from 1924 and 1932, respectively. (Wikipedia)

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Prescience of Mind

We have more from E.B. White, this time in a humorous piece titled “The Dove’s Nest,” in which White took a poke at the most influential newspaper editor in the country, Arthur Brisbane. A close friend of William Randolph Hearst, Brisbane essentially ran Hearst’s newspaper empire. The New Yorker often ridiculed Hearst’s (and Brisbane’s) jingoistic approach to the news that included giant headlines warning of war. Excerpts:

William A. Swanberg, author of the 1961 biography Citizen Hearst, described Brisbane as “a one-time socialist who had drifted pleasantly into the profit system…in some respects a vest-pocket Hearst–a personal enigma, a workhorse, a madman for circulation, a liberal who had grown conservative, an investor.”

DAMN THOSE TORPEDOES…**Arthur Brisbane** in 1933. His grandson, **Arthur S. Brisbane,** now retired, served as public editor of *The New York Times* from 2010 to 2012. (credo.library.umass.edu)

The New Yorker continued to take jabs at Brisbane in the following issue (March 30). Brisbane owned a large estate (including a horse farm) in New Jersey that he made available to New Deal work programs during the Depression. I suppose this Al Frueh cartoon was some kind of reference to that…

…also in the March 30 issue was this ad from World Peaceways, which raised alarms about possible war and bombs raining down from the sky…

…back to the March 23 issue, where we find the calming strains of a Brahms concerto at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Arturo Toscanini with some support from his son-in-law, Vladimir Horowitz…

MAY I CALL YOU DAD?…Not likely something said by young **Vladimir Horowitz,** left, to father-in-law **Arturo Toscanini**. (WQXR/Britannica)

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From Our Advertisers

Beginning in 1934 the makers of Old Gold cigarettes hired pin-up artist George Petty to create a series of ads featuring a homely, clueless sugar daddy and his leggy mistress…here he turns the tables, introducing a “Pudgy Wudgy” matron putting the moves on a handsome hosiery salesman…

…this Petty ad appeared in the Feb. 9, 1935 issue of The New Yorker…

…the makers of Camels continued their campaign of “distinguished women” who enjoyed their product…here we have a former debutante, Dorothy Paine, an “alert young member of New York’s inner circle.” Not much of a record of Dorothy, who married a man named Walter H. Sterling in 1935…apparently they moved to Phoenix and bought up property in the Southwest…

…the makers of General Tire offered this grim assessment of tire safety…the lad seems to be a mere investment of time…

…although prestige brands suffered mightily during the Depression, the folks at Packard were doubling down on the elite status of their automobile…

…we’ve seen the work of fashion illustrator Ruth Sigrid Grafstrom before in ads for Spud cigarettes…here she contributes some elegant lines to a spot for Bergdorf Goodman (is the woman on the right smoking a Spud?)…

…here’s the Duchess again, still blowing her top over College Inn tomato juice…just look at her clenched fists…that fop with a monocle looks like he just took a left hook to the chops…

…on to our illustrators, William Cotton created this caricature of Rexford Guy Tugwell for Russell Lord’s two-part profile…Tugwell and President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Resettlement Administration, which relocated rural unemployed to “Greenbelt Cities” near urban job markets. Critics called him “Rex the Red” for his social engineering experiments, and after he was forced out of federal government, Tugwell was appointed in 1938 as the first director of the NYC Planning Commission. Naturally, he would butt heads with Robert Moses…

…illustrator and painter Maurice Freed kicked off the calendar section…

…bookended on the bottom of page 4 by one of James Thurber’s most recognized drawings…

…Thurber again, and more woes between the sexes…

…we continue with our cartoonists by looking in on Barbara Shermund…

…George Price found a new wrinkle for his recurring floating man cartoon…

…Helen Hokinson graced page 19 with scenes from the opera…

…leaving an extra drawing stranded on page 18…

…Alain offered a new twist on the promotion of physical fitness…

…Gluyas Williams brought us to the stuffy confines of club life (the cartoon was originally featured vertically)…

…and we close with Richard Decker, and a lucky draw at the IRS…

Next Time: The Lighter Side of George Grosz…

Reel News

Above: Newsreel cameramen perch on boards resting on a windowsill to get a birds-eye view of a passing parade, circa 1930. (Public Domain Image)

We marvel at, and sometimes decry, today’s instantaneous news coverage of wars, disasters and the like, but ninety years ago newsreel crews did a remarkable job of filming and delivering the latest news to thousands of theaters across the U.S. and around the world.

Sept. 22, 1934 cover by **Harry Brown.**

In his “A Reporter at Large” column, Morris Markey penned a lengthy account of Fox Movietone’s coverage of the SS Morro Castle disaster. En route from Havana to New York City on Sept. 8, 1934, the luxury liner caught fire near the New Jersey coast. Due to the ship’s design and the ineptitude of the crew, the blaze claimed 137 lives. Markey described how newsreel crews—with their bulky cameras and sound equipment—went into action, including a cameraman who “goaded” a pilot into taking him aloft through vicious weather conditions.

GUTS AND INGENUITY took newsreel reporters to places high and low. Clockwise, from top left, title card from a 1935 Fox Movietone newsreel; **Jack Lieb** goes aloft to get capture newsreel footage in an undated photo—Lieb was a cameraman for Hearst’s *News of the Day;* a 1930s Fox Movietone camera; the SS *Morro Castle* ablaze off the New Jersey Coast on Sept. 8, 1934. (Wikipedia/Lieb photo Courtesy of Bette Marshall via unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov)

Somehow the cameraman aboard the airplane (which was forced down by weather three times) was able to get his footage to the Movietone office by noon, less than seven hours after the office first received word of the disaster. By three o’clock, five thousand feet of film from all sources was being developed.

UP NORTH AND DOWN UNDER…Movietone news had crews stationed around the world, including field staff in Sydney (top, from 1938), and in Toronto, circa 1930. (Nat’l Library of Australia/City of Toronto Archives)

Markey concluded with this observation about the “rugged” and persistent newsreel cameramen:

In the aftermath of the Morro Castle disaster, a scene of enormous tragedy was turned into a tourist attraction…

GAWKERS AND HAWKERS…The charred hulk of the SS *Morro Castle* came to rest on the shore near the Asbury Park boardwalk, which became a popular spot for souvenir salesmen and photo-ops. Tourists flocked to the site from September 1934 to March 1935, when the ship was finally towed away. Note the postcard (bottom) advertising homemade candy over an image of the charred ship. (ripleys.com/side-o-lamb.com)

Fox Movietone News produced sound newsreels from 1928 to 1963, and in the UK as British Movietone News…here is Movietone footage of the Morro Castle disaster, as presented by British Movietone in 1934:

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Up In The Old Hotels

Last week “The Talk of the Town” looked in on one of Manhattan’s oldest saloons, McSorley’s. For the Sept. 22 “Talk” the subject was “Oldest Hotels,” two of which, The Cosmopolitan and The Grand, remarkably survive to this day.

HANGING IN THERE…The 1845 Brevoort House hotel at 15 Fifth Avenue (top left) was torn down in 1952, however the 1868 Grand Hotel (right) at 1232–1238 Broadway and the 1845 Cosmopolitan Hotel (below, left) at Chambers Street and West Broadway still stand today. (Museum of the City of New York / Chester Higgins Jr. for The New York Times)

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The Six-Million Dollar Road

The first roadway designed exclusively for automobile use was likely the Long Island Motor Parkway, privately built by William Kissam Vanderbilt II because he wanted a road suitable for auto racing. He established the Vanderbilt Cup races on local roads in 1904, but after two spectators were killed and many others injured, in 1908 he began building what would become a 45-mile (72 km) toll road from Queens to Lake Ronkonkoma. After two mechanics were killed in a 1910 race, the New York Legislature banned racing on the road, which the state took over in 1938.

ROAD WARRIOR…**William Kissam Vanderbilt II** (top right) staged his Vanderbilt Cup Races on his private road until a fatal accident put a stop to the fun in 1910; At bottom right, a surviving section of the road today. Most of the road in Queens is a bicycle trail, and other segments still serve as parts of a county road. (nyheritage.org/Wikipedia-Steve Nowotarski/ny1.com)

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From Our Advertisers

I have nothing against accordion music, despite years of exposure to Lawrence Welk during my youth, but I find it hard to believe that a Park Avenue socialite (identified here as Mrs. René Du Champ Bellinger) would contemplate tormenting her posh friends with a Hohner squeezebox…

…Esquire magazine was barely a year old when it posted this ad in The New Yorker…its appeal to men (and their anxieties) keeps it going today…

…it’s interesting how companies in the 19th century and on through the 1950s featured idealized, bird’s eye images of their factories in advertising, doubtless believing that consumers associated size (and smokestacks) with prosperity, and therefore a quality product…

…White Rock, however, has used the image of the Greek goddess Psyche for more than a century to promote the purity of its spring water…

…purity was also the main point of this ad from Daggett & Ramsdell, who hawked their wares to the Park Avenue set…after more than 130 years D&G is still in the beauty business…

…this next ad is almost unbelievable…single rooms starting at $5, double rooms $7, and a whole suite for $10…at the Plaza…okay, $10 is roughly equivalent to $225 today, but half of that could get you a single…

…and yet another unlikely claim from R.J. Reynolds regarding the energizing qualities of their Camel cigarettes…it seems the last thing you would need while climbing a mountain is smoke in your already over-taxed lungs…

…however, let’s give proper due to Georgia Engelhard (1906–1986), who scandalized the mountaineering world by ditching the Victorian climbing skirt in favor of a pair of climbing pants. Engelhard was the first female climber to ascend many of the peaks in the Rockies…

**Georgia Engelhard** in a 1922 photo attributed to her friend **Alfred Stieglitz.** (nga.gov)

…it seemed like nearly everyone smoked in the 1930s, even in ads that had nothing to do with tobacco companies (detail)…

…on to our cartoons, we begin with Richard Decker and some retail competition…

…George Price drew up a curiosity even Robert Ripley couldn’t believe…

…Robert Day examined advances in evolutionary science…

…E. Simms Campbell offered up this abbreviated love story…

…Peter Arno gave us a director with a god complex…

…and one from Ned Hilton, and a new perspective on flying…

…on to Sept. 29, 1934, with a cover by Arnold Hall, who produced at least twelve covers for The New Yorker between 1933 and 1939…

Sept. 29, 1934 cover by **Arnold Hall.**

…and we go straight to ads, beginning with this alarming image that greeted readers on the inside cover…why would this prompt anyone to purchase a can of onion soup?…

…the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center opened in 1934, and it quickly became a focal point for the city’s elite…

Above, the dining room at the Rainbow Room, 1934, and below, in 2004. (Library of Congress/Wikipedia)

…Lucky Strike continued its series of ads featuring fashionable women looking smart with their product…

…our cartoons include this spot illustration by Otto Soglow, who did spots for The New Yorker for many years…although Soglow’s Little King moved to the Hearst newspapers, he continued to contribute cartoons to The New Yorker until 1974…

…George Price continued to explore life as a levitating man…

…the enforcement of the Hays Code had this teen in a “fix,” per James Thurber…

…Gluyas Williams continued his exploration of various crises, this time in the music world…

…Alan Dunn gave us a glimpse of civilization via the pharaonic sculptures that were emerging on the face of Mt. Rushmore…

…and we close with the wonderful wit of Barbara Shermund…

Next Time: Bojangles…

Lunch at the Dog Wagon

If you think today’s food trailers are the result of some hipster craze, consider that their origins go back more than a century; by 1934 Manhattan was home to 300 of the country’s 5,000 “lunch wagons,” which were commonly called “dog wagons.”

September 8, 1934 cover by Ilonka Karasz.

Some of Manhattan’s dog wagons belied the moniker, however, resembling the sleek roadside diners over which many today wax nostalgic. Jerry O’Mahony Diner Company of Elizabeth, New Jersey, produced more of these dining cars than any other concern—2,000 of them between 1917 and 1952 (only about twenty remain today). “The Talk of the Town” had this to say about the dog wagon phenomenon. Excerpts:

PROMISE OF BIG BUCKS…Tierney, based in New Rochelle and established in 1895, was an early manufacturer of lunch wagons and dining cars. It went out of business in 1933. Above, detail from a Tierney Diner Car Advertisement from the late 1920s. (scalar.usc.edu)

LUNCH ON THE RUN…Clockwise, from top left, early “dog wagons” were horse-drawn affairs; the wagons became semi-stationary with the advent of manufactured units designed to resemble old railroad dining cars; bottom photos show interiors of two O’Mahony diners. (restaurantingthroughhistory.com/americanbusinesshistory.org/dinerhunter.com)

ALL IN A NAME…Above: The Jerry O’Mahony Diner Company produced 2,000 diners in its Elizabeth, New Jersey, factory. Below, an O’Mahoney dining car headed for its new home in Kansas—the O’Mahony company preferred that patrons give their dining cars elite names, such as this “Palace Diner.” (dinerhunter.com/nyfta.org)

LAST CALL…One of the few surviving O’Mahony diners—The Summit Diner in Summit, New Jersey. A prototypical “rail car” style diner, it was built by the O’Mahony Company in 1938. (Jeff Boyce/Wikimedia Commons)

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A Captain’s Curios

“The Talk of the Town” also paid a visit to Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, a place that would later be visited (and written about) by The New Yorker’s chronicler of the commonplace, Joseph Mitchell. Excerpts:

MURKY MUSEUM…This is likely the red brick building on 127th Street where the old mariner **Captain Charley** held court in the basement with his Private Museum for Intelligent People. (Google Street View)

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Origins of Life

Wolcott Gibbs took his turn as theater reviewer (in relief of Robert Benchley) and managed to sit through Life Begins at 8:40, which had a successful run at the Winter Garden.

GIVING IT A REST…**Roy Bolger, Luella Gear, Frances Williams** and **Bert Lahr** headed the cast of Life Begins at 8:40 at the Winter Garden. Critic **Wolcott Gibbs** appreciated Lahr’s change in tempo, as he was becoming a more “restful” comedian. Lahr was the father of *New Yorker* theater critic and writer **John Lahr.** (Library of Congress)

In contrast to Bert Lahr’s new toned-down style, Milton Berle’s outlandish antics over at the Imperial Theatre had Gibbs wondering what the comedian’s vaudeville-style show Saluta was all about, if it was about anything. Whatever it was, it worked—Berle would enjoy a comedy career spanning eight decades, including becoming one of early television’s biggest stars.

ON FIRE…**Milton Berle’s** show *Saluta* featured **Chaz Chase** (right), famed for gobbling up whatever was placed in front of his mouth, including a box of lit matches. At left, Berle in 1930; right, Chase in the 1935 film Vaudeville. (Pinterest/IMDB)

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From Our Advertisers

We begin with a cold one from Rheingold, which had “beverage balance” and wasn’t afraid to stamp a slogan right over its ad copy…

…Lucky Strike gave us another stylish reason for taking up a bad habit…

…Arts & Decoration magazine took out this full page to tout the latest news in modern design…

…while the folks at Packard bought this center spread to give ample space to their 1935 model, which must have been a helluva thing to parallel park…

…clothing companies continued use class shaming to goad aspiring toffs to purchase the “correct” attire for school…

…with the help of Gardner Rea, Heinz suggested that the upper orders would simply swoon over cuisine you managed to scoop out of a can…

…on to our cartoonists, we begin with spots by James Thurber…

…and Lloyd Coe…

…with the absence of Otto Soglow’s Little King, Gluyas Williams did his best to fill the void of a full page, something Williams did quite nicely…

…Rea Irvin gave us yet another local bird sighting…

…Richard Decker found understatement over a reservoir…

…Robert Day borrowed from the style of Rockwell Kent to offer a bit of humor from the northern climes…

…here is a woodcut from Kent’s N by E is, an illustrated story of his voyage to Greenland…

(From **Rockwell Kent’s** 1930 book of woodcuts, *N by E,* via untendedgarden.com)

…Reginald Marsh lent his social realism to an uglier side of American life…

…and we close with Helen Hokinson, just taking in the passing scene…

Next Time: Sticks and Stones…

America’s Sweetheart

Above: A scene from Mary Pickford’s 1922 film Tess of the Storm Country. (Library of Congress)

In today’s celebrity-saturated culture it is difficult to find a parallel to silent film star Mary Pickford, who was dubbed Queen of the Movies more than a century ago. Indeed, during the 1910s and 1920s Pickford was regarded as the most famous woman in the world.

Pickford was also known as “America’s Sweet” for her portrayal of gutsy but tenderhearted heroines. In real life she was also a gutsy and shrewd businesswoman who co-founded United Artists in 1919 with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D. W. Griffith. Commanding a salary only rivaled by Chaplin, her stardom only grew when she married Fairbanks in 1920, forming the first celebrity supercouple; together they ruled Hollywood from their Beverly Hills mansion, Pickfair (apparently staging dull affairs, per the “Profile” excerpt below).

The end of the silent era also put an end to Pickford’s stardom, as well as to her fairytale marriage to Fairbanks. Margaret Case Harriman’s profile of Pickford, simply titled “Sweetheart,” gave readers a glimpse into the decline of a silent superstar. Excerpts:

SINGULAR STAR…Clockwise, from top left, **Mary Pickford** in a publicity photo, circa 1910; Pickford visits close friend and screenwriter **Frances Marion** during filming of *Straight is the Way* (1921); **Douglas Fairbanks** and Pickford in the early 1920s; Pickford with a movie camera in 1916—in addition to being a shrewd businesswoman, she was also skilled behind the camera. (thehollywoodtimes.today/Time/Library of Congress)

Harriman concluded her profile with some thoughts on Pickford’s future:

THE SOUND BARRIER…With the advent of sound movies **Mary Pickford** turned to writing books and serving various charities. From left, sharing ice cream with rising star **Bing Crosby** in 1934; center, **Al Frueh’s** caricature of Pickford for the profile; Pickford in a 1934 promotional picture supporting The Salvation Army. (Pinterest/Library of Congress)

A note on the profile’s writer, Margaret Case Harriman (1904-1966), who doubtless sharpened her people-watching skills at the Hotel Algonquin (famed birthing ground of the New Yorker), which was owned by her father, Frank Case. Douglas Fairbanks was one of Case’s best friends, and Harriman knew both Fairbanks and Pickford well, since they often stayed at the hotel.

HOME SWEET HOME…**Margaret Case Harriman**, photographed May 31, 1937 by Carl Van Vechten. Harriman was born in 1904 in room 1206 of the Hotel Algonquin, which was owned by her father, **Frank Case.** (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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Master of Masters

The founder of perhaps the world’s most prestigious golf tournament was an amateur and a working lawyer by profession. When Bobby Jones (1902–1971) co-founded the Masters Tournament in 1934 with investment dealer Clifford Robert, it was called the Augusta National Invitation Tournament (it was Robert’s idea to call it The Masters, a name Jones thought immodest). Jones dominated top-level amateur competition from the early 1920s through 1930—the year he achieved a Grand Slam by winning golf ’s four major tournaments in the same year. However, by the 1934 Jones’s skills began to wane. The New Yorker had little to say about the first Masters (it wasn’t a big deal yet), other than Howard Brubaker making this observation in “Of All Things”…

A SWING INTO HISTORY…**Bobby Jones** (center) drives during the first-ever Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia on March 22, 1934. (augusta.com)

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From Our Advertisers

Wanna get away? This colorful advertisement beckoned New Yorker readers to take the next boat to sunny Bermuda…

…while the Grace Line offered a southern cruise through the Panama Canal…

…but who needed to travel when you could enjoy a beer that was beloved the world over?…

…Mrs. Potter d’Orsay Palmer nee Maria Eugenia Martinez de Hoz was content to stay home in Chicago and smoke a few Camels, apparently…

…we’ve encountered her before—she appeared in a Ponds ad (below) in the Aug. 8, 1931 issue of the New Yorker, where we learned she was wife No. 2 of Potter d’Orsay Palmer, son of the wealthy family of Chicago Palmer House fame…they would divorce in 1937, and the playboy Potter would marry two more times before dying of a cerebral hemorrhage in May 1939—following a drunken brawl in Sarasota, Florida with a meat cutter called Kenneth Nosworthy. Maria Eugenia would remarry and return to her homeland of Argentina to raise a family…

…this ad from Nash looks like a scene from Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, if she had a car to match, that is…

…the Cadillac V-16 was a truly massive automobile, but in contrast to the Nash ad, you can barely see the car as it approaches from the vanishing distance…

…E. Simms Campbell got in on the advertising game with this spot that features contrasting images of storm and calm…

…James Thurber offered this cartoon on behalf of Heinz soups…

…and Thurber again, as we kick off the cartoons with the ongoing battle…

…Adolph Schus made a rare appearance in the New Yorker…according to Ink Spill, he also contributed a cartoon on March 19, 1938, and was editor of Pageant Magazine in 1945…

…Gluyas Williams looked in on the sorrows of moneyed classes…

…Helen Hokinson’s “girls” were in search of lunch, and propriety…

…and Leonard Dove gave us a renter surprised by something not included in his lease…

…on to April 14, 1934…

April 14, 1934 cover by **Harry Brown.**

…and book reviewer Clifton Fadiman, who found F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary gifts “bewilderingly varied”…

A NOT-SO-TENDER RECEPTION…**F. Scott Fitzgerald’s** status as a symbol of Jazz Age excess hurt his career during the Depression years. *Tender Is the Night* received mixed reviews, which didn’t help his alcoholism and deteriorating health. When **Carl Van Vechten** took this photo of Fitzgerald in June 1937, the author had a little over three years to live. (Wikipedia)

…speaking of F. Scott Fitzgerald, fellow author Ernest Hemingway defended Fitzgerald’s writing, arguing that criticism of his Jazz Age settings stemmed from superficial readings. One then wonders what Hemingway thought of E.B. White’s poetic “tribute” to his big game hunting excursions…

I ONLY SHOOT STRANGERS…Author Ernest Hemingway poses with a lion shot during a safari in Africa in 1934. (MPR News)

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From History’s Ash Heap

Various reference sources cite “freak shows” as a normal part of American culture in the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, but I have to admit I saw exhibits at state fairs of half-ton humans and conjoined twins when I was a kid in the 1970s (not to mention things in jars at a carnival in St. Louis that should have been given a decent burial).

When Alva Johnston penned the first installment of a three-part profile series titled “Sideshow People,” such attractions could be found across the U.S. and Europe—Coney Island featured “Zip the Pinhead,” who was actually William Henry Johnson (1842–1926), one of six children born to former slaves living in New Jersey. His desperately poor parents agreed to allow P.T. Barnum to display him at a museum and at circus performances billed as a missing link, a “What-Is-It” supposedly caught in Africa.

FOR THE SUCKERS…**P.T. Barnum** exhibited **William Henry Johnson** as a “wild man”, a “What-Is-It” that subsisted on raw meat, nuts, and fruit, but was learning to eat more civilized fare such as bread and cake. Note the difference between the poster depiction at left and the actual man. Civil War-era photo at right by **Mathew Brady’s** photography studio in New York City. (National Portrait Gallery)

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Floating and Sinking

As much as New Yorker cartoonists (and E.B. White) liked to take pokes at Chrysler’s futuristic Airflow, there was much to be admired by the innovations the car represented. Unfortunately, the car’s design was too advanced for the buying public, and despite a big manufacturing and sales push by Chrysler the car was shelved by late 1936.

Writing for Time, Dan Neil noted the Airflow’s spectacularly bad timing. “Twenty years later, the car’s many design and engineering innovations — the aerodynamic singlet-style fuselage, steel-spaceframe construction, near 50-50 front-rear weight distribution and light weight—would have been celebrated. As it was, in 1934, the car’s dramatic streamliner styling antagonized Americans on some deep level, almost as if it were designed by Bolsheviks.”

SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA. A restored 1934 Airflow. (Hagerty Media)

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More From Our Advertisers

Maybe the buying public wasn’t ready for a car with a sloping hood and embedded headlights, but the folks at Cadillac were eager to unveil concepts for the new streamlined La Salle, which retained the familiar bullet headlights so as not to alarm consumers too much…

…and here’s a lovely image from Goodyear…I assume this woman is merely resting in a rumble seat, since this pose would not be possible above 25 mph…

…full-bleed color ads were coming into their own, as demonstrated by this stylish entry from the purveyors of silk garments…

…on the other hand, our well-heeled friends at Ponds stuck with the tried and true copy-heavy approach…here they offer the flawless features of Anne Gould (1913–1962), granddaughter of Gilded Age robber baron Jay Gould…

…R.J. Reynolds continued their campaign to convince us that Camels bring success to the average Joe and the champion athlete…

…the makers of Old Gold opted for the super creepy approach, asking entertainer Jimmy Durante to shove a pack of smokes into the face of what appears to be a teenager…

…here’s another ad from World Peaceways, reminding us of the futility of war…

…speaking of futility, you could visit the USSR, which doubtless took great pains to steer tourists away from mass starvation in Ukraine and mass executions of Stalin’s many “enemies”…

…while folks in the USSR were worshiping Lenin and Stalin, Americans were rightly transfixed by the miracle of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes…a producer of industrial and advertising films, Castle Films would become a subsidiary of Universal and would go on to make a line of science-fiction and horror films including The Wolf Man, The Mummy, and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

…on to our cartoons, Alain took on the recent MoMA exhibition of “Machine Art”…

…and speaking of machine art, George Price was to latest cartoonist to take a crack at the Airflow…

…James Thurber offered this bit of spot art for the opening pages…

…and returned to a somber scene on the battlefield of the sexes…

Next Time: Model Citizens…

Coach Arno

Peter Arno departed from his usual one-liners in the Nov. 18, 1933 issue with a football-themed cartoon that featured a four-paragraph caption…

…that consisted of a pep talk from a football coach—”Old Waddy”…

…Arno had visited the football theme before, notably in this early cover from 1928…

…and he referenced it again in the years ahead…

HAIL VARSITY…**Peter Arno** delivered another, much shorter pep talk in a cartoon (left) from the Nov. 20, 1937 issue; at right, Arno’s last football-themed gag, published in *The New Yorker* of November 25, 1967, just three months before the cartoonist’s death. Check out one of my favorite *New Yorker* sites, **Attempted Bloggery**, for more on the 1937 cartoon.

…and one more from Arno, a classic from September 27, 1947…

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Pre-emptive Nostalgia

Although E.B. White welcomed the end of Prohibition with open arms, he also wondered what could be lost when drinkers emerged from the shadows of the speakeasy world…

THAT HOMEY FEELING…**E.B. White** suggested transforming the Waldorf-Astoria’s Sert Room (right) into a dingy dive to help ease drinkers back into the world of legal alcohol. (Britannica/Library of Congress)

White also referenced his many years at Tony’s, a speakeasy and Italian restaurant popular with writers and others in the New Yorker’s orbit. Tony Soma operated the speakeasy until 1929, when John D. Rockefeller bought Soma’s building along with other properties to make way for Rockefeller Center. Soma would later open another popular (and legit) restaurant and also become known as a yoga practitioner and the grandfather of actress Angelica Huston. You can read more about Soma at The Speakeasy King.

* * *

The French Underground

Although war seemed like a distant rumor to most Americans, the French were busy preparing for that likelihood, according to this “Talk of the Town” piece attributed to Europe-based documentary filmmaker Richard de Rochemont and New Yorker stalwart James Thurber.

LOOK OUT BELOW…At left, a preserved WWII *abris* can be found below platforms 2 and 3 at Paris’ Gare de l’Est; right, Parisians take shelter in an *abris* in 1939. (Trip Adviser/Ebay)

…in his column, “Of All Things,” Howard Brubaker mused on the latest rumblings from Berlin…

DEMOCRACY IN ASHES…An arson attack on the Reichstag (home of the German parliament) on February 27, 1933 was used by **Adolf Hitler** as pretext to suspend civil liberties and conduct a ruthless pursuit of “communists,” both real and imagined. (Wikipedia)

* * *

Little Women, Big Film

On the brighter side, we turn to Hollywood and John Mosher’s review of George Cukor’s critically acclaimed Little Women, which featured a cast led by Katharine Hepburn and Joan Bennett.

MEINE LIEBCHEN…Impoverished German linguist Professor Bhaer (**Paul Lukas**) proposes to Jo (**Katharine Hepburn**) in 1933’s *Little Women*. (IMDB)

SEW WITH JO…From left, the March family as portrayed by Jean Parker (as Beth), **Joan Bennett** (Amy), **Spring Byington** (Marmee March), **Frances Dee** (Meg), and Katharine Hepburn (Jo) in the **George Cukor**-directed *Little Women.* (IMDB)

…Mosher also found something to like in the MGM romance The Prizefighter and the Lady, which starred Myrna Loy along with professional boxers Max Baer, Primo Carnera, and Jack Dempsey.

THE NEW “IT” MAN was how MGM publicists promoted professional boxer **Max Baer** in his film debut. Top right, Baer in a scene with **Myrna Loy**; bottom right, professional boxer Primo Carnera with Loy and Baer—Carnera was the world heavyweight boxing champion at the time of the film’s release, however Baer would defeat the Italian giant in their real-life 1934 fight; bottom center, Baer’s son, **Max Baer Jr.,** would also find Hollywood fame in the 1960s playing Jethro Bodine on TV’s *The Beverly Hillbillies.* (IMDB/Wikipedia)

* * *

Sausage Factory

We’ve previously looked at the smashing success of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs cartoon and its theme song, which took the country by storm in the fall of 1933. So it was no surprise that the piggies could be found in toy departments across the metropolis as the Christmas season approached. These are brief snippets from a lengthy holiday shopping column that was appended annually to Lois Long’s “On and Off The Avenue” every November and December.

HOG HAVEN…You could help the Three Little Pigs find their way to safety in this 1933 Disney board game. As in the film, the final leg of the board game’s journey has the wolf landing in a cauldron of boiling water. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Disney film also featured one of the pigs adding turpentine to the cauldron. (Ebay)

This being America in the 1930s, and early Disney, the Three Little Pigs cartoon contained an offensive scene in which the Big Bad Wolf disguises himself as a Jewish peddler, complete with a fake nose, glasses, and beard (accompanied by a fiddle, the wolf also adopts a Yiddish accent).* The character was included in the above board game:

* The film was finally edited in 1948 with a redesign of the Wolf’s disguise—as a Fuller Brush salesman.

* * *

From Our Advertisers

We kick off our ads with more “healthy nerves” testimonials from Camel smokers, including stuntwoman/pilot Mary Wiggins…

…Caron Paris also went aloft with one of their famed “En Avion” adverts…

…back on the ground, this hapless couple found themselves taking a slow car to a soaking…although wearing a fur coat while riding in a rumble seat probably wasn’t a good idea, regardless of the weather…

…for those rainy days, you could get yourself a Salisbury overcoat from Brooks Brothers…this sports-themed illustration was a new twist for the usually staid BB…

…and there’s always one or two really weird ads, like this one from The Sun newspaper that touted baloney sales at Gimbels as proof of advertising prowess…

…collectors of Art Deco are well-acquainted with the work of Hans Flato, who did a series of ads (and related merchandise) for New York-based Ruppert’s Beer in the early 1930s…Flato (1887-1950) worked in a variety of styles, but the characters he created for Ruppert’s stand out…for reasons known only to the Flato, the feet of the Ruppert’s characters were always attached to yellow disks, like toy dolls…

…James Thurber was keeping busy illustrating ads aimed at folks wanting to escape the cold…

…as well as those who caught a cold in a drafty automobile…

…The New Yorker announced the publication of its sixth album, with an illustration by Gluyas Williams…

…while Otto Soglow, in a much smaller back-page ad, proclaimed the publication of his first The Little King collection…Soglow had just ten months left on his contract with The New Yorker—his Little King would relocate to William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate in September 1934…

…speaking of Soglow, we kick off the cartoons with his potentate’s latest adventure…

…William Steig gave us a sneeze and a chorus…

…and we close with Eli Garson, and a tale from the Almost Wanted…

Next Time: The Invisible Man…

Tugboat Annie

New Yorkers were enduring the dog days of August, and those who couldn’t escape the heat by fleeing to the country or the beach could find cool respite at the movies.

August 19, 1933 cover by **Gardner Rea.**

It was doubtless in an air-conditioned theatre where critic John Mosher enjoyed the craft of older actors, in this case Wallace Beery and Marie Dressler in Tugboat Annie. Although the film didn’t quite live up to Beery and Dressler’s 1930 smash hit, Min and Bill, Mosher found Beery to be a “beautiful foil” to Dressler, who thankfully wasn’t just another “fluffy little pink young thing.”

ON GOLDEN POND…**Wallace Beery** and **Marie Dressler** portrayed a comically quarrelsome older couple who operate a tugboat in MGM’s *Tugboat Annie*. It would be one Dressler’s last film roles—she would die the following year; at right, a young **Robert Young** with Dressler in a scene from the film—Young would go on to television fame playing two beloved characters: the dad in *Father Knows Best* (1954-60) with fellow film star **Jane Wyatt**, and the kindly, avuncular doctor on Marcus Welby M.D. (1969–76). (IMDB)

Another seasoned performer Mosher admired was Mary Boland, although her latest film, Three Cornered Moon, was crowded with “too many young people”…

BRAT PACK…**Mary Boland** (left) with **Wallace Ford, Claudette Colbert**, and **Hardie Albright** in *Three Cornered Moon* (IMDB)

…and then there was Buster Crabbe’s lackluster Tarzan the Fearless to consider—it was Crabbe’s only screen appearance as the Ape-Man…

MONKEYING AROUND…A self-described “King of the Serials,” **Buster Crabbe’s** career included nine sound serials, including Flash Gordon and *Buck Rogers* (1936-40). In *Tarzan the Fearless* Crabbe’s sole appearance as Tarzan was played opposite **Jacqueline Wells** (aka **Julie Bishop**). The media at the time made hay of a so-called rivalry between Crabbe and Johnny Weissmuller, who defined the Tarzan role in twelve films from 1932 to 1948. Both men were Olympic athletes: Crabbe won the 1932 Olympic 400-meter freestyle swimming championship, while Weissmuller was the undefeated winner of five Olympic gold medals. (IMDB)

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The folks at Hoffman Beverages continued to offer up ways to enjoy an adult refreshment, including a tongue-in-cheek “code” to be used until the repeal of Prohbition…

…with the return of legal (3.2) beer, brewers were aggressively targeting women as a new growth market…

…a selection of one-column ads from the back pages touted imported beers and an old “Pennsylvania Dutch” quaff, intermixed with apartment ads and a women’s deodorant called SHUN…

…Otto Soglow, who would become rich and famous with his The Little King strip, also did well as an illustrator for various products, including Rheingold beer…

…another way to stay cool was to dine at Longchamps, thanks to their “scientific air-conditioning system”…

…on the subject of keeping cool, back in the day you had to regularly top off the radiator on hot days, and if you added lead to your gasoline you could also get rid of those annoying hot engine knocks…

…It would be four years before Dr. Seuss would publish his first children’s book, so he continued to pay the bills with illustrated ads for Flit insecticide…ah the good days when spraying poison above a child’s head seemed perfectly reasonable…

…another one-column ad from the back pages says a lot about how advertisers perceived a New Yorker reader—even dog food demanded snob appeal…

…on to our cartoons we return to Otto Soglow and his take on the old William Tell trope…

…Peter Arno delivered some surprising news to dear old mom…

…Henry Anton gave us a sign man unconvinced that sex sells…

…Gluyas Williams gave us his latest take on “Fellow Citizens” (this originally appeared sideways on p. 17)…

…and Garrett Price shared this observation, from the mouth of babes…

…on to Aug. 26…

Aug. 26, 1933 cover by **Perry Barlow.**

…where we find Ring Lardner, who since March had been injecting humor into the “Over the Waves” radio column.

In this installment, Lardner outlined his ideal radio program. An excerpt:

UP TO OLD GAGS?**…Ring Lardner** gave the comedy duo Jack Pearl (right) and **Cliff Hall** a generous four minutes in his fantasy radio show—if they did their old routines. (Wikimedia)

Lardner concluded his dream program:

Sadly, Ring Lardner would be gone in less than a month—he died of a heart attack on Sept. 25, 1933, at the tender age of 48.

* * *

On Second Thought

Previously, film critic John Mosher had been lukewarm to the up-and-coming Katharine Hepburn. No more. Her appearance in Morning Glory drew praise from all over, including the Academy, which gave the young star her first Oscar.

A STAR IS BORN…**Katharine Hepburn** with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (left) and **Adolphe Menjou** in *Morning Glory* (1933). Hepburn would win the Oscar for Best Actress in a Leading Role, the first of four she would receive in that category—a record for any performer. (IMDB)

* * *

Life With Clarence

Following “The Talk of the Town” section was this illustrated contribution by Clarence Day…

* * *

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While folks were cooling down at the movies Barbara Stanwyck did her best to heat up the screen…

…the frank discussion of sex in Baby Face made it one of the most notorious films of the year and no doubt hastened the implementation of the Hays Code…

LIGHT MY FIRE…**Barbara Stanwyck** in *Baby Face*.

…in case anyone had forgotten during Prohibition, Budweiser reminded them who was the king of beers with this inside front cover ad…

…Irvin S. Cobb was back on behalf of Hupmobile, the struggling carmaker hoping that a bit of humor would boost sales…

…this ad from Reo not only lacked humor, it lacked the car itself…

…too bad, because the 1933 Reo Royale was a beauty…

…more color ads from our cigarette manufacturers Camel…

…and Chesterfield…

…why, it’s Barbara Stanwyck again, this time in color, thanks to the folks at Powers Reproduction…

…and Otto Soglow again for Rheingold beer…

…and on to the cartoons, with Soglow’s Little King…

…Carl Rose demonstrated the perils of attending theatre in a barn…

…Robert Day found a Hebrew lifeguard at Coney Island…

…and we end with another by Day, with a twist on America’s Pastime and a subtle plug for the National Recovery Administration…

Next Time: The Shape of Things to Come…

The Flying Season

New Yorkers witnessed flying milestones and mishaps in the summer of 1933—after Wiley Post landed at Bennett Field, he became the first person to fly solo around the world, and famed Italian aviator Italo Balbo would bring a squadron of 24 Savoia-Marchetti S.55 flying boats across the Atlantic and triumphantly land them on the Hudson River. So before we get to the Aug. 5 issue…

…let’s look in on Morris Markey, who described all of the skyward thrills in his “A Reporter at Large” column in the August 12 issue. Markey also offered a “bold prophecy” that the ticker-tape parades and “hysterical cheers” could not go on forever.

ROUND AND ROUND HE GOES…Clockwise, from top left, **Wiley Post** under the wing of the famed Lockheed Vega monoplane *Winnie Mae* in 1933; Post next to the Winnie Mae in Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1934, his achievements recorded on the fuselage; miners from Flat, Alaska, bring the *Winnie Mae* upright for repairs—the plane nosed over after hitting a patch of mining tailings; Post climbs out of the *Winnie Mae* at Floyd Bennett Field, Long Island, after completing the first solo flight around the world. Post set a new record of 15,596 miles (25,099 kilometers) in 7 days, 18 hours, 49 minutes. (NASM/Oklahoma Historical Society/U of Alaska-Fairbanks/Associated Press)

Markey wrote admiringly of the Italians and their oddly beautiful flying boats as they descended, 24 in all, on the Hudson River. Things did not go so well for Scottish aviator James Mollison and his wife, Amy Johnson, who had set many flying records in the 1930s.

DESCENDED LIKE FLIES…Twenty-four Savoia-Marchetti flying boats left Italy in 1933 to fly in formation to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair and back, with stops along the way including New York. The squadron was led by **Italo Balbo**, who has featured on the cover of *Time*, 26 June 1933. (Wikipedia/Time Inc.))

GOING IN STYLE, Clockwise, from top left, twenty-four Italian Savoia-Marchetti S.55X flying boats left the west coast of Italy to fly in formation to the Chicago World’s Fair, with a stop on the Hudson River (top right). The Italians were famed for sleek designs, including the Macchi-Castoldi 72, pictured here circa 1931. It was then the fastest plane in the world; **James Mollison** and his wife, **Amy Johnson** recover from their injuries after a nonstop flight from Wales to the U.S. Unable to locate the Bridgeport (Conn.) Municipal Airport—which he circled five times— he ultimately crash- landed into a field. Both were thrown from the aircraft but survived—they were later congratulated by New York society with a parade on Wall Street. (warbirdsnews.com/Wikimedia)

Markey’s “bold prophecy” would sadly come to pass; after all of the parades and hoopla, these wonderful airplanes would soon take on more sinister roles as machines of death. Italo Balbo, seen as a possible successor to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, would die in 1940, shot down by Italian anti-aircraft batteries that mistook his plane for a British fighter. Amy Johnson would die months later in a crash near the mouth of the Thames (possibly by friendly fire). Two years after his record-breaking flight, Wiley Post and American humorist Will Rogers would perish in a 1935 crash near Point Barrow, Alaska.

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Depression Diversions

New Yorkers could escape Depression woes and the summer heat with a visit to the cinema. These listings in the Aug. 5 issue were headed by the Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza Gold Diggers of 1933…

DEPRESSION’S FEVER DREAM…Choreographer Busby Berkeley chased those Depression blues away with his lavish musicals, including *Gold Diggers of 1933*, featuring **Ginger Rogers** among a bevy of stars. (IMDB)

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Fledgling airlines including Eastern Air Transport and American Airways (forerunners of Eastern Air Lines and American Airlines) were giving passenger trains a bit of competition with relatively quick flights to destinations including Washington D.C. and Atlantic City—the D.C. round trip cost $20, roughly equivalent to $455 today…

…introduced in 1933, the Curtiss YC-30, called the Condor in civilian use, could seat 15. It could also be fitted out as 12-passenger luxury night sleeper…

YOU COULD REST EASY on the Curtiss Condor in 1933. (U.S. Air Force)

…Packard and Cadillac both produced premium automobiles, but where Packard emphasized durability and longevity…

…the folks at Cadillac went for pure sob appeal…

…I wonder how many people still wore pince-nez in 1933, especially while drinking beer…

…the makers of Hoffman ginger ale weren’t waiting for the official end of Prohibition to tout their popular mixer…

…with the launch of FDR’s New Deal, advertisers were quick to jump on the bandwagon…

…as did one of our cartoonists, Otto Soglow…

…and now on to the Aug 12 issue…

Aug. 12, 1933 cover by **Helen Hokinson.**

…which featured another installment of James Thurber’s My Life and Hard Times—”The Night the Ghost Got In”…

**James Thurber’s** illustration for “The Night the Ghost Got In” that appeared in his book *My Life and Hard Times.* The scene depicts his brother Herman, and his fear of ghosts. The caption read: “He always half suspected that something would get him.”

Meanwhile, Thurber’s colleague, film critic John Mosher, was finding joy through Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies…

DELIGHTFUL DIVERSION…Critic **John Mosher** was “one exalted” over Walt Disney’s latest Silly Symphony, titled *Old King Cole.*

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This giant two-page spread from the makers of Dodge sought to prove you could have both durability and affordability in their six-cylinder model (the cheapest Packard listed at $2,150—you could almost buy four Dodges for that price)…

…another Chrysler corporation product, the family-friendly Plymouth, could be had for even less—$445—it was apparently just the kind of car a penny-pinching ingenue needed for getting to her casting calls…

…Ann Lee Doran (1911–2000) went on to a long career as a character actress, perhaps best known for portraying James Dean’s mother in Rebel Without a Cause…

**Anne Lee Doran** (at far right) in 1941’s *Penny Serenade.* Also pictured, from left, are **Edmund Elton, Edgar Buchanan, Cary Grant** and **Irene Dunne**. (IMDB)

…when you finished brushing your teeth, you could put this other Pepsodent product on your face…

…on to our cartoons, we begin with this two-page spread by Gardner Rea…

…Gluyas Williams referenced the Camel cigarette ads from 1933 that revealed the secrets of popular magic tricks…

…an example from the June 3, 1933 issue of The New Yorker…

…Eli Garson paid a visit to the optometrist…

…in the wake of the scandal-ridden mess left behind by deposed Mayor Jimmy Walker, the upcoming November election was bound up by three candidates, none of whom seemed poised to get a majority vote…Robert Day offered up this scenario…

…Carl Rose discovered that even in the boonies, everyone’s a critic…

…and we close with Peter Arno, and another classic…

Next Time: Tugboat Annie…

Making Hays

The name Will Hays will always be linked to the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of guidelines for self-censorship that studios adopted to avoid government intervention.

Hays, however, played both sides in the culture wars. A Republican politician, Hays (1879–1954) managed the 1920 election of Warren G. Harding before moving on to Postmaster General and then chairman of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. During the so-called pre-Code era, roughly 1930 to 1934, the Production Code was barely enforced, giving filmmakers the freedom to explore themes ranging from prostitution to gangster violence. When Alva Johnston wrote a two-part profile on Hays for The New Yorker, pressure from Catholic Church and other morality groups was building for Hays to strictly enforce the Code, or else. An excerpt:

CLEAN IT UP, JOAN…**Will Hays** (top left) felt pressure in 1933 to start seriously enforcing the Production Code, and scenes such as the one at top right from *Blonde Crazy* (1931) with Joan Blondell would probably not pass muster after 1934; the Hays Code would also lengthen the animated **Betty Boop’s** skirts, and tone down gratuitous violence (**James Cagney** and **Edward Woods** in 1931’s Public Enemy). (Wikimedia/pre-code.com/Warner Brothers)

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The Trouble With Money

In their investigation of the probable causes of the 1929 market crash, the Senate Banking and Currency Committee summoned J.P. Morgan Jr (1867–1943) on June 1, 1933, to testify on questionable banking practices. Committee counsel Ferdinand Pecora (1882–1971) set out to prove, among other things, that Morgan sold stock below market price to some of his cronies. Pecora also learned that Morgan and many of his partners paid no income tax in 1931 and 1932, big news to Americans still suffering from the effects of the Great Depression. E.B. White made these observations:

Although not mentioned by White, the hearing began with an odd little sideshow. Writing for the U.S. Capitol Historical Society blog, Joanna Hallac notes that because the hearings were slow to get started, newspaper reporters grew desperate to get something for the evening papers. Then one enterprising reporter, Ray Tucker, spotted circus dwarf Lya Graf with her agent, Charles Leef, outside of the hearing room (the Barnum & Bailey Circus was in town) and suggested Graf meet the famed banker. Hallac writes: “Although he was initially startled, Morgan was genial and rose and shook her hand. Naturally, the photographers were stepping all over each other to get a picture of the exchange. Leef, seeing a perfect press opportunity for himself and the circus, waited for Morgan to sit down and then scooped up Graf and placed her in J.P. Morgan’s lap. Morgan apparently laughed and had a brief exchange with the demure lady, in which he told her he had a grandchild bigger than her.”

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF FINANCE…Before being grilled by Senate counsel **Ferdinand Pecora** at a June 1, 1933 banking hearing, **J.P. Morgan Jr** was paid a surprise visit by **Lya Graf,** a Barnum & Bailey circus dwarf. At right, Pecora, circa 1933. Sadly, Graf, who was German, perished in a concentration camp after she returned to her homeland in 1935. She was condemned to death in 1937 for being half Jewish and “abnormal.” (*New York Magazine*/Wikipedia)

* * *

Single Member Plurality

Among other attributes, E.B. White was known for his use of the first person plural, the editorial or clinical “we.” White himself offered this insight:

I, ME, MINE…**E.B. White** at work in 1945. (Britannica.com)

* * *

Uncle Tom, Revived

Plays based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin were wildly popular throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but by the 1930s the story seemed antiquated and no longer relevant. That didn’t stop the Players (a Gramercy park actors club) from mounting a 1933 Broadway revival that proved popular with audiences and a New Yorker stage critic, namely E.B. White, sitting in for Robert Benchley…an excerpt…

SAY UNCLE…**Otis Skinner** (1858–1942), a beloved broadway actor, portrayed Uncle Tom in the 1933 Broadway revival. The all-white cast performed in blackface.

…on the other hand, White found the Frank Faye/Barbara Stanwyck play Tattle Tales tedious, a thin veneer over the stars’ crumbling marriage off-stage…

THAT’S ALL, FOLKS…Publicity photo of **Barbara Stanwyck** and Frank Faye for the Broadway production of Tattle Tales at the Broadhurst Theatre. The co-stars’ real-life marriage supposedly inspired the 1937 film *A Star is Born* (as well as subsequent remakes). As Stanwyck’s star rose, Faye’s faded—his heavy drinking and abuse led to their 1935 divorce. The play itself closed after 28 performances. (IBDB)

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Frothy Air

E.B. White (via “The Talk of the Town”) took a stroll through Coney Island and found the place somewhat revived, perhaps thanks to the return of legal beer and Bavarian-style beer gardens…

RECALLING THE GOOD OLD DAYS…Feltman’s Restaurant on Coney Island operated this popular Bavarian Beer Garden in 1890s. (Westland.net)

* * *

Peace, He Said

Adolf Hitler was talking peace, but the French weren’t buying it according to The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent Janet Flanner—in just seven years her beloved City of Light would fall to the Nazis…

IF YOU CAN’T SAY SOMETHING NICE…**Adolf Hitler** makes his first radio broadcast as German Chancellor, February 1933. Hitler spoke of peace in Europe while preparing his country for war. (Detail of image courtesy Bundesarchiv)

…speaking of Janet Flanner, apparently her “Paris Letter” implied that the author Edna Ferber had married. Ferber offered this correction, in good humor:

* * *

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Class anxieties were (and still are) gold to Madison Avenue—look at this poor woman, pondering her very existence, lacking as she did the horsepower to lay some rubber at a green light…

…or this woman, who thought ahead and made sure she had some hair lotion to ward off cackles from the beach harpies…

…on the other hand, this cyclist seems to care less about appearances as she races toward us with a crazed smile, half-human, half-illustration…

…and then there’s this fellow, playing it cool in a white linen suit, which for a sawbuck seems like a bargain, even in 1933…

…the last two pages of the magazine featured friends racing to some swell destination…the lads at left are being propelled to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair thanks to the wonders of leaded gasoline, while the women at right seem to be doing at least eighty…note neither car has a windshield, so you wonder how many bugs they will pick out of their teeth…

…an apt segue to our cartoons, where Peter Arno showed us a couple going nowhere fast…

…Otto Soglow’s Little King had his own marital situation to ponder after a visit from a sultan…

…a very unusual cartoon from Helen Hokinson, who rarely delved into serious socio-political issues (although her captions were often provided by others at The New Yorker)…this cartoon referred to a cause célèbre of the 1930s, the case of the prejudicial sentences of the Scottsboro boys that recalled the Tom Mooney frame-up two decades earlier…

…on to lighter topics, Robert Day checked in on the progress at Mt. Rushmore…

…George Price also went aloft for a challenge…

…and Carl Rose found this dichotomy in the conquest of nature…

…on to June 17, 1933…

June 17, 1933 cover by **Perry Barlow.**

…where Frank Curtis reported on the military-style schedule that put young men to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps…excerpts:

MARCHING ORDERS…New members of the Civilian Conservation Corps waiting to be fitted for shoes at Camp Dix, New Jersey, 1935. (Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)

…just one ad from this issue, another Flit entry from Dr. Seuss, who wouldn’t publish his first book until 1937…

…our cartoons are courtesy Otto Soglow, with some bedside manner…

…Kemp Starrett set up what should prove to be an interesting evening…

…Gluyas Williams considered the woes of J.P. Morgan Jr…

…and we close with another from George Price, doing some tidying up…

Next Time: Home Sweet Home…

Bohemian Rhapsody

Part love story and part wildlife protection fable, the pre-Code romance and melodrama Zoo in Budapest was that rare film that pleased critics and audiences alike.

May 6, 1933 cover by **Richard Decker.** This is one of four covers Decker (1907–1988) contributed to *The New Yorker;* he also contributed more than 900 cartoons in his nearly 40-year run with the magazine.

Jesse L. Lasky’s first production for Fox (Lasky was the founder of Paramount Pictures), Zoo in Budapest starred relative newcomer Gene Raymond as a young man (Zani) keenly attuned to nature and particularly to the animals he cares for in the Budapest Zoo. In the course of the film he becomes an anti-fur industry activist and rescues a beautiful orphan girl, Eve (Loretta Young) from a life of servitude. Although the film is little known today, in 1933 it had quite a winning effect on critic John Mosher, who usually found little to like from Hollywood’s output:

HE TALKS TO THE ANIMALS…Top, zoo worker Zani (**Gene Raymond**) rescues a beautiful orphan girl, Eve (**Loretta Young**) from a life of servitude, and both come to the aid of a little boy named Paul, played by **Wally Albright**, who escapes the clutches of his harsh governess. Below, hidden in the bushes, Eve changes her clothes after escaping from a group of orphans visiting the zoo. (IMDB)

The film made such an impression that even E.B. White had to mention it in the opening lines of his “Notes and Comment”…

ANIMAL CRACKERS…Filmmakers went all out in creating elaborate sets for *Zoo in Budapest.* The film was likened to *Grand Hotel* because the drama took place in less than 24 hours, almost entirely in one location. Below, **Loretta Young** converses with director **Rowland Lee** on the set. (IMDB)

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High Anxiety

The Depression was hard on the Empire State Building, which opened its doors during some of the darkest days of the economic crisis. Visitation was down, and a lot of the office space in the world’s tallest building remained vacant. It would remain in the red into the 1940s.

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT…To this day the 86th floor observation deck has been a popular destination for tourists. In the 1930s a photographer stationed on the deck captured the moment for tourists on a souvenir postcard. The image at top is from 1934, the one below circa 1930s. Fencing to deter suicide attempts (or people chucking things over the side) wouldn’t be erected until 1947. (nyccirca.blogspot.com)

* * *

As the World Churns

Howard Brubaker continued to comment on the deteriorating conditions of the German people in his column “Of All Things”…

…and speaking of the Third Reich, Alexander Woollcott profiled (in his column “Shouts and Murmurs”) an enterprising young journalist Hubert R. Knickerbocker (1898–1949), who reported from Berlin from 1923 to 1933 and wrote about the threat of Nazism. In April 1933, after fleeing Germany, he reported in the New York Evening Post that “an indeterminate number of Jews [had] been killed.” A brief excerpt (with illustration by Cyrus Baldridge):

MYSTERY WRITER…In December 1930, **H.R. Knickerbocker** interviewed Josef Stalin’s mother, **Keke Geladze**, for the New York Evening Post. The resulting article was titled, “Stalin Mystery Man Even to His Mother.” (*The New Yorker*)

A graduate of Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas and a 1931 Pulitzer Prize winner, Knickerbocker kept his word with Woollcott and entered Columbia University to study psychiatry.

TALES TO TELL…**H.L. Knickerbocker** (at the microphone) with **Alexander Woollcott** circa 1940. (Kansas City Public Library)

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From Our Advertisers

We begin with an ad from the makers of the first commercially successful wheat flake breakfast cereal…before there were Wheaties (created in 1921) there was Force, invented in 1901…almost from the beginning the Force brand was wildly successful thanks to a series of jingles featuring a morose character, Jimmy Dumps, who was transformed into Sunny Jim by consuming Force flakes…in 1933 the makers of Force were still big on jingles, sponsoring contests such as the one below…

…here is a box from that period, promoting cash prizes for winning jingles…

…the folks at Chesterfield began targeting the working man in their advertising…

…while Canada Dry was anticipating the end of Prohibition…

…but until that day, you could mix some Green Ribbon with your bootleg alcohol, according to Sonia Strega, who was likely an invention by the advertisers rather than an actual living endorser…

…Lux, on the other hand, had piles of money to spend on real life endorsers including Jimmy Durante, Hope Williams and Lupe Velez…

…Otto Soglow drew up this strip for the makers of Nettleton shoes, creating a character similar to his famed “Little King” to promote the company’s sports and golf shoes…

…James Thurber continued his work for the French Line, replete with his familiar dogs…

…and we also find Thurber in the cartoons…

…joined by Garrett Price…

…Gardner Rea…

…Gluyas Williams (originally this ran sideways)…

…and we close with a frolic by Robert Day…

Next Time: Headline News…

Stormy Bellwether

While legal beer dominated the headlines in the spring of 1933—a little something to cheer about in those depressed times—few seemed to notice the troubles brewing on the other side of the pond.

April 1, 1933 cover by Julian de Miskey.

Artist George Grosz (1893–1959) was not among them. A recent self-exile from his native Germany, Grosz had savagely caricatured the perversity of the bourgeois in 1920s Weimar Berlin; through his art he tried to warn fellow Germans of the horrors to come. Critic Lewis Mumford stopped in at the Raymond & Raymond galleries to check out the latest efforts of this Manhattan newcomer:

EARLY WARNING SIGNS… **George Grosz’s** *The Pillars of Society* (1926) satirized the bourgeois supporters of Fascism in post-war Germany; Grosz with friend, circa 1933. (history net.com)

Although Grosz intended to make a clean break with his past after emigrating to New York in January 1933, his work still reflected his distaste for bourgeois sensibilities…

GROSS GROSZ…*In a Restaurant* (circa 1933) was admired by Mumford for the tenderness of the watercolor wash that contrasted with the “grossness” of its subjects. (artnet.com)

ON THE SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK…Grosz wanted to make a clean break with his past after emigrating to New York in January 1933, but he still couldn’t help but see the hypocrisy in the faces of bourgeois Manhattanites. At left, *Black & White* (1933) and at right, *Street Scene, Downtown Manhattan* (1933). (mutual art.com/artsy.net)

…and when war raged in his homeland, Grosz returned to chronicling the perversity of the Nazi regime…

HORRORS REALIZED…Grosz’s God of War (at left, from 1940) and his 1944 oil on canvas, *Cain or Hitler in Hell. (*David Nolan New York)

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Bluenose Blues

Sadly, we are moving toward the end of the pre-Code era, and as E.B. White explained in “Notes and Comment,” the talkies were about to get a bit less talkative:

AW HECK…**Dorothy Mackaill** portrayed a secretary-turned-prostitute in the 1931 pre-Code Hollywood film *Safe in Hell*. The days were numbered for the brief period in Hollywood (roughly 1929–34) when films featured “adult” themes including sexual innuendo, mild profanity, and depictions of drug use, promiscuity and prostitution. (IMDB)

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From Our Advertisers

We begin with the back pages, and the latest in entertainment on Broadway…

…the makers of Cadillacs continued to promote the snob appeal of their 12- and 16-cylinder automobiles…it appears these folks are leaving an Easter service (note the doves), but whatever went on in there, they don’t seem very moved by the spirit…

…and here’s a close-up of the ad’s opening lines that suggested Cadillacs are an ideal complement to the apparel of those strutting their stuff on the Easter Parade…

…and here’s a jolly rendering for Lucky Strike by advertising illustrator John LaGatta (1894–1977)…his work was seen in many ads and in magazines during the first half of the 20th century, including twenty-two Saturday Evening Post covers…LaGatta’s style was known for its cool elegance, but I have to say this image is a bit disturbing, given that the banjo player’s cigarette is just inches from the woman’s eyeball…

…on to our cartoonists, we have a rare appearance by Clara Skinner (1902–1976), showing us here in the “Goings On About Town” section that John Held Jr wasn’t the only one making woodcuts…

…William Steig was lost at sea…

…Perry Barlow gave us this split scene (across two pages) of the challenges of mixing domestic and non-domestic life…

…Otto Soglow continued to chronicle the adventures of his popular Little King…

…we haven’t seen Mary Petty in awhile, so here’s a bit of gossip…

…James Thurber used a rare two-page spread of Alexander Woollcott’s “Shouts and Murmurs,” to lay out this unusual illustration…

…and Thurber again, in a more familiar vein…

…we move on April 8, 1933…

April 8, 1933 cover by Adolph K. Kronengold.

…and go straight to advertisers who were responding to the March 22 signing of the Beer and Wine Revenue Act by Franklin D. Roosevelt…the Congressional action made it permissible to sell beer as long as it was less than 3.2% alcohol…

…the makers of Rheingold beer came out of the gates with this ad showing that even elegant women could enjoy this taste of freedom…

…not completely sure, but I believe this was the first ad for Coca-Cola to appear in The New Yorker…

…in those tough times the steamship lines were beginning to realize they needed to appeal to the thrifty as well as the posh…

…Illustrator Herbert Roese offered up this Arno-esque gag for Johnson & Joshnson…

…on to our cartoons, we begin with this Peter Arno spoof of a series of R.J. Reynold’s Camel ads that referenced various magic tricks…

…in the same issue, just 20 pages later (p. 48) appeared one of the actual Camel ads…proof that Harold Ross would never kowtow to the advertising department—with the exception of those yeast ads for his friend and benefactor Raoul Fleischmann, who kept the magazine afloat in the early, lean years…