Above: Scores of German tanks lined up at a harvest festival near Hanover, produced in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. Germany began rapidly rearming shortly after Hitler came to power in January 1933.
The year 1933 marked a shift in the political winds, starting with Adolf Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship of Germany in 1933. By October he withdrew from the League of Nations and the Geneva Peace Conference, all the while clandestinely building up his war machine.
While some sounded alarms, most people, along with their nations, turned inward, focusing on domestic issues—FDR was busy with his New Deal agenda, Britain was dealing with its own economic woes, and Germany, Italy and Japan were keeping their populations in line by stoking the flames of nationalism. Few paid much attention to a 420-page book titled What Would Be the Character of a New War?, which accurately predicted the nature of the war to come. New Yorker critic Clifton Fadiman offered this sobering assessment (wryly titled “To the Gentler Reader”) of the work:
The book’s prescient warnings could be attributed in part to the experiences of the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s 19 authors—nearly half of them soldiers from Great Britain, Sweden, Germany and France, the others mostly scientists along with a statesman or two. In her Oct. 22, 1933, New York Times Book Review article, Florence Finch Kelly noted the authors’ general agreement as to the “utter uselessness” of international peace agreements. “This book is a sign-post that blazons in unmistakable language the distance the world has traveled—backward—during the last dozen years,” she wrote, concluding “the world very greatly needs this book…For it is the most ghastly, the most horrifying book about war that has ever been written.”
In my previous post we saw how H.G. Wells envisioned the next war, with destruction raining from the sky. So too was the conclusion of Inter-Parliamentary Union. Fadiman observed:
The rumblings heard in Germany were also on the mind of Howard Brubaker, who made these observations in his column, “Of All Things.”
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Dining For Success
The Society for the Advancement of Better Living offered its own New Deal for Depression America—you could eat your way to better life. E.B. White noted the non-ideological nature of this new movement, where commies and capitalists could break bread together…
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Bread & Circuses
“The Talk of the Town” looked in on the game of college football, which some college presidents annually decried for becoming a “great spectacle.” If they could have only known what was to come…
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From Our Advertisers
The fine folks at Martini & Rossi were doing their part to get Americans ready for the end of Prohibition…
…meanwhile, the makers of Her Majesty’s perfume summoned the old and the new while also showing support for the New Deal (the NRA logo)…this image, however, doesn’t conjure up visions of “Tomorrow’s World”…
…and frankly neither does this tire, here linked to the wonders on display at Chicago’s Century of Progress…
…on to our cartoons, we have two by James Thurber, beginning with this cryptic drawing…
…and later in the issue, a more familiar Thurber at play…
…Helen Hokinson’s “girls” surmised a scandal aboard an incoming liner…
…Henry Anton gave us a kindly pawn shop owner with a money back guarantee…on a pair of brass knuckles…
…Izzy Klein conjured up a ghost who’d found a use for an executive’s wire recorder…
…and we close with Alan Dunn, and the perils of interior design…
Next Time: Music and Murder…
A New Yorker State of Mind 