Above: The Dec. 2, 1934 opening of the reconstructed Central Park Menagerie drew such luminaries as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, pictured at left with his family, and, at right, former New York Governor Al Smith, who was designated honorary zookeeper. Smith, who, lived across from the zoo at 820 Fifth Avenue, poses with two donkeys at the Menagerie in 1940. (New York Parks Archive)
The Central Park Zoo was not part of the original Olmstead-Vaux plan for the park, but beginning in 1859 it evolved spontaneously as a menagerie located near the Arsenal; its odd collection of animals included exotic pets donated as gifts, and other random creatures including a bear, a monkey, a peacock and some goldfish.
Dec. 1, 1934 cover by Leonard Dove.
The menagerie accepted animals of all kinds, even sick ones, and by the 1920s the quality of the animals as well as the hodgepodge of buildings had degraded significantly (the lion house had to be guarded to prevent the animals from escaping their rotting quarters). In early 1934 Parks Commissioner Robert Moses addressed the adverse conditions in the menagerie, putting a redesign on a fast track and insisting that only healthy animals, in more humane settings, would be displayed.
DUMBOS…According to a 1911 Department of Parks Annual Report, the menagerie at Central Park submitted animals to questionable treatment, as suggested by this photo of a trainer and a dog perched on top of an elephant. (nycgovparks.org)
Built of brick and limestone, the new zoo was designed in just sixteen days by an in-house team led by architect Aymar Embury II. Construction on the roughly six-acre zoo took just eight months, employing federally financed Works Progress Administration (WPA) labor.
MOSES PARTS THE RED TAPE…Robert Moses wasted no time after his appointment as parks commissioner (in January 1934) to get rolling on the menagerie makeover—it took just eight months to complete the new zoo. Clockwise, from top left, invitation to the opening celebration of the Central Park Menagerie—12,000 invited guests attended the opening, while another 25,000 lined Fifth Avenue hoping to be admitted; the popular sea lion pool was a central attraction on opening day (it is one of several elements from the 1934 zoo that still exists); conditions had improved for elephants and other animals, but they were still far from ideal; aerial view of the zoo as it neared completion on Oct. 9, 1934. (nycma.lunaimaging.com/digitalcollections.nypl.org)
Much ado was made of Al Smith’s appointment as “Honorary Night Superintendent”—in these clips from the Dec. 3 New York Times, Smith gave a brief “lecture” about the zoo’s bison, to which he offered a slice of bread…
(Excerpts from The New York Times via the TimesMachine)
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From Our Advertisers
R.J. Reynolds continued to roll out its list of distinguished women who preferred their Camel cigarettes: “Mrs. Allston Boyer” nee Charlotte Young was a model with the John Robert Powers agency who was married to resorts planner Allston Boyer from 1934 to 1939. Young (1914–2012) would later marry New York Times Moscow correspondent Harrison Salisbury, and the two would embark on lengthy journeys throughout Asia, including a grueling 7,000-mile journey retracing the route of The Long March that Charlotte recounted in one of her seven travel books. Whether she continued her Camel habit is unknown, but she did live 98 years…
…a house ad from The New Yorker celebrated the holiday season with special Christmas rates (and Julian de Miskey embellishments)…
…Rea Irvin continued to have fun with the federal government’s new food and drug labeling standards…
…while Richard Decker had these two castaways contemplating a simpler form of government…
…and James Thurber continued to stir up trouble among the sexes…
…on to Dec. 8, 1934…
Dec. 8, 1934 cover by Richard Decker.
…which featured (on page 135) a handwritten letter from Kewpie Doll inventor Rose O’Neill, who commented on her recent New Yorker profile…
…here is an excerpt from the Nov. 24 profile referenced by O’Neill:
…and on to our advertisements from the Dec. 8 issue, including another Julian de Miskey-illustrated house ad…
…the clever folks at Heinz enlisted the talents of Carl Rose for a play on his famous Dec. 8, 1928 New Yorker cartoon…
…a closer look at the illustration (note the mother’s softer, more conservative appearance, five years removed from her flapper days; the child hasn’t changed a bit, except now we can see her face)…
…and the 1928 original, with caption by E.B. White…
…Peter Arno also popped up in the advertising section on behalf of Libby’s…
…the magazine grew thicker with many Christmas-themed ads, including this one from Johnnie Walker…
…Marlboro continued to take out these modest, back-page ads aimed at tobacco’s growth market—women smokers…
…the makers of Spud menthol cigarettes continued their campaign to encourage chain-smoking with this rather depressing image…
…while Spud’s new competitor in menthol cigs, KOOL, kept things simple with their smoking penguin mascot and valuable coupons for keen merchandise…
…the Citizens Family Welfare Committee offered this reminder that the Depression was still very much a challenge for 20,000 New York families…
…on to our cartoonists, beginning with Alan Dunn’s rather dim view of Robert Moses’s generously funded parks department…
…George Price gave us the latest update on his floating man, who had been up in the air since the Sept. 22 issue…
…Daniel ‘Alain’ Brustlein marked the season with dueling Santas from Macy’s and Gimbel’s…
…and we end with James Thurber, and some reverse psychology…
The New Yorker’s art and architectural critic Lewis Mumford found much to dislike about urban life, from pretentious ornamentation to the gigantic scale of skyscrapers popping up all over Manhattan. Technology and progress were fine, but when coupled with unbridled capitalism, Mumford believed they created inhuman environments in which the average citizen struggled to survive, let alone thrive.
Oct. 27, 1934 cover by Constantin Alajalov.
A housing exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art proposed policy and design solutions that addressed housing for the masses in “a human environment,” with European innovations leading the way. The Romanian-born Carol Aronovici (1881-1957), a well-known expert in city planning and public housing, was editor of a companion book to the exhibit, America Can’t Have Housing, in which he included seventeen essays by such experts as architect Walter Gropius, public housing advocate Catherine Bauer, and The New Yorker’s Mumford.
GIVE ME SHELTER…At left, Carol Aronovici’s companion book to the exhibition, with a cover image of the Siemensstadt Housing Development in Berlin, by Walter Gropius; above, excerpts from Lewis Mumford’s essay in the book; below, entrance to the exhibit. (MoMA)
Mumford reviewed the exhibit in his regular column, “The Sky Line.” Excerpts:
BETTER HOMES…Images from the exhibit included the squalor of a tenement (top right) that offered a stark contrast to the clean, modern look inspired by European designers. (MoMA)
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From Our Advertisers
We once again open the magazine to an odd juxtaposition of canned soup and high fashion…Hormel was pushing their onion soup by linking the product to French nobility (a previous ad featured Napoleon)…at right, illustrator Lyse Darcy created many ads for Guerlain products from the 1930s through the 1950s…
…the Macbeth-Evans Glass Company introduced Americans to a revolution in coffee brewing—the drip method…
…the folks who made Arrow Shirts wanted men to know that its “Thor” model would make them as confident as this man at a business conference…so confident, in fact, that he can appear mildly disinterested as he engages in a game of tic-tac-toe…
…purveyors of high fashion Lord & Taylor offered up a new design twist with this ad rendered in the Courier font…
…Pond’s continued to featured the rich and famous, women who apparently defied age itself with a few dabs of cold cream…the ad featured Alice Erdman, the wife of politician and theater producer Francis Cleveland (President Grover Cleveland’s son) and Long Island society maven Xenia Georgievna of Russia…
BELIEVER…Xenia Georgievna of Russia (1903–1965) was an influential member of New York’s Long Island North Shore society. She is best known for her belief that the imposter Anna Anderson was actually the Grand Duchess Anastasia. (Pinterest)
…Newton D. Baker mobilized and presided over the United States Army during World War I, and during the Depression he led a “National Citizens Committee” that he mobilized for human needs…
…this detail from an ad for Webster cigars offered an image of a football game almost unimaginable today…
…William Steig offered his cartooning services to the local gas company…
…which segues into more cartoons from the Oct. 27 issue, beginning with this spot from James Thurber…
…and a cartoon…
…another in the floating man series by George Price…
…and one from Peter Arno, with a classic clueless cuckold…
…on to Nov. 3, 1934…
Nov. 3, 1934 cover by Richard Decker.
…and straight to the ads, beginning with this one from Schrafft’s, which was a chain of high-volume, moderately priced restaurants in the New York area…despite its affordability, Schrafft’s dining rooms were known for their gentility, an idea conveyed through this ad…
…and here we have another image of a posh couple savoring their downscale dining experience…perhaps they should ask their cook to stop using real turtles…
…the makers of Gold Seal “Champagne” lined up poet Ogden Nash to endorse what had to be some pretty awful stuff, even if Dwight Flake, “brilliant monologist and raconteur,” enjoyed its “delicate bouquet”…
…New York debutante Mimi Richardson joined the growing list of distinguished women who preferred puffing on a Camel…
…this back-page ad featured an Arno-esque illustration touting the wonders of Borden’s Golden Crest milk…
…while the real Garrett Price drew up this image for the folks at Heinz…
…which brings us to more cartoons, still up in the air with George Price…
…Peter Arno gave us a suitor who was no fan of the silents…
…and we close with James Thurber, and some scandalous dish…
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:
* * *
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…
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)
* * *
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’sLittle 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…
Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth (1885–1965) sought to popularize classical music and improve the musical tastes of the masses by meeting the public wherever he could find them, from vaudeville halls to national radio broadcasts.
September 1, 1934 cover by William Steig.
Born in a line of three generations of Lutheran clergymen, Spaeth chose a different path and became a musicologist who sought to de-mystify classical music, often demonstrating how popular melodies had origins in earlier music. He also had strong opinions about lyrics in popular music, demonstrating his distaste for “the lyric school of self-pity” in this “Onward and Upward” column. Excerpts:
BRINGING MUSIC AND LIGHT…Sigmund Spaeth found much to dislike in the world of popular music, but he was never stuffy in his approach to music appreciation. At right, Spaeth appeared in vaudeville-style shows (and for many years on the radio) as “The Tune Detective,” wearing a deerstalker cap, cape, and checked tweeds in imitation of Sherlock Holmes. He hoped to demonstrate to a wide audience that all music was essentially based on a set of simple principles. (sinfonia.org/wnyc.org)HAVE NO FEAR…Spaeth wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column, “Music for Everybody,” and contributed articles to many periodicals during his career. With his first book in 1925, The Common Sense of Music, and others that followed, Spaeth sought to de-mystify music for a general audience. (Wikimedia Commons)OH LIGHTEN UP…Spaeth detected a cynical note in Bing Crosby’s (left) sob song, “I Cried for You,” and noted Irving Berlin’s latest contribution to the “sob symposium,” “I Never Had a Chance.” (Wikipedia/digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/britannica.com)
Spaeth noted that not all sad songs were dripping in artificial self-pity, citing Helen Morgan’s “Why Was I Born?” as an example of a song modeled on “the legitimate blues,” marked by “a sincerity of expression in everyday language”…
RIGHT AND WRONG…Spaeth acknowledged the “sincerity of expression” in Helen Morgan’s (left) torch songs, while at the other extreme he suggested that the authors of “Was That the Human Thing to Do?” (Sammy Fain and Joe Young) be boiled alive in their own tears. The song was popularized by The Boswell Sisters, a beloved New Orleans trio in the early 1930s. (findagrave.com/amazon.com/genius.com)
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Off to the Races
In his column, “Of All Things,” Howard Brubaker commented on the apparent competition and contrast between Alexander Woollcott’s book, While Rome Burns, and another with a rosier title, The Coming of the American Boom. It appears Woollcott’s book won out, at least in the long run, as I can find no trace of the Boom book, or its author.*
* One of our kind readers has identified the author: “The Coming American Boom” was written by Lawrence Lee Bazley Angas and published by Simon and Schuster in 1934. In 1939, Time noted that “Major Lawrence Lee Bazley (‘Boom’) Angas is a pink & white Britisher with a reputation for making daring predictions which have sometimes come true…. He won his nickname with a much-publicized booklet, The Coming American Boom, which heralded his arrival in the U.S. in 1934.”
Speaking of rosy outlooks, E.B. White offered some parting thoughts on Chicago’s World’s Fair, called “A Century of Progress.” Rather than focus on the grandiose exhibits, White wryly noted other signs of progress at the fair, as recounted from a letter he received from his nephew.
The Chicago World’s Fair featured all sorts of modern wonders “dedicated to the ideal of scientific advance”…
…but as with any World’s Fair, it also catered to the baser interests of the masses, with attractions such as Robert Ripley’sBelieve It Or Not “Odditorium,” which was essentially a P.T. Barnum-style freak show…
…Ripley’s syndicated newspaper feature included these Odditorium attractions…
…White made light of exhibitions displaying such signs of progress as how to brush your teeth, and more examples of human freakdom…
…White’s nephew wrote of a man who could pull a wagon (containing his wife) with his eyelids, an apparently arthritic fellow who was “turning to stone,” and a man who could support heavy weights with his pierced breasts…
(all images courtesy postcardy.blogspot.com)
* * *
Letter From Paris
Paris correspondent Janet Flanner wrote that August 1934 was a “month of memories” as it marked the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War, which we now call World War I. Flanner wrote about a new attitude that had arisen in those two decades, “a new attitude not only toward the last war but toward the next (which, ironically enough, seems increasingly inevitable to France since the death of the enemy warrior, von Hindenburg).” She continued with these observations made by French journalist and historian Emmanuel Berl (1892–1976), who wrote that as a result of the Great War, the youth in both France and Germany held few heroic illusions about war, seeing it not as a sacrifice but rather “as a means of being annihilated.”
SO MUCH FOR THE HEROICS…A refugee family returning to Amiens, France, looking at the ruins of a house on Sept. 17, 1918. Top right, Janet Flanner in 1940; below, Emmanuel Berl. (iwm.org.uk/Flanner photo copyright Estate of George Platt Lynes/Berl photo courtesy Joël Chirol)
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From Our Advertisers
Clothing company Rogers Peet used the threat of humiliation to encourage young men to stock up on “authentic university fashions” before returning to campus…
…the Wanamaker department store took a different approach, offering up new styles with a heavy English accent (I say, didn’t we play tennis once at the Hon. Toppy Crew’s?)…
…the makers of Goodyear tires offered up this disturbing image to boost sales…
…this ad told us that “Mrs. Henry Field” collected fine art, loved to go to parties, and “always smoked Camel cigarettes”…I am unaware of the fate of Mrs. Henry Field, married to the grandnephew of Marshall Field, but this unseemly image suggests she was replaced by a wax figure before the photo was taken…
…on to our cartoons, we begin with spot illustrations from (clockwise, from top) Victor De Pauw, Abe Birnbaum, and an unidentified illustrator who offered this suggestion for beating the late summer heat…
…we move along to Alan Dunn and a record-seeking pooch…
…Peter Arno with a very Arno-esque take on the stranded island trope…
…James Thurber gave us a man who was done making decisions…
…Richard Decker offered up this living history demonstration…
…George Price gave us two tropes for the price of one…
…Barbara Shermund gave us another glimpse into the lives of modern women…
…Rea Irvin continued his exploration of Manhattan’s fauna…
…our next cartoon is by Henry Steig, who used the pseudonym Henry Anton to avoid being confused with his brother, William Steig (featured on this issue’s cover)…unlike his brother, Henry was also a jazz musician, a sculptor and painter, a photographer, and a novelist…that is before he became a noted jeweler…
…Henry Steig’s jewelry shop at 590 Lexington Avenue can be glimpsed in the background of the famous subway vent scene from 1955’s The Seven Year Itch featuring Marilyn Monroe…
…and we close with Otto Soglow, and the last appearance his “Little King” in The New Yorker...William Randolph Hearst had lured Soglow away for his King Features Syndicate, debuting The Little King in his newspapers on September 9, 1934, where it would run until Soglow’s death in 1975…Soglow, however, would continue contributing cartoons of other themes to The New Yorker until 1974…
Photo above circa 1930 via mensfashionmagazine.com.
Lois Long took a break from reviewing the latest fashions to offer some thoughts on the relations between men and women, and more specifically, what was expected of women if they ever hoped to land the type of man who represented a “potential Future” for them.
August 4, 1934 cover by Otmar. Likely Otmar Gaul, sometimes spelled “Ottmar.”
Based on what we know about Long, this column has a strong “tongue-in-cheek” quality. It should also be noted that the 32-year-old Long had been divorced from cartoonist Peter Arno for three years, and was possibly contemplating the dating scene (she would marry newspaper ad man Donaldson Thorburn in 1938). In this excerpt, Long dispelled the notion that “the brutes” never notice a woman’s appearance:
THEY MIGHT BE BRUTES, but they notice the little things, according to Lois Long. (fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu)
SEEING RED…According to Long, discerning men preferred women in brimmed hats (actress Sylvia Sidney models above), but found red fingernails to be disturbing. (glamourdaze.com/vintagehairstyling.com)SEEING RED in women’s clothes, however, wasn’t a problem, according to Long, who wrote that men liked to see women in bright, tropical colors. (clickamericana.com)
Long concluded that in the end, it didn’t matter what men thought about women’s clothes, but letting them “yap” about such things was a good way for them to blow off some steam.
Check out these patronizing examples from an illustrated guide for women published in 1938 by Click Parade magazine. It gives us some idea of what Long, and millions of other women, were up against…
(dailymail.co.uk)
* * *
Fifth Avenue Remnant
The first years of The New Yorker coincided with some of the most transformational years in Manhattan’s urban fabric, including the replacement of Gilded Age mansions with upscale commercial buildings. One of the last remaining mansions was the Wendel house, featured in “The Talk of the Town.”
A ONCE GRAND MANSION becomes diminished as the city grows around it. At left, the Wendel mansion as it appeared circa 1901; at right, shorn of its balconies and shutters, the mansion shrinks in contrast to the city around it, circa 1930. (Wendel Family Papers, Special Collections and Archives, Drew University Library)WHAT HO!…A “very British-looking” zinc-lined bathtub (with shower) was state-of-the-art when installed at the Wendel mansion. (New York Public Library)BARELY A MEMORY….The glass-and-steel structure towering above the former Knox Hat Building sits on the site of the Wendel mansion. (Photo by Nicolson & Gallowy via Daytonian in Manhattan)
In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White noted the spurious nature of cinema newsreels, including one featuring the case of Thalia Massie, a navy wife stationed in Hawaii whose immature behavior and trail of lies would implicate five men in a crime they could not have committed (one would even be killed by vigilantes) and would cast Hawaii into a state of racial turmoil. (You can read more about it at the PBS site for American Experience.
FATAL FEMME…Thalie Massie, circa 1930. (Library of Congress)
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Blunders, Part II
Howard Brubaker commented on the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War. Today we call it World War I, and as we know, the blunders did not cease with the Armistice.
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RIP Madame Curie
Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, noted the passing of Marie Curie, a pioneer in field of radioactivity.
THE CURIE CURE…Marie Curie and daughter Irène, 1925. (Wikipedia)
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From Our Advertisers
The folks at Chrysler were trying every angle to get car buyers interested in the Airflow—although the car offered a number of advanced features, consumers just weren’t ready for its radical aerodynamic design…note how the ad downplays the car’s sweeping curves…
…and we have more deception from the cigarette industry, including claims that cigarettes gave you more energy and improved the performance of top athletes…
…the makers of Chesterfields gave us this sunny picture of health…indeed, there was sunshine in every pack…
…The Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company launched KOOL cigarettes in 1933 as the sole competitor to the other menthol brand, Spud, which was a big advertiser in the early New Yorker. Maybe it was the coupons, or the modern brand name, that helped KOOL knock Spud from the market by the 1940s. As for those coupons, it appears each pack contained only one of them…
…so you would have to smoke a ton of those things to get one of these swell prizes…
…early Budweiser ads often featured images of the Old South…here they conjured up the ghost of Mark Twain (who had been dead only 24 years), putting the great humorist and writer on par with their bottled beer…
…Canada Dry didn’t have Mark Twain, but what they did have was a beer (Hupfel’s) lacking “that queer yeasty taste that beer usually has”…
…a couple of ads from the back pages featured, at left, an ad for a pre-mixed Tom Collins, which must have been awful, and at right, a spot for Bacardi rum, which was actually made in Cuba before the revolution…
…on to our cartoons, we begin with Alain (Daniel Brustlein) and some not-so-intrepid mountain climbers…
…Otto Soglow’s Little King sought a glimpse of the street life…
…William Steig took a dip with his Small Fry…
…Isadore Klein gave us a glimpse of sensationalist radio reporting…
…and we close with Richard Decker, and a game of charades…
Power broker Robert Moses always made sure he was few steps ahead of any possible opposition to his grand development plans in and around New York City. That included the yacht clubbers along the Hudson River, who were more or less erased from the scene by Moses in one fell swoop.
May 19, 1934 cover by Ilonka Karasz.
The Upper West Side’s Columbia Yacht Club probably thought it was just swell that the city was dumping waste and rock along the shores of the Hudson River, since it eventually created driveway access for members who previously had to access the club via a footbridge over the New York Central’s tracks. What hadn’t occurred to them was that nearly 25 years-worth of infill had also created a new strip of land that extended from 79th to 96th street, land that Moses envisioned as an expansion of Riverside Park (and the abrupt end of the West Side yacht club scene). “The Talk of the Town” explained:
LOCATION, LOCATION…Two views of the Columbia Yacht Club at West 86th Street, circa 1930. The club was razed to make room for Robert Moses’s expansion of Riverside Park. Moses’s ambitious project, which cost twice as much as Hoover Dam, put the train tracks underground and topped the park with the Henry Hudson Parkway. (newyorktoursbygary.blogspot.com/NYPL Digital Collections)HEADS UP…Elsie Henneman dives into the water near the Hudson River Yacht Club, circa 1930. Located at the foot of West 74th Street, the club moved onto a barge at 145th Street to escape Moses’s park expansion plans, but it was eventually banished from the West Side. (Reddit)
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Ode to the Road
We now shift gears to E.B. White, who was poetically inspired by an advertisement in the Herald Tribune that featured Prince Alexis A. Droutzkoy (a member of the exiled White Russian colony in New York) praising the “magic silence” of the new “Dodge Six” automobile:
SILENCE OF THE CAMS…The 1934 Dodge Six. (detail from a vintage ad)
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Führer’s Filmmaker
The ability (or inability) to separate art from an artist’s personal conduct or beliefs has been a particular topic of the last two decades, given the litany of stars who have been “cancelled” despite the quality or importance of their work. The work of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003), still debated nearly ninety years after her collaboration with Nazi leaders, demonstrates the fine line many a film historian or critic must walk when assessing the career of an innovative artist (for an American example, see filmmaker D. W. Griffith). Riefenstahl’s 1932 film, The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht), made prior to her Nazi collaborations, was praised for its beauty by American critics, including the New Yorker’sJohn Mosher, when it was released in the U.S. in 1934.
The Blue Light also captivated Adolf Hitler, who saw the attractive and athletic Riefenstahl as an ideal of Aryan womanhood. A subsequent meeting with Hitler would result in Riefenstahl’s controversial 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens). We will explore that film, and Riefenstahl’s role, in a later post.
CAREER MOVE…Clockwise, from top left, Leni Riefenstahl demonstrated her acting ability, athleticism and filmmaking talents in 1932’s The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht); Riefenstahl filming in Nuremberg during the 1934 Nazi Party congress—the footage was used in 1935 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will; working at a film cutting table, 1935; with Adolf Hitler at Nuremberg, 1934. (IMDB/Library of Congress/UTK Cinema Studies/The Irish Times)HI HITLER…Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler pay a visit to Leni Riefenstahl at her Berlin estate, circa 1937. (Roger-Viollet)
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From Our Advertisers
We begin with more Carl “Eric” Erickson-inspired artwork, here promoting the bygone elegance of transatlantic travel…
…perhaps a bit less upscale but still pretty nice, the “Santa” line of ships operated by the Grace Line between New York and Latin America included air-conditioned interiors paneled with aluminum (a fireproofing measure) and spacious cabins with private baths that faced to outside…
…this ad must have been a happy sight to folks who had to endure more than a decade of bootleg Scotch during Prohibition…
…Smirnoff vodka had its origins in 1860s Russia, capturing two-thirds of the Moscow market by the mid-1880s…forced to leave Russia in 1904 after the Tsar nationalized the Russian vodka industry…Smirnoff relocated to Turkey, then Poland, and then Paris, each time with limited success…at the end of Prohibition the brand relocated once again to a distillery in Bethel, Connecticut, hence this advertisement…
…the habanero pepper has been used to infuse everything from tequila to vodka to whiskey…this particular product was marketed as something new that could be mixed with a variety of spirits or topped up with club soda or ginger ale…
…I include this ad from the maker of Spud cigarettes for its sheer audacity…it claims your mouth will feel dewdrop fresh after an entire day of smoking menthols…
…stunt driver Billy Arnold was one of the “Hell-Drivers” Chrysler employed to tout the safety of its low-priced Plymouths at promotional events…
…including Chicago’s “Century of Progress”…below, a crowd watches Arnold take his Plymouth for a roll and emerge unscathed…
…the folks at Redi-Spred employed a murder theme to promote their “Pâté de Foie”…which foie was used…duck, goose or lord knows what, is not specified…
…the signature is muddled, but this looks like another illustration by Herbert Roese, who never published a cartoon in the New Yorker but sure had its style down, especially Peter Arno’s…
…Harold Ross’s high school friend and cartoonist John Held Jr. was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker from 1925 to 1932 (he also contributed to Life, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar), but when demand for his Jazz Age cartoons and illustrations fell off in the 1930s, he turned to painting and illustrating children’s books. So it was a surprise to catch this glimpse of Held’s work in a one-column ad promoting a Held-drawn map of New England inns…
…speaking of elusive illustrators, I am often challenged to discover the identities of spot illustrators in the early issues…this one appears to be signed by “Maurice Dreco”…
…the signature on this one looks like “Saphire,” but again, it is not clear…
…but there is no doubt this little gem is by Daniel ‘Alain’ Brustlein…
…which leads us to Richard Decker, and a hostage situation gone flat…
…and Decker again, with a back-handed compliment…
…James Thurber was in his familiar world of dogs and battling sexes…
…Mary Petty found some good news on the dentistry front…
…Otto Soglow’s Little King believed more is merrier…
…and we close with William Crawford Galbraith, and a wedding day surprise…
Above, from left: When Teddy Roosevelt announced in 1912 that he would run for president against his former VP, William Howard Taft, Brown Brothers sent photographer Charles Duprez to Oyster Bay to take this famous photo; President Taft and his wife, Helen “Nellie” Taft, in 1909; famed New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson warms up before a game, circa 1912. (liveauctioneers.com/cabinetcardgallery.com/psacard.com)
Before there were photo agencies like Magnum or archives such as Getty Images there was a company named Brown Brothers, the world’s first stock photo agency founded by Arthur and Charles Brown in New York City in 1904.
March 24, 1934 cover by Garrett Price.
“The Talk of the Town” looked in on Brown Brothers, “the largest collection of photographs in the world—more than a million,” including a famous image of Teddy Roosevelt and the first photographic portrait of a woman’s face.
Brown Brothers photos could be seen everywhere in the early 20th century—their staff of twelve photographers provided images to New York newspapers at a time when the technology for publishing photos in the dailies was in its infancy and most papers didn’t employ staff photographers. Even the venerable New York Times hired the Browns to cover news events until they established their own team of photographers.
LITTLE DID DOROTHY DRAPER KNOW that she would become world famous when she sat for this photo (left) taken by her brother Dr. John W. Draper in his Washington Square studio at NYU in 1839 or 1840. Dorothy had to sit unblinking for the 65-second exposure—apparently her brother dusted her face with white flour to enhance the contrast. The Drapers still go down in history as creators of the oldest photo of a woman; at right, Dorothy Draper in the 1890s, in a photograph taken by her nephew. (boweryboyshistory.com/MCNY)ONE IN A MILLION…The early 20th century image at left is just one of as many as three million images amassed in the Brown Brothers archive; at right, a Brown Brothers archivist at work. (Pinterest/sportscollectorsdigest.com)
Note: The Brown Brothers’ archive of photos and negatives went up for sale in 2014, and was ultimately acquired by Leland’s in 2020.
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De Terraplane!
E.B. White (in “Notes and Comment”) was also looking at a photo, or rather scrutinizing one that was featured in a Saturday Evening Post advertisement for Hudson’s Terraplane:
…here is the ad from the Post…
…and a closer look at the image, which had White seeing double.
(Both images courtesy The Saturday Evening Post)
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Escape Artist
In his “Of All Things” column, Howard Brubaker included the following item about a new telescope, ostensibly to set up a quip about John Dillinger’s recent prison break (his second):
YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED…The FBI issued this “Wanted” poster of gangster John Dillinger— “Public Enemy No. 1″—in June 1934. The Feds gunned him down a month later. (AP Photo)
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Playing Nice
The New Yorker commented on the trend toward fewer fights in the world of hockey, and although fighting in general ebbed a bit through mid-century, it nevertheless remained a staple of the game. Indeed the New York Rangers founder, Tex Rickard, who also promoted boxing at Madison Square Garden, knew quite well that hockey fights were one reason folks attended the games.
FACE OFF?…At left, goaltender Andy Aitkenhead of the New York Rangers padded his legs and arms but put his clean-shaven mug on the line in December 1934— it wasn’t until 1959, 42 years into the NHL’s existence, that a league goalie wore a mask on the ice. At right, New York Rangers captain Bill Cook (right) flanks coach and manager Lester Patrick alongside Frank Boucher on the ice at the Chicago Stadium in November of 1934. (Pinterest)
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From Our Advertisers
We begin with this sumptuous ad from Packard, appealing to those who could afford to own this luxury brand…
…if you couldn’t afford a Packard, you could rest assured that even a well-heeled deb could be happy with a Chevy…
…the folks at Powers Reproduction continued to tout the wonders of their color photography, even if their cake looked less than appetizing…
…Fanny Brice was appearing with the 1934 Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway, so the folks at Spud jumped on her celebrity bandwagon…
…while R.J. Reynolds was suggesting we replace our chewed up pencils with a nice Camel cigarette…now, don’t you feel better?…
…the Canadian distillery giant Gooderham & Worts offered all sorts of options to calm our jangled nerves in this two-page spread…
…while the Germans continued to entice us onto their cruise ships perfected by science and featuring “the strapping sons of sailor families”…hmmm…
…in 1934 the New Yorker began featuring mostly wordless cartoons on the opening page of “The Talk of the Town,” including this one by Robert Day featuring Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia checking up on city employees…
…Richard Decker gave us an Irish Sweepstakes winner from Brooklyn who displayed some modesty and media savvy…
…Decker again, with the latest in perambulators…
…Otto Soglow’s Little King put his back into a ceremonial groundbreaking…
…Peter Arno’s sugar daddy received some not-so-happy returns…
…one of William Steig’s “Small Fry” was doing some serious reading…
…and James Thurber’s war continued from the rooftops…
…on to March 31, 1934…
March 31, 1934 cover by Rea Irvin.
…where we find Alice Frankforter covering an exhibition dubbed “A Mile of Art.” I’m guessing critic Lewis Mumford passed on this opportunity to offer some blistering commentary. As for Frankforter, she found the spectacle puzzling, if not irritating. An excerpt:
Constantin Alajalov offered his perspective on the art world stunt with this bit of spot art…
…and more from Frankforter, now reaching a state of exhaustion and near-delirium as she approached the end of the exhibit:
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Biblical Babbitts
Frank Buchman’s First Century Christian Fellowship (aka the Oxford Group) meeting in New York featured a lot of people chuckling and bubbling, but all that forced conviviality left critic Edmund Wilson feeling “quite morose.” Writing for the “A Reporter at Large” column, Wilson looked in on the group as they awaited Buchman’s arrival at a preliminary rally. The column was subtitled, “Saving the Better Classes and Their Butlers.” An excerpt:
Like other critics at the time, Wilson saw “Buchmanism” as bourgeois optimism and boosterism, interested more in converting the souls of the wealthy and celebrated rather than serving the needs of poor.
ODD COUPLE…Frank Buchman liked to be seen with the rich and famous. In 1939 he asked for a half hour of Mae West’s time, ostensibly to get this photo of him sharing some wisdom from his “Moral Re-assessment” booklet. West seems less than enamored by the encounter, regarding Buchman as some sort of alien creature; right, Buchman on the cover of April 20, 1936 edition of Time, which identified him as “Cultist Buchman.” (maewest.blogspot.com/Time)
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Carnegie’s Couture
Vogue magazine fashion editor Nancy Hardin and the New Yorker’s fashion editor Lois Long teamed up on a profile about Hattie Carnegie (1889 -1956) titled “Luxury, Inc.” Born Henrietta Kanengeiser in Vienna, Carnegie immigrated with her family to New York in 1900; nine years later she adopted the name “Carnegie” after Andrew Carnegie, the richest person in America. Through hard work and an inherent instinct for what American women desired, she built a fashion design business that thrived in Depression and catered to stars and celebrities including Tallulah Bankhead, Joan Fontaine, Lucille Ball, and Joan Crawford. An excerpt, with illustration by Hugo Gellert:
FUR SURE…Hattie Carnegie posing for a 1951 Vogue magazine photo. (Vogue)
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Steampunk Dream
In my previous entry I featured Robert Coates’s observations on the new Machine Art exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. For the March 31 issue critic Lewis Mumford, celebrant of the simple and unpretentious, waxed nostalgic over the novel exhibit:
I’M A LITTLE TEAPOT that made a big advance in the design world, according to critic Lewis Mumford. (MoMA)
Alan Dunn was also inspired by the exhibit, as evidenced in this cartoon from the April 7 issue…
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More From Our Advertisers
Founded in October 1933, the men’s magazine Esquire took off with a bang, and the publishers were not shy about boasting of its early success…
…cover of the April 1934 issue, featuring the mustachioed mascot Esky…based on a drawing by cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, Esky was featured on the cover in various situations until 1961…
…Peter Arno’s “Whoops Sisters” appeared sixty-three times in the New Yorker between 1926 and 1927 before Arno retired them (they occasionally popped up in other publications, and in a 1931 Cunard ad)…it seems odd that they would make an appearance in a cheap thermometer ad in 1934…at any rate, it is difficult to tell if this is by Arno or by a clever forger…
…there’s no mistaking the cartoonist behind this ad…
…and this one by Otto Soglow…
…and we close our advertising section by raising a glass to Frankfort Distilleries…
…on to our March 31 cartoons, and a lineup of New Yorker regulars Abe Birnbaum…
Above: Adolf Hitler at a groundbreaking ceremony for a new section of the Reichsautobahn highway system, 1933. (Bundesarchiv)
Mildred Gilman was one of the highest paid female reporters in the 1920s, interviewing everyone from murderers to heads of state. But when she arranged to interview Adolf Hitler in 1933, the Gestapo got nervous and threw her out of the country.
Feb. 10, 1934 cover by Harry Brown.
Gilman (1896-1994) doubtless sought a modicum of satisfaction when she penned “Made in Germany” for the Feb. 10, 1934 issue. I am including generous excerpts below, which describe the day in the life of an average Berliner named Emil Pfalz, a man who doesn’t question the omnipresent Nazi propaganda and often worries about his ability to keep in step with the new regime.
THERE’S SOMETHING HAPPENING HERE…Berliners (left) and residents of Worms (top) inspect Nazi propaganda that instructed Germans not to do business with Jewish people (on Jan. 24, 1934, the German government banned Jews from membership in the German Labor Front, depriving them of the opportunity to find employment); below, in early 1934 a simulated uprising was staged in Berlin (with people posing as casualties) as part of Nazi maneuvers. Later that summer SS and Gestapo forces would conduct a purge known as “Night of the Long Knives,” eliminating any known or suspected dissenters of the Nazi regime. Hundreds were murdered and many more arrested. (digitallibrary.usc/Wikipedia)GRIM FAIRY TALE…As a loyal citizen, Emil Pfalz was sure to teach his children the Nazi salute. Image from a Nazi propaganda booklet. (British Library Board)
Emil’s story continues as he contemplates his duties as a father and husband in the Third Reich…
…and heeds the call to produce more Aryan babies.
What the Nazis did not want more of was chronically ill or disabled persons. The sick minds of Nazi propagandists produced this image below, which argues that for the same daily amount of reichsmarks you could either support an entire Aryan family or a single mentally disabled person…in 1933 the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was passed, allowing for the forced sterilization of those regarded as ‘unfit’. In 1939 the regime began killing the disabled (up to 250,000 people).
A final note about the writer, Mildred Gilman. In addition to being a journalist of both daring and flair, she wrote eight novels including the bestseller Sob Sister. In her younger days she was employed as a secretary for New York World columnist Heywood Broun and partied with Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, and Robert Benchley. She wrote a profile of Paul Robeson for the Sept. 21, 1928 issue of The New Yorker.
Mildred Gilman in 1938.
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Up In Smoke
George Cecil Cowing, known for his whimsical “Boulevardier” column for the Pasadena Star-News, commented on the changing themes adopted by cigarette manufacturers, namely the folks at R.J. Reynolds who abandoned their magician-themed ads for their Camel brand (“It’s Fun to Be Fooled”) for spots featuring endorsements from second-tier society women…
POSH PUFFERS…”Mrs. Thomas M. Carnegie Jr.” (Virginia Beggs) and “Mrs. J. Gardner Coolidge II” (Mary Louise Coolidge) shared their favorite dishes and their love for smoking Camels in these ads, which appeared in The New Yorker in early 1934.
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From Our Advertisers
Appropriately we turn to our advertisers, where we find the Camel brand trying out a new theme that demonstrated their product’s appeal to plainer folks…
…Brown & Williamson’s first national brand, Raleigh, was launched as a premium cigarette in 1928, here marketed with a plain or cork tip (“to please her and save her lips”)…
…in his parody of Camel ads, George Cecil Cowing wrote that he preferred Chesterfields, a big-time brand of mid-century America…
…the makers of White Rock reveled in the newly found freedoms of legalized alcohol…
…the folks at Fisher were sticking with their lavish two-page color ads and what has always been a tiresome double entendre…
…Lord & Taylor took to the skies to promote their “country clothes” to the smart set…
…and cartoonist Herbert Roese, who apparently never published a cartoon in The New Yorker, turned in this very New Yorker-looking illustration for Piel’s…
…on to our cartoonists, we begin with Clarence Day, better known for his Life With Father stories…
…the Valentine’s issue featured several themed cartoons, including these by Richard Decker…
…and John Reehill…
…love was also in the air for Gilbert Bundy…
…while William Crawford Galbraith continued to ply the waters of the creepily lustful…
…and we test different waters with Richard Yardley, a popular editorial cartoonist for The Baltimore Sun…this is the only cartoon he published in The New Yorker…
…the Westminster Kennel Club dog show was in town, here tapped by Helen Hokinson to also explore the theme of fatherhood…
…Perry Barlow was the latest New Yorker contributor to mock the futuristic, aerodynamic style of Chrysler’s Airflow…
…and James Thurber’s “War Between Men and Women” paused as the two sides made preparations for the next battle…
ABOVE: Broadway's As Thousands Cheer (1933) featured evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson (Helen Broderick) trying to persuade Mahatma Gandhi (Clifton Webb) to end his hunger strike and join her act. (NYPL)
Broadway gave Depression audiences a lift with As Thousands Cheer, a revue featuring satirical sketches that skewered the lives and affairs of the rich and famous and served as a precursor to sketch shows like Saturday Night Live.
Oct. 7, 1933 cover by Peter Arno.
With a book by Moss Hart and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, the revue was a big hit, playing for nearly a year on Broadway in its initial run.
TOON TIME…Marilyn Miller led a chorus of cartoon characters in a sketch titled “The Funnies” in As Thousands Cheer; leading the revue were Miller, Clifton Webb and Helen Broderick, here featured on the cover of the Playbill. The production would be Marilyn Miller’s last—one of Broadway’s biggest stars known for playing sunny characters, her personal life was filled with illness and tragedy, and she would go to an early death in 1936. (playbill.com)
Wolcott Gibbs took his turn as Broadway reviewer, and pronounced As Thousands Cheer “the funniest thing in town.”
Not everything was roses in As Thousands Cheer: In a poignant star turn, Ethel Waters sang—at Irving Berlin’s request—his famous tune “Supper Time,” a Black woman’s lament for her lynched husband. The revue was the first Broadway show to give an African-American star (Waters) equal billing with whites, however she was segregated from her co-stars and did not appear in any sketches with them. Her co-stars even refused to bow with her at the curtain call until Berlin intervened. According to the James Kaplan biography Irving Berlin, “The show had a successful tryout at Philadelphia’s Forrest Theatre in early September, although opening night was marred by an ugly incident all too in tune with the times: the stars Clifton Webb, Marilyn Miller, and Helen Broderick refused to take a bow with Ethel Waters. To his everlasting credit, Berlin told the three that of course he would respect their feelings—only in that case there needn’t be any bows at all.
“They took their bows with Waters at the next show.”
NEWSMAKERS…Each sketch in As Thousands Cheer was preceded with a newspaper headline. Clockwise, from top left, in the sketch headlined JOAN CRAWFORD TO DIVORCE DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, JR, Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb portrayed the stars arguing over publicity rights to their divorce; Webb as 94-year-old John D. Rockefeller; the headline FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT INAUGURATED TOMORROW featured Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Hoover on their last day in the White House, portrayed by Leslie Adams and Helen Broderick; Ethel Waters singing Irving Berlin’s “Supper Time.” (New York Public Library)
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A Final Byline
E.B. White opened his column with a tribute to Ring Lardner, who died at age 48 of a heart attack and other complications. In the months before his death Lardner had contributed a number of comical “Over the Waves” radio reviews.
JOURNALIST AT HEART…Ring Lardner (1885-1933) worked for several newspapers before settling at the Chicago Tribune in 1913—it became the home newspaper for his syndicated column, In the Wake of the News. (Chicago Tribune)
Lardner’s first contribution to The New Yorker came shortly after the magazine’s founding. “The Constant Jay” was published in the April 18, 1925 issue: Readers appreciated his subtle wit, including this oft-quoted gem:
“The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong—but that’s the way to bet.”
Lardner also liked to poke fun at himself and his aw-shucks view of things. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of his final New Yorker contribution, “Odd’s Bodkins:”
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Macy Modernism
As Lewis Mumford observed in his “Skyline” column, Macy’s was the first department store to embrace a modern approach to interior design, but as Marilyn Friedman notes in her book, Making America Modern: Interior Design in the 1930s, Macy’s modernism was a bit toned down to blend into more traditional settings. A case in point was Macy’s 1933 Forward House exhibition, which Mumford described as “a brilliant piece of modern showmanship.”
EASY ON THE EYES…”Living room in the Suburban House of Forward House” at R.H. Macy & Co., New York, 1933, from The Upholsterer and Interior Decorator, October 15, 1933. (artdeco.org)
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Fishing for Commies
Geoffrey Hellman profiled New York House Rep. Hamilton Fish Jr (1888–1991), a staunch anti-communist perhaps best known for establishing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. I feature this brief excerpt mainly for the great caricature by Abe Birnbaum.
MINDING THE HOME FRONT…Hamilton Fish, Jr making a speech in Los Angeles, 1935. Fish served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1920 to 1945 and during that time was a prominent opponent of intervention into foreign affairs. (UCLA Special Collections)
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All Wet
Eleven years before Esther Williams made her first aqua-musical, Ruby Keeler took the dive under Busby Berkeley’s direction in Footlight Parade. E.B. White served as film critic for the Oct. 7 issue, and found Footlight to be a feast for the male gaze, as well as mindless entertainment.
TAKING THE PLUNGE…Clockwise, from top left: According to E.B. White, there was no gainsaying “the general aahhhhh” of the semi-nude waterfall scene in Footlight Parade; promotional poster left no doubt as to what audiences might expect from the film; Busby Berkeley displayed his craft in water-based choreography; Ruby Keeler portrayed a dancer turned secretary who is transformed back into a dancer—just add water. (IMDB)
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A Dog’s Life
Doubtless drained from writing The Waves, Virginia Woolf followed up with some historical fiction, namely Flush: A Biography, a book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel. Clifton Fadiman had this to say about the unusual biography:
VIRGINIA WOOF…Frontispiece for Flush: A Biography. Virginia Woolf used the tale of a dog to explore social themes ranging from feminism to class conflict. (Heritage Auctions)
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From Our Advertisers
When you market a car for only $445 you aren’t going after the luxury market, but hey, drop a ten-truck truck on this baby and you can live to tell about it…
…with legal beer flooding the market brewers were particularly keen to attract female drinkers of all ages…and apparently social classes…
…a couple of ads from the back pages, the first touting the smart-set writing of columnist and foreign correspondent Alice Hughes for the New York American, and the second an advertisement for Chase & Sanborn coffee, which relayed the story of a marriage on the brink due to stale coffee…
…I include this ad for the heroic scale of the ocean liner, particularly as depicted by the people in the background…
…we bounce on to our cartoons with Otto Soglow’s Little King…
…James Thurber continued to explore the unrest among our domestic youth…
…speaking of America’s youth, this gathering (courtesy Gardner Rea) appeared to have trouble finding some…
…Helen Hokinson found fun with flounder…
…Rea Irvin turned the tables on a life-drawing class…
…and we close with Richard Decker, over the moon with a stranded chorine…
…and in a nod to the approaching holiday, imagery from a 1933 Fleischer Studios animated short film, Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party…
A New Yorker State of Mind 