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.
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.
Mumford reviewed the exhibit in his regular column, “The Sky Line.” Excerpts:
* * *
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…
…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…
…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…
McSorley’s Old Ale House is probably best known to New Yorker readers through the work of Joseph Mitchell, who was noted for his distinctive character studies in The New Yorker and who in 1943 published McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which was later included in a 1992 collection of Mitchell’s works, Up In the Old Hotel.
Among New York’s oldest saloons, McSorley’s was one of the last of the “Men Only” pubs, finally admitting women in 1970 after the state required the saloon to comply with the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. McSorley’s was visited by many famous patrons in its long history, a mixed bunch that included Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Houdini and John Lennon. Nine years before Mitchell would pen his account of the saloon, “The Talk of the Town” took a look.
* * *
Of the People
The Italian-American labor organizer Carlo Tresca was a gifted orator and outspoken critic of anyone who stood in his way in his quest for workers’ rights. As political activist and writer Max Eastman pointed out in the lead paragraph of a two-part profile, speaking truth to power also prompted a number of deadly assaults on Tresca (1879–1943), whose campaign for justice was ultimately cut short by an assassin’s bullet in 1943. A brief excerpt:
* * *
Up In Smoke
Lewis Mumford sniffed at much of the new architecture popping up around his city, but he took an especially big whiff of the new incinerator that rose above the neighborhoods at 215th Street and Ninth Avenue. When the incinerator opened in 1934 the city stopped dumping its garbage into the sea (it was fouling the beaches) and began burning the stuff around the clock in Harlem, where residents had put up with the smoke and cinders that were emitted from the supposedly “odorless” plant. Cole Thompson’s website My Inwood is a great place to read more about it.
Mumford brightened, however, at another development in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, where architect William Lescaze (1896–1969) had slipped a bright, modernist house in between two dusky brownstones on East 48th Street. The house featured extensive use of glass block in its construction, an architectural first in the city.
Mumford noted that the recent invention of home air-conditioning systems made it possible for Lescaze to bring light deep into the central core of the building…
* * *
Poser
The novelist and poet Raymond Holden (1894–1972) was a regular contributor to The New Yorker from 1929 to 1943. For the Sept.15 issue he assumed the guise of an economist to pen this cheeky letter to the editors:
* * *
Head in the Clouds
Film critic John Mosher thought Bing Crosby was a fine singer, but he couldn’t quite fathom why the movie-makers at Paramount thought the singer would be even more attractive if he was sent aloft using various camera tricks.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
The advertising department must have been thrilled with the flurry of ads that announced the fall and winter fashions…here are three examples, the first two focused on styles supposedly designed attract the opposite sex…the International Silk Guild promised that the “swish” of silk would turn any man’s head…
…while B. Altman’s “Young Colony Shop” claimed you could get your man with the “swish and billow” of taffeta…
…B. Altman ran a second full-page ad to catch a bit older demographic, less concerned with landing a man and more concerned with sending the proper signals to fellow Anglophiles…
…the folks at Matrix shoes were looking for a way to associate their “Countess” model with modern living, but what they got was an image of people waving farewell to some flying footwear…
…and here is another in a continuing series of ads from R.J. Reynolds that claimed “science” had confirmed the refreshing, energizing effect of its Camel cigarettes…
…we clear the air with this attractive ad beckoning New Yorkers to sun-kissed Bermuda…
…Budweiser continued its series of Rockwellesque portraits of old men enjoying its product…
…and this two-page spread from Fisher—maker of car bodies for General Motors—shows us how young tots travelled in the days before plastic car seats and other restraining devices…
…on to our cartoonists we begin with a couple examples of spot illustrations from the opening pages…
…on to Peter Arno…the caption reads, “I adore driving at night. Once I caught my foot in a bear trap, though”…the humor is lost on me…I suppose she is referring to a speed trap, perhaps set by an amorous cop…
…speaking of amorous, William Steig explored the subject amongst his “Small Fry”…
…Gardner Rea sat in on an unlikely boast…
…Perry Barlow illustrated the doldrums associated with waitressing…
…Garrett Price checked in on the latest developments in deep sea exploration…
…the cartoon refers to the explorations of William Beebe, who along with engineer Otis Barton descended in a bathysphere to a record 3,028 feet (923 m) on Aug. 15, 1934…
…and we close with Gilbert Bundy, and a couple of horse wranglers…
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.
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:
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”…
* * *
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…
* * *
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.”
* * *
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…
Claudette Colbert and Henry Wilcoxon in 1934's "Cleopatra." (cecilbdemille.com)
New Yorker film critic John Mosher was in the mood for one of Cecil B. DeMille’s big, splashy epic movies, but was disappointed to find a relatively restrained effort in DeMille’s latest flick, Cleopatra.
Perhaps Mosher would have preferred a silent version of the film, finding the dialogue “the worst I have ever heard in the talkies.” Among examples cited by Mosher was Warren William’s Caesar, who utters the word “Nope” to one of his senators.
Despite Mosher’s grumbles, Cleopatra would receive five Academy Award nominations (winning for Best Cinematography) and would become the highest-grossing film released in North America in 1934. That year Claudette Colbert (1903-1996) would appear in three films that were all nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture—she is the only actress ever to do so.
On the lighter side, Mosher took a liking to Harold Lloyd’s latest picture, The Cat’s Paw, which marked a sharp departure from Lloyd’s trademark slapstick. Lloyd adopted to a calmer pace, “touched with the delicate bloom of satire.”
Moviegoers who associated Lloyd with such pictures as 1923’s Safety Last…
…would have to settle for this new version of Lloyd, which was even touted on the movie’s promotional poster…
* * *
Fun With Philately
After reading a column in The Herald Tribune that concerned interesting stamps and envelopes…
…James Thurber found himself inspired to make a brief examination of the “Thurber envelope”…
…which proved to be neither interesting nor unusual (excerpts):
* * *
From Our Advertisers
A couple of colorful advertisements, the first from the folks at Heinz, who invited New Yorker readers to become “Salad Wizards”…
…if being a salad wizard wasn’t good enough, you could pop open a bottle of Cora vermouth and feel downright aristocratic…
…and if you wanted to maintain that aristocratic pose, you’d better know how to serve your tomato juice, and make sure it is prepared by a “famous French Chef”…
…more libations in the back pages…here’s a sampling of three…there must have been a reason why all of the one-column ads featured mixers and spirits on the top and ads for hotels and apartments on the bottom…
…and before we jump into the cartoons, a brief look at illustrator Mildred Oppenheim, who worked under the pseudonym “Melisse.” Her work was seen in the early New Yorker mostly in ads for Lord & Taylor, however she also did work for others including the makers of Cannon towels (seen below). In 1931 The New York Times described her as “a wicked and telling satirist—almost a feminine counterpart of Peter Arno”…
…Melisse ran a cartoon strip, “Real News of New York…A Preview of What’s New,” in the New York Sun from 1933 to 1935. Melisse seemed to be flying high, but in 1940 she declared bankruptcy. However she quickly rebounded in 1941 with an advertising panel for Orbachs—“Around Town…with Melisse”—which became a nationally syndicated feature:
…in the 1940s Melisse also produced a variety of drawings and paintings, designed mannequins for window and counter displays, and even produced designs for handkerchiefs and other clothing items. But for all her fame as a commercial illustrator, very little is known about her personal life, or what became of her after 1950. According to Alan Jay of the Stripper’s Guide, Melisse was born in Newark in 1905 and died in Miami in 1993, and was briefly married to another commercial artist in the early 1930s. A December 14, 1934 ad for her “Real News” strip in the Pelham Sun featured her photo:
…on to our well-known New Yorker cartoonists, we begin with the stalwart Rea Irvin…
…accompanying part two of a three-part profile of New Deal Administrator Hugh Samuel Johnson was this terrific caricature by Miguel Covarrubias…
…never too early to get ready for winter…spot drawing in the opening pages by Alan Dunn…
…but there was enough summer left for William Steig’s “Small Fry” to enjoy some leisurely pursuits…
…William Crawford Galbraith continued to ply his familiar waters…
…while Al Frueh turned in this gem…
…Helen Hokinson found some lively anticipation at the train station…
…Garrett Price took us to the seashore…
…while Barbara Shermund kept us abreast of current events…
The 1930s saw steady improvements in the fledging airline industry, which catered mostly to major businesses or well-heeled (and somewhat brave) folks who were interested in getting to places relatively quickly. Margaret Case Harriman reported on the many ways one could criss-cross the country by heading to the Newark Airport, the first major airport to serve the New York metro.
Writing for the “Out of Town” column, Harriman described how someone in 1934 could make their way to Los Angeles by boarding a 9 a.m. American Airlines flight in Newark and then changing over to a “sleeper plane” in Fort Worth around 10 p.m. that same day (top speed of the fastest plane was about 190 mph or 306 kph. The trip also required stops for refueling). The night flight from Fort Worth would deliver the traveler to Los Angeles the following day, at 7:55 a.m.—the trip totaled about 23 hours.
When we think of flying in the 1930s many of us recall the great travel posters featuring Pan American’s Clipper Ships—flying boats that took passengers to exotic locations in the Caribbean and in Central and South America. Harriman wrote:
Harriman closed with some advice to readers unfamiliar with flying, including putting drops of Argyrol (a silver-protein antiseptic) into ones eyes to “prevent that ticking sensation in the temples.”
* * *
No Offense Taken
Critic John Mosher was no fan of Jean Harlow’s, but he did acknowledge her box office appeal, and that fans eagerly awaited the Blonde Bombshell’s next picture, The Girl from Missouri…with its “usual plot of a gold-digger and millionaries.” Mosher also noted that Harlow, along with Mae West, was a prime target of reformers (see Hays Code) who wanted to ban “immorality” from the pictures, and he was eager to see how the Puritans had wielded their new censoring shears on the film.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
We begin with another ad from the makers of Spud menthol cigarettes, who deployed what seemed like every known visual metaphor to suggest that smoking their cigarettes “all day” would leave one feeling cool, clean and fresh, in this case as a blanket of newly fallen snow (an appealing sight in that hot summer of 1934)…
…R.J. Reynolds deployed any number of tricks to sell their Camels, from ads promoting their health benefits to endorsements by wealthy socialites, in this case Sarah Lippincott (“Mrs. Nicholas Biddle”) of Philadelphia…
…snob appeal was not limited to cigarette ads, as this full page from the folks at Chevrolet attests…
…zooming in on the copy that accompanied the above ad, we find that this fictive Chevy owner was a “marked woman” sought out by paparazzi and admired by couturiers…
…Dr. Seuss continued his series of weird ads for Flit insecticide…
…Helen Hokinson illustrated this patrician picnic scene to promote Heinz’s line of sandwich spreads…
…and we kick off our cartoons with Helen again, observing a proud moment…
…Robert Day offered this observation on modern architecture…
…Rea Irvin skewered the puritan set with his latest bird illustration…
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.
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:
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…
* * *
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.”
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
RIP Madame Curie
Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for The New Yorker, noted the passing of Marie Curie, a pioneer in field of radioactivity.
* * *
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…
Above: Illustration of the Dorchester Hotel’s ballroom in the 1930s. (dorchestercollection.com)
Lois Long took her nightlife column, “Tables for Two,” to London and its famed nightclub scene, where everyone from British royalty to gangsters reveled in a boozy, bohemian scene.
Prince Edward, a well-known party animal (who would serve as king for less than a year and abdicate in 1936) was known to get up on the stage of the Embassy Club and perform drum solos, while at the Savoy his fellow toffs would sip Champagne and glide in elegant dress across the dance floor. London nightlife included a lively jazz scene in edgy Soho basement clubs, featuring such greats as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.
Long hoped that the visit to London, her first in eight years, would give her some much-needed rest and a change of scene. What she found instead was a red-hot, all-night party, where the smart set took dinner near midnight and danced until dawn.
* * *
Misery Loves Company
In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White observed that almost everyone was “made miserable” by the Depression, but if one looked around there were signs that things weren’t so bad after all.
* * *
He Came Up a Bit Short
Howard Brubaker, in his column “Of All Things,” made this observation about Adolf Hitler’s prediction that Nazism would endure a thousand years.
And now a retreat into the cool darkness of the cinema, where John Mosher singled out Bette Davis’s performance in Of Human Bondage…Mosher’s instincts were correct—the film proved to be Davis’s breakout role on her road to major stardom.
Mosher also took in the “bright” performances of William Powell and Myrna Loy in The Thin Man, a pre-Code comedy-mystery based on the Dashiell Hammett novel by the same name. Powell and Loy portrayed Nick and Nora Charles, who added spice to their leisurely lives through numerous cocktails, flirtatious banter, and crime-solving. Critics loved the film, as did audiences, spawning five sequels from 1936 to 1947.
Another star of the show was Asta, the Charles’s wire fox terrier. Asta was portrayed by Skippy, a dog actor who not only appeared in The Thin Man films but also acted alongside Cary Grant in 1937’s The Awful Truth and in 1938’s Bringing Up Baby. Skippy appeared in three Thin Man movies and in more than twenty films altogether between 1932 and 1941. Being an actor in the film must have been good for one’s health: Powell lived 91 years, Loy 88 years, and Skippy, 20 years—a good long life for any pooch.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
While Chrysler’s styling of their streamlined Airflow proved to be too far advanced for the buying public (the Depression didn’t help), Studebaker’s own foray into the streamlined future caused a sensation…
…thanks to Studebaker’s brief merger with Pierce-Arrow (1928–33), Studebaker’s designers took cues from Pierce’s streamlined 1933 Silver Arrow and created more than 800 cars with “Year-Ahead” design features—the positive reception convinced the company to continue the style in 1935…here is a top-of-the-line 1934 President Land Cruiser…
and the car that inspired it…
…we continue with those round rubber things that held the cars up…a lot of tire ads in the 1930s emphasized safety—blowouts were common back then…funny how it took nearly four decades to add seat belts to cars…those tires wouldn’t help much in a head-on collision, especially with your kid standing on the from seat…
…now let’s cool off with crisp Canadian Ale, thanks to Carling’s entry into the American market…
…Carling’s Black Label beer was popular in the states…my parents had a set of these coasters with the Black Label tagline…
…Budweiser continued its artful series of ads featuring the well-heeled enjoying its product…here it appears old dad (wearing some kind of medal) is getting to know his daughter-in-law over some cold chicken…”hey boy, she’s one of us!”…
…and we move on to three very different approaches to selling cigarettes, beginning with Spud, continuing its message that menthol cigarettes are as refreshing as a shower on a July afternoon…
…a close up of the message…
…Camel, on the other hand, continued its campaign against irritability…it apparently did wonders for this woman, who seems to be on something more than nicotine…
…and from the people who brought us the tagline “blow some my way” in 1928 (as a way to encourage women to take up the habit), by 1934 she is owning that cigarette, and apparently setting some ground rules with the gentleman…
…contrast with the more submissive pose in the Chesterfield ad from the late 1920s…
…on to our cartoons, we begin with spot art by Alan Dunn, which appears to have originated as a captioned cartoon…
…William Steig offered up this bit of art for a profile of an “insurance man” by St. Clair McKelway…
…Helen Hokinson drew up a full page of cartoons along the theme of outdoor dining…
…we continue Rea Irvin’s series on native birds…
…George Price found a way to save on the cost of light bulbs…
…and we close with James Thurber, and a welcome to the family…
Above: For this Hollywood-heavy post we feature stars of the 1930s—the two Joans, Joan Blondell (left) and Joan Crawford, marking the Fourth of July holiday.
The New Yorker marked the Fourth of July with this William Steig cover featuring a patriotic “strap” along the binding and one of his precocious “Small Fry”…
We’ve been looking at ways New Yorkers kept their cool in the hot summer of 1934, and one way to beat the heat was to escape into the air-conditioned darkness of a movie theater. It was not uncommon for folks to remain seated after the credits rolled and watch the feature all over again, just enjoy some cold comfort.
Film critic John Mosher no doubt enjoyed this particular perk, and perhaps this made him a bit more agreeable to whatever was playing on the big screen, including three rather dull pictures featuring actresses Marion Davies, Kay Francis and Elissa Landi.
Marion Davies (1897–1961) was the veteran of the group, beginning her film career in 1917 and appearing in thirty silent films before breaking into sound movies. Sadly, her talents as an actress and comedian were overshadowed by her reputation as William Randolph Hearst’s mistress. Known for her aristocratic bearing, Austrian-American actress Elissa Landi (1904–1948) appeared in several British silents and on Broadway before signing with Fox Films in 1931. Kay Francis (1905–1968) began her film career with the advent of sound movies in 1929. A major box-office draw for Warner Brothers, by 1935 Francis was one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors (she was also a former roommate and longtime friend of The New Yorker’s Lois Long).
Perhaps one of the more notorious examples of a white actor in blackface, Operator 13 featured Davies as a Union spy who poses as a Black maid to infiltrate a Confederate camp…
* * *
Sentimental Journey
Another critic enjoying the cool of the theater was Robert Benchley, who used this break in the Broadway season to reveal his passions regarding a number of stage actresses. An excerpt:
* * *
A Poke at Palooka
In his column “Of All Things,” Howard Brubaker took a shot below the belt at the new heavyweight boxing champ, Max Baer.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
It was hot outside, folks were cooling off with their favorite beverages, and advertisers responded in kind…we begin with a familiar green bottle, and with apologies to Max Baer, you didn’t need to know how to read to know this was a bottle of Perrier…
…if your taste was more on the domestic side, there was White Rock…
…a series of Hoffman Club Soda ads sought to convince consumers about their superior carbonation…
…or how about a brandy, perhaps lightly chilled, especially if it’s late in the evening, and you happen to be sitting on a breezy hotel rooftop…
…or you could cool down with a Lion beer…considered a heritage brewery, Lion Brewery is one of only ten pre-Prohibition breweries that has independently and continuously operated since the repeal of Prohibition…
…a fairly new brand of cigarettes, Marlboro, was still taking out these bargain-sized ads to build brand recognition…Flit insecticide, on the other hand, was well-known thanks to these ubiquitous Dr. Seuss ads…
…the folks at General Tire & Rubber were the latest advertiser to tie their product to the glamour of aviation…
…and on to our cartoons, we begin with another installment of native birds via Rea Irvin…
…Al Frueh chimed in with this three-panel encounter at a nudist colony…
…Robert Day presented a case of indigestion…
…Garrett Price welcomed us aboard a dream cruise…
…George Price gave us this gem in the “Goings On About Town” section,,,
…Gardner Rea gave us his spare line to illustrate an enormous space…one of his specialties…
…Gilbert Bundy marked the Fourth with an entitled jaywalker…
…and we close with Mary Petty, and a banker’s contentment…
Above: British architect Norman Foster's 2010 recreation of R. Buckminster Fuller's 1933 Dymaxion car. (Wikipedia)
Despite the limitations of 1930s technology, a few architects and designers were hell-bent on building a streamlined future that until then was mostly the stuff of movies and science fiction magazines.
One of them was R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), architect, designer, and futurist probably best known today as the inventor of the geodesic dome (think Disney’s Epcot Center). In the 1930s Fuller was all about a concept he called Dymaxion. Derived from the words dynamic, maximum, and tension, when applied to architecture and design it would supposedly deliver maximum gain from minimal energy input. The writer of the New Yorker article (pseud. “Speed”) was fascinated by the Dymaxion’s motorboat-type steering, no coincidence since Fuller intended to adapt his futuristic car for use on and under the water, as well as in the air.
The 1933 Century of Progress exposition in Chicago was supposed to be a major showcase for Fuller, but when professional driver Francis Turner was killed while demonstrating the first prototype of the Dymaxion, the car’s prospects dimmed considerably. According to an article by Stephanie d’Arc Taylor (cnn.com Oct. 30, 2019), during the demonstration a local politician tried to drive his own car close to the Dymaxion—to get a better look—and ended up crashing into the unwieldy prototype, which rolled over, killing the driver and injuring its passengers. “The politician’s car was removed from the fracas before police arrived, so the Dymaxion was blamed for the accident,” writes Taylor, who notes that the rear wheel–powered car, though unconventional, was not necessarily the problem. However, “the thing that made the Fuller death-mobile singularly deadly was the fact it was also steered by the rear wheel, making it hard to control and prone to all kinds of terrifying issues.”
That history did not stop architect Norman Foster from building a replica of the Dymaxion in 2010. Foster worked with Fuller from 1971 to 1983, and considers Fuller a design hero.
According to Taylor, Foster cleaved so closely to Fuller’s original designs that he refers to his creation as a fourth genuine Dymaxion—not a replica. “The car is such a beautiful object that I very much wanted to own it, to be able to touch as well as contemplate the reality for its delight in the same spirit as a sculpture,” said Foster. “Everything in (the car) was either made in 1934, or recreated using techniques and materials that Bucky would have had access to in that period.”
* * *
Meanwhile, At The Tracks…
If Fuller’s attempt at the streamlined future was a bit of bust, the Burlington railroad was making a splash with its gleaming new Zephyr. E.B. White reported:
…we continue with E.B. White, here with some observations regarding Mother’s Day and bank robber/murderer John Dillinger, who had escaped from prison in March 1934 and was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List…
…and a last word from White, about an important change at Radio City:
* * *
Voice In The Wilderness
A combination of newsreel footage, documentary, and reenactment, Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr’sHitler’s Reign of Terror played to capacity crowds for two weeks in New York City, despite the refusal of the state’s censor to license the film. Disinherited by his parents when he became a newspaper publisher, Vanderbilt was a determined journalist, covertly filming scenes in Nazi Germany and even briefly encountering Adolf Hitler outside the Reichstag, where Vanderbilt yelled to Der Führer, “And what about the Jews, Your Excellency?” (Hitler ignored the question and referred Vanderbilt to one of his lackeys). Unfortunately, Vanderbilt wasn’t much of a filmmaker, and although he warned Americans about the emerging threat in Germany, few took the film, or his warning, seriously, including John Mosher:
* * *
From Our Advertisers
It wouldn’t seat eleven people like a Dymaxion, but a Body by Fisher (coach builder to General Motors) certainly impressed this young woman…but better check with the hubby just in case…
…in this next ad, we find what looks like the same woman, perhaps celebrating her decision with a nice smoke…
…this spot seems out of place in the New Yorker, like it snuck over from Better Homes & Gardens...
…on to our cartoons…with James Thurber’s war of the sexes over, life returned to normal…
…and both sides shared in the gloom of a rainy afternoon…
…by contrast, Perry Barlow brightened things up with this life of the party…
…but a good time doesn’t always translate over the airwaves, per George Price…
…Alain illustrated the consequences of losing one’s nest egg…
…Peter Arno didn’t leave any room for dessert…
…and Charles Addams returned, a macabre cast of characters still percolating in his brain…
…on to May 12, 1934…
…and back to the movies, this time critic John Mosher found more cheery fare in 20th Century, a pre-Code screwball comedy directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. Battling alcohol abuse since age 14, Barrymore nevertheless managed to display his rare genius as a comedian and turned in what is considered to be his last great film performance.
* * *
Playing the Ponies
Horse racing correspondent George F. T. Ryall (pseud. “Audax Minor”) considered a losing wager at the Kentucky Derby in his column, “The Race Track.”
* * *
More From Our Advertisers
We begin with Camel cigarette endorsers Alice and Mary Byrd, residents of Virginia’s famous Brandon plantation and cousins of Virginia Senator and Governor Harry F. Byrd, known for his fights against the New Deal and his “massive resistance” to federally mandated school desegregation...
…also to the manor born, Whitney Bourne, a New York deb who would go on to a brief stage and film career that would end when she married her first husband (diplomat Stanton Griffis) in 1939…
…we move along from the effervescent Whitney Bourne to the sparkling waters of Perrier…
…Gardner Rea followed other New Yorker cartoonists by illustrating an ad for Heinz…
…which brings is to more cartoons, where according to Richard Decker, the move to streamlined trains wasn’t welcomed by everyone…
…Carl Rose illustrated this two-page spread with an imagined right-wing response to the recent left-wing May Day parades…
…William Steig eavesdropped onto a saucy little conversation…
…Barbara Shermund continued her explorations into the trials of the modern woman…
…James Thurber was back to his old tricks…
…and we conclude our cartoons with Eli Garson, and a new perspective…
Before I close, a bit of housekeeping. The first issues in 1925 sometimes ended “The Talk of the Town” with…
…but on May 23, 1925, “Talk” signed off with —The New Yorkers. That continued until the March 31, 1934 issue (below), the last time the New Yorker signed off “The Talk of the Town” with —The New Yorkers:
Above: Modeling agency founder John Robert Powers poses with participants of a fashion queen contest at the 1939 New York World's Fair. (NYPL)
John Robert Powers was a household name in the 1930s, founder of one of the world’s first modeling agencies—he supplied countless advertisers with mostly female models, some moving on to Hollywood careers.
Writing for “A Reporter at Large” under the title “Perfect 36,” frequent New Yorker short story contributor Nancy Hale (1908 –1988) looked into the mysteries behind the fabled “John Powers Book” and its collection of sophisticated models.
Hale was given a tour by a company representative who described the types of women the Powers company represented, noting the successes of women who landed in major cigarette ads or went on to become Hollywood stars:
A number of Hollywood stars got their start or were discovered through their work with Powers, who himself was a sometime actor and the subject of a 1943 musical comedy, The Powers Girl.
A note about the author, Nancy Hale: A brilliant short story writer, Hale published her first short story in The New Yorker in 1929 (when she was just 21) and would publish more than eighty stories in the magazine through 1969—she holds the record for the most stories in the magazine in a single year, publishing twelve between July 1954 and July 1955. New Yorker editor William Maxwell regarded Hale’s writing technique as “flawless.”
* * *
Tat For Tat
Alva Johnston explored the world of “tattooed people” in his second installment of a three-part profile series titled “Sideshow People”…
* * *
Bloody Satisfying
Film critic John Mosher declared David O. Selznick’s production Viva Villa! to be “thoroughly satisfying”—with a screenplay by Ben Hecht and starring actor Wallace Beery as Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa, the film was considered violent and bloody by 1934 standards.
Mosher found some of the film’s violence to be startling. Being one the last Pre-Code films, censors would start clamping down on such scenes in the coming years.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
MGM took out a full-page ad to tout the success of Viva Villa and other MGM “hits”…
…note the bottom left hand corner of the MGM ad—a cartoon by Otto Soglow promoting the upcoming film Hollywood Party, a star-studded comedy musical featuring Laurel & Hardy, Jimmy Durante, Lupe Velez and Mickey Mouse…
…those looking for a different kind of entertainment could have been enticed by this lavish center-page spread from German ocean liner companies…they were inviting Americans to Oberammergau, Germany to witness the “only performances of the Passion Play until 1940″…the play was usually performed every ten years (years ending in the digit zero) but in 1934 a special performance was supported by the Nazi Party…incidentally, the 1940 play was cancelled due to World War II…
…the same German-American shipping companies also advertised an African cruise…with some racist imagery…
…perhaps you wanted to go to Europe on a ship with fewer Nazis on board…in that case you could grab a berth on a ship with the United States Lines, and hang out with these stiffs…
…the makers of Old Gold referenced a previous ad featuring Jimmy Durante with a new spot starring actor/comedian Eddie Cantor…both ads depicted impressionable young women admiring the smoking wisdom of older men…
…for reference, the creepy Durante ad…
…the famous “Call for Philip Morris” advertising campaign began during World War I, but in 1933 Johnny Roventini, a bellhop at the Hotel New Yorker, would become the living symbol of the cigarette brand…
…by contrast, Frankfort Distilleries showed us an image of man who would not represent them, namely Jed Clampett…
…Chevrolet continued its rebranding campaign, positioning itself as an affordable choice that was nevertheless favored by the posh set…
…who would rather be driving a Packard, here appealing to the nostalgic sensibilities of old-timers who had the means to afford one…
…on to our cartoons, and some “Small Fry” baseball from William Steig…
…an unusual captioned cartoon (from George Price) featured in the opening “Goings On About Town” section…
…Syd Hoff gave us an alarmed matron confronting the unthinkable…a doorman as a son-in-law…
…we haven’t seen Isadore Klein’s work in awhile—understandable, as he was busy in his career as an animator––in 1934 he worked on films for Van Beuren Studios (Rainbow Parade Cartoons) and in 1936 he would move to Disney’s Silly Symphonies…
…Paul Manship’sPrometheus at Rockefeller Center is iconic today, but when it was installed in 1934 it puzzled more than a few onlookers, including Robert Day…
…and we close with James Thurber, and a turn of events in his “war”…