The Top 5 Heavyweights of the 1930s

1. Joe Louis:"The Brown Bomber" Joe Louis is the natural choice to head a list of 1930s heavyweights. Louis was not just the dominant champ of the 1930s - if you consider how infrequently past champs fought, he was the first truly dominant and busy heavyweight champion period. He consistently comes in as either the #1 or #2 heavyweight of all time.

2. Max Baer:Baer stands as the great underachieving clown prince of heavyweight boxing. He possessed brilliant talent - Jack Dempsey himself thought so - and we saw a glimpse of what Baer could have after he pulled himself back together from the Frankie Campbell tragedy. Under the tutelage of Dempsey, he beat Paulino Uzcudun and Tuffy Griffiths, and stopped both Max Schmeling and Primo Carnera

3. Max Schmeling: It is interesting to think about would have happened if Schmeling had not been fleeced in the stinky, rigged decision in his rematch with Jack Sharkey. That was the bout that prompted Schmeling's manager to famously declare "we wuz robbed!" Despite what the record books say, Max "The Black Uhlan" Schmeling beat Sharkey twice, and it is likely he could have beaten off a challenge from Primo Carnera too.

4. Primo Carnera: Primo Carnera is best known for his connection to the mafia, and it is frequently alleged that he owes all his wins to criminal machinations. While some of his fights were perhaps rightly tainted by allegations of corruption, obviously not all of them were. To even claim the world title in the first place, he had to knock out Jack Sharkey.

5. Jim Braddock: The number 5 slot was comes down to a contest between "The Bulldog of Bergen" Braddock and Jack Sharkey. That Braddock is here actually says more about Sharkey's lack of top qualifications than it does about Braddock's own accomplishments. Contrary to what the film The Cinderella Man would have the world believe, the only true contender he met on his way to challenge Max Baer was John Henry Lewis.

Cited Work

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1060843/the_top_5_heavyweights_of_the_1930s.html?cat=37. 5/31/2011

Pluto, I still think you're a planet.

On February 18, 1930 Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. He was following the celestial object through the sky for nearly a year before making this discovery. He used a machine called a blink comparator to shift back and forth between four sets of photos quickly enough to see movement across the sky, leading him to Pluto. Before coming up with the name for the planet, he gave rights to the Lowell Observatory to come up with a name. Over 1000 names were selected, ranging from Atlas to Zymal. The name Pluto came from Venetia Burney, who was interested in Roman mythology. She suggested that the planet was cold, dark and lonely much like the ruler of the underworld.

Interesting side note, Walt Disney released Mickey's dog, Pluto, that year to commemorate the planet. Today Pluto is officially recognized as a dwarf planet, or an outer planet in the Kuiper Belt. It is recognized as having not enough mass to qualify as being a full Jovian planet. I still think you're planet Pluto.

Holy 1939 Batman!

Quite possibly the greatest thing to have ever happened in the 30s was the birth of the Batman. If you're a fan of marvel then I'm sorry, I truly am, because Batman is without a doubt the worlds greatest fictional detective. Yes fans of Sherlock Holmes, Bruce Wayne would beat Holmes in a sleuthing contest blind and with an inner ear infection.

But to be serious for a moment, in 1939 Bob Kane created the Batman, alter identity Bruce Wayne. Bruce's name came from Robert Bruce, the Scottish patriot. Batman's visual design and character history were inspired by the contemporary popular culture of the 1930s. Kane said that a majority of the influence for the character came from The Mask of Zorro (1920) and The Bat Whispers (1930). The reason Batman is better than Holmes is because he is indeed one third Holmes. The Identities that came together to create the perfect sleuth were: one part Doc Savage, mixed with The Shadow, add in some Holmes for flavor, shake in family trauma and viola! Batman.

Interesting side notes, the early Batman was a remorseless monster compared to the brooding and angsty Batman we know today. He held little regard for criminal life and usually beat them within an inch of their lives, often times killing them in the process. However this was apparently the style of the pulp comics at the time. The introduction of the invaluable utility belt came about two comics after the origin of Batman.

1930s Slang

I noticed that no one posted some of the common phrases and sayings from the 1930s so I found a list off of a website and pretty much pasted it here to let you guys know some of the lingo. The group that did the communism movie used some of the words on this list to make the movie that much more authentic. Just in case anyone was wondering what they meant and where we get some of our words from today, here's the list:

Abercrombie A know-it-all
Abyssinia I'll be seeing you
Aces, snazzy, hot, nobby, smooth, sweet, swell, keen, cool Very good
All the way Chocolate cake or fudge with ice cream
All wet No good
Ameche, horn, blower Telephone
Apple Any big town or city
Babe, broad, dame, doll, frail, twist, muffin, kitten Woman
Baby Glass of milk
Bean shooter, gat, rod, roscoe, heater, convincer Gun
Beat Broke
Behind the grind Behind in one's studies
Big house, hoosegow Prison
Bleed to extort or blackmail
Blinkers, lamps, pies, shutters, peepers Eyes
Blow your wig Become very excited
Booze, hooch, giggle juice, mule Whiskey
Brodie A mistake
Brunos, goons, hatchetmen, torpedoes, trigger men Hired gunmen and other tough guys
Bulge Having the advantage
Bumping gums, booshwash Talk about nothing useful
Butter and egg fly, hot mama, sweet mama, sweet patootie, dish, looker, tomato An attractive woman
Butter and egg man The money man, the man with the bankroll
Buzzer Police badge
Cabbage, lettuce, kale, folding green, long green. color of money
Cadillac One ounce packet of cocaine or heroin
Canary A female vocalist
Cats or alligators Fans of swing music
Cave One's house or apartment
Check or checker A dollar
Chicago overcoat Coffin
Chicago typewriter, chopper, gat "Tommy Gun", Thompson Submachine Gun
Chisel Swindle, cheat, work an angle
Cinder dick Railroad detective
City juice, dog soup Glass of water
Clam-bake Wild swing
Clip joint Night club or gambling joint where patrons get flimflammed
Copper Policeman
Crumb A fink, a loser by social standards
Crust To insult
Curve Disappointment
Cute as a bug's ear Very cute
Dead hoofer or cement mixer Bad dancer
Dick, shamus, gumshoe, flatfoot Detective
Dig Think hard or understand
Dil-ya-ble A phone call
Dingy Silly
Dizzy with a dame Very much in love with a woman, sometimes at great risk to themselves, especially if she's someone else's moll
Dog house String bass
Doggy Well dressed but in a self conscious way
Dollface Name for a woman when a man is pleading his case or apologizing
Doss Sleep
Drilling, plugging, throwing lead, filling someone with daylight, giving someone lead poisoning Shooting a gun (at someone)
Drumsticks, pins, pillars, stems, uprights, get away sticks, gams Legs
Dukes, paws, grabbers, meat hooks hands


Those are common words up through the "Ds" to give you a little taste of what people were saying. To see the whole list check the site out here http://www.paper-dragon.com/1939/slang.html

30's Cartoons

Are very different.

<iframe width="425" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/qToUtpEikK8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

a list of 5 important differences between this video and what i've observed with modern animation

1) more emphasis on soundtrack. The music is what makes this piece.
2) different social norms, one of the cartoons is smoking at one point
3) Less edgy: While there are things that aren't acceptable, it tends to go with archetypes that are popular and predictable. While it does predictable things in an awesome and witty and self aware way, they are still predictable.
4) Black and white: it's obvious, but worth noting
5) Woman. The two that are shown both show... very cleche archetypes of femininity. One is the girl who gets stolen by the villain and the other is one who uses her body to get access to the studio. The princess and the frog by contrast (a modern cartoon movie) has a developed hard working career oriented woman (who happens to become a princess.)

Times sure have changed :D

Ben Shahn

Ben Shahn was born in Kaunus, Lithuania in 1898.  He emigrated to the United States in 1906 with his family.  He became a lithographer’s apprentice after he finished his schooling.  He later returned to school for art and design training.  In the 1920s he became part of the social realism movement.  This term is used to describe the works of American artists during the Depression era that devoted their talents to depicting the social problems of the suffering lower classes like urban decay, labor strikes, and poverty. 

I think his most striking works are his street photography all taken between 1932 and 1935.  They helped define urban life in the 1930s through the prosaic daily activities of ordinary people.  He used a handheld 35 mm, Leica camera, and photographed everyday life in Manhattan.  The images illustrate unemployment, poverty and protest.  Shahn’s photographs also inspired most of the work he is more widely known for: socially conscious paintings and graphic works, as well as public mural projects that promoted social reform programs of the time. 

  

1930 surrealism movement

Golden age
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí.Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions.

Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

Django, born to gypsy parents, had never learned to read of write. At twelve he discovered his love and talent for music. Just a year later he was playing and recording music with other artists. In 1928 tragedy struck and Django's life would never be the same. The 18 year old was caught in a caravan fire that severely burnt his left hand and right lower body. He was bedridden for 18 months. During this time he did what seemed like impossible; he created a entirely new finger picking technique. Only two fingers had full mobility on his left hand, this means he did all soloing with just his index and middle fingers!

http://youtu.be/fzz6fAdFFis

here is a video of Django playing.

The 1930s was the pinnacle of Django's career. He is the creator of "Hot Jazz" guitar. He joined a band 1934 called the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. The band made Django an international star and legend.

Masters of Horror: Karloff Edition.

Boris Karloff, or William Henry Pratt, was best known for his roles in horror through out the beginning of the classic horror genre. His role as Frankenstein's monster was what rocketed him to stardom in the early 30s. Interestingly enough though, this master of horror had a few problems growing up. Being originally from London, Karloff attended the King's College London for counseling. After dropping out and working various odd jobs he happened upon acting and pursued it from there. As a boy, Karloff had a lisp, stutter and was bow-legged. Not the best start, but he found ways past it. He never did quite get over the lisp, as you can still hear it a few of his movies. Karloff's major movies were Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Son of Frankenstein (1939) (there are many others, but for the sake of listing them all out I'll stop with the most famous movies).

Karloff's activities in his free time are quite surprising. In contrast to the monsters and sinister personae he played in films, he later dressed up as a Santa and gave presents to disabled children in hospitals on Christmas. He also received two stars on the Hollywood walk of fame. Other interesting side notes, he had a friendly rivalry with other horror great Bela Lugosi. While they never became close friends, they still created some of their best works together. Karloff's most known non horror role was as the narrator in Dr. Seuss's how the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Aaron Copland

Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900 in Brooklyn as the youngest of five children.  His sisters taught him how to play the piano when he was eleven years old.  As a young man he went to France to study at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, where he studies with Nadia Boulanger.  He was inspired by Schoenberg, Bartok, Ravel, and Stravinsky.  In 1924 he completed his studies and returned to the U.S.

The 1920s and 1930s were a period of deep concern for Copland.  He worried about the limited audience for new, and especially American music.  He was active in many organizations devoted to performance and sponsorship of new music.  These included, the Copland-Sessions concerts, the American Composers’ Alliance, and the League of Composers.  His fellow composer Virgil Thomson nicknamed him “American music’s natural president.”

Beginning in the mid 1930s Copland made a serious effort to widen the audience for American music. He took steps by changing his style when writing pieces for different occasions.  He composed for theater, ballet, and films as well as more traditional concert settings.  In his ballet “Billy the Kid” (1938) he uses folk melodies to be broadly recognized as “American.” 

Copland’s concern for establishing a tradition of music in American life only increased throughout his life. He taught at Harvard and published several books.  He died in 1990.  He has been remembered as a man who encouraged composers to find their own voice, no matter the style, just as he did for sixty years. 

John Cage (1912-1992)

This is a composition by John Cage. He is, in my opinion, one of the most fascinating composers of all time.  He is mostly known for his composition called 4’33.” When performing  4’33” the pianist  sits at the piano closes the lid and doesn’t play for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds.  John Cage spent time in Europe as a young man and studied architecture and painting, but found he could not really devote his life to either. He returned to the U.S in the 1930s and studied composition with composer and music theorist Arnold Schoenberg.  After a while Schoenberg decided that Cage had no ear for harmony. He felt harmony was much more structural and less coloristic.  Schoenberg told him he would never be able to write music and when Cage asked why he said, “ You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.” Then I’ll spend the rest of my life knocking on that wall,” he replied.

In the 1930s he was considered a leader in avant-garde music.  He mostly composed pieces for percussion groups and for what was called “prepared piano.”  A prepared piano is a piano with various objects inserted between the strings for percussive effects (click on the link to watch someone prepare a piano, it’s insane!).  He used erasers, washers, screws, and whatever he had on hand.

He is known for pushing the boundaries of music and always referred to his career as “an exploration of non-intention.” Schoenberg hated all of his students and never said anything about any of them except for Cage.  “John Cage is not a composer, but an inventor of genius.”   

In the 1930's, particularly in the South, it was common place to punish criminals by placing them on chain gangs. As one can imagine, this involved manual labor, such as building roads, while the prisoners were chained to one another by the ankle. This practice was often accompanied by the "sweat box" a form a punishing an uncooperative inmate by placing him in a wooden, coffin-like box in the hot sun. In the thirties, this form of punishment was to be addressed in two major films, the drama I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1932), and the screwball comedy Sullivan's Travels (1941-not technically released in the 30's, but reflective of the decade).
I Am a Fugitive...was a particularly controversial film, as the state of Georgia sued Warner Brother's in an attempt to stop the film from being released. The film is based on the true story of a man wrongly accused and placed on a chain gang in Georgia. The man in question was actually still a fugitive, and served as a consultant on the film. The film is an scathing critique on an unfair judicial system, and established the studio as one of the most socially conscious of Hollywood.
Sullivan's Travels, a post-code, post-decade screwball comedy released by Paramount, can be seen to function as a kind of anti-Fugitive, in that it addresses the problem of life on the Chain Gang, but manages, as comedies often do, to reconcile itself to the prevailing ideology.

Art Deco

Art Deco was one of the most popular architectural styles of the 1930's, perhaps most famously and recognizably embodied by the Chrysler building in New York City, built over the years of 1928-1930. Other famous Art Deco style buildings are of course the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center, both in New York. New York is not the only place where one can find great examples of Art Deco architecture, the Fisher Building of Detroit and the Kansas City Power and Light Building are both fine examples. However, perhaps one of the most beautiful and accessible places in America where one can find Art Deco style homes is the Art Deco district of Miami Beach.
As many of these landmarks were built, or in the process of being built, just before and after the crash of '29, one can see the spirit of American Exceptionalism embodied in such buildings as the Empire State Building, along with the other skyscrapers that were a testament to American ingenuity and muscle. It is an interesting coincidence that Ayn Rand's architecturally-themed book The Fountainhead (1943) began incubating within the author's mind around the same time, when Cecil B. DeMille commissioned her to write a script tentatively called Skyscraper.

To The Paleofuture... And Beyond

As our comes to a close, I wanted to share with everyone my favorite article for the website Paleofuture. It discusses a Radio-Newspaper Receiver, that would transmit (and print out) the news for you to read at home. I love the idea of this device, because it suggests that people were thinking about the possibility of mass-communication, and how audio, text and image could someday merge in a way that would be available at home. Not only is it the Inter-Web-A-Tron of the day, but it seems to have inspired these ideas as well. Plus: I love the picture.

And, of course, this is where I have to sign off. It has been great to work with this class, and I really enjoy the subject matter. I think visions of the future is a good way to wrap things up. The '30's seems to be the source for so much of our lives now, and it is interesting to imagine where things will end up when people reflect on what life was like now. Hopefully some part of this class sticks with you in a meaningful way, and if you want to contact for in the future for any reason, I'll be there.

Be Seeing You.

I Just Can't Stop With The King Kong Talk

While the articles on King Kong were handed out in class, it was pointed out that not everyone got a copy of them. So I have them available here for download. They are pdf files, and contain a scan of the pages from The New York Times that these articles appeared in.

Article 1

Article 2

Article 3

Article 4

While I have already said just about everything I usually like to mention when I talked about King Kong in Mentor Session, I did want to direct curious readers to a wonderful oddity in the world of the 1930's: Wasei Kingu Kongu. This was a cheap Japanese copy of the film that was made after the initial American release of the film, as was the tradition at the time in Japan. While the film itself did not survive into the modern age (this frame is thought to come from the film), this American knock-off pre-figured the Japanese "Monster Movie" trend by almost 17 years. It is interesting that Godzilla and King Kong are often seen as the two "giants" in Monster Movie History, and yet Godzilla, it would seem, was really inspired by King Kong.

surrealism movement

Golden age
The Persistence of Memory (1931) by Salvador Dalí.Throughout the 1930s, Surrealism continued to become more visible to the public at large. A Surrealist group developed in Britain and, according to Breton, their 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition was a high water mark of the period and became the model for international exhibitions.

Dalí and Magritte created the most widely recognized images of the movement. Dalí joined the group in 1929, and participated in the rapid establishment of the visual style between 1930 and 1935.

Surrealism as a visual movement had found a method: to expose psychological truth by stripping ordinary objects of their normal significance, in order to create a compelling image that was beyond ordinary formal organization, in order to evoke empathy from the viewer.

1931 was a year when several Surrealist painters produced works which marked turning points in their stylistic evolution: Magritte's Voice of Space (La Voix des airs)[23] is an example of this process, where three large spheres representing bells hang above a landscape. Another Surrealist landscape from this same year is Yves Tanguy's Promontory Palace (Palais promontoire), with its molten forms and liquid shapes. Liquid shapes became the trademark of Dalí, particularly in his The Persistence of Memory, which features the image of watches that sag as if they are melting.

The characteristics of this style—a combination of the depictive, the abstract, and the psychological—came to stand for the alienation which many people felt in the modern period, combined with the sense of reaching more deeply into the psyche, to be "made whole with one's individuality".

Between 1930 and 1933, the Surrealist Group in Paris issued the periodical Le Surrealisme au service de la revolution as the successor of La Révolution surréaliste.

From 1936 through 1938 Wolfgang Paalen, Gordon Onslow Ford, and Roberto Matta joined the group. Paalen contributed Fumage and Onslow Ford Coulage as new pictorial automatic techniques.

Long after personal, political and professional tensions fragmented the Surrealist group, Magritte and Dalí continued to define a visual program in the arts. This program reached beyond painting, to encompass photography as well, as can be seen from a Man Ray self portrait, whose use of assemblage influenced Robert Rauschenberg's collage boxes.


L'Ange du Foyer ou le Triomphe du Surréalisme (1937) by Max Ernst.During the 1930s Peggy Guggenheim, an important American art collector, married Max Ernst and began promoting work by other Surrealists such as Yves Tanguy and the British artist John Tunnard.

Major exhibitions in the 1930s

1936 - London International Surrealist Exhibition is organised in London by the art historian Herbert Read, with an introduction by André Breton.
1936 - Museum of Modern Art in New York shows the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism.
1938 - A new International Surrealist Exhibition was held at the Beaux-arts Gallery, Paris, with more than 60 artists from different countries, and showed around 300 paintings, objects, collages, photographs and installations. The Surrealists wanted to create an exhibition which in itself would be a creative act and called on Marcel Duchamp to do so. At the exhibition's entrance he placed Salvador Dalí's Rainy Taxi[dead link] (an old taxi rigged to produce a steady drizzle of water down the inside of the windows, and a shark-headed creature in the driver's seat and a blond mannequin crawling with live snails in the back) greeted the patrons who were in full evening dress. Surrealist Street filled one side of the lobby with mannequins dressed by various Surrealists. He designed the main hall to seem like subterranean cave with 1,200 coal bags suspended from the ceiling over a coal brazier with a single light bulb which provided the only lighting,[24] so patrons were given flashlights with which to view the art. The floor was carpeted with dead leaves, ferns and grasses and the aroma of roasting coffee filled the air. Much to the Surrealists' satisfaction the exhibition scandalized the viewers.[6]

Chemistry, Heck Yeah.

Linus Carl Pauling was a famous chemist who was responsible for the majority of the advancements in chemistry today. Pauling is credited with the introduction of electronegativity (the tendency of an atom to attract electrons, for those not familiar with electronegativity.) in 1932. Basically Linus allowed us to map a very accurate model of how much energy was required to break different bonds as well mapping the dipole movements of molecules. This is the chemistry equivalent of mapping the human genome in biology. By doing this he established a scale that we are now able to use as a reference instead of a guess and check method that was once used.

His other work in the chemistry field has been equally important. His research with the tetravalency (A state of an atom with four electrons available for covalent bonding) of carbon, as well as the hybridization of atomic orbitals were very important in conjunction with the VSEPR (Valence Shell Electron-Pair Repulsion) theory. He was also one of only four people to have ever won two Nobel prizes. The final scientific boundary Pauling pushed was that of establishing the field of quantum chemistry.

If anyone has any questions I’d love to talk about the area of study to the best of my knowledge.

Family History from the 1930's

So I figured that I should take advantage of the historical energy this class has provided and ask the matriarch of my family, my mom's mother, about her experiences in the 1930's. Here is the report according to my mom. My grandma's name is Eileen Betleski.

In 1929, when the stock market crashed, Grandma was 11 years old. Her parents were very young—her mother married Great-Grandpa James when she was 16. She gave birth to Eileen’s older (only) brother, Kenneth, before she was 18 and gave birth to Eileen when she was around 20. [I will checks these ages with Grandma later this evening.] So, Marie and James were roughly 32 and 33 years of age at the time of the crash; their children were 14, 11, 3, and 1. Everything was very bleak very quickly for many of their friends, neighbors, and family members because most people lost their jobs right away. Almost everybody in the Curran family (Eileen’s parents, aunts, and uncles) worked for the New York Athletic Club as doorman,

bookkeeper, maid, etc.

My mother tells the story from that time period that when she entered high school at George Washington High School (you should look up a picture of the school online—you will be astonished at the size of this structure), she had only one blouse to wear to school. She probably only had one skirt, too, but it was the blouse that she had to wash by hand each night, dry in the kitchen over the stove, and iron in the morning to be fresh and clean each day. It was red and she loved it (at first), but the routine of keeping it clean was tedious. They didn’t have money to spend on more clothes for her, so that blouse had to be sufficient for a long time. Her dream of the future before the stock crash was to attend Vassar College. Her Uncle C.B. had promised that he would send her there. He was an executive with Standard Oil and a millionaire, to boot. He lost most of his money in the crash, and even though he sued the stock firm which had managed his investments, he recouped very little of the pile he had accumulated. Poof! Went the dream of Vassar. When Eileen completed high school, her father was sick with a lung infection and had developed pneumonia. The drug of choice to combat infection at that time was sulfa compound; unfortunately, the federal approval to use the new wonder drug, Penicillin, had not been granted yet, so Great-Grandpa James died in the year just after Eileen graduated from high school – 1939.

Here is the a model image of the high school my mom refers to. Thanks for reading about my personal family history.

At first glance, one might think both teams are holding up the Nazi salute, one that is representative of fascism and extreme prejudice. But if you look closely, one team's salute is slightly turned to the right, which is the Olympic salute; one that represents good sportsmanship and competition.

During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, there was a spell of controversy over the salutes. Athletes and teams were unsure of which salute they should use. Out of respect to the host of the games, Adolf Hitler, some thought it would be wise to use the Nazi salute. However, that salute could be used as a sign of allegiance toward the Nazi party and their political ideologies. The Olympic salute was always good a gesture, but with both bearing an almost identical resemblance, one could hardly discern one from the other as the athletes past by Hitler's podium.

George Gershwin was born in 1898 in Brooklyn to a close-knit immigrant family.  He began his career in music as a song-plugger in Tin Pan Alley, but soon began to write songs of his own.  “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em” was the first thing he ever published and it earned him five dollars.  George began to lead a double life trying to make the public see him as a serious composer.  So, he began to compose more orchestral and “classical” music. Serious music critics had trouble finding a place for Gershwin’s classical music.  Many dismissed it as banal or tiresome, but it always found favor with the general public.

In the early thirties he began to experiment with new ideas in Broadway musicals.  “Let ‘Em Eat Cake” and “Of Thee I Sing,” were innovative new works musically and conceptually that dealt with social issues of the time.  “Of Thee I Sing” was a gigantic hit and was the first comedy ever to win the Pulitzer Prize.  In 1935 a folk opera called “Porgy and Bess” premiered in Boston, at the time it wasn’t particularly successful, but now it is considered on of the most influential works of American Opera. 

After many Broadway successes, he decided to go to Hollywood in 1937.  He teamed up with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers.  Together they made the musical film "Shall We Dance." After becoming ill working on another film he planned to return to New York and write more serious music.  He planned a ballet, another opera, and a string quartet, however, none of these were ever written.  He died when he was 38 years old of a brain tumor.  Today he remains one of America’s most beloved popular musicians. 

Thomas Hart Benton

Of the many painters who benefited from the WPA's art projects, few are as distinctively American as Thomas Benton, who was a mentor to the young Jackson Pollack, who would help establish American painting internationally in the decades following the 1930's. Considered a Regionalist, Benton painted scenes of American everyday life, usually on a massive scale in a mural format. It was during his tenure under the WPA that he painted some of his largest and most striking works. His work seems to me one of the most appropriate examples of Depression-Era art. His monumental depictions of working people and their lives provided a much-needed boost to the traumatized psyche of America, but without resorting to the nostalgic idioms of artists such as Norman Rockwell. Benton never shied away from the ugly realities of American life at the time, but he managed to condense it in a lyrical form, not unlike the way Woody Guthrie would write beautiful ballads from the darkest material from life.

List

Hey, where is that list of names people have taken for the TH project?

1930's Inventions

Here is a list of stuff that was invented in the 1930’s. All of these things are still in use today except for maybe the View Master; I don’t shop for kids toys much so not sure. Also, I don’t know is if these people were the ones who were able to make any money with there inventions during the 1930’s. Was the economy so bad that they had to wait until better times hit to make some money?

1930: Neoprene: Wallace Carothers

1930: Photography: Underwater Motion Picture Camera: Arthur C. Pillsbury

1931: The Radio telescope: Karl Jansky Grote Reber

1931: Iconoscope: Vladimir Zworykin

1932: Polaroid glass: Edwin H. Land

1934: Hammond Organ: Laurens Hammond

1935: Microwave RADAR: Robert Watson-Watt

1935: Trampoline: George Nissen and Larry Griswold

1935: Spectrophotometer: Arthur C. Hardy

1935: Casein fiber: Earl Whittier Stephen

1936: Pinsetter (bowling): Gottfried Schmidt

1937: Turboprop engine: Gy?rgy Jendrassik

1937: Jet engine: Frank Whittle and Hans von Ohain

1937: O-ring: Niels Christensen

1937: Nylon: Wallace H. Carothers

1938: Ballpoint pen: Laszlo Biro

1938: Xerography: Chester Carlson

1938: Fiberglass: Russell Games Slayter John H. Thomas

1939: FM radio: Edwin H. Armstrong

1938: LSD: Albert Hofmann

1939: Helicopter: Igor Sikorsky

1939: View-master: William Gruber

1939: Automated teller machine: Luther George Simjian

http://www.paulsquiz.com/Trivia_Quiz_Resources/Science/Notable_Inventions_of_the_1930s/ 05/21/2011

AN INTERESTING CHARACTER

The Lone Ranger was a family favorite, at least for the kids of the family, for many years both on the radio and on television. There were movies as well. January 30, 1933 was the first time Americans heard “Hi Yo Silver, Away!” roar across the airwaves from their living room radios. It was probably pretty exciting imagining this masked hero going about saving the west on his stallion Silver with his sidekick Tonto. By the way, Tonto means stupid in Spanish so it is unfortunate that the name was chosen. In some countries the name was changed to Toro or something else. Tonto didn’t appear until the twelfth episode on February 25. He stayed on the radio until 1949 and then went on to television that lasted until 1957. The most well known actor playing the Lone Range was Clayton Moore and Tonto was Jay Silverheels. The Lone Ranger and Tonto lived by a creed, which read like this:

I believe...

· that to have a friend, a man must be one.

· that all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.

· that God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.

· in being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.

· that a man should make the most of what equipment he has.

· that 'this government of the people, by the people, and for the people' shall live always.

· that men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.

· that sooner or later...somewhere...somehow...we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.

· that all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.

· in my Creator, my country, my fellow man.^[1]

These two really tried to live by these rules on and off the camera; it was important to them to be role models for children. Don’t forget about the world famous horse that the Lone Ranger road, Silver. There is a story about him called the legend of Silver in which Lone’s trusty old chestnut horse called Dusty, got killed by a bad guy and a wild horse named Silver needed to be saved because an angry buffalo was trying to kill him; Lone saved him of course and the rest is history. Anyway the Lone Ranger character has become an enduring icon of American culture. [2] Reruns of the Lone Ranger aired for 61 years.

[1][2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Ranger 5/21/2011

Robert Gwathmey

Roert Gwathmey was an artist in the 1930s who focussed on social realism and portrayed the working man an the cotton pickers in the south.

Character background Info.
Name- Robert Gwathmey.

Where do you live? I live in Philidelphia

Married to Rosalie Hook of Charolette North Carolina

Imediate family- wife and father, also Robert, a railroad engineer, had been born in Richmond in 1866 and died on May 27, 1902, eight months before Robert Jr. entered the world. He was killed instantly when his locomotive exploded. Witnesses could never obliterate the memory of seeing him blown forty feet in the air.His wife, Eva Mortimer Harrison, two years younger than Robert Sr., had been employed as a public school teacher. She died near Petersburg, Virginia, on June 1, 1941, when a bus skidded into the station wagon in which she occupied the front passenger seat. Her daughter-in-law, Rosalie Hook Gwathmey, who was driving, and her two surviving daughters, Katherine and Ida Carrington, who were riding in the second seat, were severely injured. One of the daughters suffered cruel cuts and was partially scalped. The other lost a number of teeth in this collision. Robert, the artist, and his three-year-old son, Charles, were seated in the rear of the wagon and escaped with bumps and bruises. Eva was buried next to her husband two days after the accident. The sequence of strange tragedies is even longer. Eva and Robert Sr. had four children. The oldest, Mary Louise, died in 1923 at age twenty-six in a horseback riding accident.

work profession- social realist professional artist. 1939 - 1941, taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology, 1943-1968 taught at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York, 1973 Robert was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Race- White

Religion- Liberal

Religion?

Political Affiliation- Workers Progress Administration (WPA) the most abitious New Deal agency.





The year 1934, the Workers Progress Administration (WPA) has just been founded as the most abitious New Deal agency. My name is Robeort Gwathmey, I am a White virginia born artist living in New York. I came from a middle class family but we never really felt the depression like others. We had a garden, cats, dogs, pigeons, and everything we needed. I think had something to do with our wealthy relatives but i rarely saw them. I was born in 1903 and live with my beautiful wife Rosalie Hook of Charlotte, North Carolina. She is an artist and photographer who is working on a series documentary on Blacks in the South. This documentary has influenced and created inspiration for my painting. I have became know for being a Social Realist in the depiction of life in the rural south. I studied Art from 1925-1926 at the Maryland Institute of Design in baltimor and from 1926-1930 I went to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. After this I taught in a the irls Philedelphia Beaver College, where i could work two days a week and spend the rest of the week i could focus on my paintings. I then went on to teach at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and in my later years i taught at the cooper Union School Of Art in New York.

The Business Plot to overthrow FDR

Sparked by the abandonment of the gold standard and several other New Deal policies that threatened American businessmen by redistributing wealth, the Business Plot was a political conspiracy to overthrow Roosevelt and install a fascist government led by the Du Pont and J.P. Morgan empires. This military coup was financed, organized, and supported by many of American's most wealthy businessmen. Recruited, due to his popularity with the troops as a war hero, to lead the coup d'état was General Smedley Butler, lured in by the promise of unlimited funds, complete media control and an army of 500,000 to force FDR out. Little did they know, Butler was sympathetic to the troops and only pretended to go along with the plan.

Butler's role in the coup was to confront FDR with an ultimatum: either pretend to become incapacitated from polio and create a "Secretary of General Affairs" (carrying out orders from Wall Street) or be forced out by Butler's army. Because of the businessmen's media control, an entire fabricated campaign would work: the presidents failing health, his resignation, and the legitimacy of the newly created Secretary position.

In 1933, the plot was foiled when Butler testified to the McCormack-Dickstein Committee, which would later become the notorious House of Un-American Activities Committee, which white-washed the report and erased the names of many powerful businessmen from its records. Not surprisingly, the elite controlled media also failed to pick up the report, and still today the incident remains not well known.

John Steinbeck, He's a Classic for a Reason

John Steinbeck is a classic author from the mid 20th century who wrote dozens of novels about the American experience, 7 of which were penned in the 1930's.

His most famous work, The Grapes of Wrath (which I think we're going to study) is a great example of many of the macro and micro-issues dealt with by American families in this decade. His other famous works include Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, Travels with Charlie, and Tortilla Flat. Steinbeck has a knack for creating archetypal characters that embody traditional characteristics ie. the mother, the whore, the servant, the boss ect. The conflicts that exist between and within his characters are portrayed as clear dichotomies to throw good and evil into stark contrast.

One of the most evil female characters ever created is a woman by the name of Cathy who is the wife of Adam Trask, a main character of East of Eden. As a child she is described as having a "malformed soul." She runs away as a young woman, lighting her house on fire and killing her parents. She uses her feminine wiles to manipulate men, which gets her brutally beaten by a pimp, which is the condition she is in when she shows up at Adam's front door. He falls in love with her, marries and impregnates her, and they moves to the Salinas Valley in California. There she betrays him and runs away again, this time to the largest nearby city, and becomes a madam, the proprietor of a whore-house there. The story goes on to follow her children, two boys as they grow up in the Salinas valley without the knowledge of who their mother is. Their story is a parallel of the biblical tale of Cain and Able, and the impurity of their physical source is the unknown factor in their eventual internal conflicts between good and evil. East of Eden is my second favorite Steinbeck novel, after Grapes of Wrath; here is a link for trailer for the motion picture in case anyone wants to check out the Elia Kazan directed film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdMjKq8xk-E

Eleanor Berton