Or rather, he was half right. The other great familial activity in the Thirties was listening to radio. Like the cinema, it was tightly controlled; seven hundred of the country’s nine hundred stations were organized into four networks, NBC-Red, NBC-Blue, CBS, and Mutual. Radio, too, was more innocuous than television today. Television hosts are permitted a certain amount of room for maneuver, but the announcer for a child’s program in the Thirties who, thinking he was off the air, muttered, “I guess that’ll hold the little bastards for a while,” was all through. The entire family was concerned with what the shiny wagon-wheel microphones of the time picked up. Symbolically, perhaps, one of the most durable programs was NBC-Red’s One Man’s Family, a Norman Rockwell myth heard in 28 million homes on Wednesdays at 8 P.M. The announcer always began by declaring that the play was “dedicated to the Mothers and Fathers of the Younger Generation and to their Bewildering Offspring.”
For millions, twisting the dial was a kind of tribal ritual. It was a rare household that could not identify Kate Smith with “When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain,” Ruth Etting with “Shine On, Harvest Moon,” Amos ’n’ Andy with “The Perfect Song,” Rudy Vallee with “My Time Is Your Time,” Morton Downey with “Carolina Moon,” and Ray Noble with “The Very Thought of You.” Murray Hill 8–9933 was the best-known telephone number in the country; you called it to register your opinion of performers on the Major Bowes Amateur Hour. The national audience couldn’t imagine Christmas without Lionel Barrymore’s presentation of A Christmas Carol. It is improbable that many Americans lost sleep over the question “Can this girl from a mining town in the West find happiness as the wife of a wealthy and titled Englishman?” but if they thought it foolish, they kept it to themselves. Because every scene had to be staged in the imagination, and because imagination is more colorful than any twenty-one-inch screen, the best of radio can never be matched by television. Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen’s whittled imp, was so real that Louis B. Mayer, the king of Sweden, and Winston Churchill extended their hands upon being introduced to him.
The ultimate significance of radio’s appeal is that through it the first steps were taken toward a manipulated consumer society. Advertising’s pioneer then was George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company. Thanks to Hill, American became the first firm to buy testimonials (including one from Madame Schumann Heink, the opera singer, who didn’t even smoke). The concept of product identification began with the comedians “Jones and Hare, the Interwoven Pair”; when you laughed at them, you were supposed to think about socks. Gang-busters meant Cue, the liquid dentifrice; Bergen and McCarthy, Chase & Sanborn coffee; Your Hit Parade, with its obnoxious tobacco auctioneer’s chant, reminded you of Lucky Strikes. The chant was Hill’s idea; explaining its usefulness, he once spat on a polished board of directors’ table. The act was disgusting, he said, wiping up the bubbly spittle with his silk handkerchief, but for that very reason you would never forget it. “LS/MFT” was another Hillism. Announcers repeated, “Lucky Strike means fine tobacco. Yes, Lucky Strike means fine tobacco,” until listeners thought they would lose their minds, and a grateful nation should not have forgotten the local news commentator who was handed a flash in mid-program on September 13, 1946, and said to the mike, “Ladies and gentlemen, George Washington Hill died today. Yes, George Washington Hill died today.”
At the time, “Not a cough in a carload” (Old Golds), “Ask the man who owns one” (Packard), “First he whispers, then he shouts!” (Big Ben), “Banish tattletale gray” (Fels Naptha soap), and “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet” were regarded as nothing more than minor irritants. The idea that the mass-production-consumption society was, in George E. Mowry’s words, tying together “big business and the masses in a symbiotic relationship so close that the health of one was the health of the other” had not yet emerged. Few would have understood it, anyhow. Had they been told that a later college generation would deprecate consumer orientation and scorn society’s preoccupation with security, they would have been baffled. Mechanical servants were just becoming available in large numbers. A surfeit of labor-saving gadgets was unimaginable. Security, moreover, was the impossible dream of the Depression. Nobody could have enough of it, and the viability of President Roosevelt’s limited concept of social security—the act of 1935 covered only wage earners, not their families—was to be displayed in the presidential election of 1936, which loomed ever larger in the American consciousness and which, everyone agreed, would be a referendum on the New Deal.
FOUR
The Roosevelt Referendum
Before Repeal1 Benito Mussolini had declared, “I can sum up the United States in two words: Prohibition and Lindbergh!” That was totalitarian dogma; America was a land of gangsters and kidnappers. Then he was asked his opinion of American foreign policy. He replied, “America has no policy.” This time Il Duce came painfully close to the truth. There was no mention of events abroad in Roosevelt’s first inaugural address. He silenced all official advocacy of American participation in the League of Nations, and in his first appearance on the world scene he torpedoed the International Monetary and Economic Conference of 1933, an attempt to knit together the gold bloc nations. Alone among economists, John Maynard Keynes was delighted; Keynes preferred managed currencies to the gold standard, and he pronounced Roosevelt “magnificently right.” But the President had not been swayed by Keynesian theory. He was deliberately sacrificing international good will to domestic priorities, putting the American house in order before turning to threats overseas.
All this was to change five years later, after Hitler showed his fist at Munich. Yet the danger to peace became evident much earlier. Before Roosevelt’s second presidential campaign, Mussolini had seized Ethiopia; Spain had burst into flame; Germany had rearmed, occupied the Rhineland, and, Hull’s soporifics to the contrary, made life wretched for Jews, 80,000 of whom had arrived in the United States by 1935. In Tokyo militant young officers drove Hirohito’s government toward expansionism and imperialism; when a Japanese soldier slipped across the Marco Polo Bridge to patronize a Chinese brothel, his officers accused the Chinese of kidnapping him and then attacked Peking and Tientsin. Amelia Earhart, America’s most celebrated aviatrix, is believed to have caught a glimpse of Japanese fortifications in the mandated Marianas. She was almost certainly forced down and murdered. Her fate was unknown at the time, but repeated provocations by the Japanese, all of them front-page news, seemed designed to determine whether or not America was chickenhearted.
America was. State Department spokesmen protested and talked vaguely of “moral embargoes.” Roosevelt and Hull expressed confidence in something mysteriously called “world opinion”—as though there were such a thing, and as though dictators could be intimidated by it. Congress passed new neutrality acts and resolutions, which the President reluctantly signed. He hesitated largely because he disliked any curb on presidential power; there was then little difference between the administration’s conduct of foreign affairs and opinion on Capitol Hill. The New Deal had no designs on other countries. In signing a neutrality pact with twenty-one Latin American countries, Hull made it quite clear that America wanted nothing so much as to be left alone, and one of the few Hoover decisions endorsed by FDR was a refusal to join Great Britain in a condemnation of Japanese aggression in Manchuria.
In the Depression most of this was sensible; the home front demanded every resource the government could summon. But there was no sense in the Johnson Debt Default Act of 1934, barring loans to countries which had failed to repay their World War debts, or the Pittman Neutrality Resolution of 1935, which notified the world that under no circumstances would the United States help victims of aggression. Such measures merely encouraged dictators and tied the President’s hands. Yet the fact that he said so, together with his support of the World Court, angered the high priests of isolationism. “Believing that he is under moral obligation to help decide the agelong quarrels of Europe and Asia,” Cha
rles A. Beard wrote, “President Roosevelt has resisted every effort of Congress and the country to impose limits on his powers of intervention abroad. In case of a major war in Europe or Asia, there is ground for believing that he will speedily get the United States into the fray. But with what outcome? That Americans will be euchred at the peace conference, whether they lose or win the war, is fairly certain.”
In reality, speedy intervention would have been impossible. The country’s military establishment continued to shrink during Roosevelt’s first term, until America had fewer soldiers than Henry Ford had auto workers. The Army’s real enemy, as Eisenhower later noted, was “money, or its lack.” In 1934, when the President visited Oahu, the commanding officer decided to stage an exercise in his honor. The spectacle turned into a travesty; half the trucks and seven of the twelve World War tanks broke down in front of the startled commander in chief. The following year Fortune reported that although the M-1 Garand rifle had been adopted by the infantry, there weren’t enough of them to equip a single regiment. “At the present rate of purchase,” the magazine calculated, “it will take about thirty years to equip just the Regular Army with the new Garand, by which time it might well be obsolete.” The title of the article was “Who’s in the Army Now?” Among those in uniform, it reported, were a forty-seven-year-old first lieutenant and a sixty-five-year-old sergeant. The average captain was forty-three.
A great many Americans believed that nobody should be in the Army. Scholars generally held that the country had been tricked into the World War by wicked Europeans, and for once the people—71 percent of them, Gallup found—agreed with the professors. The Depression had started in Europe, they believed; Europeans didn’t pay their debts. From Three Soldiers and A Farewell to Arms to What Price Glory? intellectuals had argued that peace was worth almost any price. Had the story of Amelia Ear-hart’s death been known, it wouldn’t have been accepted; Allied propaganda about Belgians had immunized Americans to atrocity stories. Richard H. Rovere was but one of millions of schoolchildren who would later recall an idealistic civics teacher fond of saying, “We have a War Department. Wouldn’t it be a splendid thing, boys and girls, if we had a Peace Department, too?” In 1934 the Convention of Episcopal Bishops resolved that “The Christian Church… refuses to respond to that form of cheap patriotism that has as its slogan, ‘In time of peace prepare for war.’” Their congregations approved. (So did Adolf Hitler. “Those who support the pacifist ideal,” he observed, “inevitably support efforts to conquer the world to its fullest.”) Scarcely anyone in America was paying attention to Germany’s new Führer; even the Veterans of Foreign Wars were campaigning for 25 million signatures to convince Congress that more neutrality legislation was needed. Among those who needed no persuasion was Senator Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota. Nye was chairman of the Senate Munitions Investigating Subcommittee—his chief assistant legal counsel was Alger Hiss—and he achieved the ultimate in scapegoatism by uniting villainous Wall Street financiers with foreign warmongers. “We didn’t win a thing we set out for in the last war,” he cried from podiums across the land. “We merely succeeded, with tremendous loss of life, to make secure the loans of private bankers to the Allies.”
Among college students wealthy enough to defy tradition, militant pacifism was something of a cult. Their poorer classmates, although usually silent, agreed with them. In a national poll, 39 percent of undergraduates said they would not participate in any war, and another 33 percent said they would do so only if the United States were invaded. At Columbia and Berkeley, strongholds of pacifism, only 8 percent were willing to fight under any circumstances. In 1935 over 150,000 students demonstrated in a nationwide Student Strike for Peace, despite attempts to intimidate them at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and CCNY. Subsequently a half-million undergraduates signed a pledge that if Congress declared war they would refuse to serve. Their concept of what they called “the system” was not far removed from “the establishment” their children would later learn to loathe. They were opposed to compulsory ROTC, violations of academic freedom and student rights, and Fascist activities; they wanted reform of college administrations. Radicals were members of the Student League for Industrial Democracy (SLID), a forerunner of the Students for a Democratic Society. Their bible was SLID’s Blueprint for Action: A Handbook for Student Revolutionists. Among the more memorable undergraduate pests were James Wechsler of Columbia, Eric Sevareid of the University of Minnesota, and Clark Kerr, Swarthmore ’32.
The character of “the movement” (it was called that, too) varied from one campus to another. At Minnesota “We didn’t like the leaders we observed in political life, and we didn’t like the university authorities, who we thought were merely serving the system and not the cause of truth,” Sevareid recalled. “Of all the instruments designed to uphold the existing order, I think we most hated the military establishment…. We began to detest the very word ‘patriotism,’ which we considered to be debased, to be a synonym for chauvinism.” ROTC was the target of the demonstrations in which Sevareid participated, and on his campus they abolished it.
Princetonians treated the military as a sick joke, advertising themselves as members of a new VFW—Veterans of Future Wars. Vassar played hostess to a national convention of the supermilitant American Student Union. When the president of the College of the City of New York received a delegation of Italian Fascist students, his own undergraduates hissed; he called them “guttersnipes,” and next day CCNY blossomed with lapel buttons reading, “I am a guttersnipe.” The president broke up one meeting of militants by swatting them with his umbrella. Such retaliation was rare, but not unknown. A less primitive reaction occurred at the University of Pittsburgh, which invited General MacArthur to speak at commencement. The leaders of a protest demonstration were arrested and fined. A higher court reversed the conviction, but the following week matriculating Pitt students were required to swear allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, the Pennsylvania laws, and the university regulations. The university business manager explained to the press, “We want right-minded students here.”
***
The vast majority of undergraduates were, if not right-minded, at least well-behaved. Then, as now, the militants were a tiny minority—1 percent at CCNY; three-tenths of 1 percent nationally. By demonstrating, marching for the rights of labor, raising money for the Scottsboro Boys, and picketing Hearst newsreels they created a lot of noise, as later in the decade a quite different group made front pages by swallowing goldfish. Generalizing from a small sample is a peculiarly American failing. In 1970 a national advertiser taunted middle-aged Americans by running a photograph of a 1930s marathon dance and asking pawkily, “Now What Were You Saying About Today’s Youth?” He was under the impression that marathon dance contestants had been exhibitionists. Quite the contrary; they were submitting themselves to an appalling torture in hope of winning a little desperately needed cash.
As members of the locked-out generation, most college students of the 1930s were preoccupied with acquiring marketable skills. The Depression hit their age group hardest; in January 1935 there were still several million youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four who were on relief, and a college president told his seniors that the 150,000 students being awarded degrees that June were emerging into a society which did not want them. Fortune polled twenty-five universities and concluded that undergraduates wanted a haven in a “job that is guaranteed to be safe and permanent.” Wryly they chanted:
I sing in praise of college,
Of M.A.s and Ph.D.s
But in pursuit of knowledge
We are starving by degrees.
It was a poor joke. With tuition out of reach for 80 percent of American parents, a diploma often represented a four-year fight for survival. It was not unknown for undergraduates to work forty hours a week when school was in session and eighty-four hours a week during vacations. A study at Duquesne University found students employed as filling station attendants, undertakers’ h
elpers, railroad firemen, steel mill laborers, and tombstone cutters; one Duquesne boy held 27 odd jobs on campus and in adjacent Pittsburgh. At the University of Michigan, Arthur Miller washed dishes for board and earned $15 a month from the NYA by feeding a building full of mice. He lived on that. At Minnesota, Hubert Humphrey couldn’t afford textbooks, so he used those in the university library.
Working one’s way through college has never been easy, and considering the rigors of a depressed economy it is something of a marvel that anyone made it. For ambitious youth, the challenges of the Depression continued right down to Pearl Harbor. That was not true of the rest of middle-class America, however. By the third year of the Roosevelt administration the country had drawn back from the abyss, and Jonathan Mitchell could write in the New Republic, “It feels good to have money again…. Happy days are here again. Of course, things aren’t so good…. A man can be fired, and next morning there are ten men in line waiting for his job. But the unemployed have been around a long time. No one can expect us to sit home and be sympathetic indefinitely.” There was even enough change around to provide allowances for adolescent children. Not much, to be sure; not enough to support a Woodstock Nation; but sufficient to finance a few fads and some bizarre badges of juvenile distinction.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 19
