A Toy for Toddlers Before the 1930s and the Label of Each Art

Civilization in the Thirties

Despite the Groovy Depression, civilisation in the 1930s, both commercial and funded by New Deal programs as part of the relief attempt, flourished.

Learning Objectives

Draw the civilization in the 1930s

Key Takeaways

Key Points

• Despite the Great Low 'southward devastating touch on many Americans, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of many influential cultural trends. Literature, arts, music, and cinema of the period became vehicles for establishing and promoting what would exist presented  every bit truly American traditions and values.
• A number of New Deal programs were established to back up artists, writers, musicians, and theater professionals. Projects funded through these programs were oftentimes seen as serving an of import mission of bringing culture and arts to the masses.
• Fine arts followed both global and regional trends, including Social Realism, American Regionalism, and Precisionism. Photography also became a pop medium of documenting the lives of ordinary Americans.
• The 1930s came to be known every bit the "golden age" of Hollywood. Many popular low-upkeep and epic expensive movies that reached the status of archetype were produced during the period.
• The Motion Motion picture (or Hollywood) Production Code of 1930 forbade certain subjects from beingness addressed or portrayed in film.
• The 1930s were also a very important and productive decade for American literature.

Primal Terms

• Public Works of Art Project: The first New Bargain program that employed artists to create public art works. It ran from December 1933 to June 1934.
• Section of Painting and Sculpture: A New Bargain program that aimed to select high quality art to decorate public buildings in the form of murals, making art accessible to all people.
• Federal Fine art Project: The visual arts arm of the Federal Project Number One (under the Works Progress Administration) operating from August 29, 1935, until June 30, 1943. Through the programme, artists created posters, murals, and paintings, some of which withal stand among the most significant pieces of public art in the country.
• Motility Movie (or Hollywood) Product Code of 1930: A set of rules and guidelines that major Hollywood picture show studios agreed upon under the pressure level of Christian leaders and organizations that sought to remove what was considered obscene and indecent from the picture show industry.

The Keen Low and American Culture

Despite the Great Depression's devastating impact on many Americans, the 1930s witnessed the emergence of many influential cultural trends. Historians note that literature, arts, music, and movie house of the flow flourished and became vehicles for establishing and promoting what would exist presented as truly American traditions and values–a phenomenon that was a response to the demoralizing effect of the economic crunch. The New Deal, with its core idea of the regime'southward intervention in the economic system, politics, and social life, included also programs that funded and promoted various cultural projects, many of them focusing on the documentation of the feel of ordinary Americans during the dramatic economic depression.

The New Deal and Civilisation

The first short-lived New Bargain programme that supported cultural projects was the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) that ran from Dec 1933 to June 1934. PWAP was a relief plan that created jobs for artists who were hired to pigment scenes depicting contemporary ordinary American life in public buildings and spaces. PWAP was replaced by the Federal Art Project (FAP), one of the cultural programs under the 1935 Works Progress Administration (WPA) and a much more aggressive and expansive arts plan than its predecessor. FAP provided funding for artists and artisans to create murals, easel paintings, sculpture, graphic art, posters, photography, theater design, and craft. Information technology established more than 100 community art centers throughout the country, researched and documented American design, commissioned a meaning body of public art without restriction to content or discipline matter, and sustained some 10,000 artists and craft workers during the Peachy Depression. Additionally, in 1934, the Section of Painting and Sculpture was established in social club to commission high quality murals in public buildings. Artists worked with government-provided guidelines that focused on realistic themes relevant to the life of local communities.

FAP was part of the Federal Project Number I, a WPA umbrella program that supported not only visual arts but besides literature (under the Federal Writers' Project), music (the Federal Music Project), and theater (the Federal Theater Project). Writers, musicians, and theater artists were funded to create both their own original projects and projects under the auspices of the government. Documenting what was seen as American traditions collection many of the latter. For example, literary professionals were hired to produce the State Guide Series–a series of pop guidebooks for every state. Writers and musicians engaged in a series of ethnographic and archival projects that aimed to preserve American history and cultural legacy, including collecting oral histories amid former slaves, recording traditional folk songs, or preserving and organizing archival collections. Public funding was likewise used to make theater productions hands available to mass audiences.

Arts

Visual arts in the U.s.a. of the 1930s followed both global and regional trends. Many of the works created under WPA belonged to Social Realism–an international art movement that depicted the everyday life of ordinary people, almost notably, the working class and the poor. The movement's aim was non simply to represent but to critique the realities of social inequalities and injustice. Related to Social Realism was American Regionalism, which depicted rural America, both realistic and as a subject of myths and folk legends, as well as images drawn from American history. Regionalism and Social Realism are sometimes described as a rural co-operative and an urban branch (respectively) of American Scene Painting, although borders between the meanings of these 3 terms are not ever clear. Another movement of the era, Precisionism, focused on images of urban industrial America. While sometimes differences between artists and art works belonging to these movements may exist blurry, the one feature that they all shared was realism, or focusing on depicting American life as it was.

The commitment to realism resulted too in the popularization of photography. For example, under the Subcontract Security Administration, a New Deal agency that aimed to combat rural poverty, photographers documented rural areas and the misery of working course rural Americans. The works of such photographers as Dorothea Lange or Walker Evans remain amongst the nigh iconic images of the Corking Depression. Much afterwards, these documentary photography projects would be criticized for their racial bias. Despite the fact that at the fourth dimension, and then many poor rural Americans were blackness, the New Deal photographs create an impression that poor rural America was predominantly white.

In compages and design, the 1930s was the height of Art Deco–an eclectic way inspired past industrialization that combines traditional arts and crafts motifs with Machine Age imagery and materials.

Migrant Female parent: Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother–an iconic image of the Great Depression–depicts Florence Owens Thompson, age 32, a mother of 7 children and a migrant worker, in Nipomo, California.

Hollywood

1930 marks the commencement of what is considered to be the "golden age" of Hollywood, a flow which lasted through the 1940s. The studio system was at its height, with studios having great control over creative decisions. While in the get-go years of the Great Depression all the major studios experienced losses (much less people went to see movies and ticket prices decreased), already in the mid-1930s, they began to record profits.

A lasting case of the studio influence was the Motion Movie (or Hollywood) Production Code of 1930 (known too as the Hays Code, subsequently Will H. Hays, who was the president of the Picture show Producers and Distributors of America). In response to a number of scandals in the 1920s and under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations, the studios adopted a series of topics that were to be avoided (e.k., strictly divers sexual content and ridicule of clergy) and guidelines for how certain topics should be depicted (e.g., a buss could non last longer than iii seconds). The lawmaking was not strictly implemented until 1934, when the Production Lawmaking Assistants was established. The PCA enforced the code past reviewing and making suggestions on all studio scripts before they went into production, then doing the same with all completed films before issuing a PCA certificate. Directors frequently found a way to manipulate the codes that were enforced more and more loosely during the post-World War menses and finally abandoned in the 1960s.

As the late 1920s witnessed the popularization and commercialization of a sound flick, both popular and more ambitious movie theatre flourished in the 1930s. A number of popular genres, including gangster films, musicals, comedies, or monster movies, attracted mass audiences, regardless of the economical crisis. Careers of some of iconic Hollywood's performers besides flourished in the 1930s, including Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Mae Due west, the Marx Brothers, Errol Flynn (all-time known for his role equally Robin Hood), or child star Shirley Temple. Charlie Chaplin, the greatest star of the silent era, successfully transitioned into sound film.

In improver to more pop and low-budget genres, the nigh acclaimed works of the menses were much more ambitious and expensive films with epic stories at their center. Adaptations of classic or best-selling literary works, biographies of famous individuals, and big adventure movies were the nigh common examples. Amid them are such classics of American cinema equally Male monarch Kong (1933), Anna Karenina (1935),The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Grapes of Wrath (1940).

Literature

The Great Depression produced some of the greatest works in American literature. Similar to visual artists, writers focused on edgeless and straight representation of American life and offered social criticism, coming often from the perspective of leftist political views. John Steinbeck (1902–1968) became the quintessential author of the era. He frequently wrote about poor, working-form people and their struggle to atomic number 82 a decent and honest life. The Grapes of Wrath, considered his masterpiece, is a socially-oriented novel that tells the story of the Joads, a poor family from Oklahoma, and their journey to California in search of a better life. Other popular novels include Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, and East of Eden. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

Other of import literary works of the Dandy Low that reached the condition of American classics include William Faulkner 's Absalom, Absalom!, Light in Baronial, and As I Lay Dying; F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Dark;Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God; John Dos Passos'southward U.S.A.trilogy; Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra; and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Amidst American authors in the 1930s who wrote their ordinarily more controversial or experimental and less realistic works were Gertrude Stein, who in 1933 published the memoir of her Paris years entitled The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and Henry Miller, who in the 1930s wrote and published his semi autobiographical novelsTropic of Cancer, Black Leap, and Tropic of Capricorn. Although their themes and stylistic innovations exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of American writers, Miller'due south groundbreaking novels were banned in the United States until the early on 1960s.

The 1930s too witnessed the evolution of pop literary genres. Lurid fiction magazines began to characteristic distinctive, gritty, adventure heroes that combined elements of difficult-boiled detective fiction and the fantastic adventures of the before lurid novels. Two especially noteworthy characters introduced were Doc Fell and The Shadow, who would later on influence the cosmos of characters such as Superman and Batman. Nigh the end of the decade, two of the globe'southward most iconic superheroes and recognizable fictional characters, Superman and Batman, were introduced in comic books.

Popular Culture

The 1930s witnessed the development of mass cultural trends fueled by contemporary technological advances, including radio and sound film.

Learning Objectives

Describe the popular culture of the 1930'southward

Primal Takeaways

Fundamental Points

• Despite the Corking Depression, popular civilisation flourished in the United states of america in the 1930s. Like to visual arts and literature, pop civilization of the era focused on emphasizing what was presented equally uniquely American experiences and contributions.
• Technological advances like radio and audio in film contributed to the massive popularity these forms of entertainment.
• Next to jazz, blues, gospel, and folk music, swing jazz became immensely popular in the 1930s.
• Radio, increasingly hands accessibly to nigh Americans, was the main source of entertainment, information, and political propaganda.
• Despite the Nifty Depression, Hollywood and popular picture show production flourished.
• The 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, Germany, were a key popular sporting event of the era that caused controversy over Hitler's politics.

Central Terms

• fireside chats: Term used to describe a series of 30 evening radio conversations (chats) given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt betwixt 1933 and 1944.
• Movement Picture (or Hollywood) Production Code of 1930: A ready of rules and guidelines that major Hollywood motion picture studios agreed upon under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations that sought to remove what was considered obscene and indecent from the movie industry.
• Leni Riefenstahl: An innovative and favorite filmmaker of Adolf Hitler. She was commissioned by the German Olympic Committee to movie the games for $vii million and her film, titled Olympia, pioneered many of the techniques now common in the filming of sports.

Despite the Corking Depression, pop culture flourished in the U.s. in the 1930s. Similar to visual arts and literature, pop culture of the era focused on emphasizing what was presented as uniquely American experiences and contributions. The mass popularization of civilisation was also linked to important technological advances. Many Americans, even in poor rural areas, had access to phonographs and radios. The latter was incredibly pop in the 1930s, becoming the critical source of information and entertainment. Another contemporary groundbreaking technological evolution was the popularization of sound picture. While in the first years of the Great Depression, Americans did not visit movie theaters as frequently as prior to the economical crisis, in the mid-1930s, movie house was one of the favorite forms of entertainment.

Music

Trends in popular music reflected social processes triggered by the economic crisis. Although the Great Migration of African Americans from the South (initiated around 1910) slowed down with the onset of the economic depression, hundreds of thousands of black Southerners connected to seek opportunities somewhere else, mostly in northern cities. With the transfer of people, music created and popularized by African Americans, including jazz, blues, and gospel, became increasingly popular in the North. Despite the existing racial inequalities and the ongoing black civil rights struggle, the American origins of these musical genres fit into the narrative of uniquely American cultural contributions. Analogously, American folk music, created and performed past both white performers and musicians of color, attracted mass audiences across the land. With their focus on the plight of ordinary Americans, folk songs were at present collected and recorded as part of the American legacy by the Library of Congress and artists working for the Works Progress Administration.

The 1920s (known as the "Jazz Age") witnessed the transformation of jazz from its small African American/New Orleans origin to a global phenomenon. By 1930, new forms and styles developed and swing emerged as a dominant grade in American music. Virtuoso soloists often led their swing big bands (thus swing was besides known as "big jazz") and their popularity was enormous, also because swing music developed with corresponding swing trip the light fantastic toe. Live swing bands were circulate on the radio nationally every evening. Among the virtually famous bandleaders and arrangers were Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, and Jimmie Lunceford. The pioneer of jazz music, Louis Armstrong, continued to inspire both mass audiences and fellow musicians. Musical theater also followed the predominant trend and contributed some of the most popular standards of the 1930s, including George and Ira Gershwin'southward "Summertime," Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart'south "My Funny Valentine," and Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's "All the Things You Are."

Swing uses a strong rhythm section of double bass and drums as the ballast for a lead section of brass instruments such as trumpets, trombones, saxophones, clarinets, and sometimes stringed instruments such as violin and guitar at medium to fast tempos and a "lilting" swing fourth dimension rhythm. The period betwixt 1935 and 1946 is known as the Swing Era.

Radio

The 1930s was the era of the immense popularity of radio. Those Americans who did non own a radio could still access one in their communities through friends or neighbors. Popular content spanned from comedy, with Bob Hope being one of the biggest comedic radio personalities of the time, and music, theater, and soap operas, to news and political content. Never earlier was radio used as such a powerful tool of broadcasting of political messages. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt informed about and advocated for New Deal policies in his fairly regular "fireside chats." His political opponents also used radio to attract their supporters. Huey Long and Charles Coughlin, FDR's 2 most fervent populist critics, built their vast popular back up through radio shows that attracted tens of millions of Americans. In 1938, Orson Welles' famous circulate of War of the Worlds by H.Thousand. Wells, acquired panic among the show'south listeners who feared that the disharmonize between humans and aliens (the subject of Wells' novel) was real. Although historians debate over how wide the audience of the show was and thus how widespread the panic could be, the episode demonstrates the incredible power of radio broadcast at the fourth dimension.

Fireside conversation on government and capitalism (September 30, 1934)

Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White Firm in Washington, D.C., delivering a national radio address in 1934. National Archives and Records Administration

Hollywood

1930 marks the beginning of what is considered to be the "golden historic period" of Hollywood, a period which lasted through the 1940s. The studio organisation was at its pinnacle, with studios having bully control over creative decisions. While in the start years of the Great Low all the major studios experienced losses (much less people went to see movies and ticket prices decreased), in the mid-1930s, they began to tape profits.

A lasting instance of the studio influence was the Motility Movie (or Hollywood) Production Code of 1930 (known also every bit the Hays Lawmaking, after Will H. Hays, who was the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America). In response to a number of scandals in the 1920s and under the pressure of Christian leaders and organizations, the studios adopted a serial of topics that were to be avoided (e.g., strictly defined sexual content and the ridicule of clergy) and guidelines for how certain topics should be depicted (eastward.yard., a osculation could non last longer than iii seconds). The code was not strictly implemented until 1934, when the Production Code Assistants was established. The PCA enforced the code by reviewing and making suggestions on all studio scripts before they went into production, then doing the same with all completed films before issuing a PCA certificate. Directors frequently found a way to dispense the codes that were enforced more than and more loosely during the mail-World War menses and finally abandoned in the 1960s.

Every bit the late 1920s witnessed the popularization and commercialization of a audio picture show, both popular and more aggressive cinema flourished in the 1930s. A number of popular genres, including gangster films, musicals, comedies, or monster movies, attracted mass audiences, regardless of the economic crunch. Careers of some of the iconic Hollywood'due south performers as well flourished in the 1930s, including Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Mae West, the Marx Brothers, Errol Flynn (all-time known for his function as Robin Hood), and kid star Shirley Temple. Charlie Chaplin, the greatest star of the silent era, successfully transitioned into audio film.

In addition to more than popular and low-budget genres, the nearly acclaimed works of the period were much more ambitious and expensive films with ballsy stories in their center. Adaptations of classic and acknowledged literary works, biographies of famous individuals, and big risk movies were the most common examples. Among them are such classics of American cinema as King Kong (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone With the Wind (1939), andGrapes of Wrath (1940).

1936 Summer Olympics

The 1936 Summer Olympics was an international multi-sport upshot that was held in Berlin, Germany. To outdo the Los Angeles games of 1932, the Nazis built a new 100,000-seat runway and field stadium, half dozen gymnasiums, and many other smaller arenas. The games were the commencement to exist televised, and radio broadcasts reached 41 countries. Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, a favorite of Adolf Hitler, was commissioned by the High german Olympic Committee to film the Games for $7 million. Her pic, entitled Olympia, pioneered many of the techniques at present common in the filming of sports.

Hitler saw the games equally an opportunity to promote his regime and its ethics of racial supremacy. The United States considered boycotting the games, every bit to participate in the festivity might be considered a sign of support for the Nazi regime and its anti-Semitic policies. Nonetheless, others argued that the Olympic Games should not reflect political views, but rather be strictly a contest of the greatest athletes. The 1936 Summertime Olympics ultimately boasted the largest number of participating nations of any Olympics to that point. However, some individual athletes, including Jewish Americans Milton Green and Norman Cahners, chose to boycott the games.

Jesse Owens: American track and field star Jesse Owens on the podium subsequently winning the long jump at the 1936 Summer Olympics.  He was the about successful athlete at the games and, as blackness man, was credited with disrupting Hitler's white supremacist vision and message.

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