The 1930s was the decade of Depression, the most catastrophicáeconomic downturn in history. As the terrible consequences of the 1929áWall Street crash spread across the country and around the world, moreáand more people were thrown out of work and into poverty and desperateáhardship, with nowhere to turn for help. The U.S. government for theáfirst time intervened massively in the economy to try to promoteárecovery, with limited success but with repercussions that would changeáforever the way citizens related to their government.
The decade was also overshadowed by aggressive, expansiveátotalitarianism. Josef Stalin consolidated his despotic power in theáSoviet Union; economically ruined Germany proved fertile ground foráAdolf Hitler's race-based National Socialism. Fascist Italy's BenitoáMussolini got away with aggression in Ethiopia, Imperial Japan ináChina, and Germany found its territorial ambitions "appeased" by theáWest in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Three of the totalitarian powersápracticed their martial arts in Spain's civil war, rehearsing for theáglobal conflict whose outbreak ended the decade.
TIME CAPSULE/THE 30s has been adapted and condensed from the contentsáof TIME, the Weekly Newsmagazine. The words, except for connectingápassages ((..)) are those of the magazines itself. The dateáat the beginning of the excerpt is the issue date of theámagazine.
TIME of 50 or more years ago was very different from today'sámagazine, reflecting an era far removed in its experience, assumptions,áattitudes and prejudices from the contemporary world. TIME stories ofáthe 1930s are often brash, arrogant and patronizing, sometimes wittilyásophisticated, sometimes touchingly naive, and occasionally howlinglyáfunny in their ignorance. The magazine had a well-developed socialáconscience, which it showed by reporting every Southern lynching of theádecade in all its horror and by faithfully chronicling the worseningáindignities visited on Germany's Jews; at the same time, it could titleáa story on a Faulkner novel, "Nigger in the Woodpile," and refer to theáSocialist Premier of France as "Jew Blum."
The selection in this TIME CAPSULE, while reflecting the way theámagazine looked and read then, were made with a view to avoiding someáof the more egregious solecisms of the era. But the acts of selectingáthe texts and writing the bridging passages necessarily reflect theáassumptions and attitudes, conscious or unconscious, of this decade andáof its editor.
