It was 1936. Franklin Roosevelt won reelection to a second term. King George V of England died. The Hoover Dam was completed. Peter and the Wolf made its debut in Moscow. Bruno Richard Hauptmann has executed for kidnapping the Lindbergh baby. Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Hitler introduced the Volkswagon. The Queen Mary made her maiden voyage. Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis in Yankee Stadium. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson became the first inductees in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Gone with the Wind was published. Jesse Owens won gold at the Berlin Summer Olympics. Syria won its independence from France. The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge opened. King Edward VIII of England abdicated and King George VI took over. Alan Alda, Roy Orbison, Ursula Andress, Burt Reynolds, Marion Barry (mayor of DC), Engelbert Humperdinck, James Dobson, Dennis Hopper, Harmon Killebrew, Silvio Berlusconi, John McCain, and Wilt Chamberlain were born. And Billie Holiday sang the following.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Doesn’t Dennis Hopper try to pass himself off as a boomer in those investment commercials?
And James Dobson tries to pass himself off to be a Man of God.
In kids marketing. The goofs in a Juice Box or Hot Wheels commercial will be older than the target audience. I suppose it is selling to their aspirations. In this case the desire to be money grubbing, right wing asshole hippies.
Well, Hopper is something of a Boomer icon, given his role in the making of “Easy Rider”.
Bruno Richard Hauptmann probably was innocent. My sense of it based on reading one book and seeing one doc and a movie on the case years ago. Best case I saw developed to some degree involved the real perpetrator being Lindy’s apparently emotionally troubled sister-in-law (the possibly jealous girl Lindy had actually dated first before meeting and marrying her sister). The killing might have been an act of insane emotional rage or it could have been an accident; the kidnapping angle was faked by Lindy to make it look like an outside job.
FDR and re-election: Isn’t it interesting that a president most consider one of the most politically astute ever to hold that office decided to follow up on his historic landslide by then quickly making two large political blunders — the sneeky Court packing scheme, and the Hooveresque decision to cut economic recovery programs while seeking a balanced budget.
But the court-packing scheme, while hugely unpopular with the public, did eventually have the desired result for Roosevelt. The anti-New Deal justices (especially Frankfurter, I believe) mostly backed down, and then retired soon after.
Well, that gets into a tricky Court chronology that’s misleading. The so-called “switch in time that saved Nine” actually occurred when a swing Justice, Owen Roberts, voted earlier in private conference and after oral arguments to switch his vote from against to in favor of upholding the minimum wage legislation in question.
But since one J was absent by illness (and he was expected to vote to uphold also), the CJ had a final vote postponed. This was all several months before FDR announced his Court “packing” plan. The final 5-4 vote and decision to uphold — largely a foregone conclusion once Roberts had earlier switched his vote — didn’t come until after FDR went public, thus making it seem Roosevelt had influenced the final outcome. Later in 1937, an anti-New Deal Justice, Van deVanter, did retire.
As for J Frankfurter, he wasn’t appointed by FDR until 1939, iirc.
Very interesting stuff. And weird about Frankfurter – I could have sworn I read some opinion of his in law school that was very anti-New Deal, but as you point out that just doesn’t jibe with the chronology.
More than anything, it seems that FDR got the Court that he wanted just by outlasting most of them.
There were a few other interesting events in 1936. Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, breaking the Treaty of Versailles, Italy annexed Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War began, Stalin’s Moscow Show Trials began, and Italy & Germany signed a treaty leading to the Axis alignment.
Some other births, too: Ralph Abernathy, Marge Piercy, Glenda Jackson, Ken Loach, Yves Saint-Laurent, Robert Redford, Jim Henson, and Vaclav Havel.