T H E T U M U L T U O U S THIRTIES

World-wide economic depression, political ferment, artistic flowering and lighthearted entertainment made for a fascinating decade.

The 1930s saw a great Depression and the gathering clouds of war. Yet it was a decade of cultural and political intensity, of radical ideas and behaviours, and of joyful, frivolous entertainments that delighted and distracted. Nazism and Fascism took root in economically shattered and demoralised parts of Europe, and in England, King Edward VIII astounded the nation when he abdicated the throne to marry American divorcee Wallis Warfield Simpson. In the US, intellectuals were embracing Marx and Freud, but more Americans were finding pure escapism appealing, with Broadway and film musical extravaganzas, society scandals and sports fitting the bill. The thirties sparkled with character and characters, from baseball greats Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, African-American boxing champion Joe Louis and track star Jesse Owens (whose prowess humiliated the Aryan supremacist Germans at the 1936 Berlin Olympics), to tunesmiths Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, the Gershwins, Rodgers, Hart and Hammerstein and bandleaders Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Duke Ellington and Glenn Miller. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal pioneered American social programs, including the WPA, which put artists, craftspeople, writers and photographers to work making public art and documenting folk music and everyday life. The fine arts also flourished, with the work of artists such as Picasso, Diego Rivera, Matisse and Georgia O'Keefe, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and modern choreographer Martha Graham. Hard-boiled detective fiction was born, Disney began producing early animated classics such as Pinocchio, the art-deco Chrysler Building and the Golden Gate Bridge were constructed, and Albert Einstein revolutionised physics. Women began to hold elected office, and divorce, birth control and respect were all a little easier to come by. The guilt of German immigrant Bruno Hauptmann, executed for the kidnap and murder of the Lindbergh baby, is still disputed today. Radio reporter Herb Morrison, emotional eyewitness to the explosion of the dirigible Hindenburg, uttered the famous line "Oh, the humanity." This was the golden age of songwriting, as vaudeville, black spiritual, ragtime and jazz influences combined with Eastern European folk traditions in the tunes of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. Enduring standards of the decade include "My Funny Valentine," "These Foolish Things," "My Baby Just Cares for Me" and "Moonlight Serenade." Music offered a path for African Americans to flourish, and Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong and Paul Robeson became mainstream entertainers. African- American life also became a legitimate theme for stage and page. Showboat and Porgy and Bess set recent American history to music.

THE SILVER SCREEN

Despite, or perhaps because of, reinvigorated censorship regulations, films of the thirties included some of Hollywood's most innuendo-laden dialogue and inventively suggestive scenes. The "screwball comedy" was born in the work of directors like Frank Capra and Howard Hawks. Directors like Bunuel, Renoir, Eisenstein, Lubitsch and Hitchcock crafted some of the finest films ever made. And talkies created a new crop of stars, including Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Jean Gabin, Cary Grant, Norma Shearer, John Barrymore, James Cagney, Clark Gable and Edward G. Robinson. Shirley Temple and the Three Stooges provided lighter antics for audiences.

BETWEEN THE PAGES

Dashiell Hammett and James Cain carved out new literary terrain with their detective noir tales. Thomas Wolfe explored the disorientation created by the mobility of modern society, and John Steinbeck cast an unsentimental eye on the disenfranchised. Great works came from Hemingway, Lewis, West, Powell and writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston