The federal government imposed a new gasoline tax to fund roadmaking.
Among popular
films:
42nd Street
Duck Soup
directed
by Leo McCarey starring the Marx Brothers
Flying Down to Rio
starring Dolores Del Rio, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire
Footlight
Parade
starring James Cagney and Joan Blondell
Gold Diggers of
1933
starring
Ginger Rogers, Joan Blondell and Dick Powell
King Kong
starring Fay
Wray
Little Women directed by
George Cukor and starring
Katherine
Hepburn and Joan Bennett
Queen Christina starring Greta
Garbo
and
John Gilbert
She Done Him Wrong starring Cary
Grant and Mae
West.
Fiction included Erkstine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, Jack
Conroy’s The Disinherited, James Gould Cozzens The Last Adam,
Josephine Herbst’s Pity is Not Enough, Meyer Levin’s The
New Bridge,
and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonleyhearts.
Popular Songs included: “I Like Mountain Music” by Frank Weldon
and James Cavenaugh, “Lazybones” by Hoagey Carmichael and Johnny
Mercer, “Let’s Fall in Love” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, “Love is
the Sweetest Thing” by Ray Noble, “It’s Only a Paper Moon” by Harold
Arlen, E.Y. Harburg and
Billy Rose, “Sophisticated Lady” by Duke Ellington, Irving Mills and
Mitchell
Parish, “Stormy Weather” by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler.
Darryl Zanuck
of Warner Brothers organized 20th Century Pictures.
Disney
produced the animated Three Little Pigs with the song “Who’s
Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” by Frank E. Churchill.
Frequency modulations (FM) permitted radio reception without static.
Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
January 24: Noel Coward’s Design for
Living opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater.
March: Frances
Perkins became the
first woman cabinet member when President Roosevelt named her secretary
of labor.
March 5: President Roosevelt
declared a four-day national bank holiday.
March 9: Congress passed the
Emergency Banking Act.
May: The New
Deal Legislation was
passed.
May 27: The Century
of Progress
World’s Fair opened in Chicago; fan dancer Sally Rand performed.
June 6: The first
drive-in movie
theater opened in Camden, New Jersey by Richard M. Hollingshead Jr.
October: Esquire, the first magazine
for men, was published.
October 24: Mulatto by Langston
Hughes opened at New York’s Vanderbilt Theater.
December 5: The
prohibition of the
sale of alcohol was repealed, despite six southern states which
remained dry.