March 31, 1933: The film Gabriel Over the White House premieres, directed by Gregory LaCava, and written by Carey Wilson, based upon the recently-published novel Rinehard: A Melodrama of the Nineteen-Thirties by Thomas F. Tweed. (He was a British author and hero of World War I, and no relation to the legendary American political "boss" William M. Tweed.)
Walter Huston plays a corrupt and philandering President, Judd Hammond, who nearly dies in a car crash, and, believing himself to have been visited by the Archangel Gabriel, changes his ways, using broad executive power to solve the nation's problems, before dying of a heart attack.
The film was backed by media mogul William Randolph Hearst, whose own Presidential ambitions were thwarted about 30 years earlier. He thought, at the depth of the Great Depression, that America needed a dictator to get out of it.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in office for merely 27 days, is said to have seen and liked the film. He didn't go as far as Hammond, but he did take steps few Presidents before him would have. Among these was, on this day, the founding of the Civilian Conservation Corps.
The CCC, one of the "alphabet soup" programs of FDR's "New Deal," was not only a major blow against unemployment, it was also one of the country's earliest steps forward in environmental work. It ran until 1942, when World War II made the CCC's staffing impossible, and no longer necessary from a jobs standpoint.
*
March 31, 1933 was a Wednesday. Country singer Anita Carter was born. She was a member of the singing Carter Family. Through her sister June, she was a sister-in-law of Johnny Cash. And she was a distant cousin of later President Jimmy Carter.
Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. And the Stanley Cup Playoffs were underway, but no games were scheduled. So there were no scores on this historic day.
No comments:
Post a Comment