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1930s

<imagemap>File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson shows the effects of the Great Depression; due to extreme drought conditions, farms across the south-central United States become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads; The Empire of Japan invades China, which eventually leads to the Second Sino-Japanese War. In 1937, Japanese soldiers massacre civilians in Nanjing; aviator Amelia Earhart becomes an American flight icon; German dictator Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party attempt to establish a New Order of German hegemony in Europe, which culminates in 1939 when Germany invades Poland, leading to the outbreak of World War II. The Nazis also persecute Jews in Germany, specifically with Kristallnacht in 1938; the Hindenburg explodes over a small New Jersey airfield, causing 36 deaths and effectively ending commercial airship travel; Mohandas Gandhi walks to the Arabian Sea in the Salt March of 1930.|335px|thumb rect 1 1 174 226 Great Depression rect 177 1 375 121 Dust Bowl rect 177 124 275 226 Second Sino-Japanese War rect 276 124 375 226 Rape of Nanking rect 378 1 497 226 Amelia Earhart rect 1 229 221 353 Salt March rect 1 357 221 488 Hindenburg disaster rect 225 230 359 488 Nazi Invasion of Poland rect 361 230 497 488 Kristallnacht </imagemap>

The 1930s (pronounced "nineteen-thirties"; shortened to the "30s" and referred to as the "Thirties") was the decade that began on January 1, 1930 and ended on December 31, 1939. In the United States, the Dust Bowl led to the nickname the "Dirty Thirties".

The decade was defined by a global economic and political crisis that culminated in the Second World War. It saw the collapse of the international financial system, beginning with the Wall Street crash of 1929, the largest stock market crash in American history. The subsequent economic downfall, called the Great Depression, had traumatic social effects worldwide, leading to widespread poverty and unemployment, especially in the economic superpower of the United States and in Germany, which was already struggling with the payment of reparations for the First World War. The Dust Bowl in the United States (which led to the nickname the "Dirty Thirties") exacerbated the scarcity of wealth. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, introduced a program of broad-scale social reforms and stimulus plans called the New Deal in response to the crisis. The Soviet Union's second five-year plan gave heavy industry top priority, putting the Soviet Union not far behind Germany as one of the major steel-producing countries of the world, while also improving communications. First-wave feminism made advances, with women gaining the right to vote in South Africa (1930, whites only), Brazil (1933), and Cuba (1933). Following the rise of Adolf Hitler and the emergence of the NSDAP as the country's sole legal party in 1933, Germany imposed a series of laws which discriminated against Jews and other ethnic minorities.

Germany adopted an aggressive foreign policy, remilitarizing the Rhineland (1936), annexing Austria (1938) and the Sudetenland (1938), before invading Poland (1939) and starting World War II near the end of the decade. Italy likewise continued its already aggressive foreign policy, defeating the Libyan resistance (1932) before invading Ethiopia (1935) and then Albania (1939). Both Germany and Italy became involved in the Spanish Civil War, supporting the eventually victorious Nationalists led by Francisco Franco against the Republicans, who were in turn supported by the Soviet Union. The Chinese Civil War was halted due to the need to confront Japanese imperial ambitions, with the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party forming a Second United Front to fight Japan in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Lesser conflicts included interstate wars such as the Colombia–Peru War (1932–1933), the Chaco War (1932–1935) and the Saudi–Yemeni War (1934), as well as internal conflicts in Brazil (1932), Ecuador (1932), El Salvador (1932), Austria (1934) and British Palestine (1936–1939).

Severe famine took place in the major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union between 1930 and 1933, leading to 5.7 to 8.7 million deaths. Major contributing factors to the famine include: the forced collectivization in the Soviet Union of agriculture as a part of the First Five-Year Plan, forced grain procurement, combined with rapid industrialization, a decreasing agricultural workforce, and several severe droughts. A famine of similar scope also took place in China from 1936 to 1937, killing 5 million people. The 1931 China floods caused 422,499–4,000,000 deaths. Major earthquakes of this decade include the 1935 Quetta earthquake (30,000–60,000 deaths) and the 1939 Erzincan earthquake (32,700–32,968 deaths).

With the advent of sound in 1927, the musical—the genre best placed to showcase the new technology—took over as the most popular type of film with audiences, with the animated musical fantasy film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) becoming the highest-grossing film of this decade in terms of gross rentals. In terms of distributor rentals, Gone with the Wind (1939), an epic historical romance film, was the highest-grossing film of this decade and remains the highest-grossing film (when adjusted for inflation) to this day. Popularity of comedy films boomed after the Silent era with popular comedians The Three Stooges and Marx Brothers. Popular novels of this decade include the historical fiction novels The Good Earth, Anthony Adverse and Gone with the Wind, all three of which were best-selling novels in the United States for 2 consecutive years. Cole Porter was a popular music artist in the 1930s, with two of his songs, "Night and Day" and "Begin the Beguine" becoming No. 1 hits in 1932 and 1935 respectively. The latter song was of the Swing genre, which had begun to emerge as the most popular form of music in the United States since 1933.

The world population increased from 2.05 to 2.25 billion people during the decade, with about 750 million births and 550 million deaths.

Politics and wars

Wars

Internal conflicts

Major political changes

Germany – Rise of Nazism

United States – Combating the Depression

  • Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected President of the United States in November 1932. Roosevelt initiates a widespread social welfare strategy called the "New Deal" to combat the economic and social devastation of the Great Depression. The economic agenda of the "New Deal" was a radical departure from previous laissez-faire economics.

Saudi Arabia – Founding

Spain – Turmoil and Civil War

Colonization

Decolonization and independence

Other prominent political events

Europe

Africa

  • J. B. M. Hertzog of South Africa, whose National Party had won the 1929 election alone after splitting with the Labour Party, received much of the blame for the devastating economic impact of the Depression.

Americas

Asia

Australia

Disasters

  • The China floods of 1931 are among the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded.
  • The 1935 Labor Day Hurricane makes landfall in the Florida Keys as a Category 5 hurricane and the most intense hurricane to ever make landfall in the Atlantic basin. It caused an estimated $6 million (1935 USD) in damages and killed around 408 people. The hurricane's strong winds and storm surge destroyed nearly all of the structures between Tavernier and Marathon, and the town of Islamorada was obliterated.
  • The German dirigible airship Hindenburg explodes in the sky above Lakehurst, New Jersey, United States on May 6, 1937, killing 36 people. The event leads to an investigation of the explosion and the disaster causes major public distrust of the use of hydrogen-inflated airships and seriously damages the reputation of the Zeppelin company.
  • The New London School in New London, Texas, is destroyed by an explosion, killing in excess of 300 students and teachers (1937).
  • The New England Hurricane of 1938, which became a Category 5 hurricane before making landfall as a Category 3. The hurricane was estimated to have caused property losses of US$306 million ($4.72 billion in 2010), killed between 682 and 800 people, and damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, including the home of famed actress Katharine Hepburn, who had been staying in her family's Old Saybrook, Connecticut, beach home when the hurricane struck.
  • The Dust Bowl, or "Dirty Thirties", a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). Caused by extreme drought coupled with strong winds and decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops, or other techniques to prevent erosion, it affected an estimated of land (traveling as far east as New York and the Atlantic Ocean), caused mass migration (which was the inspiration for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck), food shortages, multiple deaths and illness from sand inhalation, and a severe reduction in the going wage rate.
  • The 1938 Yellow River flood pours out from Huayuankou, China, inundating of land and killing an estimated 500,000 people.

Assassinations and attempts

Prominent assassinations, targeted killings, and assassination attempts include:

Economics

  • The Great Depression is considered to have begun with the fall of stock prices on September 4, 1929, and then the stock market crash known as Black Tuesday on October 29, 1929, and lasted through much of the 1930s.
  • The entire decade is marked by widespread unemployment and poverty, although deflation (i.e. falling prices) was limited to 1930–32 and 1938–39. Prices fell 7.02% in 1930, 10.06% in 1931, 9.79% in 1932, 1.41% in 1938 and 0.71% in 1939.
  • Economic interventionist policies increase in popularity as a result of the Great Depression in both authoritarian and democratic countries. In the Western world, Keynesianism replaces classical economic theory.
  • In an effort to reduce unemployment, the United States government created work projects such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which was a public work relief program that operated from 1933 to 1942 to maintain National Parks and build roads. Other major U.S. government work projects included Hoover Dam which was constructed between 1931 and 1936.
  • Rapid industrialization takes place in the Soviet Union.
  • Prohibition in the United States ended in 1933. On December 5, 1933, the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment repealed the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
  • Drought conditions in Oklahoma and Texas caused the Dust Bowl which forced tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms and seek employment elsewhere.

Science and technology

Technology

Many technological advances occurred in the 1930s, including:

Science

Popular culture

Literature and art

Best-selling books

The best-selling books of every year in the United States were as follows:

Film

Highest-grossing films

Radio

  • Radio becomes dominant mass media in industrial nations, serving as a way for citizens to listen to music and get news- providing rapid reporting on current events.
  • October 30, 1938: Orson Welles' radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds is broadcast, causing panic in various parts of the United States.

Music

The most popular music of each year was as follows:

Fashion

The most characteristic North American fashion trend from the 1930s to 1945 was attention at the shoulder, with butterfly sleeves and banjo sleeves, and exaggerated shoulder pads for both men and women by the 1940s. The period also saw the first widespread use of man-made fibers, especially rayon for dresses and viscose for linings and lingerie, and synthetic nylon stockings. The zipper became widely used. These essentially U.S. developments were echoed, in varying degrees, in Britain and Europe. Suntans (called at the time "sunburns") became fashionable in the early 1930s, along with travel to the resorts along the Mediterranean, in the Bahamas, and on the east coast of Florida where one can acquire a tan, leading to new categories of clothes: white dinner jackets for men and beach pajamas, halter tops, and bare midriffs for women.

Revolutionary designer and couturier Madeleine Vionnet gained popularity for her bias-cut technique, which clung, draped, and embraced the curves of the natural female body. Fashion trendsetters in the period included The Prince of Wales (King Edward VIII from January 1936 until his abdication that December) and his companion Wallis Simpson (the Duke and Duchess of Windsor from their marriage in June 1937), socialites like Nicolas de Gunzburg, Daisy Fellowes and Mona von Bismarck, and Hollywood movie stars such as Fred Astaire, Carole Lombard, and Joan Crawford.

Typical fashions in the 1930s:

Architecture

Visual arts

Social realism became an important art movement during the Great Depression in the United States in the 1930s. Social realism generally portrayed imagery with socio-political meaning. Other related American artistic movements of the 1930s were American scene painting and Regionalism which were generally depictions of rural America, and historical images drawn from American history. Precisionism with its depictions of industrial America was also a popular art movement during the 1930s in the USA. During the Great Depression the art of photography played an important role in the Social Realist movement. The work of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Lewis Hine, Edward Steichen, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Marion Post Wolcott, Doris Ulmann, Berenice Abbott, Aaron Siskind, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn (as a photographer) among several others were particularly influential.

The Works Progress Administration part of the Roosevelt Administration's New Deal sponsored the Federal Art Project, the Public Works of Art Project, and the Section of Painting and Sculpture which employed many American artists and helped them to make a living during the Great Depression.

Mexican muralism was a Mexican art movement that took place primarily in the 1930s. The movement stands out historically because of its political undertones, the majority of which of a Marxist nature, or related to a social and political situation of post-revolutionary Mexico. Also in Latin America Symbolism and Magic Realism were important movements.

In Europe during the 1930s and the Great Depression, Surrealism, late Cubism, the Bauhaus, De Stijl, Dada, German Expressionism, Symbolist and modernist painting in various guises characterized the art scene in Paris and elsewhere.

People

Scientists and engineers

Actors/entertainers

Filmmakers

Musicians

Influential artists

Painters and sculptors

Photography

Sports figures

Global

United States

Criminals

Prominent criminals of the Great Depression:

See also

Timeline

The following articles contain brief timelines which list the most prominent events of the decade:

References

Books and magazines on film

Works cited

Further reading

  • Allen, Frederick Lewis. Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-thirties in America (1939) online
  • Brendon, Piers. The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (2000) global political history; 816pp excerpt
  • Cornelissen, Christoph, and Arndt Weinrich, eds. Writing the Great War – The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present (2020) free download; full coverage for major countries.
  • Cunningham, Valentine, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford University Press, 1988)
  • Gardiner, Juliet, The Thirties: An Intimate History. London, Harper Press, 2010. on Britain
  • Garraty, John A. The Great Depression: An Inquiry into the Causes, Course, and Consequences of the Worldwide Depression of the Nineteen-Thirties, As Seen by Contemporaries (1986).
  • Grenville, J.A.S. A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (Harvard UP, 1994) pp 160–251.
  • Grossman, Mark. Encyclopedia of the Interwar Years: From 1919 to 1939 (2000). 400pp. worldwide coverage
  • Lewis, Thomas Tandy, ed. The Thirties in America. 3 volumes. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2011.
  • Matera, Marc, and Susan Kingsley Kent. The Global 1930s: The International Decade (Routledge, 2017) online
  • Watt D.C. et al., A History of the World in the Twentieth Century (1968) pp 423–463.

External links

  • The Dirty Thirties – Images of the Great Depression in Canada
  • America in the 1930s Extensive library of projects on America in the Great Depression from American Studies at the University of Virginia
  • The 1930s Timeline year by year timeline of events in science and technology, politics and society, culture and international events with embedded audio and video. AS@UVA