1920's & 30's

 

 

CLICK HERE to view Jeanne's Junior Year, 1930, and Senior Year, 1931, Martins Ferry Yearbook, The Ferrian.

 

Many thanks to the Library Staff at Marting Ferry High School for providing these inages.

 

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What was happening in Jeanne's World

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The 1920's - Prosperity and Its Demise

January 10, 1920 - The League of Nations holds its first meeting and accomplishes the stratification of the Treaty of Versailles, ending the hostilities of the first World War.  Nine days later the United States Senate votes against joining the League.

 

The American American Professional Football League is formed in 1920 with Jim Thorpe as its president and eleven teams.  It would change its name to the National Football League in 1922.

 

August 18, 1920 - Women are given the right to vote when the 19th Amendment to the United States constitution grants universal women's suffrage.

 

November 1920 - A landslide victory for Warren G. Harding in both the Electoral College and popular vote returns the Republican Party to the White House.

 

For the first time, the 1920 census indicated a population in the United States over 100 million people.

 

July 2, 1921 - A Congressional resolution by both houses is signed by President Warren G. Harding, declaring peace in World War I hostilities with Germany, Austria, and Hungary.  The treaties would be executed one month later.

 

September 7-8, 1921 - The first Miss America pageant is held in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

 

May 30, 1922 - The Lincoln Memorial, located on the opposite end of the National Mall from the Capitol building, is dedicated in Washington, D.C.

 

August 2, 1923 - President Warren G. Harding dies in office after becoming ill following a trip to Alaska, and is succeeded by his Vice President, Calvin Coolidge.

 

Clarence Birdseye invents frozen food with his quick-freezing process.

 

January 25, 1924 - The first Winter Olympic Games are held in the French Alps in Chamonix, France with sixteen nations sending athletes to participate, including the United States, which won four medals.  \

 

June 15, 1924 - All Indians are designated citizens by legislation passed in the U.S. Congress and signed by President Calvin Coolidge.

 

November 1924 - Calvin Coolidge wins his first election as President, retaining the White House for the Republican Party

 

January 5, 1925 - Nellie Tayloe Ross is inaugurated as the first woman governor of the United States in Wyoming.

 

June 13, 1925 - Radiovision is born.  The precursor to television is demonstrated by Charles Francis Jenkins when he transmits at 10 minute film of synchronized pictures and sound for five miles from Anacostia to Washington, D.C. to representatives of the United States government.

 

July 10, 1924 - The Scopes Trial or "Monkey Trial" begins and would later convict John T. Scopes of teaching Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory at a Dayton, Tennessee high school, which violated Tennessee law.  He is fined $100 for the charge.

 

November 28, 1925 - The Grand Ole Opry transmits its first radio broadcast.

1926

May 9, 1926 - The first flight to the North Pole and back occurs when pilot Floyd Bennett, with Richard Evelyn Byrd as his navigator, guided a three-engine monoplane.  They were awarded the Medal of Honor for their achievement.

 

May 31, 1921 - The Sesqui-Centennial Exposition opened in Philadelphia to celebrate the one hundred and fiftieth birthday of the United States.

 

March 16, 1926 - Robert H. Goddard demonstrated the viability of the first liquid fueled rockets with his test in Auburn, Massachusetts.  The rocket flew one hundred and eighty-four feet over 2.5 seconds.

 

March 5, 1927 - The civil war in China prompts one thousand United States marines to land in order to protect property of United States interests.

 

April 22 to May 5, 1927 - The Great Mississippi Flood occurs, affecting over 700,000.

 

May 20, 1927 - Charles Lindbergh leaves Roosevelt Field, New York on the first non-stop transatlantic flight in history.  He would reach Paris thirty-three and one-half hours later in the Spirit of St. Louis, his aircraft.

 

August 10, 1927 - Work on the gigantic sculpture at Mount Rushmore began.  Sculptor Gutzon Borglum would complete the task of chiseling the busts of four presidents; George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt, fourteen years later.

 

October 6, 1927 - The advent of talking pictures emerges.  Al Jolson in the Jazz Singer debuts in New York City.

 

Television begins to emerge when American inventor Philo Taylor Farnsworth invented a complete electronic television system, its first success in 1927.  The system would be patented three years later on August 26, 1930.

 

May 15, 1928 - The first appearance of Mickey and Minnie Mouse on film occurs with the release of the animated short film, "Plane Crazy".

 

June 17, 1928 - Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly over the Atlantic Ocean.

 

November 6, 1928 - Herbert Hoover wins election as President of the United States .

 

January 15, 1929 - Future Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King is born in his grandfather's house in Atlanta, Georgia.

 

October 29, 1929 - Postwar prosperity ends in the 1929 Stock Market crash.  The plummeting stock prices led to  the worst American depression in the nation's history.

 

The 1930's - The Great Depression

1930

January 22, 1930 - Excavation work on the Empire State Building begins with construction of the building itself starting on St. Patrick's Day, March 17.

 

February 18, 1930 - American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovers the planet Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

 

December 2, 1930 - In order to combat the growing depression, President Herbert Hoover asks the U.S. Congress to pass a $150 million public works project to increase employment and economic activity.

 

The analog computer, or differential analyzer, is invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

The population counted in the 1930 census reached 123,202,624, a 16.2% increase over the past decade.

 

February 14, 1931 - The ruins of the ancient Indian villages around Canyon de Chelly are designated a national monument by President Herbert Hoover.

 

March 3, 1931 - The Star-Spangled Banner, by Francis Scott Key, is approved by President Hoover and Congress as the national anthem.

 

May 1, 1931 - Construction is completed on the Empire State Building in New York City and it opens for business.

 

November 8, 1932 - Democratic challenger Franklin D. Roosevelt defeats incumbent President Hoover in the presidential election for his first of an unprecedented four terms.

 

Construction worker atop the Empire State Building

A workman on the construction crew of the Empire State Building.  Photo: Federal Works Agency, WPA.

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March 4, 1933 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt is inaugurated for the first time.  His speech with its hallmark phrase, "We have nothing to fear, but fear itself" begins to rally the public and Congress to deal with great depression issues.  His subsequent Fireside Chats, that began eight days later, would continue his addresses with the American public.

 

March 31, 1933 - The Civilian Conservation Corps is authorized under the Federal Unemployment Relief Act.  It would provide work for two and one-half million men during the succeeding nine years and help construct many national park and other projects across the United States.

 

May 27, 1933 - The Century of Progress World's Fair opens in Chicago, Illinois

 

November 1, 1933 - In South Dakota, a strong dust storm strips topsoil from depression era farms.  It was one in a series of such storms to plague the Midwest during 1933 and 1934.

 

December 29, 1934 - Japan renounces the Washington Naval Treat of 1922 and the London Naval Treaty of 1930.

 

June 1, 1935 - The greatest hitter in the history of baseball, Babe Ruth, retires from Major League Baseball.

 

August 14, 1935 - The Social Security Act is passed by Congress as part of the New Deal legislation and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

 

May 12, 1936 - The Santa Fe Railroad inaugurates the all-Pullman Super Chief passenger train service between Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California.

 

August 1, 1936 - The Summer Olympics Games open in Berlin, Germany under the watchful eye of German leader Adolph Hitler, whose policies of Arian supremacy had already begun to take shape.  The star of the games was Jesse Owens, a black American, who won four gold at the Berlin 1936 Games.

 

November 3, 1936 - Franklin D. Roosevelt overwhelms his Republican challenger, Alfred Landon, for a second presidential term.

 

May 6, 1937 - At Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German airship Hindenburg bursts into flames while mooring.  The fire consumes the largest airship in the world, 804 feet long, within one minute, causing the death of thirty-six people.

 

May 27, 1937 - The Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic and one day later, after a ceremonial press of a button from Washington, D.C. by President Roosevelt, receives its first vehicles.

 

July 3, 1938 - The final reunion of the Blue and the Gray is held.  It commemorated the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

 

July 18, 1938 - "Wrong Way" Douglas Corrigan, with his faulty compass, lands his plane in Dublin, Ireland, after departing from Brooklyn, New York on a trip to the west coast of the United States.

 

October 30, 1938 - A nationwide scare develops when Orson Welles broadcasts his War of the Worlds radio drama, which included fake news bulletins stating that a Martian invasion had begun on earth.

 

January 5, 1939 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt asks the U.S. Congress for a defense budget hike.

 

April 30, 1939 - The New York World's Fair opens for its two year run.  This world's fair, spectacularly conceived for the Flushing Meadows trash dump made famous by F. Scott Fitzgerald in Queen's, New York, is often credited with proving to the American public that prosperity and good times could lay ahead after the decade of depression.

 

June 12, 1939 - The Baseball Hall of Fame opens in Cooperstown, New York, home of one of baseball's founders, Abner Doubleday.  The first class of inductees included Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson.

 

August 2, 1939 - Albert Einstein alerts Franklin D. Roosevelt to an A-bomb opportunity, which led to the creation of the Manhattan Project.  Einstein had arrived as a fugitive from Nazi Germany six years earlier on October 17, 1933.

 

September 5, 1939 - The United States declares its neutrality in the European war after Germany invaded Poland, effectively beginning World War II after a year of European attempts to appease Hitler and the aims of expansionist Nazi Germany.

 

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