1937 (1936) (1938) (1930-1940) (1940-1950) Table of Contents
Frank Grenville Beardsley, Ph.D. The Gospel Truth: A Mighty Winner of Souls Charles G. Finney: A Study in Evangelism, American Tract Society, 1937 See Text
SM-45 Yacht Harbor, Santa Monica, California 6A-H2619, Western Publishing & Novelty Co., Los Angeles Calif., 1937, SLL 2005 See Image and Text
Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1937, 1933, 1930s See Text
Edward Levinson Labor on the March, ILR Press: Ithaca, NY, 1995 (1938), pp. 172, 173, 1938, 1937, 1936 See Text
Curt Sachs [1881-] World History of the Dance, (Trans, Bessie Schönberg) The Norton Library: N.Y., 1937 (1965), 1912, 1910 See Text
Santa Monica Canyon Flood, 1937, Eric Rydgren is one of those near the popcorn stand. Photographer unknown. From the collection of Alyssa Navapanovich.* See Image
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1939, 1938, 1937, 1930s See Text
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1937 See Text
Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182pp., 1937, 1936, See Text
Documents
Frank Grenville Beardsley, Ph.D. The Gospel Truth: A Mighty Winner of Souls Charles G. Finney: A Study in Evangelism, American Tract Society, 1937
" . . .
"It was the genius of B. Fay Mills which, adding to the innovations of Mr. Moody, brought to perfection the modern evangelistic campaign. Months before a series of meetings was inaugurated an executive committee of ministers and laymen was at work. To prepare for the campaign three committees were set to work-a Committee on Finance, to provide funds to carry on the meetings; a Committee on Visitation, to divide the city into districts and see that every family was given an invitation to attend the services; and a Committee on Music, to organize and train a large chorus choir.
"For the direct work of the revival three additional committees were appointed-a Committee on Advertising, to see that the necessary publicity was secured; a Devotional Committee, to arrange for daily prayer meetings; and a Committee on Ushers. The ushers were charged not only with the duty of seating and looking after the comfort of those whose attended the services, but they also had the supervision of personal work, directing seekers after salvation, instructing young converts, and seeing that decision cards were signed at the close of each service. Under proper leadership an evangelistic campaign so planned and organized could hardly fail to be effective."
"In comparison with the methods of B. Fay Mills, which have since been employed by every successful evangelist, or even with those of Dwight L. Moody, the methods of Charles G. Finney were few and simple. There was no carefully planned and organized campaign, no union of forces throughout a city, no cooperation by the churches of various denominations.
" . . . "
Donald M. Cleland A History of the Santa Monica Schools 1876-1951, Santa Monica Unified School District, February 1952 (Copied for the Santa Monica Library, July 22, 1963). 140 pp., 1937, 1933, 1930s
" . . .
" . . . In 1937, when the Santa Monica High Schoolbuilding was being remodeled, the metal case that held these documents was opened. The contents were examined, resealed in another metal case, and place in the new cornerstone. [57. Santa Monica Evening Outlook, July 8, 1950, p. 8G.]
" . . .
. . . in recent years that the geographical boundaries of the Santa Monica School District have been reduced to the area of the city, with the addition still of a stretch of twenty-six miles of seashore and mountains lying between Topanga Canyon and the Ventura County Line., with the exception of the Decker Elementary School District which is only a part of the Santa Monica High School District. [1. School District Organization in Los Angeles County, Los Angeles: Office of the County Superintendent, 1937, p. 47.]
" . . .
The Campus Expands
During the reconstruction period, following the earthquake of 1933, the high school campus acquired three new buildings: an auditorium, the boys' gymnasium, and a wing for the art department. The five other main buildings were reconstructed to meet earthquake standards set up for school buildings. All of the buildings were structurally braced to withstand shocks greater than those occurring in 1933 at the quake's center, the Long Beach area. The high gabled roofs were replaced with modern shockproof, deck-type roofing. By removing much of the dangerous "gingerbread" and reinforcing all of the bearing walls with steel then coating the outside with stucco, these buildings took on an appearance of modern architecture. [66. Beach Cities Labor Journal, Santa Monica Schools Edition, Oct. 1937, p. 2.]
" . . .
Prior to 1937, vocational classes were included in the program of the Evening High School; but upon the establishment in that year of the Santa Monica Technical School, such courses were offered there.
" . . .
"An appraisal of the work accomplished by the Board of Education and the W.P.A. would certainly reveal many values to Santa Monica and its schools. Total expenditures reached nearly $3,000,000, of which the Board of Education supplied less than $950,000, or about 32 per cent of the total cost. [31. Beach Cities Labor Journal, Santa Monica Schools Edition, October, 1937, p. 3.]
" . . .
SM-45 Yacht Harbor, Santa Monica, California 6A-H2619, Western Publishing & Novelty Co., Los Angeles Calif., 1937, SLL 2005
Edward Levinson Labor on the March, ILR Press: Ithaca, NY, 1995 (1938), pp. 172, 173, 1938, 1937, 1936
"The January [1936] sit-downs, involving 43,910 workers, most of them in the automobile industry . . .
" . . .
"Several hundred strikers left the plant of the Douglas Aircraft Corporation at Santa Monica, California [1937], on a promise that their grievances would be heard at once by the National Labor Relations Board. They walked out into the arms of deputy sheriffs, who arrested them for forcible entry. . . . "
Curt Sachs (1881-) World History of the Dance, (Trans, Bessie Schönberg) The Norton Library: N.Y., 1937 (1965).
The Twentieth Century
The Tango Period
"Even before the end of the nineteenth century the dance teachers were trying to counteract the impoverishment of the society dance. Minuet- and gavotte-like figures, in Italy even pavannes of a sort , were to relieve the eternal uniformity of the waltz and the standardized quadrille, after the polka, galoppe, Rheinländer, and mazurka all had left the field.
"It was a mistaken procedure based on a false estimate of the historical situation. A society which was more and more ceasing to be a society in the old sense could not be fed on stale, warmed-over delicacies from the princely kitchen. To be sure, one could think of nothing better suited to the pseudo-rococo salons and the gilded palatial furniture of the bourgeois houses of about 1890 than these spurious minuets and gavottes. But they did not suit the people, especially not the young people. for this generation was not throwing off the bourgeois stamp to move in the aristocratic and courtly direction.
"Only two roads were open. The first was followed by those who were seeking a new order of society: the young, banded together in the youth movement, turned back to the communal dances of the people and of children, to which, at the turn of the century, Scandinavia and England had led the way. Rightly, since inner necessity pointed out this road, and successfully in most cases, though not in all, for many of these medieval choral dances had become too anemic and their spirit is often too narrowly circumscribed.
"The amorphous "society," on the other hand, had taken over new dances from America. Ostensibly these dances came out of a foreign world; in reality, however, they had preserved, more faithfully than the European, that original state in which the dance arose out of an inner and physical need. The adoption of American Creole and Negro steps corresponds exactly to the assimilation of Spanish and Slavic dances in earlier centuries.
"The discovery of the universal values of American Negro and Creole dances can in no sense be attributed to the bored and sensation-seeking snobs of the nineties. The sarabande and the chacona had been taken over more than three hundred years before. Two hundred years earlier in 1789. Moreau de Saint-Méry writes with graceful pen an enthusiastic little book about the dance in the French West Indies; and thirty years later, in 1820, the famous Parisian dancing master Charles Blais describes the Spanish and American Negro dances in a special chaper of his Traité. But it has to remain at the stage of mere admiration in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, until the store of movement of the European dance is exhausted.
"Since the Brazilian maxixe of 1890 and the cakewalk of 1903 broke up the pattern of turns and glides that dominated the European round dances, our generation has adopted with disquieting rapidity a successsion of Central American dances, in an effort to replace what has been lost to modern Europe: multiplicity, power, and expressiveness of movement. to the point of grotesque distortion of the entire body. We have shortly after 1900 the one-step or turkey-trot; in 1910, inspired by the Cuban habanera, the so-called "Argentine" tango with its measured crossing and flexing steps and the dramatic pauses in the midst of the glide; and in 1912 the fox trot with its wealth of figures. After the war we take over its offspring, the shimmy, which with toes together and heels apart contradicts all the rules of post-minnesinger Europe; the grotesquely distorted Charleston; in 1926 the black bottom with a lively mixture of side turns, stamps, skating glides, skips and leaps; and finally the rocking rumba-all compressed into even movement, all emphasizing strongly the erotic element, and all in that glittering rhythm of syncopated four-four meausres classified as ragtime. One can hardly imagine a greater contrast to the monotony of steps and melody of the latter part of the nineteenth century.
" . . ."
"Only the tango has continued to enjoy undimished favor for more than twenty years in spite of polishing and refinement. To be sure, it is no pure Negro dance and owes its best qualities to the unusual dance talent of the Spaniards, who for four hundred years have made fruitful contributions to the European dance. When the tango made its appearance in the old world in 1910, it released a dance frenzy, almost a mania, which attacked all ages and classes with the same virulence. You may shake your head, smile, mock, or turn away, but this dance madness proves nonetheless that the man of the machine age with his necessary wrist watch and his brain in a constant ferment of work, worry, and calculation has just as much neeed of the dance as the primitive. For him too the dance is life on another plane.
" . . ."
"The twentieth century has rediscovered the body; not since antiquity has it been so loved, felt and honored. Nobody really aware of what is taking place today needs to be told this. After a sleep of two thousand years the expressive imitative dance is awakening. Our generation does not find what it seeks in ballet, in the world of dancing slippers, gossamer skirts, and artificial steps. It cries out, as Noverre once did, for nature and passion; again it desires, as he did, though perhaps too strongly, to exchange stereotyped movement for something genuinely of the soul.
"As always, the new style begins not with the great performers, but with the people with ideas; as always, it turns back to the past to find not only form but courage to carry on. Isadora Duncan-and this shall be the only name we mention-breathes life into the statues of the Greeks. She frees the old Hellenic dance from the rigidity of sculpture, from its sleep in the museums. She is not the first and not the only one in the struggle against the ballet; but among her imitators at the turn of the century there was often much egotism and too little ability . . .
" . . . And yet not only of mankind today, but of men of all races and in all ages. For that to which they give living expression has been the secret longing of man from the very beginning-the victory over gravity, over all that weighs down and oppresses, the change of body into spirit, the elevation of creature into creator, the merging with the infinite, the divine.
""Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance dwelleth in God."pp. 443-448
Santa Monica Canyon Flood, 1937, Eric Rydgren is one of those near the popcorn stand. Photographer unknown. From the collection of Alyssa Navapanovich.
Santa Monica Canyon Flood, 1937, Eric Rydgren is one of those near the popcorn stand. Photographer unknown. From the collection of Alyssa Navapanovich.
Kevin Starr Embattled Dreams California in War and Peace 1940-1950, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 2002, 386 pp., 2002, 1940, 1939, 1938, 1937, 1930s
[p. 141] This is not to say that conflict was lacking, especially at Douglas, where Donald Douglas fiercely resented and resisted unionization. As far back as February 1937, Douglas had fired all CIO organizers in his Santa Monica plant. A sit-down strike followed. Some strikers poured flammable solvent on the floor and threatened to torch the place. Douglas went to court and secured indictments against 345 workers for forcible entry and occupancy. It took 350 police and sheriff's deputies to clear the plant. If Donald Douglas hated unions before this event, he certainly hated them after; and Local 683 returned the sentiment, excoriating Douglas as Donald Duck, the quacking union-basher.
Les Storrs Santa Monica Portrait of a City Yesterday and Today, Santa Monica Bank: Santa Monica, CA, 1974, 67 pp., 1937
"Still not satisfied that municipal growth and development had been adequately directed, the city administration retained Gordon Whitnall, an eminent city planning expert, as a consultant. As a result, a much improved zoning ordinance was submitted. . . . by the time it was enacted in 1937, it had been much diluted, in response to pressure from builders and other interests. In particular, it was grossly inadequate in the matter of off-street parking requirements.
" . . ."
Betty Lou Young and Randy Young Santa Monica Canyon: A Walk Through History Casa Vieja Press: Pacific Palisades, CA, 1997, 182pp., 1937, 1936
"In 1937 the Art Show added exhibits by photographer Edward Weston, watercolorist Marian Gage, painter Otto Classen, architect Thornton Abell, and the Jensens. . . ."
"475 Mesa . . . In 1937, John Entenza, who was a widely recognized authority on architecture, commissioned architect Harwell Hamilton Harris to design a small house in a new and different form. The result was this International-style/Steamline Moderne design, featuring a curving carport and staircase in the front and banks of windows looking out over the canyon at the rear. The pairing of this house with the Neutra design at #491 won critical acclaim. Entenza, who lived in this house for several years, went on to become editor and publisher of Arts and Architecture magazine and to found the Case Study Program, . . .