1937 Fifty Years Ago

On November 1 a week-long preview of Christmas toys came to an end in New York City. A ten-dollar miniature Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy, was the season’s sensation. A streamlined automobile with a Skippy trailer in tow also attracted attention, as did an eight-inch version of the China Clipper , a seventynine-cent metal model of the contemporary Cord car; and a plaster-cast WPA road-construction set that included workmen, shovels, picks, trucks, and even MEN WORKING signs.

Twenty thousand Communists gathered in Madison Square Garden in New York City on November 13 to celebrate the Soviet Union’s twentieth anniversary. “The Internationale” was sung, Stalin was saluted and Hitler booed, a play was presented that depicted the history of socialism in the U.S.S.R. from 1917 to 1937, and three thousand new members pledged their “complete devotion to the Leninist struggle for socialism, for a Soviet America.”