Free Republic

Economic Meltdown Deepens: Worst Since 1933

Between the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 and the dawn hours of September 1,1939, there was time enough to birth a new generation in England and on the continent and to forget every lesson learned in the mud and blood of Flanders and Passchendaele. And so were the English, French, and we Americans duped in 1933. Or were we all? Did we not seek to be duped? Churchill read Mein Kampf and so did others. Why was he nearly alone in taking a lesson from it? What is it in men that encourages...

Seventy years before this week’s invitation to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Columbia rolled out the red carpet for a senior official of Adolf Hitler’s regime. The invitation to Iran’s leader may seem less surprising, but no less disturbing, when one recalls that in 1933, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler invited Nazi Germany’s ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, to speak on campus, and also hosted a reception for him. Luther represented “the government of a friendly people,” Butler insisted. He was “entitled to be received . . . with the greatest courtesy and respect.”

We know that history holds many surprises. One doesn't expect to learn more about the secret history of of the Gulag than we already know from both Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Acrcipelago" and Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A history." This feat, however, is exactly what author Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished: the previously unknown story of the thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, sought employment and a better future in the "worker's paradise" built by the Bolsheviks. All kinds of Americans joined the exodus. Some of them were Communists or fellow-travelors but the majority were average Americans - skilled workers promised paid passage,...

wo UCLA economists say they have figured out why the Great Depression dragged on for almost 15 years, and they blame a suspect previously thought to be beyond reproach: President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After scrutinizing Roosevelt's record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years. "Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10-...

It's been 75 years since the federal government, on the spurious grounds of fighting the Great Depression, ordered the confiscation of all monetary gold from Americans, permitting trivial amounts for ornamental or industrial use. This happens to be one of the episodes Kevin Gutzman and I describe in detail in our new book, Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush. From the point of view of the typical American classroom, on the other hand, the incident may as well not have occurred. A key piece of legislation in this story...

Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler made public yesterday correspondence rejecting, as president of Columbia University, a request made to him by a students' club to cancel the Dec. 12 lecture of Dr. Hans Luther, German Ambassador. The request was made by the Columbia Social Problems Club, which contended: "Inviting the Nazi envoy to lecture on the foreign policy of his government and giving him an official reception means not only failing in our duty to oppose the Nazi onslaught, but signifies, if not open endorsement of the Nazi actions, atleast placing their principles on the same level with other viewpoints."

August, 1933 The Simele massacre, Iraq, the massacre & ethnic cleansing by Arab Muslims on Christian Assyrians, indigenous people August 7th ~ "Assyrian Ethnic Cleansing," The New Assyrian Martyrs Day “Though the body may perish, the soul lives on” August 7th of every year marks the Assyrian Martyrs Day, what began as the commemoration of the Simele massacre in 1933, where an estimated 3,000 Assyrians were systematically targeted by the Iraqi government to cleanse the Assyrian race, the indigenous people of Iraq whose roots date back to the Sumerians, the earliest recorded civilization in the mid 4th millennium B.C. The...

In October 1933, Erich and Marga Cohen leave their home in Germany on an organized trip to the Land of Israel, as Nazis' rise to power. They arrive in Haifa and travel across the country. Their daughter, Miriam Hazeh, shares the photos from that trip with Ynet readers. First part

Why would Harvard have embraced such a man? With everything that was known about the Nazis in 1934 -- their violent anti-Semitism, their book-burning, the concentration camps into which they were herding their enemies -- why would Harvard have treated a Nazi functionary like Hanfstaengl with such courtesy? Why would it let itself be used, in the words of historian Stephen Norwood, "to help cloak the Nazi cause with a layer of legitimacy?" In time, of course, Harvard became staunchly anti-Nazi. (Conant would go on to play a key national defense role during World War II.) But where was its...

<p>Granted, there is upheaval in the world and there are battles where a great deal is at stake -- life itself. All the more precious, then, the minor skirmishes on the home front that mean a great deal in a small way and remind us of how lucky we are to feel innocent hatreds, from summer to summer, at the ballpark.</p>

<p>CNN) -- The 1933 gold Double Eagle coin has seen its share of jeopardy in a history that could have come straight from "The Maltese Falcon."</p> <p>Since it was minted in 1933, the coin has been stolen, shipped to Egypt, hidden and almost destroyed by fire twice. The Double Eagle -- an ounce of nearly pure gold -- went up for auction Tuesday night at Sothebys, selling for $6.6 million, plus its $20 face value and a 15 percent fee to the auction house -- a total of $7.6 million.</p>