Time Magazine 3/14/1932

I chose a March 14th Time Magazine article from the year 1932 to conduct my library research. The reason I chose this year was because I knew that this was right in the heart of the Great Depression and I wanted to get a sense of the variety of articles and advertisements a society in such a slump was reading.

The first thing that stands out to me is the advertisements. The article starts out with fourteen pages of pure advertisements with no articles in between. It would be interesting to compare an article from this time period with one from before the Great Depression to see if such an emphasis was placed on promoting the product as it is in the 1932 issue.

The characteristics of the advertisements are equally as interesting. In modern magazines, the attention of the ad is usually placed on a picture endorsing the product and then a catchy jingle or motto of the company, usually kept quite short. For example, a McDonald’s ad might have a large picture of a young couple smiling and laughing, each enjoying a Big Mac and fries, with “I’m lovin’ it” and the trademark golden arches finishing off the promo. However, in the Time, advertisements explaining and detailing the product are abundant. One two-page ad for the “Packard Light Eight” car has over four-hundred words, the only pictures being of a profile of the car itself and a four inserts of the interior design. Another ad for Johns-Manville Heat, Cold, Sound and Motion describes a story of a trial in which the jury could not convict an obviously guilty suspect because of “faulty acoustics” in the courthouse. The marketing methods and strategies have clearly changed dramatically. What this says about the society of that period is that they read much more intensively than our society of today. People in the modern Internet culture are known to be “skimmers,” merely glancing over articles and ads when reading through a magazine. I don’t believe ads from 1932 placed in a magazine today would have any impact at all and might actually irritate the reader for making them read such lengthy segments about the product.

While there were no articles during the first fourteen pages of ads, there were letters sent to the editors. Some of the letters were interesting, but the main thing that I noticed was that all ten letters published were addressed to “Sirs,...” This just reemphasized to me the domination men had in the workplace at this time. Women were still “housewives” while the men did the work, and therefore every editor would in fact be a "Sir."

The real contents of the magazine, the articles, were divided into eighteen subcategories: Aeronautics, Art, Books, Business and Finance, Cinema, Education, Foreign News, Letters, Medicine, Milestones, Music, National Affairs, People, Press, Religion, Science, Sport and Theatre. Without even reading a single article, one is able to assess a certain amount about the people reading this magazine. The easiest thing to notice about these categories is the broad spectrum of disciplines that are covered here. Those interested in art and pop culture (Art, Books, Cinema, Music, People, Theatre), the government and economy (Business and Finance, Foreign News, National Affairs, Press), science (Medicine, Science) and any other broad range of subjects are all covered in this magazine.

The articles themselves are keyed toward the same intensive readers as the ads, with long write-ups, small print and few pictures. As I moved further into the article section of the magazine, however, I again became distracted by the amount of advertisements, which were now placed around relevant articles based on the category I was in. For example, in the “Aeronautics” section, the articles were surrounded by advertisements for Autogiro Company of America and United Air Lines (United’s prices for a flight from New York to the Pacific Coast were $160.00... If only that were true today. The flight was also thirty-one hours long... wow).

As a film major, I was interested to see the cinema section, which includes reviews of the new movies of the week. Such films for March 14, 1932 were Strangers in Love (Paramount), Sky Devils (Howard Hughes), The Impatient Maiden (Universal), and After Tomorrow (Fox). I found it amazing that studios such as Paramount, Universal and Fox, which are still dominant in the industry today, were such powerhouses even back in 1932. The reviews talk about the hype leading up to the movie, the stars, the plot, and how the movie was. Perhaps because I’m more interested in these type of articles, I found this section to be more similar to modern magazine articles and therefore much easier to read.

It is amazing how much one is able to infer about a society just from reading one magazine from that time period. I picked this issue in 1932 because I wanted to see if the impact of the Great Depression could be felt through the words and pictures of this magazine. The abundance of advertisements were the obvious characteristic I was looking for. In an economy where all confidence is lost within the consumer, magazines are trying to help stimulate the market by rebuilding the loyalty between the people and the product. This Time Magazine was fifty-six pages long. When I separated the articles and the advertisements, I discovered that about twenty-four of the fifty-six pages were actually articles and the other thirty-two were all ads. This magazine gave me a chance to get a glimpse of the 1932 society deep within the hands of the Great Depression and I found it truly interesting to compare it to our modern culture.