1933
Hitler becomes Chancellor
Convinced they could control him, the old conservatives around President Hindenburg handed Adolf Hitler the chancellorship. He took the oath at noon. That night torchlit Brownshirts paraded through the Brandenburg Gate in a four-hour victory march. A professor watched and wrote in his diary, This is the end of Germany.
FDR's first inaugural
Standing on a Capitol platform in a cold rain, the new president told a frightened nation that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Within a week he had declared a bank holiday, ordered Congress back, and begun the New Deal. Radios in parlors carried fireside chats, and the federal government entered daily American life.
Reichstag fire
A young Dutch communist was caught in the burning German parliament building with matches and firelighters. Whether he acted alone remains disputed, but Hitler knew a gift when he saw one. Emergency decrees the next morning suspended civil liberties. Within weeks the Nazis had outlawed every party but their own.
Dachau opens
In an old munitions factory near Munich, Heinrich Himmler's SS set up a camp for political prisoners, communists and Social Democrats first, then Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma. It was the prototype, the template for what was to come. Over the next twelve years hundreds of camps would metastasize across Europe, swallowing millions of lives in an industrial machinery of death.
Dust Bowl winds rise
Years of drought and over-plowing across the Great Plains stripped the soil and sent it up in black clouds miles high. Dust storms reached New York and Washington. Tens of thousands of Okies piled belongings onto trucks and headed for California. The Depression had found a landscape to match its desperation.
Prohibition ends
Utah ratified the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing Prohibition fourteen years after it had begun. Legal liquor flowed again, and bars reopened across the country to long lines and celebrations. The experiment had reduced drinking slightly, enriched gangsters enormously, corrupted police forces in every major city, and taught Americans that outlawing popular pleasures mostly does not work.
Twenty-first Amendment repeals Prohibition
After thirteen years of bootleggers, speakeasies, and corrupt cops, the Twenty-first Amendment ended Prohibition. Utah ratified it. Across America, bars opened legally for the first time since 1920. Franklin Roosevelt had a martini. The experiment in legislated temperance had produced more criminality than sobriety and was quietly laid to rest.