1939 In Review

In review. Today the first in the new decade, the 1940s mutual special feature division presents an hours program reviewing the outstanding news moments of the year 1939. Through the use of special recordings made by mutual during the actual occurrence of those moments we shall listen once again to the voices and the event that made the news of 1939.

As the outstanding news analysts of Radio's year 1939, we present our narrator Raymond Graham Swink. Good afternoon. During the coming hour, you and I are going to live through again some of the outstanding news events of the last year.

The year as a whole was a war year. All the forces which had gathered in the 20 years before, Suddenly came to the stage of crisis with one ominous event after another until violent action was reached.

For Americans, it was a year in which we tried to live our normal lives while we were deeply shaken by the events of fraud. In contrast to the trend away from individual liberty abroad, America began the new year with an act which gave freedom to a man who many had believed unjustly imprisoned.

On July 22nd 1916, a bomb had been thrown into a preparedness day parade in San Francisco. Ten were killed, forty and ten. Tom Mooney, a labor leader and others were arrested and convicted in what many believed was an unfair trial.

In 1918, President Wilson commuted Mooney's death sentence to life imprisonment. And in the next 20 years, many attempts were made to obtain a new trial. Finally, California elected a governor who had promised that his first official act would be to free moon.