Immediately after uttering those words he was fried in Old Sparky, the electric chair at Florida State Prison. Moments before he had become enraged when he learned no newsreel cameras would be filming his execution.
On February 15, 1933, Zangara, an Italian immigrant and naturalized United States citizen, had attended a speech by President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami, Florida, when he opened with a handgun he had purchased a couple of days before. He got off five shots and missed Roosevelt, his intended target. Instead wounded four bystanders and killed Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago. Justice was swift in those days. Zangara spent only 10 days on death row. The story of Zangara is in itself fascinating reading and you can start HERE.
Unemployment was a whopping 25 percent and President Roosevelt, making his famous “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” speech, launched his New Deal. Additionally, Congress repealed Prohibition and passed the Glass-Steagall Act which banned banks from dealing in stocks and bonds. It was enacted in response to the stock market crash of 1929 and prevent commercial banks from making risky deals with customers' money.
The bill was repealed in 1999 under President Clinton because it was seen as being too restrictive for banks and businesses. There was a financial crisis in 2008 that some say was primarily caused by deregulation that allowed banks to once again engage in hedge fund trading. Banks then demanded more mortgages to support their shady deals and that created a financial crisis, the worst since the Great Depression of 1929. Others say its repeal had nothing to do with the law's repeal.
It's well known that many people who suffer financial loss suffer from depression, sometimes serious. This happened to one chess master that I knew. He lost his life savings and as a result withdrew from his family and friends and holed up in his apartment even to the point of ordering groceries to be delivered. He survived by living on a small inheritance income. At the age of 64 he was found in his apartment and according to reports had been dead several weeks.
Another important accomplishment was Edwin Armstrong’s introduction of radio frequency modulation (FM), a static-free method of transmission.
In international news there was the Reichstag fire in Berlin. The fire was an arson attack on the home of the German parliament on Monday, February 27, 1933, four weeks after Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany. It was the beginning of Nazi terror. It was also the year Germany and Japan withdrew from the League of Nations.
For the time being, things weren’t so bad in France though. France had been somewhat insulated during the Great Depression due to the fact their economy was centered on agriculture. Due to this, France’s social, political, and economic year was far superior to the rest of Europe.
The country celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Tour de France and mourned the loss of 200 citizens in the country's second-worst train accident, the Lagny-Pomponne Railroad Disaster.
The year 1933 was a good year for chess in France. According to Chessmetrics the top 15 players in the world were: Alekhine, Kashdan, Flohr, Euwe, Bogoljubow, Capablanca, Sultan Khan, Canal, Tartakower, Spielmann, Vidmar, Nimzovich, Botvinnik, Maroczy and Lilienthal.
In mid-October Paris hosted a tournament that was won convincingly by Alekhine when he scored an undefeated 8-1 to finish two points ahead of Tartakower. Lilienthal finished tied for third with Abraham Baratz. The other paticipants were Znosko-Borovsky, Cukierman, Raizman, Frentz, Gromer and Lazard.
Speaking of Tartakower, his Best Games book is excellent and there is an e-book by David Lovejoy titled Moral Victories:The story of Savielly Tartakower in a Kindle Edition that is a good read. A lot of information on Tartakower’s life is actually quite scarce, but Lovejoy incorporated every biographical fact he could locate and when no information was available he invented incidents and characters. i.e. he took historical liberties, but in notes at the end of the book, he has clearly indicated these instances.
Tartakower’s book, My Best Games of Chess 1905-1954 (originally in two volumes), lists two matches against Lilienthal that were played in 1933. Tartakower won one in September by a score of +1 -0 =5 and another one by a score of +2 -0 =4.
I could find no details on these matches, but while browsing through the Saptember 1933 issue of L'Italia Scacchistica (Chess Italy), I came across a brief mention of the first match:
PARIS - There was played recently at the Cafe de La Regence in Paris, a match of six games between the great international master Tartakower and the new chess star, the Hungarian Lilienthal. The games were all drawn with the exception of the following won by the master Tartakower.
Savielly Tartakower (February 21, 1887, died February 5, 1956, 68 years old) was born in Russia and moved to Vienna at age 17. He became a doctor of law in 1909, but he never became a practicing lawyer.
During World War I, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army. In 1918, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I, he became a Polish citizen (although he did not speak Polish) and moved to Paris. He became a French citizen after World War II.
During World War II, he served in the Free French Army under General Charles de Gaulle. His French colleagues found his name too difficult to pronounce, so he changed it to Lieutenant Dr. Georges Cartier.
Tartakower was a prolific writer. In addition to chess books, he also wrote a screenplay and a collection of poems. He worked for more than 30 chess magazines in multiple countries and his newspaper correspondence appeared in 11 languages.
Andre Lilienthal (May 5, 1911 – May 8, 2010, 99 years old) was born in Moscow to Hungarian parents and was taken to Hungary at the age of two, but emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1935. Awarded the GM title in 1950 he w had the distinction of having met or played every World Champion, with the exception of Steinitz, and was the world's oldest living GM when he passed away.
The following game is from their (first ?) match and was played on September 6, 1933.
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