In 1928, after Calvin Coolidge refused to seek renomination,
the Republican National Convention nominated Herbert Hoover for President.
In 1929, shortly after Hoover took office, the Wall Street stock market
crashed and the economy quickly collapsed. A proponent of individualism
and self-reliance, Hoover was eventually forced to make federal loans available
to private corporations to ward off a wholesale collapse of the US economy.
In the same year when Herbert Hoover became President, Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was elected Governor of America's wealthiest and most
populous state of New York where he launched a revolutionary federal relief
program for the poor which contrasted sharply with President Hoover's inactivity
in this very sensitive area. After winning the Democratic nomination for
President, Roosevelt never tired of stressing the need for helping out
the millions of crisis-stricken Americans.
FDR's bubbling energy belied the fact that the man was seriously
ill. In 1921, while at the family's vacation home off the Maine coast,
Roosevelt took cold and became stricken with polio. Initially, he couldn't
even move his arms and legs, but in a courageous, lifetime struggle against
the ravaging disease, he eventually fought his way back into politics.
In the Soviet Union, the Communist leadership announced the start
of collectivization which was essentially about establishing major state-run
farming associations to always keep the public granaries full. The more
Joseph Stalin learned about the overall situation in agriculture, the more
he realized the need for a speedy and uncompromising policy of collectivization
of smallholder farms. The plan could put the Bolsheviks on a collision
course with the country's 100 million peasants but, capitalizing on his
vast powers and smoothly-working secret police, Stalin saw it through with
deadly determination.
In 1928 the Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming made the
epochal discovery of the antibacterial powers of penicillin, the world's
first antibiotic which has since saved the lives of millions of people
worldwide. For this Sir Alexander Fleming was awarded the Nobel Prize in
1945.
In that very same year when penicillin was discovered, the famed
Italian engineer Umberto Nobile flew a giant airship of his own design
to the North Pole. The expedition fell through after the dirigible Italia
crashed near Spitsbergen. The Soviet icebreaker Krasin salvaged seven out
of the eight surviving members of the Italia's crew. Umberto Nobile himself
was picked up by a Swedish pilot. The great Norwegian polar explorer Roald
Amundsen also joined in the search and rescue operation, but he never managed
to find the crash site as his plane was lost over the Barents Sea on June
18, 1928…
And now, as usual, we'll talk about the famous people born in
the year 1928. In the United States, Grace Kelly was born into a family
of New England billionaires. 28 years and an Oscar-winning Hollywood career
later, she tied the knot with Prince Rainier III of Monaco. In 1982 Princess
Grace died in a car accident and is still remembered with love by her Monegasque
subjects.
The US astronaut Frank Borman was born in the same year with
princess Grace. He performed two space flights, including one on board
the Apollo 8 spacecraft which was the first to fly around the Moon.
In Poland, Zbigniew Brzezinski was also born in 1928. At age
10 his family moved to Canada and, 20 years later, Zbigniew became an American
citizen. A renowned political scientist and an ardent critic of the Soviet
Union and now Russia, Brzezinski served as a National Security adviser
under President Jimmy Carter.
The year 1928 was also the first in the life of the great Nobel
prizewinning Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marques whose best-known novel,
A Hundred Years of Solitude, is much touted by experts as a prime example
of magical realism. In India, the future Pakistani President Zulficar Ali
Bhutto was also born in 1928…
And here is something I think will be of interest to our film
buffs. Walt Disney's brainchild and best-known cartoon character, Mickey
Mouse, hit the silver screens in that very same year of 1928. More than
70 years on, Mickey Mouse remains as funny and mischievous as he has ever
been before ...
THE 20th CENTURY:YEAR AFTER YEAR series
of historical programs is prepared by Vladimir Zhamkin.
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