The Buoyancy of Depression Entertainment
When the 2008 economic crisis hit, I was surprised at how eager people were to compare it to the Great Depression and brace themselves for the worst. Paul Krugman and Fox News commentators alike speculated on whether cyclical recession would become worldwide depression, and whether unemployment might grow from the forecast 7 percent to 10 percent to reach the Great Depression's jaw-dropping 25 percent. Columnists compared Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt and cartoonists showed Obama flashing an FDR grin and waving the famous New Dealer's signature cigarette holder. And almost everyone cut back on spending.
People of all ages — most of them many decades too young to have any direct memory of the 1930s — have seemed anxious to recall the New Deal and Roosevelt's first two terms, with books on the topics enjoying a miniboom. We're feeling fearful about the future but also nostalgic somehow for a past that lives in generational memory as synonymous with "bad times." We seem to intuit that some good can come from rough sledding.
What's the source of that intuition? I think it's hiding in plain sight: Depression-era arts and entertainment. After all, isn't that where our images of the period mostly come from?
We need to look beyond analogies from the 1930s based solely on hard, cold economic facts. For, compelling as such analogies may be, they mislead as often as they inform. Now, as in 1929, to be sure, unprecedented things have gone wrong at the heart of the financial system. And yet, as pundits have recently reminded us, not all comparisons between the Great Depression and the current crisis fit. While reeling, the current stock market has not yet fallen the Depression's 75 percent. And, of course, the slump after 1929 had lasted almost four years before the New Deal began and had come to seem like a permanent condition, while the current recession dates from December 2007 and was fully recognized only in the fall of 2008....
Read entire article at Marianna Torgovnick in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
People of all ages — most of them many decades too young to have any direct memory of the 1930s — have seemed anxious to recall the New Deal and Roosevelt's first two terms, with books on the topics enjoying a miniboom. We're feeling fearful about the future but also nostalgic somehow for a past that lives in generational memory as synonymous with "bad times." We seem to intuit that some good can come from rough sledding.
What's the source of that intuition? I think it's hiding in plain sight: Depression-era arts and entertainment. After all, isn't that where our images of the period mostly come from?
We need to look beyond analogies from the 1930s based solely on hard, cold economic facts. For, compelling as such analogies may be, they mislead as often as they inform. Now, as in 1929, to be sure, unprecedented things have gone wrong at the heart of the financial system. And yet, as pundits have recently reminded us, not all comparisons between the Great Depression and the current crisis fit. While reeling, the current stock market has not yet fallen the Depression's 75 percent. And, of course, the slump after 1929 had lasted almost four years before the New Deal began and had come to seem like a permanent condition, while the current recession dates from December 2007 and was fully recognized only in the fall of 2008....