Purging the Rottenness from the System

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
John Marsh
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Joseph Schumpeter ◽  
Classical Economics ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
System P ◽  
The World ◽  
End Times

When the Great Depression descended on America, many people had no idea why and no idea about how long it would last. Others, however, experienced no such doubts. For them, the Depression reinforced their understanding of how the world worked and confirmed their most sacred beliefs. This chapter examines their righteous response to the Great Depression. It locates that righteousness in three admittedly far-flung spheres: the laissez-faire fundamentalism of classical economics like Joseph Schumpeter and then secretary of the treasury Andrew Mellon; the apocalyptic interpretations of the Great Depression on the part of many Christians, who believed the Depression signaled the beginning of the end times and the Second Coming of Christ; and one famous Depression short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.” As far apart as these sources are, each nevertheless conveyed a sense that the Depression was a punishment for past misdeeds, whether economic, spiritual, or moral, and, therefore, was a punishment that had to be endured, even embraced, for the good life to resume.

Claustrophobia: Totalitarianism and the Great Depression, 1920–1936

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-50
Author(s):  
R. Keith Schoppa
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Fast Track ◽  
Good Life ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Lu Xun ◽  
Individual Control ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Great War

This chapter focuses on two of the three-tiered political identities, specifically the power of individual control (localism) and the force of nationalism. After the Great War, the 1920s roared with the possibilities of wealth, pleasure, the good life. Women seemed to be at the center of things: the “flapper,” homemaker, and female suffrage worlds. Yet national ambitions of Germany, Italy, Japan, and the Soviet Union were put on the fast track of totalitarianism working by way of fascism, monarchical dictatorship, and communism. The policies of those four placed thousands of people in “iron houses” to be suffocated, or, more likely, executed. To deal with these tragedies, the long shot seemed perhaps to be the wide-ranging individualism of Lu Xun, the “duende” of Garcia Lorca, and the initiative of countless others to try to exorcise nationalism run amok.

Selling Historic Natchez to Depression-Era Pilgrims

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-210
Author(s):  
Susan T. Falck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Cultural Image ◽  
The World ◽  
Depression Era

This chapter recounts the early years of the Natchez Pilgrimage, a heritage tourism enterprise created by the Natchez Garden Club at the height of the Great Depression. The Pilgrimage dramatized a mix of decades-old southern racial ideology and white historical memory that was repackaged for 1930s consumption. Pilgrimage founder Katherine Miller and other leading clubwomen defined their community’s cultural image, while also redefining the meaning of traditional southern womanhood. The Pilgrimage is also the story of how one southern community’s selective expression of historical memory captivated white tourists eager to immerse themselves in the world of the Old South so vividly portrayed by popular writers and entertainers of the 1930s. The widespread appeal of the Pilgrimage home tours and pageant suggests the power of popular culture to shape a tenacious historical memory that remained in force for much of the twentieth century and lingers even today.

The Sunshine State Emerges on the World Stage

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-197
Author(s):  
David J. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Entire Population ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Tourist Industry ◽  
Tourist Attractions ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
New York World's Fair ◽  
The World ◽  
Park Service

Near the end of the Great Depression, Florida ends the decade with a triumphant tenure at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, dozens of thriving tourist attractions, and a newly built Florida Park Service. By 1940, Florida enjoyed a thriving tourist industry that attracted more than double the entire population of the Sunshine State.

Ecocritique and Anecdote

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-48
Author(s):  
Sean Cubitt
Keyword(s):  
Good Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
Living Well ◽  
The World ◽  
Central Notion

Section 1 starts by considering the central notion of this book: a “ecocritique”. The ecocritique recognises that the good life for all includes the well-being of the world we are involved in at every level from the cellular to the cosmic. It is all encompassing. Section 1 then considers how the term “anecdote” relates to ecocritique. Anecdotes provide a peculiarly powerful tool for finding out the meaning of living well, as well as the answering the oft-asked question: who is this “we”? The beauty of anecdotes is that they operate in a non-contemporaneous time. They operate equally well in the past, present, and future. A primary political and ecocritical task of anecdotal method, therefore, is to recognise this hybrid temporality, and to free and maintain its capacity to generate new futures and new pasts.

Dilemmas of Political Agency and Sovereignty: The Omelian Allegory

2020 ◽  
pp. 026327642096743
Author(s):  
Annabel Herzog
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Good Life ◽  
Political Action ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Good Life ◽  
Walk Away ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Neoliberal Capitalism ◽  
Conception Of The Good

This essay is a political reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, which examines agency and resistance in situations of political wrong. Le Guin’s short story allows us to reformulate the questions of the boundaries of popular sovereignty and the opposition to general consent. These concerns will be here regarded as elements of a critique of neoliberal capitalism, in which freedom and self-realization are founded on injustices that persist because of a prevalent conception of the good life. The case of ‘Omelas’, moreover, challenges our understanding of resistance in revealing the blurred boundary between political action and mere noncompliance. The question asked will be about the nature of noncompliance: is noncompliance a form of resistance, and, if so, can it transform the political reality?

The Late, Great Globalization

2009 ◽  
Vol 108 (714) ◽  
pp. 20-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold James
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The World

We are likely to see more and more parallels with the political dynamics of the world of the Great Depression.

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