Tort Tales, Gold Diggers, and the Crusade against Heart Balm

2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 394-410
Author(s):  
Brian Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Media Representations ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
The Great Depression

Beginning in the early 1930s, US citizens made a concerted effort to ban lawsuits for breach of promise, seduction, criminal conversation, and alienation of affection. By 1940, ten states had outlawed so-called heart balm torts. Yet there is no empirical evidence that rates of heart balm lawsuits were increasing. This article analyzes 1930s media representations to show how the movement against heart balm grew from “tort tales” about allegedly outrageous lawsuits. Heart balm narratives drew from stylized representations of “gold diggers” found in popular culture, and they reflected divisions around gender and social class exacerbated by the Great Depression.

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 Look of Catholics: Portrayals in Popular Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (review)

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-87
Author(s):  
Una M. Cadegan ◽  
Thomas J. Ferraro ◽  
Anthony Rotella
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Look ◽  
The Cold War

Son of the Forgotten Man

2019 ◽  
pp. 516-546
Author(s):  
Vincent DiGirolamo
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The State ◽  
Labor Standards ◽  
Independent Contractors ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Fair Labor Standards Act

The Great Depression exposed newsboys to the vicissitudes of the market and the power of the state in new ways. They formed unions, joined strikes, and, for a time, came under federal protection. Publishers argued that newsboys were not employees but independent contractors who should be exempt the Fair Labor Standards Act and other New Deal measures. Caught up in this tug-of-war between a paternalistic capitalist press and an expansive welfare state, the American newsboy became a contested figure in popular culture, appearing in WPA murals, proletarian novels, and other works as a symbol of working-class resentment more than as an icon of bourgeois virtue. The shrill, restless son of the Forgotten Man, he helped America reassess the merits of laissez faire capitalism and recalibrate government’s responsibility to citizens young and old.

Popular and Culture, World War Broadway, II

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Robert L. McLaughlin ◽  
Sally E. Parry
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Social Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
American Life ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Theater Project ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Class Divisions

This chapter looks at the operations of popular culture during the war, the rise of socially conscious theater in the 1930s, which established the aesthetic and ideological contexts in which theater about the war was produced, the economics and audiences for Broadway theater, and the cultural place of theater in American life in the 1930s and 1940s. The theater of the 1930s was unusually politically conscious, primarily due to the Great Depression, which engendered heightened awareness of class divisions and the distribution of wealth. This social consciousness led to the rise of theater groups like the Theater Guild, the Group Theater, and the Federal Theater Project, which often expressed anti-Nazi or antifascist views.

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