Regionalists, The

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lara Kuykendall
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Abstract Expressionism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Critical Approach ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Contemporary Life

The visual artists known as the Regionalists rose to prominence in the United States during the 1930s. They advocated the use of realistic styles to depict the lives and environs of everyday Americans. The most well-known Regionalists were Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry, whose paintings and prints chronicled the agrarian Midwest. During the Great Depression, Regionalism was seen as a comfortingly accessible mode of art. It appeared to celebrate American cultural history using a realistic figural style that repudiated abstraction, which was understood to be a European import. The populist art group Associated American Artists successfully marketed and sold lithographs by many Regionalists to middle-class patrons across the country, thereby extending Regionalism’s influence to those who were not accustomed to owning works of art. The Regionalists’ views of American life were not exclusively flattering, but their approach differed from the critical approach of Social Realists like Ben Shahn or Philip Evergood, whose works illuminated injustices they perceived in contemporary life. The regionalist heyday drew to a close with the advent of World War II and the development of Abstract Expressionism.

War and the Next Lesson

Money ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith ◽  
James K. Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Monetary Policy ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
The Great Depression

This chapter examines the lessons of World War II with respect to money and monetary policy. World War I exposed the fragility of the monetary structure that had gold as its foundation, the great boom of the 1920s showed how futile monetary policy was as an instrument of restraint, and the Great Depression highlighted the ineffectuality of monetary policy for rescuing the country from a slump—for breaking out of the underemployment equilibrium once this had been fully and firmly established. On the part of John Maynard Keynes, the lesson was that only fiscal policy ensured not just that money was available to be borrowed but that it would be borrowed and would be spent. The chapter considers the experiences of Britain, Germany, and the United States with a lesson of World War II: that general measures for restraining demand do not prevent inflation in an economy that is operating at or near capacity.

From American Exceptionalism to the Great Compression

2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Living Standards ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
First Time

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.

World War II Fiscal Policies and the End of the Great Depression

1994 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 850-868 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. R. Vernon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Full Employment ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fiscal Policies ◽  
World War ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
United States Economy

The United States economy completed its recovery from the Great Depression in 1942, restoring full-employment output in that year after 12 years of below-full-employment performance. Fiscal policies were not the most important factor in the 1933 through 1940 phase of the recovery, but they became the most important factor after 1940, when the recovery was less than half-complete. World War II fiscal policies were, then, instrumental in the overall restoration of full-employment performance.

SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY AND TAX REGIMES IN THE UNITED STATES, 1763 TO THE PRESENT

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Elliot Brownlee
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Philosophy ◽  
World War ◽  
Ability To Pay ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Tax Regimes ◽  
The Republic

The essay explores how ideas about social justice and economic performance shaped the debates over federal taxation in the United States since the origins of the republic. The debates were most intense during major national emergencies (the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II), and each debate produced a new tax regime-a tax system with its own characteristic tax base, rate structure, administration apparatus, and social purpose. The criterion of "ability to pay" and a concern for economic efficiency powerfully shaped the formation of every tax regime, but "ability to pay" became the more influential of the two considerations during the national crises of the twentieth century.

The Great Depression

2009 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Alan Brinkley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Instability ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
The Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s was the most catastrophic economic crisis of modern times. Although it began in the United States, it swept quickly through most of the industrial world and created untold misery to millions of people. It also created political and social instability and contributed significantly to the coming of World War II. Although the Depression has received enormous attention from historians, economists, and many others, there is still no consensus on the two major questions that the crisis raises.

Conclusion—Where Did We Go Wrong?

2021 ◽  
pp. 527-560
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses

Having finished our history of prohibitionism, Chapter 18 asks: Where did our historical understandings go wrong? The chapter begins with the autumn years of Pussyfoot Johnson during the Great Depression, when prohibitionists had been thoroughly discredited. With the rise of Hayekian neoliberalism after World War II in the United States, any infringement on individual economic rights became understood as a necessary infringement on political rights too—which has made it difficult for contemporary historians to understand prohibitionism. In the 1950s and 1960s, Richard Hofstadter and Joseph Gusfield cast prohibition as solely a moral, religious issue, rather than a political or economic one, motivated by equal parts of “Marx, Jefferson and Jesus.” Ultimately, prohibitionism was a transnational normative shift about the inappropriateness of benefiting from addiction and misery of the masses, and an attempt to put the welfare of society ahead of the needs of the state.

Realignment

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evan Osborne
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Self Regulation ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The Great Depression

The later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed arguments from social reformers and artists and economists that the new, spontaneously evolving society was deficient. It worsened poverty, and it impoverished the soul. The tool of political regulation, exercised in the growing political power of the emerging organization known as the nation, was called in to polish the rough edges of the self-regulating society. As time went on, political regulation gradually came to be seen as the default, and self-regulation needed to be justified. The chapter particularly emphasizes the growth in such thinking among socialists and progressives in the United States and Western Europe. The catastrophe of the Great Depression, combined with admiration for a Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany, where political regulators said they were rationally designing a better society, meant that by the onset of World War II, this presumption was firmly in place throughout the West.

The Efficiency/Community Duality in the Emergence of Planning: Cases in Rural Regional Development

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-68
Author(s):  
Michael Hibbard ◽  
Kathryn Frank
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Capital ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Regional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rational Utilization ◽  
World War ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Local Populations ◽  
The Great Depression

The various approaches to planning manifest the intellectual currents of a society. Dualities such as efficiency/community have been central to shaping contemporary planning. The quest for efficiency, the rational utilization of natural, built, and human capital, along with concern for community, the human needs and rootedness of local populations, has been an ongoing theme. We explore that duality in the context of rural regional development and how it shifted from complementary to either/or in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century through the Great Depression and the onset of World War II.

Geriatric Capitalism

2018 ◽  
pp. 580-606
Author(s):  
Matt Vidal
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Political Polarization ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Instability ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Political Economic

This entry presents a variegated capitalism analysis of Atlantic capitalism. We trace the development of the national accumulation regimes in the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany from the nineteenth century to the present. Following the Great Depression and World War II, policymakers, reformers, and business leaders explicitly crafteda framework for regulating North American and Western European capitalism . The national Fordist accumulation regimes embedded in thisinternational framework offset the stagnationist and crisis tendencies of capitalism for around two decades, seeing high profits and strong, wage-led growth. The crisis of Fordism that lasted through the 1970s—declining profits and stagnation—marked the transition to what we refer to as the geriatric stage of post-Fordist Atlantic capitalism. In response to the crisis, capital and the state engaged in widespread restructuring. The post-Fordist regime of internationalized competition and finance generated a return to destructive, wage-based competition. The core-periphery nature of the enlarged, neoliberalized European Union and the precarious dependence of the United States on China have exacerbated global political economic instability. The post-Fordist stage is characterized by slow growth, economic instability, and increasingly damaging economic crises; wage stagnation, rising inequality, and labor market precarity; and political polarization.

The Great Depression

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Bradd
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Capitalist System ◽  
The Great Depression

Beginning on New York’s Wall Street on October 29, 1929, which would come to be known as ‘Black Tuesday’, the Great Depression was the most intense and protracted global economic crisis of the twentieth century, ending with the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In the United States, ‘Black Tuesday’ saw the sale of 16 million shares, as catastrophic losses shook confidence in the laissez-faire capitalist system. In 1930 the effects of the American market crash spread worldwide; by 1932 there were 30 million unemployed in the industrial world, plunging millions into abject poverty.

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