A READER WRITES: "I'M NOT SCARED BY A 1934 CARTOON -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE ARE DEAD!"

A READER WRITES: “I’M NOT SCARED BY A 1934 EDITORIAL CARTOON – ALL THOSE PEOPLE ARE DEAD!"

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 14, 2009

REFERENCE:

The 1934 cartoon shows US vice president Henry Wallace, secretary of interior Harold Ickes, and other “pinkies” from Columbia and Harvard riding a horse driven wagon and shoveling out money with the caption on the wagon:

“Depleting the resources of the soundest government in the world.”

It failed to mention that more than 25 percent of Americans were unemployed and the US was deep in a World Depression.

A figure at the bottom left, who looked a lot like the Russian revolutionary leader, Leon Trotsky, is writing on a board:

“Plan of action for US: Spend! Spend! Spend under the guise of recovery, bust the government, blame the capitalists for the failure, junk the constitution and declare a dictatorship.”

Polemical? Yes. Consoling? No. Then what was its advantage? A grain of truth was implicit in its message: could the US spend its way out of the Great Depression?

John Maynard Keynes, the celebrated English economist, claimed that it could. But it became academic. WWII lifted the country out of the depression.

As I have indicated in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007), the more things change the more they remain the same.

The Bush and now Obama administration could be made caricatures on this same money wagon. It remains to be seen if Keyes was right. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman who won the economic prize for 2008 thinks so. I am a fan of Krugman’s.

ABOUT THE WRITER:

I am privileged to correspond with delightful minds, minds that have been beat up with the vicissitudes of the times, and still prevail, people who have been made redundant doing nothing wrong, while other people tool on the wave of the current hysteria.

Mighty nations of the world create the complexities and man, ever resourceful, must deal with them to survive. Power and greed are always at the citadel of these complexities with them contributing to the calamities that ensue. Freedom to express ourselves is perhaps the greatest anodyne to our pain during these transitional periods.

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A READER WRITES:

I’m not scared. All those people (in the 1934 editorial cartoon) are dead. I continue to read and enjoy what you send. Your thoughts and worldview contribute to my resilience.

We are all thankful for Santayana’s oft quoted (and misquoted) aphorism. Whether we are condemned or doomed to repeat bad behavior or are serendipitously rewarded for unconsciously replicating beneficial decisions made by our predecessors, we fail to recognize that history does not repeat itself.

Each era has its unique set of circumstances established by an ever-changing social, economic and natural environment.

Frank Capra, in his well-watched and overplayed movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, shows the dark side of post-war expansion.

Mr. Potter, the usurer, was loaning money in a manner similar to many of the mortgage brokers of the 90s and 00s, only at an exorbitant 2.5%. No doubt he anticipated the recession of 1953-54 when he could foreclose on all the recalcitrant veterans who borrowed above their means. Yet, he made enough money to keep himself in fancy wheelchairs, a unique healthcare plan.

The bumbling Uncle Billy meanwhile was behaving like the AIG people. He misplaced $8000. AIG’s richly rewarded financial folks “misplaced” financial bets on cleverly contrived credit default swaps to the tune of over $8,000,000,000. That is a magnitude of 106 times greater but equally as irresponsible as Uncle Billy’s mistake.

The banks and hedge funds that bought AIG’s risky financial vehicles cashed in the swaps and didn’t give the money back. They are not vilified. When Mr. Potter intentionally kept Uncle Billy’s error, he became the villain. Then, when the bank examiners discover the Building & Loan’s insolvency, there’s a run on the bank.
This is followed by the first “taxpayer” bailout (ironic in the name Bailey) as citizens throw cash (undocumented loans) into a basket. This is played as an uplifting Christmas-spirited event.

Is it difficult for Republicans to watch this movie? Mr. Capra made a number of propaganda films for the War effort in the Forties and seemed a power-to-the-people type; reference Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Was he a closet socialist?

We remembered this false version of the past and repeated it very well. Interestingly, we are learning a disproportionate number of oil war veterans are sub-prime victims. And, we’re back to context.

We clap for veterans at sporting events, spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars to develop and build robotic appendages to make them whole, then wink and nod at the crooks who steal the rest of their lives.

America is the land of the free (to grab anything you can, as long as it’s not too obvious). This is not unique. It has always been the context of our world. The new environment is that because of technological breakthroughs in communication, more people than ever before know it.

The printing press enabled dissemination of the Bible, which exposed it to broader scrutiny. When people realized its words were being manipulated to control them, their questions led to the rise of heretics.

Today, thousands of times more information is at our fingertips. The Internet allows everyone to post his or her notes. Thousands of times more musical compositions are available to us. The leisure time to learn an instrument means one does not have to be gifted or privileged to play music. This also means there will be thousands of times more bad writers and musicians than 300 years ago. By the way, I am familiar with Messiah and can hum the Hallelujah Chorus.

Remembering the past is the first step. Extrapolating those events and outcomes to the present is the skill that leads to good decisions. Tax cuts may have worked twenty-five years ago. In Santayana-time, Reagan was a century ago. The cartoon is from a faint memory. We are in a different context requiring different answers. I am pleased with the answers we are getting. As slowly as things seem to be moving, what took years in the thirties has taken months in the nascent 21st Century.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

I thank the reader for reviving my memory of these wonderful works of Frank Capra, and placing them in the context of today's events.