I loves the old movies too, and this is a good observation by this weekend’s Steve Benen stunt stand-in. She misses the fly in the chardonnay, though: the fact that Amity Shlaes’ contrarian pro-austerity manifest, “The Forgotten Man”, gets so much play from Very Serious People.
[I] recently attended a screening of one of my favorite films, Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. It’s one of the masterpieces of the classic Hollywood era, and trust me, it’s not until you see it on the big screen that you can fully appreciate the force of the Busby Berkeley’s demented genius. The “We’re in the Money” production number that opens the movie, with that gloriously lunatic moment in which Ginger Rogers start singing the lyrics in pig Latin, has long been referenced as an iconic moment of pure Hollywood escapism. But even that song had lyrics that acknowledge an economic reality principle: “And when we see the landlord/We’ll look that guy right in the eye.”Most striking of all is the song that culminates the film, the “Remember My Forgotten Man” number. Smack dab at the tail end of this fizzy, fruit cocktail of a movie comes an unexpectedly powerful, achingly earnest, ballad urging the audience to remember the “forgotten man” — all those hard-working, once proud veterans, farmers, and laborers who have fallen on economic hard times. It’s social consciousness in the best Warner Brothers 1930s style, a moment of genuine, we’re-all-in-this-together solidarity. There’s even a smidgeon of racial diversity, when an African-American woman sings a verse of the song.
Take a moment like that, and contrast it with the way contemporary pop culture by and large erases and marginalizes the huge number of unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise economically struggling Americans. It speaks volumes about the insularity and out-of-touchness of our contemporary cultural elites.
brent
Benen doesn’t work at WashingtonMonthly anymore. Its Ed Kilgore now. Not quite the superhuman blogger that Benen is but he does a good job.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@brent:
I refer to them all as Benen stand-ins. I’m not too keen on Kigore. I like this Kathleen Geier person better.
BGinCHI
You know who else was a gold digger in 1933.
jl
People are still taking the Shlaes’ book seriously? Seriously?
It was not even an analysis, but a cherry picked collection of Depression era vignettes.
And since he is here, fess up DJay, you been spoofing us nostop, right? No real troll could could so outrageous, but a half mad mathematician could easily pull it off. Am I right?
You betcha. Yessir. Coincidence that DJay posts about Gold Diggers a seemingly happy go lucky forget your cares musical with a commie subtext? That is, things that are not what they seem? I think not.
Yutsano
@BGinCHI: Eleanor Roosevelt?
Raven
Speaking of film, this piece in the Times is fascinating.
“DANCER, bride, runaway wife, radical filmmaker and pioneer — Shirley Clarke is one of the great undertold stories of American independent cinema.”
jl
@BGinCHI: I think one of my great aunts was, from what I heard. You have some one else in mind?
Valdivia
Not to nitpick but it is not Benen anymore but Kilgore :)
oops! see I was beat to it. I like that you call them all Benen.
Mino
I saw that and all I could think of was …bet all those hard-working, once proud veterans, farmers, and laborers who have fallen on economic hard times voted Republican for the last thirty years, too.
Which was not the case in the first Depression.
Jewish Steel
Hip hop still engages life at the street level. Rock n roll? Hell no. It abdicated its relevence sometime in the early 2000s.
Aimai’s take on Kilgore’s relentless Catholicism soured him for me. She hit the nail on the head.
Roger Moore
@jl:
People who desperately want to overturn FDR’s legacy are still taking her book seriously. They’ll keep doing so at least until there’s an even better anti-FDR book out there for them to hold up.
aimai
I love Kathleen Geier and, generally speaking, the weekend crew is way better than Kilgore. I have already had enough of his 1) west coast start times, 2) knocking off at 5:30 on the dot EST time, 3) endless Catholic guilt insider shit, 3) “when I was in politics” thing. Don’t we have enough pudgy former catholic altar boys explaining politics to us?
aimai
aimai
Oops, I must have made the same point on some other thread if Jewish Steel remembered it. Guess we’ve all got our own shtick.
aimai
jl
@Mino: You sure? The US voted Republican massively before he Depression. My family was mostly GOP before the Depression.
Some oldster in my family was supposed to have said ‘I’ve voted Republican for twenty years, and I realize now I’ve been a fool for twenty years.”
Supposedly. But like a lot of stories in my family, probably either not true or taken from a famous quote back in the day, upon further research.
Maybe I will find out about that story on this here very thread. Anyone else have a story that some oldster in their family said that?
SiubhanDuinne
What a swell party this is :-)
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Jewish Steel:
That late?
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@aimai:
I agree.
Baud
@Mino: Democrats during the Depression still had the good sense to hate black people.
For some people, there are some things more important than standing up for yourself and taking care of your family.
gene108
Partly because the book has a certain truthiness to how things should work versus what empirical observation demonstrates.
People would rather go with something that reaffirms their preconceived notions, than look back at the 1930’s objectively and the benefits the New Deal left for America during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
For example, even Republicans sometimes bemoan the loss of “good paying” manufacturing jobs, without realizing that without the New Deal giving legitimacy to the Labor Movement, as well as Supreme Court rulings that allowed the minimum wage to be enacted, as well as rulings that abolished child labor, the “good paying” manufacturing jobs wouldn’t have existed in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
The truly wealthy realize that the New Deal era jurisprudence that is still with us today inhibits returning the era of sweat shops and child labor that is still prevalent throughout the world, which is why think tanks and such keep trying to attack the New Deal interpretation of interstate commerce and right to contract and the Supremacy Clause powers of the Federal government; they know their ability to make money is being hampered by not being able to crush workers, like Foxconn can do in China.
gogol's wife
The African-American woman who sings in the finale about the forgotten man is Etta Moten, who sang Bess in the 1942 revival of “Porgy and Bess.” She’s also featured in Astaire-Rogers, “Flying Down to Rio” (I think that’s the one).
God, I love Gold Diggers of 1933. Everyone should watch it every day. Great performance by Guy Kibbee as “Faneuil Peabody.”
eemom
@aimai:
dayum, woman…..you’ve been on a roll lately.
I’ve pretty much stopped checking WaMo since Benen quit, and it used to be my go-to place for no-nonsense news.
Mino
@jl: If you were in agriculture, you didn’t.
I suspect it was repulsion against the continued mess in Europe between the wars that made Wilson’s party so unpopular in that period.
Mino
@Baud: I don’t think Democrats were any different from Republicans policy-wise. In fact the South was the only region that voted Dem in Hoover’s landslide.
Sorry, I misread your reply. You were referring to the present.
jl
@Mino: Half my family was in ag, and they were all Republicans for decades before the Depression. I think it depends on what kind of ag you were in and where. A lot of places in CA, ag did just fine under Republican policies, until they blew up the whole economy.
But you are right, a lot of places, problems with agricultural finance drove people to Democrats from late 19th century all the way through the 20s, which in many places was not a fun time for agricultural families.
BGinCHI
@jl: I was going to go with Andrea Mitchell. She graduated from college in ’33 I think.
Her husband was already in his 40s.
Raven
Any of you pups ever drink any 33?
Schlemizel
I think a huge factor in why FDR was so successful was that the majority of Americans understood how close they were to being in trouble if they were not already there. They were glad to spend the extra cash to help out their fellow countrymen.
Today its all about ME! I have to ensure that every dine I have only goes to making ME happy and safe. Of course the irony is that this attitude just makes us all less well off and less safe. The more we hoard the less there is to go around and that means less of each of us. We seem to be a nation of sociopaths.
Jewish Steel
@DougJ: I just watched Pearl Jam’s film, 20. Never a really big Pearl Jam fan but I always liked what Eddie Vedder had to say in interveiws. They performed some anti-Bush song of thiers shortly after 9/11 and got booed roundly by the audience. An interesting moment. Probably rock was already quite dead by then. I can’t point to much after Chavez’s or Neutral Milk Hotel’s second albums (c 99, I think) that isn’t a tiresome retread or just too stupid for words.
This is my hobby horse, obvs. Carry on, folks.
Raven
@Schlemizel: It was the same then. Read “In Dubious Battle”.
BGinCHI
@Jewish Steel: You’re obviously not including Creed and Nickleback in there I assume.
Mino
@gene108: It sure has become apparent that a labor contract is meaningless in this day, even ones with the State. I think only consumer credit contracts are still sacrosanct.
Valdivia
I know I know it is TNR but this is a classic epic takedown about Ms Amity. Can’t have a thread about her and not drop that link.
Jewish Steel
@BGinCHI: I bailed on a potentially lucrative cover band last month. The possiblity of having to play both Creed and Nickelback were among my top reasons. I don’t care if they are crowd favorites. Sometimes, an audience must be protected from itself.
MikeJ
@aimai: I like the west coast start times.
BGinCHI
@Jewish Steel: You did the right thing. You can’t get your integrity back after that kind of shit.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Valdivia:
Now that Marty Peretz has been marginalized, it’s an okay magazine. I like a lot of the articles there.
Citizen_X
@BGinCHI:
John McCain?
Valdivia
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
yeah I agree DougJ. There was a pretty brutal takedown of the Douthat book and a classic, though from quite a few years ago, of the precious bs Gopnik writes in his book and The New Yorker. And I love that they got read of the paywall. The early years (I mean way way back) have some great articles about classic books.
Brian R.
@Valdivia:
That’s a great takedown, but it’s worth noting the ways in which actual historians* have rebuffed Shlaes as well. Eric Rauchway, for instance, has a beauty here.
*As opposed to Shlaes, who has no training as an historian at all, which might explain why she’s so shitty at pretending to be one. There’s no argument in the book, and it plays fast and loose with the facts. She basically invents her own unemployment numbers. I mean, for fuck’s sake.
Mino
@Brian R.: If you want Depression vignettes, Studs Turkel is your man.
DougJ, Head of Infidelity
@Valdivia:
I hate Adam Gopnik, I’ll have to look for that takedown.
Brian R.
@Mino:
Sure, Hard Times is a classic.
That’s the frustrating thing about Shlaes, is she writes well enough and has some interesting little vignettes like that, about people like the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. But then she waves her hand wildly at some cherry-picked economic data she clearly doesn’t understand at all and says, ha, see, the New Deal failed!
I’m not sure who’s dumber – her or the people who think her piece of shit book proves anything about the New Deal aside from their own inability to judge it on its own merits.
I love how they think this book uncovers some secret mystery about the New Deal, that it was really a failure, but somehow Americans at the time failed to realize it and kept on electing Roosevelt in landslide victories, to an unprecedented four fucking terms in office AND somehow historians, political scientists and politicians of all parties managed to miss out on the obvious truth she’s presented here.
Sure, that’s it. Or maybe this one woman, with no training in history and a giant axe to grind is just a fucking snake-oil salesman.
Mino
Popular Americans born 1933.
http://www.imdb.com/search/name?birth_year=1933
Jeebus, I feel old.
DarcyPennell
Gold Diggers of 1933! I love that movie so much. It’s a silly, fluffy musical that still acknowledges the Depression throughout (the women scramble for jobs and steal food when they can’t find work), and includes my favorite Busby Berkeley number ever, “Pettin’ in the Park” which means exactly what you think it means, and features Billy Barty as a lecherous baby on roller skates. Every movie should be like that.
Jewish Steel
An afternoon of NPR programing, an 8 page Adam Gopnik reminiscence of his days in France, or a knitting needle driven deep into one’s eye socket?
BGinCHI
@Jewish Steel: Or a morning FM radio show with two overgrown adolescents who think they’re really funny.
jl
@DarcyPennell:
It is a good movie. One of my favorites too.
Same year as Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, another one of my favorites.
Roger Moore
@Jewish Steel:
I’ll take the NPR, but only as long as I can pick the programs. An afternoon of Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation Science Friday, Car Talk, and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me wouldn’t be bad.
Mino
@Brian R.: She’s auditioning for the Wingnut Welfare. A modern gold digger, if you will.
Jewish Steel
@BG, Mr Moore: Chicks dig eyepatches, right?
Roger Moore
@Jewish Steel:
Only if you have a parrot and know the three ahrrrs.
Bruce S
Here it is…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WEdHDdFfHE
jl
@Brian R.: problem is that the New Deal was at least two New Deals. The first New Deal bought into fashionable crony capitalist ideas about need to cartelize and ‘organize’ business, reduce production to increase prices, more cooperation between government and business to put ‘order’ into markets.
You know else who advocated cooperation between government and business to put ‘order’ into markets, don’t you?
It didn’t work too well, except for some things like Civilian Conservation Corps. And a lot of things that did work well were really Hoover initiatives (HOLC for housing and mortgage banking crisis) and public works (
BoulderHoover Dam).After the SCOTUS threw out the first New Deal, FDR improvised the second, which operated more on modern Keynesian principles, but that was not planned, it was just turned out to be what worked, since the General Theory was only published in 1936.
So, you have to know a little history to understand the New Deal, which in the US today, means that bamboozlement is easy to pull off.
Edit: today’s GOP is the wrong answer, but doesn’t mean the statement is false.
Water balloon
@Jewish Steel: I was at that concert at Nassau Colisseum they talk about in the doc, though I had pretty bad seats. It was right around the time of the Iraq invasion and Even in a place that’s relatively Democratic in its political leanings like Long Island, any criticism of Bush was met with belligerent rage. It’s almost difficult to remember the atmosphere of the time until you’re reminded of it by something like that.
Vedder of course reacted to the booing by taunting the audience and pouring wine all over the Bush mask he’d been wearing. It was an ugly end to what had been a really good show.
Roger Moore
@jl:
The bigger problem is that a lot of people don’t want to accept Keynesianism. They want the nasty old business cycle because periodic depressions are a great way for rich creditors to screw over everyone else. They aren’t going to accept the real history of the Great Depression because they don’t accept the conclusions, and no amount of boring facts and figures are going to make them change their minds. It’s the same story with tobacco/lung cancer deniers and climate change deniers. As long as there’s a rich, powerful lobby that doesn’t want to accept the facts, there will be a profitable industry providing them with the cover to keep denying them.
Jewish Steel
“It’s almost difficult to remember the atmosphere of the time until you’re reminded of it by something like that.”
Too true. No wonder those clowns thought they were heading into a time of permanent Republican majority. To squander that kind of political capital takes a special kind of talent.
jl
@Roger Moore: You, sir, sound like a DemocRAT communist.
But I digress.
I agree. I was just saying that if people don’t know the history, it is easy to fool people about the lessons of history. Is all.
I was surprised when I found out how many of the successful programs in the first New Deal were really timid too small initiatives cooked up in desperation by Hoover.
FDR committed the sin of continuing and expanding the ones that worked.
The idea of the New Deal as an ideological program, and you can lump everything that happened from 1929 (Edit: I guess I mean ‘from FDR’s inauguration’) to 1941 into one ideological program and judge on that base is either a fantasy or lie.
jefft452
@jl:
“I once was a tool of opression
As green as a sucker could be
And monopolies banded together
To beat a poor hayseed like me
The railroads and the old party bosses
Together did sweetly agree
They thought there would be little trouble
In workin’ a hayseed like me
But now I’ve roused up a little
Their greed and corruption I see
And the ticket we vote next November
Will be made up of hayseeds like me”
Brachiator
@Mino:
The Southern Democratic Party was still the official party of racism and segregation.
And the best “Forgotten Man” comedy is “My Man Godfrey,” from 1936, with Carole Lombard and William Powell.
Mino
@jl: The first New Deal bought into fashionable crony capitalist ideas about need to cartelize and ‘organize’ business, reduce production to increase prices, more cooperation between government and business to put ‘order’ into markets.
First 100 days I guess you mean.
Much of the legislation that the Hundred Days Congress drafted doled out immediate relief for the American people that President Hoover and the Republicans had failed to provide. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s relief assistance, for example, provided millions of Americans with enough money to make ends meet. The Civil Works Administration put the unemployed to work, and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the National Recovery Administration, and the Public Works Administration kept millions of others alive as well. Americans were so relieved by the federal government’s quick action that many became die-hard Democrats and Roosevelt fans. The president’s optimism and can-do attitude, combined with the success of his immediate relief programs, made him almost politically untouchable during his first term. (Cite:http://www.sparknotes.com/history/american/depression/section5.rhtml)
That Congress created the SEC, passed Glass-Steagall, took us off the gold standard (which stopped the devaluation of the dollar), and created the FDIC.
The NIRA act was probably the worst failure and the one the courts went after. Surprise, surprise.
But I would contend the first 100 days were pretty exceptional.
Mino
@Brachiator: And I would contend that there was no appetite for a change in the status quo from Republicans after Reconstruction failed.
A Democrat, Truman, a Midwesterner, true, was the first to pick up the subject in almost 80 years.
Mino
@jl: Too timid and designed to fail, perhaps? Or am I too cynical?
Roosevelt freely admitted he was throwing the spaghetti against the wall to see what stuck. It is astounding how sound so many of the laws proved to be.
jl
@Mino: No. The first 100 days produced a lot of very good programs that saved a lot of lives, as you rightly point out.
However, some of the ideas of the National Recovery Administration (and all of its ideas were not all bad) influenced macroeconomic policy, and they did not work very well. Some of the ideas of putting order into markets involved restricting supply to increase prices, while people were starving.
The NRA was what the SCOTUS threw out in 1936 or 37. Some policies of the NRA that Keynesian macroeconomists, and normal people today would find shocking are exactly the ones that Shlaws plays up in her book of anecdotes.
So, in economic history, at least, the ‘first 100 days’ and ‘first New Deal’ refer to different things.
jl
@jl:
Can’t edit my own dang commment.
Sorry. Shlaes, not Shlaws.
Anyway, Shlaes in her book plays up like early NRA crop control programs that thew out good crop harvests while people were starving, stuff like that.
But that was just the NRA, which did bad stuff, other than the production control stuff, mainly on its effect on macroeconomic thinking.
As Mino indicates, there was a lot more to the first New Deal than the NRA. But a lot of conservatives play up only the bad effects of the NRA, forget that a lot of good programs started with Hoover, and ignore all the good stuff in the first 100 days, and ignore the good policies of the second New Deal.
FlipYrWhig
I hadn’t noticed Kilgore speaking so much about Catholicism. And I’m born and raised utterly secular, so I have no dogma in the fight.
Mino
NIRA was the Act that created NRA. And while you argue that it bought into fashionable crony capitalist ideas about need to cartelize and ‘organize’ business, reduce production to increase prices, more cooperation between government and business to put ‘order’ into markets, I think the part that killed it was the attempt to protect labor.
The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was the primary New Deal agency established by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) in 1933. The goal was to eliminate “cut-throat competition” by bringing industry, labor and government together to create codes of “fair practices” and set prices. The NRA was created by the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and allowed industries to get together and write “codes of fair competition.” The codes were intended to reduce “destructive competition” and to help workers by setting minimum wages and maximum weekly hours, as well as minimum prices at which products could be sold. The NRA also had a two year renewal charter and was set to expire in June 1935 if not renewed.(Wiki)
NRA membership was totally voluntary! Also, too.
Baud
@Mino:
But compliance with the industrial codes was not, IIRC.
Brachiator
@Mino:
Reconstruction didn’t fail, it was betrayed and abandoned in order to settle the 1876 presidential election.
The status quo definitely changed. The US went backwards on civil rights, but picked up the pace of industrialization as the Indian finally displaced all Native American peoples and ultimately saw the country expand, connected by the railroads, from coast to coast.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Jewish Steel:
Chicks dig the long ball.
Mino
@Baud: Everything I find indicates membership was voluntary. But if you joined and displayed the Blue Eagle, you had to follow the codes.
jl
@Mino:
I think you misread me, I said the overall first New Deal macroeconomic philosophy bought into fashionable crony capitalist ideas, I did not say that that the NRA specifically caused that to happen, certainly not the useful parts of the NRA (and if I said that or implied it, I misspoke)
The NRA did a lot of good things. But parts of it, not all of it, but parts of it, were implemented in a way that furthered mistaken macroeconomic ideas, that were the environment in which the NRA was implemented.
I don’t remember if it was killed because of the good labor protection parts. But, at least from what I read in economic histories, the death of the NRA forced the administration to do a rethink of their macroeconomics and they abandoned most of the counterproductive policies.
Edit; in short, the bad macro ideas were in the air, and many of them would have happened regardless of the NRA itself, one way or another.
Mino
@Brachiator: Well, we certainly went backwards from Reconstruction.
By status quo, I meant that national Republicans totally ignored state restrictions on minority civil rights, both in the South and elswhere. I was only speaking of civil rights.
Mino
@jl: Well, I thank you for the discussion. It is good to refresh the subject.
jl
@Mino: thanks for reminding me of the first 100 days. You made me realize I was too hard on the first New Deal in my initial comment.
Brachiator
@Mino:
Again, this was part of the shameful bargain. In return for settling the 1876 election, the GOP agreed to let the South ressurect anti black codes and to usher in the age of Jim Crow. In the 20th century, the GOP would occasionally fight back, goaded by a nascent NAACP, but lost interest as they became more corporatist. But the direction had been set much earlier.
Mino
@Brachiator: OK. Well, thank you for the discussion, also.
Zach
“There’s even a smidgeon of racial diversity, when an African-American woman sings a verse of the song.”
It’s been awhile since film class, but didn’t Etta Moten sing most of the song and it was just bookeneded by Blondell?
Jewish Steel
@The prophet Nostradumbass: No stereoscopy, no long ball. No chicks.
This is going to be tougher than I thought.
Valdivia
@DougJ, Head of Infidelity:
Biggest grin. I can’t stand the man, so precious. Here you go in case you didn’t find it
Smugged by Reality
Jewish Steel
@Valdivia: Hey, that was great! Thx.
Valdivia
@Jewish Steel:
you are so welcome. I just re-read and it is even more brutal than I remembered it. Delicious! :)