Toilet paper fights, the cult of the smile, and other aftermath of America's Great Depression

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

When, with the announcement of the coronavirus epidemic, Americans began to buy essential products in supermarkets, reaching fights, such panic caused ridicule and bewilderment. Okay, Europe suffers from neurosis after all the misfortunes of the Second World War and may lose its head, but why should Americans behave this way? The residents of the United States, however, have their own nationwide memory of the terrible trials - the Great Depression.

The Great Depression is not just the years that most of the United States spent in poverty or outright poverty. During these years, hundreds and thousands of people were dying of hunger and diseases of poverty, homeless families wandered around the country, and it seemed to many that the end, if not of the world, then of their country and life had come.

The epidemic is not only about the fact that many people become infected and many will have to sit in strict quarantine for days. This is also, like any great disaster, about the economic crisis - the Americans can smell it on their backs. It is not surprising that this stirred up a terrible national memory in many. But the fear of hunger and the inability to buy the simplest things is not the only mark that the Great Depression left in the American mentality.

The consumer boom isn't just driven by skilled marketers

You can often read that the United States in the fifties seemed to have broken off the chain, hitting a consumerism of such insatiability that analogs cannot be found in other economically developed countries, even in the most fed-up times. The consumer boom, skillfully fueled by marketers but hardly created from scratch, lasted for about forty years. The portions in restaurants are as large as possible, parties - with the maximum scope, clothes - for the dressing room (and some of them were dressed only during fitting, but this fullness warms the soul!).

Most often, the beginning of the boom is associated with the desire for the most peaceful and bourgeois life after the end of the war, but it is worth remembering that the country entered the war directly from the Great Depression, during which poverty and austerity dictated fashion, diet, and housekeeping. The war only continued this life with the endless tightening of the belts, and after it the pendulum swung in the opposite direction very strongly. Only in our time does the country get rid of the obsessive desire to fill the house with anything to the brim, relying on the slogans of environmental awareness.

Machismo

It would seem that the United States is a country of victorious equality, but in fact laws, appeals and public statements constantly coexist with everyday macho, the desire to separate the two sexes as much as possible (starting with the fact that most of the goods for girls are produced in pink, and then suddenly one-year-old girls will not understand what it is to them), constant sexist jokes and attitudes and regular sexual crimes, because an unwritten but constantly spoken code of rules is active, according to which it is supposedly normal to “take advantage of the situation”.

Machism's roots include intense competition for jobs during the Great Depression, when emancipated women who grew up in their free twenties were being ousted from all decently paid jobs, and yesterday's "we are for progress, girls can do anything" was supplanted by ridicule and aggression towards women trying to build a career - after all, now they have turned not into colleagues in developing companies, but into competitors for ever-shrinking jobs.

For the same reason, the solution to the problems of integrating blacks into a single common space has probably slowed down so much. The competition for even the cheapest jobs was so intense that the tension couldn't help but spill over into old, proven forms. Racism has strengthened its position due to the desire to find the enemy because of which you, a respectable American, still cannot get a job. Yes, they are all occupied by blacks!

The cult of the smile

In the midst of social tension, psychologist Dale Carnegie decided that it was worth learning a new attitude towards each other, just for everyone's psychological safety. He has written his famous books on how to communicate without conflict and make friends (and better find work). Of course, in order for the book to be sold, he had to tie it as much as possible to business success, but in the text itself we read stories about how pleasant it is to improve the mood of even a stranger in passing, if it is not difficult for you to say a kind word now. And, of course, a smile will soften any communication. So America began to smile constantly. It is difficult to say whether the degree of stress in everyday situations decreased from this - no one conducted such studies at that time.

Supported the cult of a smile and cinematography. Any photographer knows that a smile makes a face prettier and more photogenic, so actors and actresses in studios were taught to smile at the sight of a aimed camera. In the thirties, there was a real cult of cinema, photographs of actors in the form of postcards and clippings from magazines were kept at home by, if not all, then many, and in all these portraits, movie stars were smiling. It inspired me to repeat after them.

Bad day? See something interesting

During the Great Depression, virtually all forms of television that we use today developed - albeit on radio, because there was no television yet. People wanted to forget themselves from the daily worries and horrors of thoughts about the future, and cinema and radio became more popular than ever. Cinemas maintained interest by including a simple snack in the ticket price and the opportunity to win an internal lottery prize; so, as a matter of fact, Americans are used to having a snack while watching. And in order to pay for a radio subscription, families sometimes spent their last money. If there was no money on the radio, they went to visit those for whom it still works - to listen to analogs of talk shows, serial productions and light music.

As a result, it was in the USA that behavior developed - if you feel bad, take a snack, put on the series and watch it, watch it. And after the Americans, others began to repeat themselves, because this way of unloading the brain from problems constantly flashed in popular films and, yes, TV shows.

Americans accepted the idea that the state has a duty to solve the problems of society

Things like providing jobs for the unemployed through social projects, providing food and benefits, setting up social camps where a large number of people in distress can wait out bad times - in general, everything that is now perceived as the responsibility of the state before the Great Depression was considered unacceptable in the form of state policy, because it is "communism". It was believed that helping those in difficult situations should be provided by citizens on their own initiative and by charitable foundations.

Through the efforts of the Roosevelt couple during the Great Depression, it was possible to make the organization of aid the norm, especially during national disasters, from the state. So, in order to provide jobs for thousands of Americans at a time when one in four in the country was already unemployed, the president initiated a program for the construction of socially significant facilities that would later be useful to the same citizens: hospitals, schools, stadiums, and so on. They were hired at construction sites without looking at the experience and even for exhausted, weakened workers they found some kind of work, distributing the processes.

The post-Depression years were not sunny for the country. Secret alcoholism, punitive gynecology, and other secrets of smiling 1950s American housewives.