|
Ephemera
by fauxreal (stolen from a comment)
I’ve been looking through some ephemera related to American politics in 1925-ish. An article excerpts talk about the coming depletion of American oil, and predicts all oil will be gone in the U.S. in twenty years.
Interesting in light of today, but also in view of WWII and the mention of the Japanese not bombing the oil storage at Pearl Harbor those twenty years plus or minus later.
I also saw some things about the fight for Iraq between France, England, Italy, the U.S. and Japan. Germany was not an issue in this fight. Mussolini was already leading the fascists in Italy and claiming he had no designs on invasion of anyone.
In the meantime, there was a campaign in California called EPIC, or "End Poverty in California," because so many people were seriously suffering. Upton Sinclair was the candidate for Governor of CA. in this group and he was a professed socialist.
He was also endorsed by a group that called itself Progressive Republicans for Democratic Candidates or something like that. In other words, Republicans were willing to endorse Sinclair to try to solve the problems of poverty in light of the robber barons’ continued exploitation.
Interesting, at least to me.
We are certainly living in different times.
Another photo dealt with the death of Lenin and showed a clutch of men who were possible successors in an informal photo. Four of five of them were mentioned. A guy in the center was not mentioned. His name was Joseph Stalin. Was the paper so ignorant, or was the omission on purpose?
Of course, we can go back an construct a history based upon events. But in the midst of events, isn’t it amazing how wrong people can be, and sometimes for the best of reasons (and sometimes for the worst.)
anna missed- I’d like to see your take on the “unified theory” 🙂 of the arts and crafts movement.
It seems that Sinclair was something of a utopian believer…later he believed in something called “technocracy,” a future in which technology would make it possible to work 6 days a month and retire at 45…but it was based upon need/use, not supply/demand:
here’s something about it from, believe it or not, Social Security History online…
…it would briefly flare as a serious intellectual movement centered around Columbia University; although as a mass-movement its real center was California where it claimed half a million members in 1934. Technocracy counted among its admirers such men as the novelist H.G. Wells, the author Theodore Dreiser and the economist Thorstein Veblen.
Technocracy held that all politics and all economic arrangements based on the “Price System” (i.e., based on traditional economic theory) were antiquated and that the only hope of building a successful modern world was to let engineers and other technology experts run the country on engineering principles. Technocracy’s rallying cry was “production for use,” which was meant as a contrast to production for profit in the capitalist system. Production for use became a slogan for many of the radical-left movements of the era. Upton Sinclair, among others, affirmed his belief in “production for use” and the Technocrats briefly made common cause with Sinclair, and even Huey Long, in California. But the Technocrats were not of the political left, as they held every political and economic system, from the left to the right, to be unsound.
It sounds like it has more to do with the actions, if not ideology, behind “radical simplicity” today.
You know, if the 20s, more ppl were living in the city rather than country for the first time, so rich and poor could more easily bump against each other’s lives.
The Bolshevik Revolution was just three years old, and ppl had all sorts of hopes for a system that would not allow so much suffering amidst such aggrandizements. No wonder there were so many utopians, and ppl willing to entertain various ideas for new ways to live…that’s not so utopian anyway, considering the second industrial revolution.
And in the 20s, just as now (just as always…) both Republicans and Democrats were in the pocket of the richest of the rich and gave them all sorts of govt deals and handouts (but that’s not “welfare” because, in return for selling off what is not theirs to sell, the pols were paid for their corruption. )
The problem with the poor is that they’re poor, in other words. Otherwise, it would be okay for the govt to give them a helping hand to establish themselves with some degree of basic human pride.
The oil cos were so corrupt then that not only did they bribe pols and buy the naval oil reserves (teapot dome), they also did deals to scam their stockholders, as in Standard Oil, Sinclair, and Humphries and a fake (shell, heheh) oil co in Canada, that was created to skim profits from unknowing shareholders.
sounds enron-ish to me.
I suppose I have a dearth of imagination, but I do not see why anyone who makes as much money via Halliburton as Darth Cheney, for instance, needs more money, esp. when you see, via Katrina, the levels of poverty in America.
As a public servant, you’d think he’d give a damn…but I suppose that just reveals my utopian tendencies too.
Posted by: fauxreal | Mar 26 2006 0:32 utc | 21
|
