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Escapism During the Great Depression

Alan Brinkley, author of Culture and Politics in the Great Depression presents how escapism became the new trend for dealing with the hardships created by the stock market crash in 1939. Brinkley comments on how [magazine]s, the [radio], and [movies], all aimed to help people mentally escape from the mass poverty and economic downturn. [Life Magazine] which became hugely popular during the 1930’s was said to have pictures that give “no indication that there was such a thing as depression; most of the pictures are of bathing beauties and ship launchings and building projects and sports heroes--of almost anything but poverty and unemployment”. The main goal of media at this time was to lift peoples spirits and allow them to escape mentally from the very distressing reality. Through an activist standpoint, the media ended up causing more harm than good. It did allow the very few who were unemployed to have limited access to stress relieving media which positively affected morale. More significantly, it impacted those least affected by the depression by allowing them to turn a blind eye to those suffering around them. Movies were the biggest culprit. [Hollywood] purposefully set out to produce movies with comedic plot lines. A famous director, [Preston Sturges], aimed to validate this motion by creating a film called [Sullivan’s Travels]. The film ends with a group of poor destitute men in jail watching a comedic [Mickey Mouse] [cartoon] that ultimately lifts their spirits. Sturges aims to point out how “foolish and vain and self-indulgent” it would be to make a film about suffering. Therefore movies of the time more often than not focused on comedic plot lines that distanced people emotionally from the horrors that were occurring all around them. These films were “consciously, deliberately set out to divert people from their problems”, but it also diverted them from the problems of those around them. The mass media was a great thing, especially movies, that some say “staved off revolution, because they had worked to make people happy”. This is valid, but the downfall that most people do not realize is that it also impeded those most capable of helping rise [America] out of its [depression] from realizing there was even a need to do so.

Brinkley, Alan. Culture and Politics in the Great Depression. Waco, Tx: Markham Press Fund, 1999. http://www.uvm.edu/~pblackme/Brinkley.pdf>