JF Ptak Science Books Post 754 Blog Bookstore
The Depression didn’t stop professional theorists from working
on the issue of what people should do with what was seen as the impending
explosion of leisure time. Arthur Pack (The
Challenge of Leisure, 1934) for example wondered about the impact of free-ish
time and the implementation of “constructive leisure”. Walter Lippmann worried
about the impact of “commercialized pleasures” rather than those that were
creative and involving an idea. Still,
in 1934, the ideas of leisure and pleasure as institutions were a distant,
deeply fuzzy notion to most Americans.
In 1935 the Depression in the U.S.(which started with the
October Crash of 1929) had bottomed out, the worst of it all behind us (except
for the recession of 1937). Industrial
production was coming back (it had fallen about 45% by 1932), home building was
making a rebound (coming around from an 80% drop in 1932 and after 274,000
people had been evicted in 1933), the bank failures had stabilized (having
reached about a 40% failure rate in 1933), and the unemployment rate had “fallen”
to 20% (following a 3% rate in 1929 and a 25% high in 1934). In 1932 the corporate profit rate had dropped
90% as had the value of the stock market, industrial production was off by about
half, immigration had fallen to one-tenth of its 1929 figures, and over two
million people were roaming around the country, forced from farms or homes,
seeking destiny in trucks loaded with all of their possessions, walking, or
riding the rails.
But that doesn’t mean that the other segments of the
American economy, those happy and personally unaffected in the Depression,
couldn’t remain so: there was money and
money to be spent, and spent well in the dwindling power of the mid 1930’s
dollar, the purchasing power of the wealthy growing as the economy declined.
Which brings us to this pamphlet for Flaming-Arrow dude
ranch and the kids outfitted in the high, big-chaps fashion of thin-lipped,
vocabularily-challenged cowboy stars of the 30’s matinee. But by Neptune’s
soggy trousers, the kid on the front cover just looks so wrong—historical placement
and societal understanding aside. Kids were
sent to Flaming-Arrow (“for the discriminating family”) near Bozeman to spend the
summer in a “semi-military” fashion, comforted in fine cabins with first-class appointments,
all for about $395 for eight weeks. That
figure would have been out of reach for a great majority of Americans (the average
income at this point for a family having fallen to about $1500 a year), costing
about a quarter of all family yearly money.
I’m not so sure why this cover is so disturbing to me—maybe it
is just something so simple as the war between the enjoyed leisure time of people
with money and the enforced unpleasant leisure time of the unemployed and unmonied.
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