As some of you may remember, in his 2020
Democratic National Convention acceptance speech, Joe Biden stated that “hope
and history rhyme,” words quoted from the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Biden drew
parallels between the 2020s and the 1920s by highlighting similarities in
political, social, and economic contexts. 
The 1920s were often called the Roaring Twenties. That term indicates that that decade was characterized by significant economic prosperity, rapid social and cultural change, and exuberant optimism following the tragic years of World War I.
The slogan "Return to Normalcy" was
used by Warren G. Harding during his successful 1920 presidential campaign. He ran
on that theme, appealing to the widespread public desire for stability and a
return to pre-World War I conditions after a decade marked by upheaval,
including the war, the 1918 influenza pandemic, and other serious issues.
The economy boomed in the 1920s. People in the
U.S. used installment plans to spend liberally on consumer products. They also poured
money into speculative new investments, such as automobile and telephone
stocks. The prevailing interest rate was around 5%, a low rate that encouraged “gambling”
in the stock market.
In a November 7 essay in The New York Times,
William Birdthistle wrote that the “influx of buying from 1919 to 1929 drove
the stock market up more than six-fold over the decade.”** But we know how that
ended in October 1929. The stock market collapsed, triggering the Great Depression.
As Birdthistle pointed out, "Between 1929
and 1932, the stock market dropped 77 percent, and the global economy staggered
into the Great Depression while unemployment and malnutrition spiked. In 1932,
suicide rates soared to their highest in recorded history.”
Is that a harbinger of what might happen
before the end of this decade?
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby
(1925) was written to portray the 1920s as a time of decadence, materialism, and
moral bankruptcy.
According to what I learned from AI, “The
novel critically depicts the era’s opulence and empty pursuit of wealth through
its characters and their lifestyles. Gatsby’s lavish parties symbolize the era’s
excess, but beneath the surface lies a loss of authentic human connection.”**
Does that remind you of a man you read/hear about in the news daily?
You probably heard something about the 47th
POTUS’s lavish Halloween party last month. As Nobel Prize-winning economist
Paul Krugman wrote on November 4, it was “a party complete with sequined,
feathered dancers and, yes, a scantily-clad woman in a giant martini glass.”
That party, held just hours before 42 million
Americans were about to lose federal food assistance, was, in Krugman’s words, “grotesque”
and “unspeakably vulgar.” The vapidity of that evening might well be referred
to as a Holloween, rather than a Halloween, party.
The 1920s was also the time of Eugene Debs, the energetic
socialist leader paralleled in significant ways by Zohran Mamdani, the newly
elected mayor of New York City and a dynamic, young trailblazer for progressive
Democrats in the 2020s.
In her November 5th “letter,” Heather
Cox Richardson wrote how Mamdani began his victory speech the night before with
a nod to Debs, the Socialist candidate for president in 1920. He said, “The sun
may have set over our city this evening, but as Eugene Debs once said: ‘I can
see the dawn of a better day for humanity.’”**
A blog article I posted in March 2015 was
titled “Christians for Socialism” (see
here). I wrote briefly about Debs there, so I know there are many differences
between Mamdani and Debs, who was 65 years old in 1920 when he was the
Socialist candidate for president even though he had been imprisoned in 1919
because of his opposition to WWI.
I also know that Mamdani is a Muslim and not a
Christian, although I personally know several Christians who are happy that
Mamdani was elected mayor of New York last week.
The best hope for most U.S. citizens in the
2020s lies partially in the hands of politicians such as Mamdani—and Bernie
Sanders, AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and other like-minded democratic
socialist leaders.
_____
*1 William A.
Birdthistle, “Trump Is Bringing Back the Roaring Twenties. The Hangover Could Be
Brutal.” The author served from 2021 to 2024 as director of the Division of
Investment Management at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
*2 This is from Perplexity
AI, which I am now using more than Claude. It is linked to the web browser
called Comet, which I am also using regularly now. – Regarding The Great
Gatsby, I tried to read it for what I call my “recreational reading,” but I
found it quite unenjoyable and quit reading it about halfway through. June read
it just before her book study group discussed it last month, and I have learned
more about it from her.
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