The Good Old Days

In 2003, I edited a young adult non-fiction book. Critical Perspectives On The Great Depression for Rosen Publishing. The book was a collection of contemporary writings about that bleak period of American history, with brief introductions to the pieces by the editor. This is the intro I wrote for the book, which, in light of current economic conditions and and just a few short months after the 80th anniversary of “Black Tuesday,” might be worth taking a look at.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE GREAT DEPRESSION

© 2004 Rosen Publishing

Introduction

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, first inaugural address, March 4, 1933

Social Security. The federal income tax. Unemployment insurance. Welfare. The Federal Bank Deposit Insurance Corporation. The Tennessee Valley Authority. The National Labor Relations Board. The Securities and Exchange Commission. The Federal Housing Authority.

These are just some of the federal institutions and agencies that we today either take for granted or resent for their intrusions into our lives and business. Before October 29, 1929, most of these federal institutions (and dozens more just like them) would have been unthinkable to the citizens of the United States, accustomed as they were to a laissez-faire, or hands-off, style of government. Yet after 1929, these programs resurrected the United States from the depths of the greatest economic disaster to ever strike this country, the crash and near-decade long recovery that came to be known as the Great Depression.

It seemed was as though no one wanted to see it coming. Ever since 1919 and the end of the first World War, the United States had been on what appeared to be an ever-cresting tide of economic growth, with no end in sight. Gone were the restraints of the staid, pre-War Edwardian era, shoved roughly aside by returning veterans with a reckless disregard for what lay ahead. Here were the Roaring Twenties, the swinging Jazz Age, a decade of exuberance, of excess, of wild abandon. While the Eighteenth Amendment had outlawed the transportation and sale of alcoholic beverages (1919), anyone wanting a drink knew where to find the nearest speakeasy for a shot of illegal whiskey, accompanied by the hot sounds of the popular new jazz music.

The nation was fairly exploding with prosperity, innovation, and creativity. With only a little money down, and little government regulation or interference, anyone could invest in the booming stock market and find themselves—on paper, at least—instantly wealthy.

Air travel went from being a novelty craze to commercial viability with Charles Lindbergh’s successful 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, even as Americans bought millions of Henry Ford’s new Model A automobiles to create the most mobile society in the history of the world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway brought literature into the modern age with such works as “The Great Gatsby,” “An American Tragedy,” and “A Farewell to Arms,” while motion pictures learned to talk, starting with “The Jazz Singer.”

There seemed no stopping America. “The chief business of the American people is business,” President Calvin Coolidge told the press in 1925 and no one could argue with that assessment. For most of its first century, the U.S. had been a largely agrarian society, but by the end of the first third of the Twentieth Century, the country had turned decidedly urban and industrialized, with a majority of its population living, for the first time, in cities rather than on farms. Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital, was still considered a sleepy little Southern town, “A strange city, set up in the first place to be the center of government and, like government itself at that time, a city moving slowly and doing little,” according to reporter David Brinkley in his book, “Washington Goes to War.” Government was kept small, operating with a bureaucracy that can only be called miniscule compared to the hundreds of thousands of federal workers that today keeps the monolithic machine of government humming.

Herbert Hoover, who in 1922 spoke of “American individualism” over governmental regulation and interference in the lives of its citizens, was elected president in 1928. President Hoover, former head of the American Relief Administration (which organized shipments of food for an estimated one billion starving people in fifty-seven countries in post-World War I Europe) and Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, was a believer in balancing responsibility for the welfare of the people with a faith in free enterprise. During his 1929 campaign, Hoover proclaimed “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land.”

Between May 1928 and September 1929, the average price of stocks rose forty per cent, with trading exploding from two to three million shares per day to over five million. Those interested in investing in the stock market could do so “on margin,” that is, for a small cash down payment, using the stock itself as collateral for its purchase; full payment came due when the stock was sold...usually, in those heady days, for a significant profit that would more than cover the purchase price. The market, once the playground of the wealthy, was suddenly open to Everyman. The railroad tycoon and the shoeshine boy stood side-by-side, watching the rise and fall (but mostly rise) of the Wall Street stock ticker.

Stock prices spiraled upwards, speculation ran rampant, and investors kept jumping on board the money-making wagon. But that wagon could support only so many before it collapsed under the weight and, on Tuesday, October 29, 1929, that’s exactly what happened, dumping the United States and the rest of the world into the throes of the Great Depression. In a single day, billions of dollars were lost (it is estimated that on the New York Stock Exchange alone, losses exceeded $8,000,000,000; this at a time when the average per capita urban household income was $750 a year and $273 for farming households) as more than 16,000,000 shares were frantically traded in a futile attempt to staunch the financial bloodletting. Small investors who had made their paper-profits on stocks purchased at ten per cent of face value were suddenly forced to pay the balance due on their stocks. But with prices plummeting so low, a majority of these small-timers had no profits to cover them and lost everything.

Jazz Age exuberance and excess turned almost immediately to desperation and deprivation. Banks and businesses failed, the money supply shrank, and, by 1932, the unemployment rate would reach a staggering 23.6 per cent (and continue on up, peaking at 24.9 per cent) as over thirteen million Americans lost their jobs. Relief efforts were organized across the country as families with no source of income were forced to stand in the infamous bread lines and soup kitchens, which were, for many, their only source of food.

Hundreds of thousands took to the road seeking work at any wage; entire families begin a westward migration from the southern and northern Plain states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arkansas), which suffered the added tragedy of one of the worst droughts in history that turned a large section of the nation into a Dust Bowl. President Hoover took a number of steps to stem the tide of desperation, including the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), the Federal Home Loan Bank Act, and the banking regulatory Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, but it wasn’t until newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933 that the government’s response was equal to the magnitude of the crisis. As the Democratic nominee for president, Roosevelt had promised “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”

Roosevelt was as good as his word. In the first one hundred days of his administration, his “New Deal” instituted a concentrated program of legislative activity, sending recovery bill after recovery bill to a Congress that, unsure how to respond, had not done nearly enough to help their constituents through this unprecedented financial catastrophe. Under the president’s guidance, Congress created, in swift succession, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Farm Credit Administration (FCA), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), to name a few. This alphabet soup of federal agencies—along with a rash of banking, securities, and credit acts that followed—were all aimed at getting Americans back to work and the floundering economy back on track.

But for all the efforts of FDR (whose popularity as leader would lead him to being reelected an unprecedented three times) and his dedicated administration, it would be more than a decade before the nation, and the world, would truly recover from the events of that single, terrible day.

Weekly World News XXV, or Happy New Year

It's been several months since since I posted anything from my days with Weekly World News, the World's Most Reliable Newspaper. Here's a piece that ran in the end-of-2006 issue:

TIMES SQUARE CELEBRATES NEW YEAR’S DIVERSITY

© Weekly World News

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Every year as the clock ticks down to midnight on December 31, a giant, glittering Waterford crystal ball of light descends from a flagpole to the roof of One Times Square. At the stroke of midnight the ball touches bottom and the crowd of almost one million people goes wild in celebration of the New Year!

This uniquely New York tradition dates back to 1906 and has come to symbolize New Year’s Eve to most of the world.

But December 31 isn’t New Year’s Eve for everyone. “Many cultures follow different calendars and observe their own New Years on days other than December 31,” New York’s Deputy Mayor for Cultural Affairs, Frank Daley told Weekly World News.

Since New York is a melting pot of all peoples and cultures, the municipal government has made an effort to include these diverse celebrations in its Times Square tradition. “For instance,” Deputy Mayor Daly said, “on the Jewish New Year, or Rosh Hoshanah, which falls on the first and second days of the Hebrew calendar in the month of Tishri, or around mid- to late-September, people gather at sundown—the traditional start of the new day—in Times Square to watch the dropping of a giant, illuminated matzoh ball.

“Now, the Chinese follow a lunar calendar and celebrate their New Year in January or February, which we commemorate with the dropping of a giant dim sum, while the Chinese New Year, also in February, gets its very own electric dumpling. It’s all quite festive. And delicious.”

Other New Year ornaments include the Korean Ttok-kuk, or rice cake soup bowl, Banh Trang, the Vietnamese rice paper-wrapped delicacy, which is dropped into a giant dish of dipping sauce, the mid-April celebrations of the Southern Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala with the vada, or deep fried doughnuts made from a batter of lentils, and appam, a pancake made of fermented rice flour, respectively.

“We also celebrate the New Years of the Muslim faith, of Sinhala, Tibet, Iran, the Telugu, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Bangladesh, Thailand ... you name it, New York drops something to celebrate it,” Deputy Mayor Daley proudly proclaimed.

But a thorough examination of the holiday list showed the March observance of the Assyrian New Year, Rish Nissanu, was missing.

“Whoops, I guess we dropped the ball on that one,” the deputy mayor sheepishly admitted. “Or, in this case, didn’t drop it.”

He's the Goddamned Batman!

I was recently asked by my buddy Jim Beard to contribute to Gotham City 14 Miles, a book of essays on Batman he is editing for the Sequart Research & Literacy Organization (to be published in July 2010). My subject was the lasting effects of the 1960s Batman TV show on the character and on pop culture. The first section thereof is below:

“Some Days You Just Can't Get Rid of a Bomb”:
The Legacy of Batman

© respective copyright holders

“Oh, my.”
Leonard Goldenson, ABC Television President, in response
to the pitch for the Batman television show

When that first episode of Batman aired on January 12, 1966, I was ten and one-half years old. I was already a hardcore comic book reader and something of an accumulator, if not quite yet a collector, of as many comics as I could lay my hands on.

I was the audience for that show, eager, no dying to see another of my four-color heroes come to life on the TV screen, like The Adventures of Superman, the 104-episodes of which originally aired between 1952 and 1958 and continued on and on in daytime syndication during my childhood on New York’s WPIX-TV, Channel 11.

Pow! Zap ! Bam!

Yes, I recognized they were making fun of Batman, but so what? Grown-ups always made fun of comic books. My father, himself a reader of Doc Savage, the Shadow, Conan, and G-8 and His Battle Aces in the pages of the ten-cent pulp magazines of the 1930s, who brought home the 1960s Ace Books editions of the Tarzan novels with the gorgeous Frank Frazetta covers for his sons to read, who nurtured the creative instinct in the three of us, all of whom went into some sort of creative field, my father, who must have understood the appeal and certainly never discouraged our interest in comic books, nonetheless called the four-color pamphlets my older brother and I separately hoarded by the hundreds “Popeyes,” as in Popeye the Sailor Man, whose name became the noun for all comic books. “You left a pile of your Popeyes in the car,” he would say. “When you’re finished reading your Popeyes, would you take out the garbage?” Most adults just called them “funny books.”

And even in the ghetto of Pop Culture, comic books were the lowest of the kid stuff. Dangerous, even, if the doomsayers of the 1950s witch-hunts against the evils of comic books and their damaging effect on young minds were to be believed. And even if not dangerous, certainly disposable. To modern collectors in their Mylar bags sealed between slabs of plastic, the notion that a comic book was rolled up and stuck in the back pocket of an eleven year-olds jeans before and after being read (repeatedly, and by many kids) is sacrilegious, but that was exactly what we did. That issue of Spider-Man I romped around with in my back pocket in 1964 is worth hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars today, but back then, it was the center of my universe and, until I learned better a couple of years later, I ran around with it, or another one like it, rolled up in my pocket, where I could bring it out any time to read again. A copy of a Flash Annual from around the same period will forever carry the grit of New York’s Reis Park beach sand ground into its square-bound spine from that summer when it was the comic book I could not go anywhere without.

Pow! Zap! Bam!

Comics did not get respect before Batman and, aside from the recognition of comics during the run of the show, was no better off after than before. Respect was too much to ask of a funny book. The comics had been effectively neutered by the 1950s and were unlikely to feature anything capable of offending anybody (although there’s always someone to be offended by anything), but Senator Kefauver’s Congressional hearings into the link between comics, juvenile delinquency, and childhood emotional problems were only a decade in the past. These hearings were inconclusive and came up with no result other than the creation of the industry’s self-policing agency, the Comics Code Authority of America. The bad taste had nonetheless been left behind in everybody’s mouth and, in their memory of the hearings, comics had been officially stamped “garbage” by the U.S. government. What other proof did they need?

When it came to picking from this heap, Hollywood had not always approached it with such trepidation. In the 1940s, superheroes were successful on the radio (Superman on a three-times a week program on the Mutual Network) as well as on the big screen as serialized adventures, 10 or 12 15-minute weekly shorts, each with a cliffhanger ending to draw the kids back to the theater to see how the hero gets out of this one! Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel, Captain America, Blackhawk, and others from the comics were made into serials, while a series of Superman cartoon shorts produced by the Fleischer Studios (creators of Popeye and Betty Boop before the Man of Steel) for Paramount are still considered classics of animation. The Adventures of Superman starring George Reeves was, despite, the nostalgic chuckles it elicits today, a very faithful and, for the most part, straight adaptation of the Superman then in the comic books, scaled down from his skyscraper-lifting level of four-color power to a syndicated TV program’s budget. But, of course, the program was produced by DC Comics, its stories overseen by comic book editors-turned-producers Whitney Ellsworth and Mort Weisinger. They were company men playing with company toys and they were very careful not to break anything.

The one thing all of the above have in common is that they were created as and always intended to be for kids. Serials were shown on Saturday mornings, along with cartoons and other kid stuff. The Adventures of Superman radio program ran for 11-years in a late afternoon timeslot. The Adventures of Superman TV show, though its first two seasons, in black and white, are darker and more serious than the later color seasons, was always a kids show, right down to its sponsorship by Kellogg’s cereals.

Comics only started getting into on-screen trouble when someone decided to do a TV show for grown-ups without first getting over their embarrassment at what they were doing.

One always has to start from the premise that the people adapting comics to the screen, big or little, do not have any respect for the material, certainly not then and, comics overall public relations progress to the contrary, not still.

The people who make movies and television shows, who stage Broadway shows and publish literature are embarrassed by the source material, whether they will admit to it or not. They voice a love and admiration for this true American art form, but if what has hit the movie and television screens is the result of love, hate me, please. Even the best of them can not help metaphorically winking uncomfortably in acknowledgment of the source. The subtext may be Shakespearean in scope, but the brilliance is clad in primary colored spandex that overwhelms even the strongest message. (These same dramatists forgetting that Shakespeare himself was little more than a TV writer of his time, the legends and tales of the era serving as the source material for his plays, themselves pandering to the lowest common denominator in the cheap seats.)

But no message, as it turned out, would ever be stronger than this:

Pow! Zap! Bam!

It made the show. It was, the first time it hit the screen that January night in 1966, a self-announcing visual punch in the nose. It made mom and dad laugh. It was kitschy, campy, and in tune with the “pop art” movement popularized by such commercial artists as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, both influenced by comic art, Lichtenstein, indeed, lifting, without credit or remuneration, entire panels from romance and war comics to recreate as such paintings as "Drowning Girl" and, more to the point of Pow! Zap! Bam!, "Whaam!" Marvel Comics, which, under the creative direction of Stan Lee and his co-writing artist cohorts like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Don Heck, and others, had bumped up the level of comic book sophistication with continuing stories and heavy doses of soap opera elements inflicted on superheroes whose secret identities lead less-than-perfect lives, even went so far as to change its corner symbol identifying their titles as “Marvel Pop Art Productions” for four or five months during 1965, riding the wave of a trend their existence helped to set rolling.

“Pow! Zap! Bam!” was brilliant, an inclusive nod to the source material. Sound effects have long been a vital part of the vocabulary of comics. A picture of a fist in the vicinity of a chin is only half the story. The “WHAM!” of the knock-out punch or the “whoosh!” of the fist sailing past its target tells the rest. Hand-lettered onamonapia was straight out of the newspaper comic strips and comic books the chuckling adults had read as children. It was self-referential and precious and it was exactly the right touch of gentle mockery to catapult Batman into a full-blown, two-year long bona fide fad.

The only problem was, even after Batman was gone from the airwaves, it left “Pow! Zap! Bam!” behind.

Sugar, Sugar!

Having recently started writing for the good folks over at Archie Comics, I was invited to the opening of "The Art of Archie Comics" exhibit at New York's Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art this Thursday evening past (curated by, among others, old friends Alex Simmons and Arie Kaplan). It is a great exhibit, full of fascinating art and memorabilia from the 65+ years of Archie and the gang, and the comics industry came out to see it, from Archie execs to DC Comics honchos, including Paul Levitz, to scads of old friends, from Charlie Kochman (Abrams Books) to Heidi (The Beat) MacDonald, to Michael Uslan, writer of the ongoing "Archie Marries Veronica" storyline, and many others. I even got to meet the granddaughter of Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson...he was the man who pretty much invented the comic book industry and started that company which would one day become DC Comics.

On hand to help raise much needed funds for the richly deserving Museum were Archie artists Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz. They spent the entire evening behind a table banging out sketches for donations, to which I was happy to contribute, especially as I was rewarded with the following for my generosity:


If you're going to be in the Lower Manhattan area any time between now and the end of February, I hope you'll check it out.

Oh, and while I was in the neighborhood, I chatted with the Archie folks about my participation in what promises to be a major new project for the company from Mamaroneck, NY coming in 2010! Can't wait to be able to share the news and I can't tell you how thrilled I am to be playing a part in the exciting things to come.

Rooby-Doo!

Check out, if you will, Scooby Doo #150, hitting shops next week with my story, "The Black Katz."

The Yin of Mr. Yang

When one makes a living as a freelance writer, one must often write a wide range of things.

In my case, that includes, among other things, comic books, short stories, novels, articles and the occasional foray into non-fiction for the YA market. I've been writing these since around 2001, doing one or two titles a year ranging in topics from science and history to biography and pop culture. The latest, copies of which I just received, is Asian Americans of Achievement: Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!) from Chelsea House Publishers, specialized publishers in the school and library market.

...Beware My Power, Green Lantern's Light! Extra

"Eyes of the Beholders!" Continued

© DC Comics

Pal and "Eyes of the Beholders!" penciller Rick Stasi sent me this scan, pulled from eBay, of a page (page 7 to be precise) from our (probably) never-published story, the script for which can be found in the previous three postings. Thanks, Ricky!

Enjoy!

Let Those Who Worship Evil's Might-Part 3

"Eyes of the Beholders"-Part 3

© DC Comics

No Evil Shall Escape My Sight-Part 2

"The Eyes of the Beholders"-Part 2

© DC Comics

In Brightest Day, In Darkest Night-Part 1

The following script was written, if memory serves me -- and it seldom does -- in the mid-1980s. DC Comics legendary editor Julie Schwartz was semi-retired from monthly comics, but still working on special projects, like DC's science fiction graphic novel series, and, for a time, on fill-in issues of ongoing titles. Back before continuity was such a harsh mistress, a late-running issue could be substituted with a fill-in prepared well in advance and waiting in a drawer to be slipped into the schedule. Julie was given the job of commissioning and editing a boatload of such fill-in issues for the major DC titles; my friend Rick Stasi was scheduled to pencil this story, but for reasons I forget (if I ever knew 'em), most of these fill-ins never got drawn.

(Update: Pal and artist Rick Stasi dropped me an e-mail to tell me that this story was indeed penciled, lettered and inked and that, possibly, according to what he was told by editor Schwartz, it may have been used in comics albums licensed by German publisher Ehapa, for which I wrote or co-wrote with Bob Rozakis about half a dozen 48-page Superman stories, most unpublished in this country.)

I wrote a Green Lantern fill-in, this 19-page script one of the undrawn issues. Since I got my first computer late in 1986, this story, written on a typewriter (Google it), must pre-date that. The hand-written edits were Julie's work...as you can see, he did not spare the editorial pencil...

"The Eyes of the Beholders"-Part 1

© DC Comics