Assault of Thoughts - 1920s Edition - 11/19/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

If you haven't picked up on it by now, I'm quite definitively hooked on the 1920s. The founding era is still very important to me. The 1930s and 1940s are fascinating as well. And the populist era is growing on me. But it's the 1920s that has really started to capture my imagination. So here it goes:

- I recently stumbled across an article by Robert Barro and Jose Ursua in the Wall Street Journal tying the Spanish Flu to the 1920-21 depression! Fascinating! I'm sure there is a paper they're basing this on, which I really need to track down. I wish I had had this when I wrote mine. Oh well. I remember looking at life tables in my demography class that captured the Spanish Flu - it was a surprisingly large spike. Interesting stuff. You would think that a negative labor supply shock like that would raise labor costs, though. I don't know - worth looking into. Barro and Ursua also seem to be looking internationally - perhaps it wasn't as big of a factor in the U.S.

- Andrew Sullivan notes that Bush's use of torture against terror suspects all but guaranteed the acquittal of Ahmed Ghailani on almost all his charges. In 1920 the New York Times took a more principled stance. On September 16th, 1920, a bomb planted by anarchists exploded on Wall Street, killing 38 people and sending shockwaves through the nation. The Times was firm, but principled. It talked about hunting down the terrorists "like wild animals", but noted that the very advantage of Americans was that we were "civilized" and that our society's "mental and spiritual resources" were "infinitely superior to anarchy". We hunt down terrorism. We fight it. But we don't descend into anarchy and terrorism ourselves in the process. Read the whole peace - it should be more widely read today.

- Finally, Hampton Stevens at The Atlantic discusses the upcoming Great Gatsby movie. He cautions that "Film versions of Fitzgerald's masterwork inevitably fail because of the kind of novel Gatsby is—frankly thin on story, but incredibly thick with introspection, thoughts unspoken, intricately woven metaphor, and long, dazzling descriptions of otherwise mundane things like sunsets, front lawns and angry wives that are only special because of how the narrator describes them."