How the Arabian Nights Inspired the American Dream, 1790-1935

Eight: Sign of Promise: African Americans and Eastern Personae in the Great Depression

chapter 8 .................................................................................................................. Sign of Promise: African Americans and Eastern Personae in the Great Depression W hen the economic system began to crumble in the late 1920s, performers of spiritual Eastern manhood would have a more di≈cult time playing Oriental as a way of prospering in the market, although many turned to playing Eastern as a way to cope with the worst fiscal crisis the nation had ever seen. A ‘‘crescendo of credit criticism’’ from moral watchdogs had for several years already acknowledged the growing opinion that consumers were an important measure of the strength of the economy but that many consumers made irresponsible choices. Plenty of people in the middle classes and working classes were living beyond their means since many had internalized what Lendol Calder calls a ‘‘psychology of a√luence’’ premised on consumer credit. The ‘‘Aladdin’s Lamp’’ of installment plans and other credit available from manufacturers and retailers, he explains, had grown astronomically from $500,000 in 1910 to $7 billion in 1929.∞ The inability of actual consumer incomes to absorb the nation’s productive bounty was only one ingredient leading the nation to economic disaster along with an overvalued stock market, weak banking regulation, and similar downturns around the globe, among other factors. When the crash came that October, many finally had to recognize the larger structural problems within American consumer capitalism that ruined individuals no matter how intelligent or hard working but kept them always hoping for more.≤ Along with the stories of homelessness, bread lines, and suicides by men who perceived themselves as failures when they lost jobs, investments, and their marriages came word-of-mouth and press accounts of a national debate over how the economic crisis could be fixed, some useful, some not, much of it grounded in a democratic national public culture. Many citizens wrote to their elected o≈cials with various schemes and solutions. For instance, Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg received a letter that suggested the government create work by hiring men to move the Rocky Mountains.≥ At the same time, 232 ...Sign of Promise Swami-style mind reader in dress tie and exotic cloak, crystal ball in hand, Louisiana State Fair, Donaldson, Louisiana, 1938. Note costumed portrait on right. LC-USF33-011769-M4, Russell Lee Photograph Collection, Library of Congress. and perhaps just as ine√ectually, books and movies continued to celebrate gangsters like Al Capone as self-made men who shrugged o√ economic downturns , while the peddlers of ‘‘success’’ manuals and other commercial ‘‘folklores of capitalism,’’ as Charles McGovern calls them, such as Dale Carnegie, author of the iconic How to Win Friends and Influence People (1931) made a living o√ering lessons for unlimited personal achievement.∂ Then, in 1933, at the depths of the crisis, Hollywood o√ered to the public The Mind Reader, a cinematic cautionary tale about the dangers of failure for men and the contrast between who Americans hoped they could become in a liberal capitalist country and who they really were. The movie implied that perhaps many men were secretly su√ering from imposter syndrome in a romantic drama played out in the story of a failed door-to-door salesman who resorts to the business of fortune-telling to preserve his role as breadwinner at home. ‘‘He elects to be known as Chandra the Great and to impress his clients he wears Oriental headgear and talks in sepulchral tones,’’ a contemporary review of the film recounted.∑ The plot of the film had Chandra and his sidekick Frank cavorting with society women and underage girls while his innocent wife believes him to be earning an honest living, briefcase in hand. Image Not Available Sign of Promise ... 233 The promotional poster for The Mind Reader depicted a nude woman barely obscured in sheer fabric laying draped over a giant crystal ball, within which was framed the devious face of a magician wearing a pencil-thin mustache. The obvious moral of the story was that only weak men would stoop so low as to earn a living in a turban, even in the depths of the Great Depression. The modern persona of wise man of the East was also symbolic of American men’s own struggle to materialize great wealth in a precarious capitalist system in which the consumer’s Oriental tale seemed increasingly like a magician’s illusion. Although the turban was a sign of emasculation to some and had...