GROSS DISTRACTION - Hell-Bent for Election
A punchy campaign film from Roosevelt's 1944 Presidential campaign
(skip ahead to watch the Chuck Jones campaign film or read the post about Going My Way)
This business of watching the top-grossing movies from each year in sequence is engrossing - but it’s always a bit daunting because every movie - even the crappy ones - gives me a vast, branching web of connections to explore and I quite often get lost down multiple pathways while doing so.
So, by way of a preview, here’s another pathway for you. 1944’s top film was Going My Way, a musical comedy with priests. It was released in May 1944 and a month or so later another film was released - a short animation of the kind that used to be shown before the big movie - it seems likely that lots of people saw it when they went to the cinema to see Going My Way. These two films are connected by history but also by theme.
It’s Summer 1944. With all the major powers engaged the war is beginning to look winnable. 16 Million Americans served in the war - an almost inconceivably large proportion of the population, especially when you consider the way that the USA likes to fight a territorial war in 2024. At home, the American economy is running hot, providing tanks, planes and ships at such a rate that they’re piling up in the ports.
This could be the most productive moment for any economy in history - US GDP grew by 16% in 1942. It turns out that a centrally-planned war economy in a continent-sized nation that’s thousands of miles from any actual fighting is almost ideal. The boom that started in this moment lasted for decades - until Reagan (not him again) began the great unwinding that brings us to the present unpleasantness. But you knew all that.
Vote, vote, vote!
I don’t want to be bossy but, if you’re planning on reading my Going My Way post when I send it out, you should start by watching Hell-Bent for Election. It’s a campaign ad from FDR’s fourth Presidential campaign (no one had ever served more than two and, after Roosevelt, no one ever would). It’s directed by Chuck Jones. Yes, that Chuck Jones. And it’s a minor work of art, paid for by the United Auto Workers. The film’s a thrill: a powerful reminder of a period during which it was legitimate to talk about the interests of workers in a direct and unapologetic way and it was possible for an incumbent government to ally with trade unions to win victory.
Here’s my piece about Going My Way: A hymn to capital in the city of labour.
You can download Hell-Bent for Election from various sources, including the Internet Archive. Don’t download it here because I’ve compressed it.
Roosevelt’s 1944 election victory was a big one. He won the electoral college vote by 432 to 99 but he was in office for only a few months when he died and was succeeded by his Vice-President Harry S. Truman, who wound up overseeing some of the most consequential moments in US history - the German surrender, the bomb, the Marshall Plan, war in Korea, Berlin airlift and so on.
It’s a truism that war economies grow fast. They grow in a distorted way that usually favours investors and governments over workers but they surely grow. The Russian economy, very much a war economy at this point, will grow faster than all of the developed economies this year, for instance, incuding the American powerhouse.