Postwar Decline Research Articles

“I think of Chaplin”: Poetry and the Tramp in Cold War America

AbstractThis essay explores how Charlie Chaplin’s tribulations under McCarthyism, which culminated in his exile from the US in 1952, occasioned a minor chorus of poetry on the American Left. Through case studies of Bob Kaufman, Edwin Rolfe, and Louis Zukofsky, this essay explores how radical poets from across different literary groupings were drawn to Chaplin in the Cold War’s early years out of personal and political solidarity, while also finding in him a figure through whom they could collectively register and resist the Left’s broader postwar decline. The article also sheds light on the much longer history of Chaplin’s connections with poetry and poets. It traces his relationship with socialist writers back to the 1910s and suggests how postwar poetry’s imaginative investment in Chaplin as a political figure has a deeper layer of significance, given that the filmmaker had for decades been influenced by his friendships with poets on the Left. The essay proposes that poetry’s unique potentiality as a form through which to oppose Chaplin’s struggles under McCarthyism is a consequence of poets having fostered his political consciousness in the first place.Reading [texts] . . . about Chaplin’s postwar political isolation comparatively and cumulatively, what emerges is a poetry whose shared references bespeak a form of fraught solidarity and whose full force resides in their being understood as a kind of communal response.

The role of the USA aviation industry in the development of general aviation

The history of a relatively little-studied sub-sector of aircraft manufacturing is described: the development and production of general purpose airplanes. Data on 2690 aircraft models and their production are collected by the author. It is shown that the USA share in the production in the 20th century exceeds 80 %, although in 1930–1945 European countries were the leaders. Assumptions are made about the reasons for the change of leaders. The definition of “general purpose airplane” is given with references to the regulatory documents of the USA, European Union and Russia. It is shown that the most popular subclass of such airplanes is four-seaters, its share in the total production of aircraft with the number of seats from 3 to 11 exceeds 50 %. For the first time, the year-by-year dynamics of the development and production of general purpose airplanes in the 20th century in the world is published. Strong declines in production are mentioned during the Great Depression and in the first half of the 1980s. It is shown that the demand for general purpose airplanes decreased significantly during the aggravation of the political situation, which correlates with the confidence of potential buyers in their future. Probably, such dependence should be observed for other long-time used consumer goods. The development of new models of general-purpose aircraft was also studied. It is shown that the peak of its intensity falls on 1929, and the post-war decline in the number of developments began even during the period of growth in production – in the mid-1960s. A very strong geographic concentration has been found: almost half of all general purpose airplanes in the world are built in one town (Wichita, Kansas), where more than a dozen airplane manufacturers have located their enterprises.

Economic growth, population health and Sustainable Development Goal 8

Abstract High-income countries (HICs), including UK, Germany and Japan, are reducing CO2 output relative to economic growth. SDG8 refers to 'sustainable growth' but does not differentiate between low, middle- and high-income countries. The United Nations target is for net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, therefore there is a strong case for exploring the implications of low or zero economic growth among HICs as a mechanism for limiting climate change. A key consideration is whether progress in population health would stall if HIC economies stopped growing. We examined headline health statistics among HIC countries for evidence of divergence in health trends. We looked for associations between trajectories of national economies and health trends over the past four decades. Age-standardised death rates were calculated from all-cause and cause-specific rates in the WHO mortality database. All-cause mortality (ACM) rates declined in parallel in UK, France and Japan, from about 700 to 400/100,000 in the period 1980-2010, with the lowest rates in Japan. Decline in the ACM rate in USA was shallower 1980-2010. In the decade of austerity following the banking crisis, the ACM rate in USA and UK stopped declining. The Japanese ACM rate continued its rapid post-war decline in the two decades of economic stagnation after 1990. Trends in Japanese coronary heart disease, stroke and cancer mortality rates, but not those for suicide, were consistently favourable in the recent period. The natural before-and-after experiment in Japan, of high economic growth in the decades to 1990, and low growth after 1990, is an example of a HIC with continuing progress in population health in a long period of low growth. Repeat measures of subjective, self-rated health from a population-based Japanese survey series (1986-2013) add to the evidence from objective mortality rate trends. Progress in population health does not need to stall if HIC economies focus on combatting climate change instead of growth.

WWII contract spending and inequality

ABSTRACT We find that the share of state-level income captured by the top 1% of income earners falls by 1.73pp in response to WWII contract spending. We also find a postwar permanent decline in top 1% income shares of 0.85pp attributable to wartime spending. This is half the average state-level decline in inequality during the war and one-fifth of the average postwar decline in inequality relative to 1940. We take this as evidence that WWII military spending induced permanent labour market changes in manufacturing that reduced inequality relative to its level in 1940.

A General Theory of Value and Money: Foundations of an Axiomatic Theory

This article is the first part of “A General Theory of Value and Money” and sets out the foundations of an axiomatic theory of value and money. Its purpose is to equip the public to explain the four facts that define the modern capitalist economy: the long-term post-war decline of the economies of the global North, the financial instability which produced the 2008 crash, the prolonged post-war growth in inequality between the global North and the global South, and the exceptional 30-year growth of China. The axiomatic method is poorly understood among economists. It allows us to interrogate empirical evidence in a systematic way, and is therefore the necessary precondition for an inductivist, scientific enquiry into economic events, that is, an enquiry whose starting point is the explanation of facts. The second part of “A General Theory of Value and Money,” to follow, deals with the empirical conclusions, especially the analysis of accumulation, the rate of profit, and financial crashes.

From Urban Citizens to Ocean Liners: Miami Beach Hotels and the Enclosure Movement, 1935-1955

This article analyzes changes in hotel urbanism in Miami Beach. Most of the Art Deco hotels built between 1935 and 1942 were “urban citizens”—visually integrated into an ensemble of architecturally similar buildings and economically integrated into a symbiotic leisure economy where urban hostels, nightclubs, and luxury retailers combined to offer a diverse collection of tourists a vacation of “accessible glamour” that made Miami Beach distinctive among resorts. At the same time, another approach to hotel urbanism exemplified a strategy of enclosing leisure businesses. Autonomous resorts were more like ocean liners than urban citizens: providing guests with self-contained vacation spaces that kept them apart from the city. The enclosure movement reached its pinnacle in the postwar era with a new generation of hotels epitomized by the Fontainebleau. This article discusses the consequences of the enclosure movement for nightclubs and luxury retailers, relating their disappearance to the city’s postwar decline.

A Healthy Defeat? Mapping the Postwar Decline of Tuberculosis in Japan, 1945–1955

Während der amerikanischen Besetzung Japans begann ein steiler Rückgang der Tuberkulose– die für Jahrzehnte, wenn nicht Jahrhunderte, die führende Todesursache gewesenwar – sowohl hinsichtlich der Inzidenz wie der Mortalität. Die Ursachen für diesenRückgang bleiben ein Mysterium. Dies ist sowohl auf die Limitationen der verfügbarenDaten zurückzuführen, wie auf der Epidemiologie der Tuberkulose inhärente Schwierigkeiten.Nichtsdestoweniger kann die sorgsame Erfassung des Rückgangs dieser Erkrankungin seinen zeitlichen und räumlichen Aspekten helfen, zu einem besseren Verständnisdieses spektakulären, auch in international vergleichender Perspektive beachtenswertenPhänomens zu gelangen.

‘Two children to make ends meet’: the ideal family size, parental responsibilities and costs of children on two sides of the Iron Curtain during the post-war fertility decline

One of the major corollaries of the post-war fertility boom and decline is that two-child families became common across Europe after the 1970s. Despite the general agreement on the convergence of fertility trends, there is still little understanding of how this change took place in a comparative perspective of Western and Eastern Europe, which at that time were characterised by Cold War tensions of different ideological regimes. This study addresses this aspect by focusing on individual decisions around childbearing, child-rearing and family size. Based on 104 oral histories from Switzerland and Ukraine, this study illuminates that the urban setting provided parents with a similar set of constraints and opportunities, which eventually resulted in strikingly similar perceptions of the costs of childrearing on two sides of the Iron Curtain. Individuals’ motives to postpone first birth in Switzerland and second birth in Ukraine rested on a similar aspiration to invest in the well-being of children by ensuring material security for the family. This aim was increasingly achieved through female labour-force participation and adoption of modern contraception – the pill in Switzerland and abortion in Ukraine. While the timing of returning to the labour market and the share of women working after entering parenthood might have varied across the two contexts, a good mother became increasingly defined in both contexts in terms of providing emotionally and financially for her children. Although the introduction of modern birth control methods allowed couples to plan family size more carefully, it also made Swiss and Ukrainian women increasingly carry the major costs and actual burden of birth control. Altogether, this study challenges the common assumption around the persistence of strikingly different demographic realities in post-war Western and Eastern Europe by uncovering the mechanisms behind the stabilisation of family size around the two-child family ideal.

Extinction of Lasiommata petropolitana (Fabricius, 1787) (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae) in the Czech Republic: a case of habitat loss at a range margin

Abstract Lasiommata petropolitana is a boreomontane butterfly, declining in Central Europe and not recorded in the Czech Republic since 1975. Based on revision of all existing archival records and results of recent targeted surveys in mountainous regions of East Moravia, area of its past occurrence, we document its gradual retreat and ultimate regional extinction. The historical range, marginal with respect to contiguous distribution along the Carpathian mountain chain, included both foothills and higher elevations of Bílé Karpaty, Hostýnské Vrchy, Javorníky, Moravskoslezské Beskydy and Vsetínské Vrchy Mts; pre-1950 records document also a past occurrence at calcareous bedrock localities in Brno environs. Other past lowland records (Oslava valley, Olomouc, Znojmo) were due to misidentifications. Within the historical Czech range, the butterfly inhabited pastures with exposed calcareous, flysh or sandstone bedrock, maintained by traditional grazing. The decline of the species proceeded from lower elevations and foothills towards mountain ridges. The higher elevation sites were encroached by successional changes, or intentionally afforested, with post-war decline of mountain grazing. This development went largely unnoticed by conservation authorities, and represents a loss of mountain butterfly from marginal parts of its range.

Post-War Cinema-Going and Working-Class Communities: A Case Study of the Holyland, Belfast, 1945–1962

This article utilizes oral history testimony to investigate cinema-going practices in the Holyland, a largely Protestant working-class community in post-war Belfast. It investigates the place-specific nature of cinema attendance, assesses the social practices of cinema-going and examines the reasons for the post-war decline in attendance and consequent cinema closures. Oral history testimony demonstrates the close link between the nature of cinema attendance, changes in the life cycle and urban mobility. By linking the recollections of post-war cinema-goers to broader social and economic developments in Belfast, and assessing Northern Ireland's relationship to the rest of the United Kingdom, this article investigates the reasons for the closure of the Apollo, the local neighbourhood cinema for residents of the Holyland.

You’re in the Army now!

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the employment of the military metaphor by the management thinker and writer Lyndall Urwick who in the twentieth century developed and articulated his ideas over a 60-year period, arguably the longest continuous period of any management writer of his day.Design/methodology/approachThis study draws on published research into Urwick as well as upon the breadth of his published writings over a 60-year period. It offers a contextualised explanatory analysis of his military theory ideas and explores their lack of traction by reference to British military, economic and social history.FindingsThe study reveals the wartime context that surrounded the emergence of his ideas and motivated Urwick’s faith in the military approach to management. This stood in contrast to the countervailing forces of the post-war decline in British industry and a populist mythology of British Army mismanagement and failure in the Great War.Originality/valueIn this case of a management idea’s failure to gain traction, the importance of the congruence between management theory and societal beliefs emerges as crucial to the likely uptake of new management thinking.

Harold Groves, Wisconsin Institutionalism, and Postwar Public Finance

Institutionalism was the dominant approach to public finance prior to WWII, after which it was eclipsed by Pigouvianism and Keynesianism. This transition defined the career of Wisconsin’s Harold M. Groves (1897–1969). Groves was a notable public finance economist, leading textbook author, and drafter of significant tax and labor legislation. He represented the culmination of a multigenerational institutionalist tradition. In this paper, I examine Groves and postwar public finance as a test case for the legacy of Wisconsin institutionalism. To that end, I consider Groves’s contributions to postwar tax policy, his interactions with Henry C. Simons and Richard M. Musgrave, and his view on Keynesian public finance. I identify some Wisconsin institutionalist contributions to modern public finance and offer an explanation for the postwar decline in institutional public finance.

Homer's Turk: how classics shaped ideas of the East

A seventeenth-century English traveler to Eastern Mediterranean would have faced a problem in writing about this unfamiliar place: how to describe its inhabitants in a way his countrymen would understand? In an age when a European education meant mastering Classical literature of Greece and Rome, he would naturally turn to touchstones like Iliad to explain exotic customs of Ottoman lands. His Turk would have been Homer's Turk. An account of epic sweep, spanning Crusades, Indian Raj, and postwar decline of British Empire, Homer's Turk illuminates how English writers of all eras have relied on Classics to help them understand world once called the Orient. Ancient Greek and Roman authors, Jerry Toner shows, served as a conceptual frame of reference over long periods in which trade, religious missions, and imperial interests shaped English encounters with East. Rivaling Bible as a widespread, flexible vehicle of Western thought, Classics provided a ready model for portrayal and understanding of Oriental Other. Such image-making, Toner argues, persists today in some of ways West frames its relationship with Islamic world and rising powers of India and China. Discussing examples that range from Jacobean travelogues to Hollywood blockbusters, Homer's Turk proves that there is no permanent version of either ancient past or East in English writing--the two have been continually reinvented alongside each other.

‘To Be a Woman’: Female Labour and Memory in Documentary Film Production, 1929–50

Despite extensive scholarship on British documentary in the period from 1929 to 1950, the role of female documentary film-makers has received relatively little attention, partly due to their fragmented and partial ‘archival trace’. Combining neglected materials in the BECTU oral history project, the personnel records of the GPO Film Unit, and the personal papers of leading female documentarists, this article challenges the standard narrative of wartime opportunity and postwar decline that tends to characterise the examination of women's employment more broadly in this period. It uses women's experience in documentary film production to offer a more complex explanation of the effect of war within a wider chronological framework and within the context of workflow, labour patterns, training and networks within the industry itself. It examines female documentarists’ own accounts, through oral histories, to suggest that such sources should be ‘read against the light’ to offer insights into the memory of the Second World War, contending that the place of gender in defining individual careers both during and after the conflict remains contested, a site of the continued struggle for professional recognition, achievement and identity.

‘The Antithesis of Humankind’

ABSTRACTThis article explores the political, economic, media and social reactions to the Sex Pistols' Anarchy Tour of December 1976. A critical reading of the sociological concept of ‘moral panic’ is used to examine the ways in which responses to the Sex Pistols were related to the notion of post-war decline, immorality, delinquent youth and the changing nature of the British working class. The responses to the Anarchy Tour constitute a further episode in the cycle of ‘moral panics' that emerged in British society in connection with the development of youth culture, juvenile delinquency and popular music. The exploration that follows posits the view that although ‘moral panic’ is useful for understanding particular aspects of popular music, it also conceals the complexity of the differing responses of political/social groups to the appearance of such phenomena. The article also forms a critique of recent revisionist characterizations of Britain in the 1970s. The ‘moral panic’ surrounding the Sex Pistols was in part ‘socially constructed’ by the media, yet reactions by trade unionists, students, feminists and socialists show that concerns about British society in 1976 were not confined to religious pressure groups, conservative media commentators and political elites.

Trauma, Memory and History in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Fiction

Though Kazuo Ishiguro is not labelled as a writer of historical fiction, most of his writings until now are set against the backdrop of World War II, particularly the atomic bombing in Nagasaki, the postwar decline of British empire, and Japan’s invasion to China. These historical scenarios provide Ishiguro with a context to explore the emotional and psychological trauma the war has inflicted on the protagonists, thus reminding the contemporary reader of the significance of remembering the past. His fiction also presents a picture of how individuals cope with their personal loss and how they go through the painful process from self-deception, to self-denial and last to self-redemption. And Ishiguro always ends his fiction with a hopeful note, giving the reader a sense of optimism toward the life ahead.

Constituting religious publics: The tale of two non-conformist churches in London

This article explores the constitution of religious spaces and publics in the city through case studies of two non-conformist protestant churches in London: City Temple and the Metropolitan Tabernacle. This approach allows us to unpack broad arguments about changing religious cultures in the modern city by highlighting the specificities of everyday religious cultures. Despite similar histories, from Victorian prominence to wartime destruction and post-war decline and revival, there are considerable differences between these communities. One presents itself as an inclusive site for multicultural interaction, while the other foregrounds their traditional doctrinal principles. The more traditional approach has been far more successful, offering a sense of stability, tradition and belonging, which is clearly attractive to many churchgoers. This is simultaneously a multi-ethnic gathering and a ‘mixophobic’ place, in which a clearly bounded identity community is established, and where there is little encounter with those of different views.

Arms and Influence: British arms policy and the decline of British influence in the Middle East, 1948-49

This article examines the impact of the 29 May 1948 United Nations arms embargo on Israel and the Arab League states during the first Arab-Israeli war (1948-49). The war was the direct result of Britain’s failed mandate over Palestine between 1923 and 1948. The arms embargo was a manifestation of Britain’s imperial retreat in the Middle East, exemplifying Britain’s post-war decline in the region. This article focuses on Britain’s foreign relations with Egypt, Iraq and Transjordan because Britain was treaty-bound to supply arms and ammunition to them. It also examines the fraught relationship between London and Washington over the Palestine question, and emphasises how the British and American governments were able to agree on the maintenance of the arms embargo despite their differences over the future status of Palestine. The embargo was also an early example of the unequal nature of the post-war “special relationship” between Britain and America because British diplomats were negotiating from a position of weakness. The embargo was a complete failure. While well intended, it had detrimental implications for Britain’s standing in the Middle East. Britain’s failure to support Egypt, Iraq and Transjordan during the first Arab-Israeli war undermined its credibility as a reliable ally, showing the Arabs that their interests were secondary to the political

Geographies of Desire: Postsocial Urban Space and Historical Revision in the Films of Martin Scorsese

I was stupid . . . New York meant freedom to me. -Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence (1993) IN A KEY MOMENT IN MARTIN SCORSESE'S TAXI DRIVER (1976), the taxi driver, Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), picks up a new customer, Senator and presidential hopeful Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). When Travis recognizes Palantine, the latter asks, What is the one thing about this country that bugs you most? After some hesitation, Travis answers: Well, whatever it is, he [the president] should clean up this city here because this city here is like an open sewer, you know. It's full of filth and scum. Sometimes I can hardly take it. Whoever becomes the president should just really clean it up, know what I mean? Sometimes I go out and I smell it. I get headaches it's so bad, you know. It's like . . . they just never go away, you know. It's like the president should clean up this whole mess here. He should just flush it right down the fucking toilet.1 This moment may be the film's most obvious reference to New York City's decay in the mid1970s. Taxi Driver was shot during a strike of the garbage disposal workers, when the city was literally engulfed in trash. More generally, Scorsese has commented thus: When you live in a city, there's a constant sense that the buildings are getting old, things are breaking down, the bridges and the subway need repairing. At the same time society is in a state of decay; the police force are not doing their job in allowing prostitution on the streets, and who knows if they're feeding off it and making money out of it. (Christie and Thompson 60) The decay Scorsese and Taxi Driver are referring to is historically specific, rooted in New York City's postwar decline. While Taxi Driver chronicles Travis's excessive response to the perceived decline of the city, perhaps more fundamentally, the decline of the city seems to engender the decline of the male hero- Travis's inability to function in individual, collective, and heteronormative terms. The contours of New York City's postwar decline- and its more recent redevelopmentare fairly well known. The crisis fully emerged in the 1960s, although it had been a while in the making, and it took multiple forms. It may have started with the crisis of urban planning, more specifically in postwar suburban euphoria, and Robert Moses's notorious plans to build elevated expressways through New York City (including one going east-west across Manhattan) in order to facilitate suburbanization (Burns and Sanders 517). These plans were stopped, not least because of the engagement of Jane Jacobs, who in 1961 published The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she argued for neighborhood control, as well as economic and social diversity, shifting the issue from large-scale planning to block power. Nonetheless, it hardly presented a largescale solution, if only because of additional urban transformations and crises, such as the race riots of 1964 and the influx of immigrants from Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and elsewhere that accompanied the deindustrialization of the city, which pushed blue-collar jobs toward the outer boroughs (Beauregard; Glazer and Moyhinan). In 1958, 27 percent of New York State's jobs were still in manufacturing; in 1993, it was a slim 8.6 percent. A disproportionate number of these job losses (three out of five) occurred in the city (Fitch 23). This crisis culminated in 1975- the year Taxi Driver was released- when President refused federal aid to New York, a city on the brink of bankruptcy. On the morning of 30 October 1975, New Yorkers awoke to a newspaper headline occupying the entire front page of the New York Daily News: Ford to City: Drop Dead (Burns and Sanders 550). The early instances of this long-term post-war decline have been examined by Edward Dimendberg, who has persuasively argued that in the 1940s and 50s, film noir articulated complex of nostalgia for older urban forms (7) and anxiety about late modernity and its distinctive spatiality (6). …

Investigating farmers' preferences for the design of agri-environment schemes: a choice experiment approach

In recent decades agri-environment schemes (AES) have become an increasingly important tool for policy makers aiming to reverse the post-war decline in environmental quality on agricultural land. The voluntary nature of such schemes means that the decision of farmers to participate is central to achieving policy objectives. Therefore, this paper uses a choice experiment approach to investigate the role that scheme design can have on encouraging farmers to participate. Choice data was gathered from a survey of farmers in 10 case study areas across the EU and analysed using both mixed logit and latent class models. In general, farmers were found to require greater financial incentives to join schemes with longer contracts or that offer less flexibility or higher levels of paperwork. It was also observed that a large segment of farmers (‘low resistance adopters’) would be willing to accept relatively small incentive payments for their participation in schemes offering relatively little flexibility and high levels of additional paperwork, when compared to a contrasting segment of ‘high resistance adopters’.