Fifth lecture for my students in English 104A, UC Santa Barbara, spring 2012. Course website: hhttp://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s12/index.html

1. Lecture 5: Boom and Bust
English 104A
Spring 2012
16 April 2012
“The average man won’t really do a day’s work unless he is
caught and cannot get out of it. There is plenty of work to do if
people would do it.”
—Henry Ford, March 1931, on the causes of the Depression
(and several weeks before laying off 75,000 people)

2. “The World That Jack Built”
“The man told him that the great apartment house
had been built across two depths of railway tunnels,
and that all Mr. Jack had felt was the vibration that
came from the passing of a train deep in the bowels
of the earth. The man assured him that it was all
quite safe, that the very trembling in the walls, in
fact, was just another proof of safety.” (132; ch. 10)
“The building was so grand, so huge, so solid-
seeming, that it gave the impression of having been
hewn from the everlasting rock itself. Yet this was
not true at all. The mighty edifice was really tubed
and hollowed like a giant honeycomb.” (171; ch. 13)

3. On Mr. Jack
On Mr. Jack: “he had bought the privileges of
space, silence, light, and steel-walled security
out of chaos with the ransom of an emperor,
and he exulted in the price he paid for them.”
(130; ch. 10)
“Every cloud-lost spire of masonry was a
talisman of power, a monument to the
everlasting empire of American business. It
made him feel good. For that empire was his
faith, his fortune, and his life. He had a fixed
place in it.” (135; ch. 10)

4. “he was like most rich men of his race, and
particularly those who were living every day, as
he was, in the glamorous, unreal, and fantastic
world of speculation.” (163; ch. 12)
“it seemed to Mr. Jack, and, indeed, to many
others at the time—for many who were not
themselves members of this fortunate class
envied those who were—it seemed, then, not
only entirely reasonable but even natural that
the whole structure of society from top to
bottom should be honeycombed with privilege
and dishonesty.” (165; ch. 12)

5. The Objective Correlative
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of
art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other
words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of
events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in sensory experience, are given,
the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine
any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies,
you will find this exact equivalence; you will find
that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in
her sleep has been communicated to you by a
skilful accumulation of imagined sensory
impressions [...]”
— T.S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919)

6. “This Is The House That Jack Built”
This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the rooster that crew in the morn
That woke the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That killed the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.
(English nursery rhyme, possibly mid-16th century in origin)

7. Nora Fogarty
“She was baffled and tormented by a sense of
having missed something splendid and
magnificent in life, without knowing at all what it
was.” (146; ch. 11)
“’Sure,’ I says, ‘but we’re the lucky ones!
There’s no one in the world I’d rather work fer
than Mrs. Jack.’” (153; ch. 11)
Mrs. Jack: “You could cut the smell around her
with an axe!” (148; ch. 11)

8. The Elevator Operators
Henry: “You’re goin’ to get hit, Pop. And it ain’t
goin’ to be by nothing’ small or cheap. […] You’ll
get hit by at least a Rolls Royce.” (182; ch. 13)
A reporter: “John Enborg … age sixty-four …
married … three children […] And Herbert
Anderson … age twenty-five … unmarried …
lives with his mother […] No, they couldn’t get
’em out. They was both on the elevators, goin’
up to get the tenants—see!—when some
excited fool fumbled for the light switches and
grabbed the wrong one and shut the current off
on ’em.” (267; ch. 20)

9. Kinds of People
● John: “They [‘panhandling bums’] got no right to
bother the kind of people we got here.” (173; ch. 13)
● John: “Don’t you know the kind of people we got
here don’t want every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a
package to deliver runnin’ up the front elevator all
the time, mixin’ in with all the people in the house?”
(181; ch. 13)
● Mrs. Jack, on Nora: “You’d think these people would
be so glad to be here in this lovely place with the
fine life we’ve made for them that they would be a
little proud of it and try to show that they appreciate
it. But not! They’re just not good enough!” (149; ch.
11)

10. The Stock Market Crash
“The collapse of the Stock Market, which had
begun in late October, was in some ways like
the fall of a gigantic boulder into the still waters
of a lake. The suddenness of it sent waves of
desperate fear moving in ever-widening circlces
throughout America. Millions of people in the
far-off hamlets, towns, and cities did not know
what to make of it. Would its effects touch
them? They hoped not. And the waters of the
lake closed over the fallen boulder, and for a
while most Americans went about their day's
work just as usual.” (281; ch. 22)

11. The Stock Market Crash of 1929
● Dow Jones Industrial Average had increased
fivefold in six years.
● Preceded by high sales volumes, heavy trading,
and very volatile stock prices.
● October 24 (“Black Thursday”): Market loses
11% of its value at opening bell.
● Temporarily halted when the heads of several banks
persuade Richard Whitney, vice president of NYSE,
to bid above market value on large blocks of U.S.
Steel and other blue chip stocks.
● Market closed at only slightly below its opening
value.

12. ● Newspaper coverage of the price dip over the
weekend was extensive.
● October 28 (“Black Monday”): More investors
decide to sell their stocks, further deflating
stock prices.
● Dow Jones index sets a new record for largest
single-day loss: 13%.
● October 29 (“Black Tuesday”): Further
desperation to abandon stocks.
● 16 million shares traded – a record not broken for
40 years.
● Dow Jones loses index loses another 12%.
● The sudden evaporation of value affected many
areas of financial life.

13. ● Judge Bland: “Remember when you
established what you boasted was ‘the fastest-
growing bank in all the state’ – and weren’t too
particular what it grew on?” (74; ch. 5)
● “George […] felt quite sure there must be some
direct relation between the failure of the bank
and the Mayor’s suicide.” (308; ch. 25)
● “What happened in Libya Hill and elsewhere
has been described in the learned tomes of the
overnight economists as a breakdown of ‘the
system, the capitalist system.’ Yes, it was that.
But it was also much more than that. In Libya
Hill it was the total disintegration of what, in so
many different ways, the lives of all of these
people had come to be.” (315; ch. 25)