The Year of Peril by Tracy Campbell

Author:Tracy Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300233780
Publisher: Yale University Press

Many Americans entertained and informed themselves through books. Two of that year’s best-selling novels were John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down and Lloyd Douglas’s The Robe. In November, Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter published one of the century’s most influential works of social theory, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Franz Werfel’s The Song of Bernadette topped the New York Times best-seller list for the first time in mid-July and held that spot for fifteen weeks, making it the top-selling book of the year. The novel told the story of St. Bernadette Soubirous, a nineteenth-century woman who lived in Lourdes, France, and had multiple visions of the Virgin Mary. She was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1933. Werfel, a Jew, learned of the revered saint while hiding in Lourdes after the Nazis occupied France. After escaping the German troops, he had written the book to fulfill a promise he made to God. The book transcended Judaism and Catholicism and was widely popular among readers living, in Werfel’s words, in “a time of great dread.” The following year it was made into a popular movie starring Jennifer Jones.

One book that stood out for its harsh criticism of America’s popular culture and public education system was Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers. American high schools, Wylie charged, “teach nothing but gibberish,” due to the “pee wee caliber of teachers as a class” within an educational system that he termed “a public swindle, an assassination of sanity.” In response to polls showing that nearly 60 percent of Americans could not locate China on a map, Wylie directed his ire at teenagers who had “no aptitude for learning, make no use of what they do manage to be taught, and are a waste of money.” Instead of making a futile attempt to teach them English or history, he felt, “most should be prepared for the sedentary handicrafts,” working in a factory, on a farm, or “at the pump handles of filling stations.”39

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