Martin Meenagh blog

The third cinematic version of the Moonstone, and the first of talking pictures, was produced in 1934 in Los Angeles by Monogram Pictures. It was directed by Reginald Barker, and the screen play was written by Adele Buffington.  The film was released in the United States in August 1934, and in Great Britain the following September, before making its way into Sweden, Portugal, Brazil, and Italy [i] Though successful, the film’s stars were not great box-office draws, and remain somewhat obscure. The film itself does not make most film lists of great films; it is not listed, for instance, amongst the essential films of 1934 in Schneider and Smiths 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die , and is generally only found in a truncated form on digital versatile disc or on the internet. [ii] Whilst entertaining, the movie is an obscure, if pleasant, way to spend 62 minutes. As of 2019, it did not seem to be available anywhere in an uncut form. The Moonstone is, however, a very revealing ...

  What can be called the domestic presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, between 1933 and 1940, was highly controversial. Taking office in the midst of the crisis caused by the Great Depression, Roosevelt had no set plan bar to ‘try what worked.’ This led to swathes of dynamic policymaking at odds with the more conservative impression that Roosevelt had conveyed on the campaign trail, when those who were supporters of gold-backed stability might have sought reassurance from his words. It is also clearly the case that multiple members of Roosevelt’s ‘own class’ of monied and socially well- connected Americans based largely in New England cities might also have assumed that he would, as a person known to them, not fundamentally threaten their interests. In fact, Roosevelt embarked upon a policy of economic stimulation, demand management, and industrial regulation, which quickly created reactive criticism, both in the Supreme Court and outside. Thus, criticism ‘on the right’ can be dis...

  Prohibition in the United States was a product of two wars and protestant social reform. It had a substantial latent underside of anti-Irish, anti-German, and anti-Catholic support. Characterising it in such a way places it alongside campaigns against Mormon polygamy, prostitution, and immigration between the Civil War and the First World War. It has been viewed as seperable from the movement for female suffrage, which arose at mostly the same time and the coalition of support for which broadly overlapped with prohibition. The great historian Richard Hofstadter, in fact, called it a ‘ludicrous parody’ of social reform in 1955. Such an outlook also allows for the limited federal prohibition regulations of 1918 in the Wartime Prohibition Act to be seen as opening the door to a ‘constitutional blunder’ in 1919, when Nebraska ratified the prohibition amendment, leaving New York, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Nevada isolated. A standard narrative has develope...

Many historians, particularly those on the political left, tend to become confused over Al Smith. The ‘Lincoln of the tenements’, four times Governor of New York and a reformer who was personally transformed by the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911, the consensus more or less goes, was simply bitter when he reacted against FDR’s New Deal in 1934. His rich friends in the Liberty League somehow corrupted him. Al Sold out. These underlying explanations of motive are not in fact explanations at all, but rather attempts to ‘retro-fit’ Smith’s class, background and views to the assumption that the New Deal was universally supported within the progressive centre and on the left. Though complex, Smith was in fact more consistent in his political perspective than many writers have allowed for. Smith had been a leader of the Progressive movement, and had roots in the lower East Side. He was working class, and was not a university man. He arose in the early twentieth century. His career ha...

Herbert Hoover was not treated well by his near-contemporaries and nor has he been treated well by history. He has been described as ‘inflexible’, and pilloried for his self-confidence. His numerous attempts to draw a recovery from conferences with businessmen during the early stages of the depression have been seen as pointless, and his promotion of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which was the model for many of the later ‘New Deal’ programmes has been largely ignored or forgotten. Hoover’s beliefs in the gold standard, self-reliance, and tariffs have been taken by some to suggest economic illiteracy, despite being the bedrock of Republican beliefs since 1856. It is almost as though Calvin Coolidge’s faults of indolence and do-nothing politics, and Harding’s buffoonery, had been projected onto Hoover. Such obloquy is undeserved. Hoover was an activist president who tried his best to manage an unfolding and multi-faceted crisis, and who by the end of his time in off...