Born perhaps the most egalitarian society (uh, for white men only) in world history, the agrarian United States of America always rejected appeals to pitting one economic class against the other. White American men did not see it that way. They saw, and they experienced, for it did happen, it was true, class fluidity. Born humble, a white man could become a middle-class pillar or even in rare, fortunate circumstances, a member of the wealthiest class. And back down. Fortunes could be, and easily were, lost.
The Industrial Revolution, born in the Mother Country, changed class blindness. As industrialization was just coming to the new Republic, so was our Civil War. The agrarian slave-based economy of the South was falling further and further behind the rapidly industrializing North, becoming more and more intransigent in perpetuating through expansion the "peculiar institution" that was dooming it, belying the nominal "United" States of America, and becoming an intolerable blot on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. And so the war came.
Economic class disparities exploded in the Gilded Age in the post-bellum period even as racial class disparity continued. Inter-class mobility was increasingly viewed as a cynical joke. Still no appeal to economic class came close to winning at the ballot box.
The Great Depression tested white Americans' spirit of economic egalitarianism as African slavery never tested their spirit of racial class superiority.
Which brings us to 1932, the height of the Depression, the depth of the white man's misery, and a presidential election year too, and the nominal subject of this post, the Broadway production "Face the Music" and the song written for it, by Irving Berlin, "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee". There is more than a little politico-social commentary here. "Face the Music" was what "Mister Herbert Hoover" below was about to do with extreme prejudice and "even John D. Rockefeller" was straining to see the silver lining. The song is sung by two humble characters in the humble venue of a Horn & Hardart Automat. Patrician millionaire Franklin Delano Roosevelt succeeded Hoover as president and was to save American capitalism from itself, a little aided perhaps by the assassination of "Share the Wealth" Huey Long of Louisiana.
Why worry when skies are gray
Why should we complain
Let's laugh at the cloudy day
Let's sing in the rain
Songwriters say the storm quickly passes
That's their philosophy
They see the world through rose-colored glasses
Why shouldn't we?
Just around the corner
There's a rainbow in the sky
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie!
Trouble's just a bubble
And the clouds will soon roll by
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie
Let a smile be your umbrella
For it's just an April show'r
Even John D. Rockefeller
Is looking for the silver lining
Mister Herbert Hoover
Says that now's the time to buy
So let's have another cup o' coffee
And let's have another piece o' pie!
