1931: Cheer-up Week

April 17, 2019

By AHNZ

17 April 1931, Auckland’s ‘Cheer-up Week’ turned up the manufactured optimism full bore.

The world-wide economic depression, ‘The Great Depression’, was running its course in New Zealand. Worse was to come in terms of conditions: Horrible relief camps and street riots in Dunedin, Wellington, and Auckland the following year.

Government measures would exacerbate the pain but perhaps not so despicably as FDR’s reactionary ‘New Deal’ in the USA.

The Auckland City Mafia took ratepayer’s money and threw them a party to help them forget that the world was going to heck.

So, The Auckland City Mafia took ratepayer’s money and threw them a party to help them forget that the world was going to heck. Local business became involved too, trying to get consumers back into the shops to stimulate the economy. There was a hidden present hunt around the shops and lucky Remuera woman won a solitaire diamond ring! Prime Minister Forbes made it official and became patron. Decorations and electric lights decked out Queen Street along the route of a parade of floats as if it were Christmas.

“One of the dottiest things about the slump was the effort to wash it out with ‘prosperity weeks’ and carnivals.”- Elsie Locke

It was general election year after all, the mood of the people had to be mustered at least until then. But this was a weird and perhaps unprecedented attempt to use Keynesian fiscal stimulation to shore up the market for cheerfulness. I think it’s the sort of distopic sentiment that writers like George Orwell and Aldous Huxley reacted to in their great novels. Also it reminds me of The Joker poisoning Gotham City with laughing gas to artificially induce ‘happiness’ which is far from the authentic, personal, genuine article.

Truly deserving of a place in the Top 10 transparent and pathetic attempts by a Victimhood Culture to artificially influence the mood of the Slave Culture population.

–

ref. Herald, 21/4/1931; Papers Past

image ref. NZ Herald, April 1931
– Queen Street, Auckland, processions
– Auckland Mayor (George Baildon) and his (soon to be ousted) Executive grinning their heads off

#Clownworld

Like    Comment     Share