a detailed powerpoint on contrasting views on historical events

1. Comparative History A PowerPoint by Ben Ely

2. Similarities of Roosevelt and Hitler through The Great Depression From a hindsight's perspective it is easy to tell when the great depression began, It all began on “Black Tuesday” October 29th, 1929 This Is when the New York Stock Exchange Collapsed People adrift in this poverty, resentment and despair would rightfully turn to powerful but most of all “charismatic” leaders President Hoover was lacking from the "inability to master the political techniques of leadership" At the time those leaders were Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler Both leaders came to power at exactly the same time The nazi regime and the American political system actually had remarkably similar economic principles

3. Similarities of Roosevelt and Hitler through The Great Depression Both leaders emphasized a government-supervised cooperation between business and labor. This is because by 1933 the Great Depression was at its low point, and the worst-hit countries were Germany and the United States. Unemployment was in the area of 25 percent of the work force On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor, and on March 4, 1933, in the midst of a financial panic that had caused thousands of banks to close their doors, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath as president of the United States. Their oath into office marked the beginning og the end of the great depression even though none of them seemed particularly well suited for the job

4. Similarities of Roosevelt and Hitler through The Great Depression Roosevelt had the sketchiest understanding of economics, referred to as a “political economist” a term not used since the 19th century, and Adolf was a poor student and lazy, dropping out of school at the age of 14 with his later national Socialist party being scorned by spectators Yet, this worked out for both political leaders in the end in that Roosevelt and Hitler were especially appealing to their social and economic opposites: Roosevelt to industrial workers, farmers, the unemployed, Hitler to hard-working shopkeepers and peasants Their policies aside, both exerted enormous psychological impact on the people in a lot of the same ways “the euphoria of the early days of Roosevelt's New Deal and the nationalistic fervor that swept over Germany in early 1933 made millions almost incapable of organized thought, let alone of judgment. . . .”

5. Similarities of Roosevelt and Hitler through The Great Depression New Deal and Nazi attempts to stimulate industrial recovery also resembled eachother During the early stages, big-business interests dominated the new organizations and succeeded in imposing their views on government. In regards to the idea of “corporatism” In Germany the concept of government - sponsored cartels that regulated output and prices had a long tradition The Nazis created a complex system of 13 "estates" governing all branches of industry . Each was subdivided into regional organizations, and at least in theory, the whole system was controlled by the Nazi minister of economics. In America, the system of self-governing industrial codes established under the National Recovery Administration (NRA) was in the same pattern.

6. Similarities of Roosevelt and Hitler through The Great Depression by 1935 and 1936, the Roosevelt and Hitler governments were abandoning corporatism and taking a more anti-big-business stance. In America, the supreme court declared NRA unconstitutional which created effective unionization efforts and taxes on big business In Germany, although the cartel structure was retained, the Nazis limited the size of corporate dividends and imposed higher taxes on private incomes and corporate profits. New Deal and Nazi methods of dealing with the agricultural depression also had much in common. Both sought to organize commercial agriculture in order to increase farm income. The differences in the degree and intensity with which psychological pressures were applied by Nazis and New Dealerswere different yet the two movements reacted to the depression in similar ways, distinct from those of other industrial nations Yet neither regime solved the problem of maintaining prosperity without war. The German leaders wanted war and used the economy to make war possible. One result290 THE GREAT DEPRESSION was "prosperity": full employment, increased output, hectic economic expansion. The Americans lacked this motivation. But when war was forced upon them, they took the same approach and achieved the same result

7. Cultural Change In The 1920’s As Americans recovered from the trauma and disappointment of World War I, their political mood turned conservative. Longing for "normalcy" at home Automobiles and other mass-produced consumer goods fed a new emphasis on consumption and leisure, and advertising became big business Some thing similar was happening in France at the same time, as Jeffrey H. Jackson shows in his essay. The French "Crazy Years" matched the American "Roaring Twenties" in their live-for-the-moment spirit and looser attitudes toward sexuality and consumption. Movies thus came to play a central role in the cultural conflicts that followed World War I.

8. Cultural Change In The 1920’s In American society, movies became a major factor in the reorientation of traditional values after all, films were made by men intensely committed to capitalist values, so the films played a stronger subconscious role in changing the American social order audiences in different nations brought their own cultural baggage into the theater, and because of this they took home different memories and messages Silent films may have used the universal language of pictures, but that language was interpreted quite differently by Americansand Europeans “as the food industry turned to Latin America for its bananas, the movie industry looked to Europe for its supplies of passion.” Which introduces the amazing actress Garbo; if her career had any major flaw, it was that she made Hollywood's most romantic male stars look callow and inadequate beside her. Overall the tensions between traditional Victorian values and the looser moral and social codes of the 1920s led to a transformation of traditional behavior

9. Cultural Change In The 1920’s Sex in the middle-class comedies was rigidly structured, and linked with preservation of the social order. This was a familiar theme in American novels and stories of earlier days, but what marked the movie comedians as special was their firm roots in the comic tradition of extravagance and grotesque exaggeration. Typically these movies influenced young unmarried intimacy between youth with marriage as the goal, yet movies of these time started to put spins on this classic scenario representing American life “Safety Last”, a comedy by Harold Lloyd is about the small-town boy going off in the world to accumulate enough wealth and status to marry the small-town girl eventually representing the satire of American life. Films like this could be very influential on the youthful audience it targets, as many different opposing set of values can be obtained from a film such as this This being representing just one of many milestones film in America has brought to traditional values

10. Cultural Change In The 1920’s If Chaplin's comic fantasy rested on an underlying realism of class distinctions, Keaton's was firmly anchored in the out e r world of American mechanical civilization236 CULTURAL CHANGE IN THE 1920S in its encounter with nature. In a chaplin film: the locus of movement was always the Tramp In a Keaton film: The locus of movement was always emanating from machinery, from the natural setting and from the camera, as well as from Buster himself The physical genius that Europeans regarded as the hallmark of American silent movies found its embodiment in one man, Buster Keaton, and in his struggle to wrest order from the recalcitrant machinery, natural environment and moral values of the American landscape.

11. Cultural Change In The 1920’s The Americans interest in passion, and the European’s interest in action represent their own cultural values and interests European audiences were also far more receptive to Jazz than Americans as clubs throughout Paris would be flocked with people to revel in the exotic and wild sounds of jazz This jazz phase of 1920 represented an even larger transatlantic cultural shift: Europeans experienced a "revolution in manners and morals" in the 1920s with a dissolution in traditional ways through its iconic “Crazy years” Americans experienced a revolution in behavior and cultural values through it’s iconic “Roaring Twenties” This feverishness in everyday pleasure coincidently occurred at relatively the same time and decade between America and Europe resulting in changes of tradition and culture that would shape the Country’s future forever