Mass Media Report

After some relatively not-so-disastrous economic metrics last week, I began seeing headlines and news coverage like this:

Economy on the Mend

That’s a matter of interpretation, and there’s no consensus (as if there is such a thing among economists). This did get me thinking about the value of loud public optimism in the face of continuing economic uncertainty.

The most famous case in American history may be the popularity of the song “Happy Days Are Here Again,” written in 1929 by Jack Yellen and Milton Ager:

So long sad times
Go long bad times
We are rid of you at last

Howdy gay times
Cloudy gray times
You are now a thing of the past

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let’s sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again

Altogether shout it now
There’s no one
Who can doubt it now
So let’s tell the world about it now
Happy days are here again

Your cares and troubles are gone
There’ll be no more from now on

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let’s sing a song of cheer again

Happy times
Happy nights
Happy days
Are here again!

The song became an anthem of the Great Depression. It was played at the Democratic National Convention of 1932 that nominated FDR, and became the unofficial theme song of the Roosevelt administration.

How the song came to be written and become an anthem is strange and enlightening.

The song was written in 1929, but before the Stock Market crash, and it was supposed to be about World War I soldiers celebrating the end of the war:

Along with “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” “Happy Days Are Here Again” embodied the Great Depression for millions of Americans. Yet Ager’s bouncy tune and Yellen’s feel-good lyric had nothing to do with the Depression. The movie musical Chasing Rainbows was nearly complete when Irving Thalberg, MGM’s head of production, told Yellen he wanted a song for at new scene in which World War 1 doughboys celebrate the armistice. Ager grumbled about having to collaborate on another song because his relationship with Yellen had soured, but he agreed to stop at Yellen’s house that afternoon. “Got a title?” he groused. “Happy Days Are Here Again,” Yellen answered. He later swore that the words came to him at that moment. A half hour later, they had finished the song. Two days later, MGM filmed the scene even though the movie was so lame it was not released for several years.

Ager and Yellen published the song anyway, and a New York song plugger took it to George Olsen, whose orchestra was playing at the Hotel Pennsylvania on Black Thursday, the day the stock market crashed. Yellen later wrote about the reaction:

In the big dining room of the hotel, a handful of gloom-stricken diners were feasting on gall and wormwood. Olsen looked at the title of the song and passed out the parts. “Sing it for the corpses,” he said to the soloist. The diners broke into a roar of laughter. The band played on, and one couple after another rose from their tables, stomped to the bandstand, and sardonically yelled the words with the vocalist…

(America’s Songs: The Stories Behind the Songs of Broadway, Hollywood, and Tin Pan Alley by Philip Furia and Michael Lasser)

So it was an accident, an astonishing coincidence. While those first listeners on Black Thursday sang along “sardonically,” the millions who sang it in the years to come were much more earnest and sincere:

A perky tune often played in a staccato manner to fit its jaunty words, “Happy Days Are Here Again” was soon joined by a legion of cheer-up songs that typified the Depression’s insistent public optimism…Perhaps the success of “Happy Days Are Here Again” as a Depression anthem and as a campaign song for the Democrats derives from its directness and naivete. The brief lyric has only two words of more than one syllable. Its sentiments are as simple as its words, but its bubbly assertion of good times in the face of the evidence soon has us singing along.

I’m not sure news media belong at either extreme—as suppliers of endless unmitigated economic bad news or as cheerleaders selling sunny and unrealistic optimism. Thinking about “Happy Days Are Here Again,” though, it appears that people, headlines or not, have a way of choosing and using exactly what they need to get them through the times.