Dana Blankenhorn

The 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues

We are 8 years removed from the last generational crisis, but the underlying issues of that crisis have not yet been dealt with.

Welcome to the 1940 Game: Rise of the Demagogues.

In 1940, the demagogues were organized. Germany, Japan and Italy were on the march. France was overrun and Britain was invaded. This made it easy for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was eligible for a third term, to pivot from being “Doctor New Deal” to “Doctor Win the War,” although there remained Republican isolationists, and even some who questioned the premise of democracy, against whom he fought a propaganda war with help from German refugees and British patriots like Alfred Hitchcock, whose “Foreign Correspondent”  remains a classic of the genre.

Tillie Blankenhorn 1923-2016

My mom died last night.

She was born Mathilda Gertrude Edwina O’Donnell, on July 18, 1923, in Central Falls, RI. She died September 20, 2016, at the home she’d had for half her life, in Huntington Beach, California.

Her father died when she was 4 and she was raised by her maiden Aunt Till and Grandma O’Donnell, who protected her from the harsh realities of the Great Depression in a big three-story home with huge dormer windows, where they rented out rooms.

She graduated from the Rhode Island College of Education (R.I.C.E.) in 1944. I cited that when I applied to Rice University in 1973 and  got away with it. She then moved to California to become an actress, but mainly worked as a teacher until she married my dad, Frederick Herman Blankenhorn, in January 1951.

Her Grandma O’Donnell was the catalyst for that. Grandma was dying, at age 83. Tillie had to go east for it, and dad knew that if she went alone he might not see her again. They got off the train and married in Las Vegas. They stayed married until he passed away on October 30, 1999.

Bridge to the Founders’ Generation

During my vacation this year, I surprised myself by delving into early American history, and found some comforting parallels to our own time.

Specifically I read The Quartet, by Joseph Ellis, about the four key figures who drove the creation and adoption of our Constitution, and John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit by James Traub.

What I found was the pre-history of my own profession, journalism, and the press.

In the late 18^th century, and early 19^th century, journalists were simply the owners of printing presses. They were little more than local bloggers, and their opinions were often for sale to the highest bidder. There was no one doing “objective” news. People understood broad events like the French Revolution, but what they thought of those events was driven by money, specifically that money put into driving opinion by printing press owners and by politicians controlling them.

Over the last 20 years, American journalism has moved strongly back toward that model. That gatekeeper function, the pride of The New York Times and even CNN in the 20^th century, turns out to have been a mere product of successful business models, which aggregated an educated readership and then sold access to that market, for a premium price, to advertisers.

I asked, 20 years ago, how hungry publishers were. I encouraged them to take the opportunity the Internet offered to drive their readers further down the sales funnel, not just selling billboards along the roadside by engaging in real commerce.