The Fifty-First Dragon: Analysis
(Empty Slogans = Propaganda) in “The Fifty-First Dragon” “It is simply this—man is not sufficient. He must have a rallying cry, a slogan by which to die and by which to live.” Heywood Broun Heywood Broun sold his first short story, “The Fifty-First Dragon”, to the New York Tribune. It was written during the post-Great War period and as such reflected the amount of empty propagandizing the Americans did to entice young people to join the war effort. It can in fact be argued that, as Broun puts it in his 1939 Nutmeg preface to this story, “The story says that an empty slogan is better than no slogan at all... but it is a doctrine on which some of the most dangerous causes in the world have ...
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of the microphone to sing Ickey-Ickey-Oo” “
In “The Fifty-First Dragon” the Headmaster, much like Wilson, came up with the idea that if you give the uneducated a slogan and some basic training the natural end product is a powerful killing machine. The protection that the magical word Rumplesnitz gave Gawaine very much paralleled the strong, forceful, and unbeatable war cult Wilson had created. Instead of a single word being magical, Wilson became a modern-day Hephaestus while using slogans like “Rivets and Bayonets, Drive them home” to magically forge a nation of iummigrants into a fighting whole. According to the outspoken pacifist Randolph Bourne, war sentiment spread gradually among various intellectual groups. "With the aid of Roosevelt," wrote Bourne, "the murmurs became a monotonous chant, and finally a chorus so mighty that to be out of it was at first to be disreputable, and finally almost obscene." Once the war was underway, dissent was practically impossible. "[I]f you ...
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right to free speech.
In 1918, Congress passed the Sedition Act which forbade writing or publishing "any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the form of government of the United States or the Constitution, military or naval forces, flag, or the uniform." This act was mainly used to harass unpopular radical and pro-German publications. Many sweeping generalities of the Sedition Act were later repealed. Before American entry into the war, U.S. journalists reported the war from both the allied and German and Austrian sides. However, information in the war zones was tightly controlled by the military. Shortly after the war, the United States continued to manipulate ...
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"The Fifty-First Dragon: Analysis." Essayworld.com. April 14, 2007. Accessed April 25, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Fifty-First-Dragon-Analysis/63333.
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