A Literary Analysis of the Fifty-First Dragon by Heywood Broun Essay

Namita PuranAP English Period 5March 30, 1999(Empty Slogans Propaganda) in The Fifty-First DragonIt is simply thisman 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 been founded. When the United States entered the war in 1917, the nation was deeply divided. President Woodrow Wilson had just won re-election partly because of the slogan, "He kept us out of war." Wilson established the Committee on Public Information which spread pro-war propaganda throughout the nation. The slogans were trite and did not address the deep betrayal the nation felt. Broun put it aptly when he wrote of the second European War looms in Europe, and a man with a guitar steps in front 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...

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