Dandelion Wine (Historical Context)

Historical Context

The Great Depression

Bradbury was born in 1920, and so was just nine years old when the Great Depression began, throwing his father out of work and forcing the family’s move from Waukegan, Illinois. This event had a lasting effect on the writer. In his choice of his novel’s setting, Green Town during the summer of 1928, Bradbury attempted to recreate a time and place that no longer existed, a place where the economic, political, and technological upheavals of the twentieth century had not yet touched. For Bradbury, the pre-Depression Midwestern town represented a kind of Eden, a place isolated from the rest of the world where people sat out on their porches at night and were truly neighborly. The social chaos brought on by the downward economic spiral of the Depression followed closely by the horrors of World War II made the final years before the Depression look particularly innocent and golden by comparison. This contrast, between the world of 1928, and the world of 1957, the year of the book’s publication is stark, and renders Douglas’s experiences all the more bittersweet.

The Cold War and the Nuclear Arms Race

During the years that Bradbury worked on Dandelion Wine, the United States was engaged in both World War II and the Korean War. Even when these wars ended, the struggle for world power between the Soviet Union and the United States continued in the cold war. At stake was the survival of the entire world, for as the cold war continued, both the United States and the Soviet Union (along with a number of other nations of the world including France, England, India, and China) began stockpiling stores of nuclear weapons to be used as a last resort against the other nations in the event of full-scale war. Such use, however, would mean the end of the world, as the nuclear arsenal grew to such a size that scientists estimated that nations could blow up the planet seven times over.

Bradbury clearly hoped to return to a gentler, more naive time in his creation of Green Town. His thinly veiled distrust of technology had its roots in the 1950s, as he saw his nation rushing frantically toward some gigantic conflagration. The launching of the unmanned satellite Sputnik in 1957 by the Soviet Union, the first human object in orbit around the earth, only served to confirm both the promise and the dangers of technology for Bradbury, ground he had explored earlier in his 1950 collection, The Martian Chronicles. Although Dandelion Wine might seem to have little to do with the world at large, the novel, through its idealization of small town America in the years before the Depression, marked a rejection of the political and technological dangers of mid-twentieth century America.

Compare & Contrast

• 1920s: In the aftermath of World War I, the United States enters an isolationist phase, concerning itself with its own economy and politics, an isolationism that continues until the American entry into World War II in 1941.
  1950s: In the aftermath of World War II, the United States engages in the cold war with the Soviet Union, as the country attempts to stop the spread of communism throughout the world.
  Today: The Soviet Union no longer exists, and the cold war is now over.
• 1920s: The stock market booms, and many invest in the stock market, often on credit, undermining the economic stability of the country. In 1929, the good times come to a halt with the stock market crash of October, ushering in the ten long years of the Great Depression that follows.
  1950s: As soldiers return home first from World War II and then the Korean War, unemployment rises and the country experiences another economic slow down, although not nearly as serious as in the Depression-era 1930s.
  Today: The bombing of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 leads to a substantial drop in the stock market, pushing up the unemployment rate and causing economic hardships for many Americans.
• 1920s: The automotive and aviation industries are in their infancy, although it is clear that increased technology will lead the way to ever-greater productivity in both fields.
  1950s: Americans purchase cars in record quantities, made affordable by the growth of technology. The newly born aerospace industry races to develop technology to compete with the Soviet Union’s launching of spacecraft.
  Today: Growth in technology has taken Americans to the moon and back, and now makes possible communication satellites and further exploration of space. The world grows ever more accessible because of cell phones, jet aircraft, computers, and television, all products of the rapid technological growth.