A lot of this week’s reading had one common notion or lesson, capitalism is bad. I probably should have seen this coming after last week’s class when Maggie warned us about this but after doing the reading I can see why Maggie was telling us about how bad capitalism is and I see why it has been so ingrained into our society. I am not a fan of capitalism in any way, but I never saw it as such a bad concept until this week’s reading nor did I realize how long Americans have been capitalists or why we are.
The reading that most stuck out to me was Making Your Move, specifically the tenth page when they talk about Mark Twain’s The Revised Catechism with the Q and A where the chief end of man is to get rich any way possible and money has replaced god. Mark Twain released this in 1871, when big business was just starting to rise in the United States but wasn’t anywhere near its height during the Gilded Age. This stuck out to me since the United States had always been a god fearing country and Mark Twain’s insinuation that money was becoming more important than god should have had a big effect on people’s feeling toward the rise of big business. Instead they seemed to ignore Mark Twain’s warning as seen by the pictures present in The Games We Played specifically the picture of The Game of Playing Department Store and other games about owning a business. Buying these kinds of games for your children would have only encouraged the capitalistic nature that was growing in the United States at this time.
The picture that caught my eye from the reading this week was a picture of the game Cash mostly because it advertised that “Honesty is the best policy” in a game where you try to go from being an errand boy to a millionaire. I think that with all of the capitalist ideas of the time that this game came out honesty was probably not the best policy if you wanted to become a millionaire and it is ironic that they would try to sell a game like that. It was probably just pandering to the parents with that selling line but probably didn’t uphold its honesty in the actual game.