Word: magic
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...trouble selling for thousands of pounds matchbox houses in Chelsea and Knightsbridge that cost only hundreds to build. I can get people to spend fabulously for a mean little house because a princess once used the lavatory there. Even sensible businessmen act like superstitious peasants in responding to the magic of a 'good' address...
Bill Bailey ought to know. Born in 1886, the son of a patent-medicine hawker, he learned song-and-dance routines to help sell the family product: Bailey's Gypsy Liniment. At 120-proof, the stuff worked like magic. Later, in vaudeville, Bill hoofed up with a singer named Dave Hodges, who changed his name to Barnum so the pair could work their way around the country as Bailey & Barnum. They were a sort of circus minimus until a Manhattan impresario gave them a five-minute spot in Fred and Adele Astaire's Lady, Be Good. The playbill...
This was no isolated phenomenon. "Cargo cults" ("cargo" is pidgin English for trade goods) have been observed repeatedly in the islands of Melanesia (including New Guinea, the Solomons and the New Hebrides). All of them share the belief that black men will acquire the white man's magic to materialize goods from overseas without doing a lick of work. British Sociologist Peter M. Worsley writes of the cargo cults in the May issue of the Scientific American, and lists and locates 72 of them...
...ancestors, or some future hero will appear and establish a new order of things. In World War II, both sides benefited from this. G.I.s landing in the New Hebrides before taking Guadalcanal found the natives preparing airfields, roads and docks for the cargoes they thought were coming on magic ships and planes from the King of America, the potent Ruseful (Roosevelt). The Japanese were received by the Papuans of Dutch New Guinea with joy as harbingers of the new dispensation, but when it did not materialize, the Japanese had an uprising on their hands that had to be put down...
Modern Politics. To capture the secret, cargo cults usually contain some ritual imitation of European customs which may hold the clue to the white man's magic. Sometimes believers dress in European clothes and sit around tables with bottles of flowers on them, sometimes they pretend to write on pieces of paper. Many of the cults seek to bring on the new by destroying the old; they deliberately violate the ancient taboos of their people, kill their livestock, stop cultivating their fields. "Sometimes they spend days sitting gazing at the horizon for a glimpse of the long-awaited ship...