Chapter 7: Cultural Manifestation I

For photographers documenting the 1930s, mostly hired by the government, the goal was to document poverty and inequality. This, they did well. Then, when the country began to focus more on the war in Europe (and later threats from Japan) in the late 1930s, photographers added more  reassuring images of American life. For essayists and fiction writers, the 1930s were another type of opportunity. Theirs was an explosion of literature reflecting  the discovery of  "a kaleidoscope of pasts shaped by a wide variety of political and cultural commitments. Some of these writers considered themselves radical, others conservative; still others were uninterested in politics at all. The conflicting pasts offered vehicles to defend competing views of the present and future."    Peter Conn, The 1930s, A Literary History https://www.english.upenn.edu/publications/2009/peter-conn/american-1930s-literary-history

https://www.english.upenn.edu/publications/2009/peter-conn/american-1930s-literary-history

The analytical excerpt below  from Peter Conn's Introduction to a scholarly book on literature of the 1930s draws highly thought-provoking conclusions.                                                                                     Your SGLs 

The American 1930s: A Literary History, 2009

By Peter Conn

…………..British economist John Maynard Keynes said the nearest parallel to the hard times of the thirties “was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years.”

In fact, however, the situation was more complicated. Not everyone lost a job, and not all the indicators were doom-laden. The unemployed were a minority of the work force, even in the worst years of the Depression, and the majority of those who lost jobs found new ones. “It is important to keep in mind,” John Garraty reminds us, “that during the Great Depression, people who had full-time jobs were usually better off, at least economically, than they had been before 1929,” because the cost of living fell faster than wages. Even in the ravaged Dust Bowl, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children – two-thirds of the 1930 population – clung to their homesteads.

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While these encouraging reference points do not subtract from the scale of anxiety and deprivation during the thirties, they usefully suggest that the decade encompassed a striking diversity of experience. Some Americans recoiled in disappointment and anger, and sought alternative structures and explanations. At the same time, others embraced all the more fervently the essential rightness and continued relevance of traditional national propositions. One study indicated that only a few citizens reacted with either apathy or protest: "Established values and desires persisted," even among the unemployed.

Thus, while many of the victims of the Depression directed their anger toward the government or "conditions," sometimes to the point of violence, others blamed themselves. As many contemporary observers pointed out, a commitment to self-reliance survived among countless men and women who continued to believe in the efficacy of initiative and hard work and considered poverty a proof of moral turpitude. Since up to a quarter of the workforce was idled, such a belief could engender enormous emotional pain. 

Many of those who lost jobs or homes expressed feelings of “guilt and self-recrimination.” In doing the travel and research for My America (1938), Louis Adamic interviewed scores of people who felt personally responsible for their unemployment and impoverishment. Journalist Lorena Hickok, reporting to Harry Hopkins on the conditions she was observing, quoted a young woman who refused either aid or encouragement: “Oh, don’t bother. . . . If, with all the advantages I’ve had, I can’t make a living, I’m just no good, I guess.” On his travels around the country in the mid-thirties, Sherwood Anderson met a man who told him: “I failed. I failed. It’s my own fault.” From Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) to its host of imitators, Depression-era books and articles insisted that "failure is personal, not social, and success can be achieved by some adjustment, not in the social order but in the individual personality."

Blaming themselves or blaming the system, "Middletown Faces Both Ways." The title of the final chapter of Robert and Helen Lynd's Middletown in Transition (1937) summarized the national mood. Every revolutionary manifesto can be matched by a call to re-affirmation. In 1932, Malcolm Cowley, Langston Hughes, Edmund Wilson, and the other intellectuals who published Culture and the Crisis demanded a revolution and supported William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate for president. A couple of years later, on the other hand, regionalist painter Grant Wood, in his Revolt Against the City (1935), argued, “during boom times conservatism is a thing to be ridiculed, but under unsettling conditions it becomes a virtue.” Wood detected, in the opinion of one scholar, a “powerful yearning for security” as the dominant mood of the time. Looking back on the 1930s from a village called Grafton in upstate New York, ex-Communist Granville Hicks decided that the Depression had "changed no one's views," in part because the majority of his neighbors understood the slump to be a "natural catastrophe, in no wise different from a drought or a hurricane." 

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Those diverse understandings led to diverse imaginative expressions, in effect a debate over the meaning of America. The task of the pages that follow is to provide a through line for exploring that rich heterogeneity, by tracing one of the main subjects to which the decade’s writers turned again and again: the past. The writing of the 1930s comprises an extensive and complex engagement with the past, in myriad forms: the memoirs and biographies of influential individuals, and the factual and imaginary histories of the United States and other nations.

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Americans, in Eric Foner's view, “have always looked to history for a sense of national cohesiveness,” especially in times of crisis, when cohesiveness is under siege. It is not surprising that many Americans turned to the past in response to the turbulence of the Depression decade. The historian David Lowenthal has argued that the recovered past – even if recovered only in the form of mythology – “legitimates and fortifies the present order against subsequent mishap or corruption.”

These statements are helpful, though both claim too much and distinguish too little. While the retrospection of American writers in the 1930s was sometimes nostalgic, they frequently revived the past to criticize American values and institutions. In historical novels, poems and films, biographies and autobiographies, historical monographs and folklore studies, in painting, music, and photography, men and women of the thirties discovered a kaleidoscope of pasts shaped by a wide variety of political and cultural commitments. Some of these writers considered themselves radical, others conservative; still others were uninterested in politics at all. The conflicting pasts offered vehicles to defend competing views of the present and future.

Thus, to see the thirties exclusively as “the red decade” is to reduce a complex palette to a monotone. In this book, I want to argue against the current, widely shared scholarly assumption that the 1930s were largely characterized in cultural terms by Left aesthetics and politics. In fact, the United States in the 1930s was – as it has always been, and despite the pressures of the Depression – a place of enormous ideological and imaginative complexity, and the uses to which writers put the past can assist in recovering the heterogeneity of intellectual life in the decade. The French writer Andre Maurois, after several visits to the U.S. in the thirties, summarized his “total impression” of the country at the end of the decade:

"This is an immense country made up of overpopulated islands sprinkled among the prairies, the forests, and the deserts. Among these islets of skyscrapers there is hardly any common life. The newspapers of Minneapolis are not read in Cincinnati. The great man of Tulsa is unknown in Dallas. The Negro of Georgia, the Swede of Minnesota, the Mexican of San Antonio, and the German of  Chicago, Marquand’s patricians, and Steinbeck’s tramps are all citizens of the United States, but there is slight resemblance among them."

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Some years ago, Peter Novick offered an important admonition about the writing of history: "As cultural historians multiply, cultural epochs get cut finer and finer: where once we had the Age of the Baroque and the Siècle des Lumières, we now have characterizations of the culture of decades: ‘iconoclasm’ for the 1920s; ‘radicalism’ for the 1930s. But there was no shortage of superstition in the Age of Reason; plenty of traditionalism and complacency in the decades of iconoclasm and radicalism." Or, in the more vernacular formulation of journalist Robert Bendiner, whose family lived a hand-to-mouth existence through the American thirties: “It has always seemed to me fatuous to fix a single label on a whole decade – as though the Nineties were gay for immigrant ladies in the garment sweatshops of Manhattan or the Twenties stood for hot jazz in the mind of Calvin Coolidge.”

 These comments usefully warn against the reduction of entire decades to two or three hackneyed adjectives. At the same time, the advantages of working within the confines of a relatively brief period such as the 1930s are substantial: among them precisely the opportunity to enrich our understanding by documenting the breadth and even the internal contradictions of the decade. Part of that cultural breadth consists in the patterns of continuity that link the 1930s to the history that had come before. As Oscar Cargill shrewdly observed, many years ago, “nothing precisely ceased or began on October 29, 1929.” By connecting the 1930s to earlier American pasts, this book provides a fuller description of the cultural life of the Depression decade. That in turn offers at least the beginnings of an alternative literary history of the 1930s.

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

What do you make of the contention that Americans “have always looked to history for a sense of national cohesiveness, especially in times of crisis, when cohesiveness is under siege?" (Peter Conn, op. cit.)

In what ways are we, today, looking to history for background of our own, reassuring, version of an American ‘past’ when cohesiveness is under siege?

How immersed are we in: originalist interpretation of the Constitution; scrubbing racism and social justice history from textbooks; denying laws based on "precedent;" yearning for interpretations of the past that never existed? 

EXCERPT from CONCERN and CRAFT: THE PARTISAN REVIEW and the 1930s  

Thesis by Fred Metting, 1976. pp 204-208

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1p3b5WcGFrMV5qb0qlmY9TTq6XUAT_eQb 

The excerpt below is quite readable, even gritty.                                                                Your SGLS

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It was not difficult to point to stupidities and narrowness on the part of some radical intellectuals in the 1930s. The communist party critics were often guilty of blatant demagoguery in their critical pronouncements. The New Masses (communist leaning publication) was full of examples of short-sightedness, prejudice, and coercion. This abuse was not necessarily the result of radical ideology, for many radicals avoided dogmatic literary views. It seemed to spring from an over-zealous desire for immediate change; in this fervor, literature was viewed as a tool, a weapon.

These readily observed abuses of literature should not, however, cloud over appreciation of that decade's successes.

Throughout my study of the decade's literature I found works that were strong in both their human and literary values.

The Partisan Review (a generally "liberal" publication) was a center for this integration of social purpose and art. Its writers depicted the victims of the American system while avoiding dogma and rigidity. Nelson Algren studied the dispossessed, the bottom-dogs, the hoboes and nameless victims on the bum from Chicago's inner-city to the vast stretches of Texas. Yet, Algren would not glorify the moral consciousness of these people; he sought the truth and this truth included the moral decay of the victims of poverty. His art presented a painful examination of isolation and defeat. 

John Dos Passos presented a radical vision of a divided America with a corrupt ruling elite and a crushed mass of underlings. His detailed examination of three decades of our history found little to be positive about, save a few isolated figures working for the common good. Yet he distrusted radical bureaucracy as well as capitalist greed, and he refused to conceal that distrust. His revolutionaries fare little better than his corporate executives. 

James T. Farrell's naturalism caught the sidewalks, street corners, pool rooms and speech of a Chicago neighborhood. The destiny of Studs Lonigan (character in a trilogy)  was determined, in part, by the overwhelming cultural poverty that lay beneath the cliches of this typical American neighborhood. Yet Farrell also probed the limitations of personality. In his criticism, Farrell stressed imaginative freedom as well as social message.

James Agee detailed the poverty of three families, victims of the share-cropping system. Yet his emphasis was not on economics; Agee was determined to reveal the divinity of his subjects. 

A great deal of the decade's literature addressed itself to the era's social problems. The decade produced a new generation of writers acutely aware of the discrepancies in American life: Robert Cantwell had worked in the plywood veneer factory he depicted in Land of Plenty; Edward Dahlberg had grown up in the orphanages described in Bottom Dogs; Henry Roth had lived in the ghetto that provided the setting for Call It Sleep. These writers and many others broadened the range of literature to include the gangs of young Irish delinquents, the bottom-dogs of the ghetto and factory, the southern share-croppers, rebellious farmers, the  Oakies, and boxcar hoboes. The writers stressed the relationship of these new characters to the experiences of their social environment. As readers we see the effects of breadlines, handouts, hunger, hopelessness, and dispossession. The writers broadened our understanding of and sympathy for victims of the depression. The writer of the depression was a citizen working with others on common problems, not an exiled spectator watching the collapse of values. 

Malcolm Cowley spoke of this renewed engagement in the art of the 1930s: A new conception of art was replacing the idea that it was something purposeless, useless, wholly individual and forever opposed to a stupid world. The artist and his art had once more become a part of the world, produced by and perhaps affecting it; they had returned toward their earlier and indispensable task of revealing its values and making it more human.

The literature of the 1930s went beyond social involvement, for example in the technical experiments of John Dos Passos, the mythic symbolism of Henry Roth, and the soaring language of James Agee. The writers of the era were not, on the whole, confined by ideology or dogma. They were not obedient to the formula of Socialist Realism. Their novels do not end with the vision of a triumphant communist state; rather, Cass KcKay of Somebody in Boots and Lorry Lewis of Bottomdogs continue their blind wanderings, Studs Lonigan dies a victim of his debaucheries, and Johnny Hagen of Land of Plenty weeps in the rain after an unsuccessful strike. Some writers became temporarily dogmatic, but for many others it was the era and not a single party that was the dominant influence. They reacted to the era with individuality and integrity. 

The Partisan Review of the 1930s encouraged this individuality and integrity. In its critical pronouncements it moved from the "leftism" of the communist critics; it denounced rigidity and formula in revolutionary fiction. It encouraged its circle of writers to look to tradition for strength. It also pointed to the lessons to be learned from the rich variety of modern American and European artists. While the New Masses rejected all but the most explicit radical fiction, the Partisan Review supported a wide range of works. It opened its pages to many authors, including John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell and James Agee, whose achievements have enriched our literary heritage.

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QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

How do these descriptions of these writers and artists resonate with your own experiences in reading and looking at works from later in the century?

In both the Partisan Review and Grapes of Wrath, we read about the desperation of living on the edge which can bring out the best or the worst in people. What can we imagine it is like for today’s 50% of the population who cannot afford the cost of car repair?