Art and Culture Art and Culture in the 1930s

Introduction: Depression Culture

Cultural history is commonly seen as soft history, an exploration of what falls between the cracks: sensibility, moral feelings, dreams, relationships, all hard to objectify. My subject hither is at once concrete--the books, the films of an era: the stories they told, the fears and hopes they expressed--and withal intangible, the look, the mood, the experience of the historical moment. Nigh of us think we know what the thirties were about. Its iconic images remain with us: apple sellers past their pushcarts, tenant farmers in their shacks, families trudging through dust clouds swirling over parched state. Like the 1960s, the thirties belong not only to history but to myth and legend.

Dancing in the Dark
By Morris Dickstein
Hardcover, 624 pages
W.W. Norton & Co.
List Price: $29.95

To this twenty-four hour period the period remains our byword for economic crunch, a historical marker of what could happen again. Every serious economical reversal since so has elicited dire comparisons to the 1930s. It was not, of grade, the showtime economic depression. Nineteenth-century economic history is punctuated past repeated episodes of "panic," a word that suggests headlong, contagious, irrational feet: the Panic of 1873, the Panic of 189394. Just it was the 1929 Crash, not the depository financial institution run of 1907, that was on everyone'south mind when stocks plummeted in the fall of 1987. It remained an unspoken fearfulness during the long, intractable recession that began in 1989 and left many Americans without jobs and with diminished hopes, a downturn that doomed the presidency of the beginning President Bush. Similar fears surfaced in 2007 when the housing chimera outburst, leading to widespread mortgage foreclosures and explosive pressure on banking and investment firms.1 As the credit markets dried up in 2008, there was a most-meltdown of the whole fiscal system, followed by a renewed fascination with every facet of the Depression and the New Deal. But these problems did not begin in 200708. In the preceding decades we witnessed a contraction not just of American industry but of the quondam sense of unlimited possibility in American life. My theme, however, is psychological and personal rather than strictly economic: not the loss of jobs but the state of listen that accompanies the lowering of economic horizons. My goal hither is to explore the role of civilisation in reflecting and influencing how people understand their own lives and how they cope with social and economic angst.

The mood of the Depression was defined not just by difficult times and a coming world crisis but by many extraordinary attempts to cheer people up--or else to sober them upwards into facing what was happening. Though poor economically, the decade created a vibrant civilization rich in the production of popular fantasy and trenchant social criticism. This is the split personality of Depression culture: on one hand, the effort to grapple with unprecedented economical disaster, to explain and interpret it; on the other hand, the need to get away, to create art and amusement to distract people from their trouble, which was in the cease some other way of coming to terms with it. Looking at both sides of this cultural split, we can see how closely linked they are.

Thanks to the new media created past early twentieth-century technology, the thirties proved to exist a turning point in American popular culture. Radio had grown exponentially in the late 1920s. Past the early 1930s it came of age, bounden together audiences living far autonomously with shared amusements as well every bit anxieties. Photography, photojournalism, and newsreels provided visual images, all in stark shades of blackness and white, that even those keen radio voices--H. 5. Kaltenborn from civil war Spain, Edward R. Murrow from London under siege, Orson Welles from Mars--could not convey. This was also the era that saw the consolidation of the Hollywood studio system and the classical way of American sound films. The bully movie genres of the thirties--the gangster flick, the horror film, the screwball comedy, the dance musical, the road movie, the social-consciousness drama, the animated drawing--came to dominate American filmmaking over the adjacent decades. Significantly, they still influence the style movies are made, while the onetime films themselves remain objects of nostalgia or appreciating imitation.

In 1985, for case, Woody Allen looked dorsum at the 1930s in his ingenious flick The Purple Rose of Cairo, a pastiche of Low cliches that lovingly portrays the Janus-faced civilization of the era. Mia Farrow is a waitress in a jerkwater town who lives out her fantasies by going to the movies, while Danny Aiello plays her unemployed husband, a blue-neckband lout representing the drab and boring life she's trying to forget. Jeff Daniels portrays a character who literally steps off the screen to add a little magic and romance to her pinched world.

If y'all look at the movie within the movie, the film she keeps going back to see, you lot'll notice Woody Allen's ship-up of the fantasy itself. There are incoherent glimpses of wealthy, frivolous idlers making silly banter on movie sets designed to look like cavernous living rooms, glitzy nightclubs, or "Egyptian" tombs. This cheesy but exotic setting parodies the famous Low idea of the careless rich living a life of pure swank and style. But Allen'southward movie likewise shows u.s.a. the other side of the story: the small boondocks so idle and empty that it looks like a picture postcard; the married man out of work, supported past a waif-like married woman equally he hangs out with the boys; the picture palace equally the scene of communal daydreaming where ordinary people feed on escapist images of wealth, adventure, and romance.

Woody Allen was always a principal at manipulating motion-picture show cliches, simplifying them, satirizing them, infusing them (like Chaplin) with his own kind of little-human being pathos. Dennis Potter did the aforementioned thing for the English mutual man, Low-style, in his wildly original series Pennies from Heaven. In that location Bob Hoskins played a sheet-music salesman with a bossy, repressed wife and a shy, dreamy love for the music and lyrics that calorie-free up his gray, constricted globe. They're his romantic outlet as he lip-synchs his feelings to the incongruous sound of the old recordings. He looks longingly to America equally the identify the all-time songs come from, but also as the fantasy land where those songs actually come up true.

Psychological studies of the Low have shown how economic problems were complicated by emotional problems, since hard times, whatever their origin, undercut their victims' feelings of conviction, self-worth, even their sense of reality. "The Depression hurt people and maimed them permanently considering it literally depressed mind and spirit," co-ordinate to Caroline Bird. "Hoover chose the give-and-take 'Low' in 1929 because information technology sounded less frightening than 'panic' or 'crisis,' the words that had formerly been used for economic downturns."2 The psychological anguish was worsened by the American ethic of self-help and individualism, the remnant of a frontier mentality--the aforementioned dream of success, dignity, and opportunity that had inspired immigrants, freed slaves, and natives alike. Just it made people experience responsible when their lives ran downhill. Royal Rose and even Pennies from Heaven are stories virtually fighting off low, in every sense of the word. In Purple Rose, as in Zelig, Woody Allen showed a special affinity for people who feed on borrowed lives. Out of the cliches of movie fandom and Depression escapism--far less escapist than he suggests--Woody Allen fashioned a complex fable of fine art and life, the wounded self and the projections that assistance sustain information technology. This exploration of dream life and fantasy is indeed a Depression theme, though seen through later eyes.

Every bit the Depression wore on, fewer people believed the assurances of America'south hapless thirty-fifth president, Herbert Hoover: they saw that the economy was non "fundamentally sound," that prosperity was not "merely around the corner." Despite how the public remembers him, Hoover himself was a progressive whose activist policies in combating the Depression actually paved the way for the New Deal. He was annihilation but aloof, but his dank demeanor lacked empathy. He was incapable of doing what was needed to boost the nation'southward morale, and he resisted intervening in important areas of the economy, such every bit the creation of jobs. The Low was more than a temporary setback: though the word was coined to minimize the crisis, it seemed similar a betrayal of the American Dream, the securely felt hope of American life. As individualism lost its glow, certain varieties of collectivism, including the Soviet model, became attractive to many American intellectuals, some of whom had been drawn to the Russian experiment since the 1917 revolution.

Nevertheless this economic morass also fostered a communal feeling far more widespread than Marxism or cornball agrarianism. There was a growing fascination with regional civilization and sociology. Exploring popular culture, Constance Rourke unearthed tall tales and legends and studied the roots of American humor; anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston recorded the folkways of backwater towns whose mode of life would soon be threatened; Ruth Benedict's 1934 book Patterns of Civilisation became a bestseller, equally did Margaret Mead's studies of growing upward in Samoa and New Guinea; musicologists like Charles Seeger and John and Alan Lomax, traveling with rudimentary tape recorders, unearthed a treasure trove of folk music that had been passed on in prisons, on chain gangs, and in remote country settings. Only the thirties also witnessed the momentous growth of a new kind of popular culture in America: national rather than regional, amplified by applied science, creating new folkways in a country yet relatively isolated from the world.

Information technology has been forcefully argued that during the thirties more people, especially the poor, lived vicariously by turning on the radio than by going to the movies. (The picture audition really peaked in 1946, shortly before the full arrival of tv set.) Woody Allen complemented his moving picture of the Low in Imperial Rose with his more autobiographical treatment of a noisy Jewish family in Brooklyn in Radio Days, a tribute to the role radio had played in forming a larger community out of an indigenous stew. The nightly fifteen-infinitesimal dose of the tribulations of Amos 'n' Andy, which was often piped into theaters--otherwise few would accept gone to the movies--propelled traditional dialect humor onto a national stage. New York's mayor, the inimitable Fiorello La Guardia, himself a salad of ethnic differences, read the comic strips over the radio on Sun mornings. Franklin Roosevelt'southward fireside chats gave people a feeling of intimate connection with their more activist government; radio, by intervening so widely into people'southward lives, thus became the electronic equivalent of the New Deal. It eased their anxieties and contributed to lifting their spirits; it helped fashion the nation's collective mind.

For all its roots in minstrel humour, Amos 'n' Andy was an ongoing epic of daily life, setting off the practical man against the quixotic dreamer whose schemes, especially moneymaking schemes, were e'er going awry. Backside the laugh lines, it was a programme about ordinary people trying to get by. This was typical of Low "escapism": reflecting people'south deeply felt concerns yet also channeling and neutralizing them, spinning out problems to evidence they could somehow be worked out. This was not so different from the mode Roosevelt himself, despite his patrician tones, put a warm human spin on the news of the globe. He spoke with potency but but and direct, as if to each listener individually. By showing he cared, he fostered a renewal of hope after the deepening despair of the Hoover years. While giving a human bear upon to the new federal role in people's lives, he reaffirmed traditional values. Taking full advantage of the new media, he helped navigate the nation through this troubled decade.

Though movie newsreels, like illustrated magazines such as Life, were important vehicles of information in the thirties, movies were inherently a fictional medium. With their dreamlike qualities, which film aestheticians had long emphasized, they offered appealing fantasies to counter social and economic malaise. Simply the myth of the thirties was far more than than the sum of its motion-picture show images and radio sounds. A legion of gifted photographers helped create the enduring milky way of images that we'll e'er acquaintance with difficult times: the urban and rural poor, the bread lines and the homeless, families camped out in Hoovervilles at the edge of towns and cities; southern chain gangs and haggard but dignified sharecroppers. Ballsy scenes from the Dust Bowl are role of our permanent shorthand for rural poverty and natural desolation. Much that we know about the human spirit in adversity can still be seen in Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother," the neat 1936 photo of a woman whose brow is furrowed like tractored-out land, with a look on her face more pensive and afar than pained or troubled. Two children, with their back to the camera, have nuzzled into her shoulders, and the bony fingers at her chin seemed to extend from some armature sculpted to support the weight of her caput. Like migrants in other Lange photographs, she is all angles, a zigzag of intersecting lines. Anxious merely reserved and self-contained, she speaks to our humanity without soliciting sympathy. All the same she has a wait of distress, of entrapment, of someone with her back to the wall.

As we look dorsum at it today, the Depression is a report in contrasts. At one farthermost the "look" of the thirties is in the flowing Art Deco lines of the new Chrysler Building, the Radio Metropolis Music Hall, the sets of Astaire-Rogers musicals similar Elevation Chapeau, Swing Fourth dimension, and Shall We Dance. At the other end is the piece of work done by photographers like Lange, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, and Ben Shahn for Roy Stryker'south photography unit of the Farm Security Assistants, conceived as a way of bringing abode the unthinkable pain of rural poverty to urban Americans. If the FSA photographs give usa the naturalistic art of the Low at its most humane, the Astaire musicals convey an elegant, sophisticated globe in which the Depression is barely a distant rumor. Withal the two are equally characteristic of the period.

The FSA photographs, forth with Pare Lorentz'due south government-sponsored documentaries The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), with their images of drought, flood, and other rural calamities, helped Gregg Toland (the cinematographer) and John Ford (the director) requite authenticity to their 1940 screen accommodation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. (Indeed, the poetic narration and visual beauty of the Lorentz films actually influenced Steinbeck as he was writing the original novel.) The Ford moving-picture show, in turn, fixed the iconography of the thirties for future generations. Nosotros can meet its long afterlife in films similar Hal Ashby's 1976 biography of Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory.

Surprisingly, this look was more meaningful to posterity than to the people of the menstruation. In his fine book Documentary Expression and Thirties America, William Stott described how the government, business leaders, and even economists suppressed or sweetened the unpleasant facts during the early years of the Low. Until Fortune published an article in September 1932 called "No One Has Starved," establishment newspapers, magazines, and radio programs downplayed or ignored the Depression and portrayed the land, as Hoover himself did, in business organisation-as-usual terms.3 For years the Depression was underreported; it went against the grain of laissez-faire optimism, a widespread belief, revived in the 1980s and 1990s, that the system was self-correcting.

This virtual blackout of bad news gave impetus to the documentary motion, to radical journalism, and to independent films like King Vidor's pastoral legend Our Daily Staff of life (1934), which shows the old American individualism giving way to a utopian sense of community on a Russian-style commonage farm. A few years later, an upbeat Life magazine, founded in 1936 as the vehicle for a new photojournalism, complained that "depressions are hard to see because they consist of things not happening, of business non being done."four Needless to say, Life published none of the stomach-churning pictures of rural misery taken by its star photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, in 1936 and 1937. They appeared instead in a volume she wrote with Erskine Caldwell, You Have Seen Their Faces, whose accusing championship reminds u.s.a. that a great deal of suffering, poverty, and unemployment was invisible, except to those who cared to wait for it, and look at information technology. In his second inaugural accost, on January 20, 1937, FDR described it this way:

I run across millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them twenty-four hours past twenty-four hour period.

I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm go along under atmospheric condition labeled indecent past a so-chosen polite gild half a century ago.

I meet millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to meliorate their lot and the lot of their children.

I see millions defective the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying piece of work and productiveness to many other millions.

I see one-3rd of a nation ill-housed, sick-clad, ill-nourished.5

Trying to grasp the essential spirit of the thirties would seem to be a hopeless task. How tin can one era have produced both Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio City Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate expedition toward the pastures of plenty in California? To readers of the journalist Eugene Lyons'southward 1941 bestseller information technology was the "Red Decade." Revisionist historians like Warren Susman and Loren Baritz countered by drawing attention to the bourgeois heartland of the eye class, with its deep economic fears however also its interest in sports, mystery novels, self-improvement, and mass entertainment. Liberal historians such every bit Daniel Aaron, James B. Gilbert, and Richard Pells focused on the intellectual history of the thirties, analyzing the radicalism of the era in terms that accomplish back to prewar socialism and progressivism. Other writers, in the popular tradition of Frederick Lewis Allen's best-selling Only Yesterday (1931) and Since Yesterday (1940) or Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd'due south Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), concentrated on the social history of everyday life. However others (like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the three volumes of his Age of Roosevelt) centered on the administrative and political history of the New Deal and the dramatic figure of Roosevelt himself, whose dominating presence became a force of mythic proportions. More recently, feminist scholars emphasized the unsung role of women writers in bringing gender issues, family histories, and deep personal emotions into the committed fiction and journalism of the era. Radical scholars accept assiduously excavated the proletarian writing of the 1930s and explored the culture of the Pop Front, in office because they experience it has been unjustly neglected but likewise because they identify with its political direction. My own arroyo in this book is to focus on unusually complex, enduring works for what they reveal well-nigh the agebooks, films, music, and photographs that speak for their times yet still speak intimately to the states today.

When I was in college in the belatedly 1950s, the thirties appeared to u.s.a. in the hazy altitude as a golden age when writers, artists, and intellectuals developed strong political commitments and enlisted literature on the side of the poor and the destitute. We were able to mythologize the thirties because we had never read much of what was written then. (Most of it was long out of print.) Simply we managed to dig upwardly records past Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, even the Red Army Chorus, all ruby meat for armchair revolutionaries. We recoiled from the blandness and repressive limits of the political culture of the fifties, and looked back wistfully at the excited ideological climate of the thirties, nigh which nosotros knew side by side to goose egg.

Years later, when I finally looked into some of the ideological debates of the thirties, whose radical intensity I had admired from afar, I was horrified by the brutality of many sectarian polemics; they seemed more concerned with doctrinal purity than with promoting any real social change. For all their dialectical ingenuity, the Stalinists, Trotskyists, and other left-wing factions seemed deaf to the free play of ideas; their piece of work breathed an atmosphere of personal aggression and fundamentalist dogma. Yet this was also a catamenia when writers as well as photographers keenly pursued an involvement in the backwaters of American life: the travail of the immigrant, the slum, and the ghetto, the failures of the American Dream, and, above all, the persistence of poverty and inequality amid plentya discipline with few but significant parallels in earlier American literature.vii

The discovery of poverty had been a great theme of the naturalist writers of the 1890s. It had roots even earlier in the nineteenth century, in some of the lesser-known works of Herman Melville and the sensational pop literature on the "mysteries of the urban center," with its teeming social undercover. In the nineties this fascination was summed up in the championship of Jacob Riis's landmark work of documentary muckraking, How the Other One-half Lives (1890). In the same year William Dean Howells published a great fictional written report of grade and social conflict in New York, A Hazard of New Fortunes. The protagonists of both works are social tourists in the best sense, curious well-nigh how poverty and plenty alive side past side in the bang-up urban center. Howells had moved down from Boston to live and piece of work in a more vibrant modern city. Riis was a Danish immigrant who became a journalist and followed the police in their raids in New York's most dangerous neighborhoods, such as the notorious Five Points. Training himself to go a photographer, he took advantage of new flash techniques to take pictures in dark, crowded rooms and dank cellars, oftentimes terrifying his hapless subjects and once, inadvertently, setting fire to their digs. He used these crude but powerful photographs to give slide lectures, which may have influenced writers, including Stephen Crane, but likewise to produce a text-and-pictures book, How the Other One-half Lives, that anticipates one of the primary genres of social reportage in the 1930s. In some means this is where our story begins, in a metropolis of immigrants, a turbulent social cauldron at the plow of the twentieth century, an era well remembered by the writers of the 1930s.

Reprinted from Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression by Morris Dickstein. Copyright (c) 2009 by Morris Dickstein. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113057611

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