This essay contends that the accumulated characterisations
of 1930s literature have been shaped through the use of the past
as present-day resource. As
Richard Pells
suggests, "any effort to re-examine the conflicts and passions
of the 1930s becomes, inevitably, a commentary on contemporary problems
as well" (xi). Yet
the 1930s presents particular difficulties due to the crisis, beginning then and continuing
into the present, in both economic and leadership terms, afflicting
Western societies. For one
author, the inter-war period constitutes the source of a "moral
impasse", the "other Sixties" that establishment
commentators would sooner avoid discussing (Furedi 88-126).
Thus there is more at stake in the historiography than just
an assessment of what happened; rationales of progress, growth and
development are also subject to contestation. This essay traces
the history of the representation of the thirties in the USA
and the impacts of these representations on political culture.
At least part of the difficulty of the
1930s as the object of historical study is the methodological problem
contained in the premise that a decade is self-contained and easily
characterisable. Even cursory study, whether of social and political
trends or individual biography, will reveal tendencies present in
the decade prior to the one under scrutiny and continuing long afterwards. For instance, the shift towards government intervention
under the Roosevelt administration actually commenced in a more
limited form during Herbert Hoover's term of office (Romasco 321). Likewise, while literary histories of the 1930s
invite us to consider the leftward movement of writers as producing
a significant if not dominant literary form, such writing was frequently
rooted in the 1920s or practised by those who would find their creative
maturity (or at least their most lucrative employment) in the post-war
years. Chronological devices for apprehending past
realities are convenient, but they can lead to confusion and oversimplification.
Despite
these inherent problems, the appeal of 'decade-ology' remains substantial.
Reducing key characteristics of an era to the notion of a
'decade' – be it Roaring Twenties or Greedy Eighties – is an attractive
form of shorthand for summarising events.
The pervasiveness of this approach to historical narrative
can be made apparent by simply listing some relevant book titles
appearing after 1939: The Red Decade (1941), The Fervent Years
(1945), The Angry Decade (1947),
The Aspirin Age (1963), The Anxious Years (1963), The Years of Protest (1967), Dark Valley (2002) and
the Age of Extremes (1994), in which the 1930s constitutes
one half of the 'Age of Catastrophe' (Hobsbawm 21-222).
Whatever their content, such volumes indicate the ascendancy
of particular themes in cultural history.
One way to surmount some of these problems
is to distinguish between the actual decade in question and the
tropes which dominate subsequent attempts at representation.
As a typographic indicator of this process, this essay uses
'the 1930s' and 'the Thirties' on the page, in order to indicate
history and historiographical concept – and perhaps 'reality' and
'myth'– respectively. Discussions of this interaction allow us to
distinguish both between historical developments in the years 1930
to 1939 and the received image of the 1930.
This second type of 'period' denotes not merely the passage
of ten years, but a selection of a number of trends and events,
reconstructing history according to particular interpretations.In this process, 'the Thirties'– a decade itself
often presented as marking a distinct break from any previous
influences – can be characterised in terms that, taken collectively,
further solidify an extant 'master narrative'.
As the titles cited above suggest, such construction has
tended to involve the privileging of particular themes.
'The
Thirties' narrative places radicalism and protest at its forefront.
Yet other accounts suggest that this is an exaggeration.
In Warren Susman's influential essays the 1930s was an essentially
conservative decade, characterised by individual survival strategies
and a reluctance to break with political convention (150-183).
Perhaps in keeping with the theme of the past as a present-day
resource, "The Culture of the Thirties" involved Susman's
own generational differentiation from his Old Left predecessors.
Yet the essay also captured some of the intellectual trends
unfolding in the 1930s but not easily identified through their presence
in manifestos and movements (for instance, by indicating the way
that self-help books outsold proletarian novels).
By emphasising anthropological methods rather than intellectual
or literary history, Susman arrived at a very different picture
to the normative view of the 1930s discussed below. Such findings are an important exception to the usual literary-critical views of the
decade, however.
Susman's attempts to rework 1930s historiography
as disclosing an essentially conservative or even consumerist character
is insufficient to dislodge 'the Thirties' as a dominant narrative. Nevertheless, we see a number of attempts to
rewrite the usual accounts. Even before it was clear that economic
conditions were improving at the end of the thirties historiographical
dogfights were well under way on both sides of the Atlantic. Conservative participants wanted a version of
1930s without the slump, in which what W. H. Auden called "a
low, dishonest decade" was precipitated by critics of the system. The same concerns led US
journalist Eugene Lyons to publish The Red Decade in 1941, in which liberal and left-leaning
intellectuals were the villains of the moment.
Political allegiances formed in the
Depression era shaped the intelligentsia for decades to come: witness
the row over Elia
Kazan's Academy Award (Conrad
passim). Post-war apologists for the market system
seemed more comfortable blaming the permissive society for social
problems, perhaps because it allowed them to evade a discussion
of their own youthful antics. A
decade as controversial as the 1930s was likely to generate considerable
conflicts over interpretation. Before the present essay can note some trends
in the recent period, it is worth exploring the established if no
longer wholly dominant interpretive framework.
An
appropriate place to start is The Red Decade (1941), a polemical
tract stressing communist infiltration of American institutions,
with a number of chapters devoted to the arts.
Drawing in part on Max Eastman's essay "Artists in Uniform"
(1933) – an account of Soviet suppression of artistic freedom –
author Eugene Lyons presented the US Communist Party (CPUSA)
as almost omnipotent, with the power to dictate cultural trends,
generate careers for the mediocre and control US foreign policy,
all in accordance with the interests of the Soviet Union.
As a former enthusiast of the 'Russian experiment', Lyons
vented his growing disillusionment in his Assignment in Utopia (1937).
His arguments often included a critique of Stalin's Russia
from the left – alleging it had betrayed its promises and potential
– even while Lyons himself was shifting to the right of the political
spectrum. This earned him the enmity of the CPUSA and of broader
left-liberal opinion which viewed Russia
as a beacon of hope and prosperity amid the Depression.
The
political orientation of The
Red Decade expressed a political process similar to that
sketched in Assignment in Utopia, but in an accelerated form. Some of Lyons'
criticisms of the CPUSA were drawn from the anti-Stalinist left,
attacking the Stalinists for their backsliding and compromise. Hence the book depicts the political summersaults
undertaken after the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Other chapters articulate a more general cynicism
about social change or a gossipy disdain for liberal foibles. It fared badly in terms of sales and reviews;
Lyons exaggerated its
unpopularity, alleging a conspiracy against the book (Kutulas 201-203). However, whatever its immediate effect, it certainly
had a longer term impact. Some years after publication, with the onset
of the Cold War and McCarthyism, its title gained currency as a
shorthand description of the 1930s as a whole. In an atmosphere
of hostility towards 'fellow travellers' and critics of the free
market, such caricatures of the 1930s acquired plausibility.
In conservative circles, The Red Decade was valued
for its capacity to dent the moral authority of the Soviet
Union, at a time when more traditional conservative
arguments were largely discredited (Nash 86-88).
Obviously
Lyons' tome gave central
emphasis to the CPUSA in its rendering of 'the Thirties'.
It is an early example of an author substituting
the experiences of a section of the intelligentsia for those of
society as a whole. Moreover,
the peculiar features highlighted by Lyons
allowed for a discussion of the 1930s with minimal reference made
to economic slump. Sidestepping economics in favour of intellectual
and literary life gave prominence to 1930s literature, particularly
that described as proletarian or revolutionary. Retrospectively, this reads like a 'Thirties'
without economics, a Depression era without the Depression. From the vantage point of 1941, however, to
those in the intellectual community at whom it was aimed, The Red Decade was an unhelpful
affront to the war effort and US-Soviet co-operation.
Making
sense of The Red Decade requires stepping
back to the conditions which so agitated its author, also posing the question as to why the CPUSA has such a high profile in accounts
of the inter-war years. One
place to start is with Culture
and the Crisis, the manifesto launched by he League of
Professional Groups for Foster and Ford.
The League consisted of prominent American intellectuals,
a number of whom had campaigned against the execution of Sacco and
Vanzetti in 1927, supporting the Communist Party's slate in the
1932 presidential election. The launch of Culture and the Crisis
was an event significant not in its own terms, but indicative of
a broader shift in consciousness that decade. The backing of America's
best and brightest for the Communist slate symbolised a profound
uncertainty within the US
elite. The manifesto's effects at the polls were negligible, yet
in its own way, Culture and the Crisis highlights the 'zeitgeist' of the inter-war period.
The significance of the League of Professionioal Groups lay
not in its actual activities, but in its subsequent impact on intellectual
life. That fifty-three
prominent intellectuals, whom Edmund Wilson among others saw
as vastly superior writers (Cantor 134), signed a manifesto supporting
the Communist Presidential slate in the 1932 election embodied the
sense of the crisis unfolding around them. In hyperbolic prose, Culture and the Crisis
argued that capitalism was incapable of defending even its limited
gains, comparing the system to a decaying house which no other party
was willing to fix. The positing
of Stalin's Russia
as an alternative model of society, backed up by a network of intellectuals,
was the feature which most galled Lyons,
yet left more traditional conservatives struggling to reply. Even in later years, when manifesto signatories
such as John Dos Passos presented the initiative as a youthful protest
vote (Caute 228), such events retained their power to shock. Indeed, a representative sample of those backing
Foster and Ford also turned into some of the most prominent pundits
and supporters of the Cold War.
Taken
together, the League of Professional Groups and Culture
and the Crisis presented humanity's choices as either
Soviet-style socialism or barbarism.
By linking the fate of culture so closely to the slump, they
anticipated subsequent narratives of the Depression era.
However, in contrast to the campaigning of 1932, accounts
starting with that of Lyons
tended to detach the broader culture of the left from the economic
conditions which gave it new impetus.
In numerous memoirs of the 1930s written during the Cold
War the slump becomes a mere background detail whilst Communism
and 'commitment' become central. In turn, such issues were played out in the
literary arena and then popularised through a range of loosely 'middlebrow'
sources. This process is
explored below, not least because of its impact on perceptions of
'the Thirties' now.
The
development of a homologous package of anti-Soviet ideas servicing
political life in the mid to late-1940s can be located, in
part, in the previous decade's literary debates.
Most notable are the various formulations which emerged on
the question of the relationship between the committed writer and
organised politics. Significant
here are Eastman's "Artists in Uniform" (1933), a depiction
of the stultifying life of Soviet Writers, published in the Modern
Quarterly and expanded to a book-length essay the following
year, and Philip Rahv's article "Proletarian Literature: A
Political Autopsy" (1939), which appeared in the Southern
Review. Prior to Aaron's
Writers on the Left (1961), these pieces were often taken
as the last word on literary and critical matters surrounding US
political fiction and poetry in the 1930s.
Strikingly, Eastman's essay rarely touches on the American
literary scene, but its polemical tone, title and reputation fuelled
perceptions that the radical novel was a matter of Communist policy,
an idea codified in Rahv's essay.
A series of stereotypes emerged, suggesting that US
'Proletarian Literature' was an attempt to impose Kremlin aesthetics
upon indigenous literature culture and that modernism was denigrated,
favouring dreary reportage, strike novels, and poetry eulogising
Lenin. It became commonplace to claim that, William
Faulkner aside, the 1930s novel was hijacked for propaganda
purposes (Barnfield 1999). This narrative then suggests that, in response,
a brave and isolated minority broke with official Communism over
this issue and faced subsequent persecution from the Popular Front
via book reviewers, mainstream publishing houses and even GPU
assassins.
Subsequent years saw the often embittered
claims of the participants in this early 'culture war' incorporated
and modified into a wide range of accounts.
Their insight has varied enormously; some were scholarly,
others written according to a disingenuous, a
priori anti-communist formula.
Paradoxically, whereas those directly involved in these struggles
– like Rahv and Lyons – tended to make Communism central to cultural
questions, traditional histories of US Communism made the coverage
of cultural affairs largely perfunctory. Thus, in the main, Harvey
Klehr's The Heyday of American Communism (1984) farms off the discussion of culture to a footnote citing Daniel
Aaron's Writers on the Left. The centrality given to culture among fellow-travelling
intellectuals, which formed a key theme in the post-war construction
of 'the Thirties', is largely absent from traditionalist specialist
studies of the CPUSA.
Even
as the cultural history of the 1930s ('the Thirties') took shape
around stereotypes of literary radicalism, the 1950s saw the emergence
of an open minded approach. Two major works challenged the depiction of
proletarian literature as a form of patronage, with Party functionaries
commissioning novels, of dubious artistic merit, on purely ideological
grounds. Among the first
to confront what had become a conventional view was Walter Rideout,
in a comprehensive work entitled The Radical Novel in the United
States (1956). In a manner that suggested revulsion with the
'literary' approach of both Lyons and Senator McCarthy, he prefaced
his work with a warning:
If the general
reader has picked up this volume in the hopes of finding the sort
of thing which should be entitled The Novel on the Barricades
or, conversely, I Read Red Fiction, he had better put it
down at once. (vii)
Rideout's remarks reflected a perception that the preoccupations of the
Cold War were distorting the study of literature.
His assumptions were consolidated with the appearance of Aaron's
Writers on the Left in 1961, which explicitly took issue with Lyons's
characterisation of the 1930s as the Red Decade, calling it 'a
polemic written without charity or understanding . . . reflect[ing] the
acrimonious spirit and attitudes of the decade he deplores'(231 n). The thrust of both works was to separate radical
cultural production from the Communist organisation – real or imagined
– that was exciting US-wide hostility.
While the assessment of Communist politics was unsympathetic, the
literary production associated with the movement could be disentangled,
allowing a more objective assessment.
The contribution of Aaron and Rideout was the creation of a vantage point from
which to examine 1930s literature without acquiescing to McCarthyism.
Neither account was definitive, since they tended to abstract culture
from some of the broader social conflicts played out in the 1930s (and
beyond). As Josephine Herbst
complained of Writers on the Left, much of the discussion tended
to revolve around New York
literary critics (cited in Madden xxi). Nevertheless, Rideout and Aaron's foundational
role was such that they paved the way for future scholarly research, by
providing an alternative reference point to that established by past partisans
and professional anticommunists like Lyons.
This enabled a wide
range of publications in which the Red legacy of the 1930s could be
re-examined and some of the more specific myths dispensed with.
So extensive is the scholarship that as early as 1971 an historian
complained disingenuously that "a spate of recent publications'
have 'merely compiled a series of lengthy footnotes to Daniel Aaron's
Writers on the Left" (Singer 73). Later examples of the post-Aaron approach are
manifold. Thus Eric Homberger
points out the disparities between Soviet literary politics – including
the abolition of the Proletcult
group and its doctrine – and the proletarian editorial stance of the
New Masses magazine, allegedly the source of "the Party
line in literature" (119-140). In the process he reveals Max Eastman's
deliberate mistranslation of Soviet Writers Congress documents in Artists
in Uniform. James
F. Murphy
and Lawrence Schwartz indicate the thematic and aesthetic overlap of
proletarian literature in America
with such movements as German Workers Theatre (Proletbuhne) and, unusually for the 1980s, use the Daily Worker as a key primary resource.
Like Homberger, Douglas
Wixson sought to locate US
worker-writers (especially Jack
Conroy and the Anvil/Rebel Poets milieu)
in an indigenous tradition of literary radicalism.
Both Murphy and Wixson re-present Partisan Review's Philip
Rahv as a sectarian advocate of proletarian literature during the early
1930s, at odds with his subsequent self-styled critical heroism.
Barbara Foley has interrogated current scholarship and, importantly,
original proletarian texts, in order to demonstrate the fine balance
of political manoeuvring and aesthetic incoherence that shaped perceptions
of a 'party line in literature'. Bill
Mullen reinterpreted black Chicago
as a literary centre. Alan Wald
(2002) has provided an extensive group biography that goes some way
to shattering other key myths of 'the Thirties', partly by arguing for
a study of literary radicalism in the 'non-canonical decades' after
1939. Taken collectively, these revisionist accounts
provide a compelling challenge to the idea that this significant current
in 1930s writing was the unmediated result of 'party patronage'.
Throughout the 1990s, these revisionist literary histories
were emboldened by the emergence of a broad historical school known
as the 'new histories of American communism'.
Unlike Theodore Draper and Harvey Klehr, who depict the Communist
movement as a monolith organised from the top down with Soviet Russia
at the centre of its firmament, the revisionists emphasise the local
activities of the Communist movement and its supporters.
Symptomatic of this is "an unprecedented outburst of academic
interest in American Communism . . . produc[ing] more doctoral dissertations,
books, and articles on the subject during the past five years than in
all the previous sixty years of American Communist history" (Draper
44). Seldom claiming to be part
of a coherent 'school' in this field, such authors stress rank and file
initiative as a key factor. In
the study of literature and culture (and, bridging the gap, of oral
history), this approach has proliferated in recent years.
'New histories'
can provide a useful corrective to the conservative construction of
'the Thirties' in the US as stemming entirely from Moscow, but they
also risk perpetuating a false dichotomy between 'micro' and 'macro'
readings of 1930s culture. Regardless of what was happening 'on the ground',
is there a 'big picture' that can account for these disparate activities?
Despite a proliferation of new scholarly studies, until recently
it seemed that the mainstream mythology of a literary and cultural Red
Decade would live on in memoirs, obituaries and textbooks. For instance,
the construction of 'the Thirties' within the teaching of literature
has not kept pace with the historical research. On one hand, there are canonical works of criticism
written while the proletarian controversy was still fresh. Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds, for
instance, is largely a measured consideration of the development of
modern American letters. On the
question of 'the Thirties', however, it is markedly partisan. Discussing 'the more fashionable kind of hard-boiled
writing', Kazin claims that "the left-wing naturalist surrendered
his craft to what seemed ultimate considerations beyond literature. Literature, in the Communist jargon, was a 'front'
and each militant writer a guerrilla fighting in his own way for a common
purpose" (387).
Kazin is both an erudite scholar and a principled liberal
who avoided the red-baiting approach adopted by many of his contemporaries.
However, his formulaic synopsis of radical writing forms a barrier
to understanding it. The book
both demands deference as a major literary work (even warranting special
fortieth anniversary editions) but goes largely unread on undergraduate
courses, further compounding the difficulty of identifying its precise
role in constructing 'the Thirties' on the faultline of literary radicalism. Nevertheless, because it insists that a 'party
line in literature' was a characteristic 1930s influence, On Native
Grounds introduces the general reader to proletarian literature
whilst embedding the predominant stereotypical tropes.
Kazin creates the impression, never empirically demonstrated,
that the CP was a powerful direct
cultural patron.
This
problem is often also reproduced in chronologically-arranged introductory
literary histories. It reflects
a generic standard that was firmly established in the 1950s. This pattern has persisted to this day, albeit
in a more liberal form. Unlike
Kazin, Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury are sympathetic to individual
radical authors like Michael Gold and Henry Roth. However, they bracket them with the left-wing
critics with whom they disagree. Writing
of V. F. Calverton and Granville Hicks, Ruland and Bradbury locate "the
sterility of their approach" in a 'limited conception of what is
real', before making an imaginative leap unsupported by evidence, with
the claim that "the Marxist world of the 1930s, was a world preoccupied
solely with the play of economic forces; the only place for literature
in such a world was as a weapon in class warfare". (361)
Likewise, Bradbury quotes Gold as urging writers to "go
left", become workers identified with the workers, experience and
record and radicalise the proletarian world which provided a writer
with "all the primitive material he needs" (125).
Aside from a synopsis of the novel Jews Without Money
(1930), there is little to balance this one-dimensional portrait, conflating
Gold as agitator with Gold as critic and cultural practitioner. In both
examples a part is substituted for the whole, hence the inflation of
Calverton and Hicks into "the Marxist world of the 1930s".
Given the role that both of Bradbury's texts play as introductory
guides for a general readership, it is clear that a one-sided view of
the writing of the inter-war period can persist despite revisionist
scholarship.
As mentioned previously, similar
trends become apparent in such 'middlebrow' forums as the literary memoir
or autobiography. Thus, Kazin
further enhanced his depiction of 1930s literary life in Starting
Out in the Thirties (1962). Perhaps
by way of disclaimer, he establishes his own position as a sharp contrast
to that of his contemporaries among the Depression-era literati:
I was sick of Communists. I had the deepest contempt for those middle-class
and doctrinaire radicals who, after graduating from Harvard or Yale
in the Twenties, had made it a matter of personal honour to become Marxists,
and who now worried in the New Masses whether Proust should be
read after the Revolution and why there seemed to be no simple proletarians
in the novels of Andre Malraux. (4-5)
A variation on this theme appears in Making It,
where Norman Podhoretz presents Partisan Review as "refusing
to accept the Stalinist dogma that experimental poets of a politically
conservative bent were to be attacked as decadent while tenth rate proletarian
novelists like Jack Conroy were to be promoted as great" (86).
Appearing within a year of each other in the late 1960s, both
memoirs employ a stereotype that conflates the Communist Party with
its literary sympathisers and their cultural activities.
The general and imprecise formulations of a Kazin or Podhoretz
were circulated in texts intended for a largely non-academic audience,
thus allowing the stereotype to acquire a purchase as ‘common sense’
to an extent disproportionate to its accuracy.
On this basis 'the Thirties' was constructed through a constant
preoccupation with the literary left, often presented as a two-dimensional
clash of good and evil. In other words, despite the available scholarship
to refute the claims made for ‘the Thirties’, the key stereotypes persevere
at a 'common sense' level.
So if there was, in real terms, no 'Red
Decade', why all the fuss? Estimates
of CPUSA membership vary, reaching 28,849 in December 1933 (Levine 115);
yet, despite these limited numbers, the party remains one of the most
scrutinised aspects of the period. Likewise,
whilst the struggles recounted by those constructing 'the Thirties' are narrated as epic tales of persecution and high
principle, they tended to be far removed from the actual events. The CPUSA pursued its political objectives among
writers in relation to the Moscow Trials (Kutulas 106-113) in a way
that was often despicable, but the experiences described in Partisan Review as 'trials of the
mind' were in no way comparable to their alleged Soviet equivalent. Intellectuals repelled by the left reworked
their encounters in 1930s literary politics into a narrative of liberal
anticommunism. Thomas Hill Schaub provides a useful summary of this
process:
How closely intertwined with each other both writer
and intellectual were in the paralysing logic of this era.
Both writer and intellectual shared the conviction of a thwarted
socialism and what seemed to have been a naïve liberalism. The critic and intellectual essayist could capitalise
on this enervated socialism and did: their group therapy occupies
volumes of Partisan Review, Commentary, Dissent
and Kenyon Review during the forties and fifties. (74)
Correspondingly, the social protest novel declined
(Hilfer 14-15) and organisational commitments beyond the Congress of Cultural
Freedom were usually avoided. Yet
this 'group therapy' acquired a wider social function: even as it announced
the end of ideology, it forged an ideological account of the moral collapse
of hegemonic ideas in the 1930s. Avoiding
discussing that collapse in terms of global slump and warfare, it hinged
instead upon a 1930s haunted by Communist inspired 'ideological' literature.
What are we to make of all this? Why would
a representation of events in terms of 'Culture and the Crisis' become
reworked in wholly cultural terms? One explanation is that crises are
themselves divisible into different levels, unfolding on economic, institutional
and ideological planes (Habermas; Mattick). Although too quick to discard the former categories,
one author uses the idea of crisis as discourse to suggest how a crisis
of ideas can take shape: "Crises
do not exist in the world. They
exist in discourse. Crises are
not real events, but they are evaluations of the significance of what
is happening. . . . We can say that crises are specific codes of significance.
. . . News media can therefore be said discursively to produce crises"
(Bruck 108). While maintaining that crises can have a worldly
existence, I would contend that the distinction between the 1930s and
'the Thirties' is precisely a product of the discursive production of
crisis. By replacing the "the
news media" of Bruck's formulation with "Cold War pundits
and commentators" this argument can be extended.
In the actual
1930s, conditions were such that Soviet Russia appeared axiomatically,
to some, to be a beacon of progress and prosperity.
Prominent and up-and-coming intellectuals alike campaigned under
the assumption that humanity faced a fundamental choice between socialism
or barbarism, thereby constituting crisis discursively. Their actions were symptomatic of what Habermas
terms legitimation crisis. Conversely,
when many of same individuals developed the '1930s without slump' narrative
described above, they were, in effect, developing a counter-crisis strategy
in discourse. This critical consensus
was reducible to a formulation found in Rahv's widely quoted "Political
Autopsy" essay: proletarian literature was "the literature
of a party disguised as the literature of a class" (625). Subsequently, this phrase became incorporated
into numerous hostile accounts of a significant literary tendency of
the Depression years. 'Proletarian
literature' came to serve as a cipher for assumptions that owed little
to a direct engagement with cultural production. Instead
the term signified that Depression era literature was a matter of policy,
connoting a totalitarian link between social commentary in fiction and,
via the CPUSA, Stalin’s Kremlin. Such
claims also ensured that communists loomed large in the story of 'the
Thirties'.
Even
with the end of Cold War, the allegation that writers worked according
to the diktat of an authoritarian party has maintained
its purchase. During the 1990s similar characterisations continued to
circulate. Hence the Modern Language
Association convention was attacked by Roger Kimball (author of Tenured
Radicals) who claimed that "one might have been forgiven for
believing that the year was 1969 – if not, indeed, 1935" (75).
Not insignificantly, the focus of Kimball's attack is Barbara
Foley, herself a major authority on – and defender of – the proletarian
novel. In bracketing 1990s 'Political Correctness'
with an earlier cultural milieu influenced by Stalinism, Kimball
can rely upon unstated assumptions to undermine a strand of 1930s writing
and to help him engage in present-day polemics.
Once again the past is used selectively in launching a critique of the present.
In a conservative tour
de force, Edward
Walter uncritically resurrects the
notion of the 'Red Decade' to praise Eugene
Lyons and damn the likes of Edmund
Wilson, George
Soule and Corliss
Lamont. Despite conceding the existence
of the Great Depression and the injustice of President Hoover's assault
on the Bonus Army, his real venom is reserved for the radical Group
Theater and its successors, among whom he numbers Oliver Stone for his
movie JFK. Walter's polemic
is orchestrated around the complaint that Soviet sympathisers in the
"American intellectual Hall of Fame . . . have not been removed"
(24-25). If this strand of the discussion appears anachronistic
and bound up with the Cold War, does this mean that constructing 'the
Thirties' along conventional lines is no longer an option?
Certainly
perceptions of the 1930s are in constant flux.
Shaped and reshaped to fit the priorities of the present, a decade's
images and experiences are a potential treasure trove for those using
history as a contemporary resource.
Not all such discursive strategies are successful; few now recall
comparisons between President Clinton's short-lived 'New Covenant' and
the New Deal of FDR. Yet the box office success of Gary Ross's Seabiscuit (2003), based on Laura
Hillenbrand’s 2001 non-fiction bestseller, suggested the scope to find
present-day role models from the Depression (Denby, 2003), without the
need to confront awkward issues of legitimation and past defeats. More broadly, this new interest invites an unlocking
of the 1930s, opening up the decade to a less cagey and more open mainstream
discussion.
Indeed,
recent treatment of the decade is striking for its return to economic
categories. As we saw above,
in the post-war period an ad hoc narrative centred on cultural responses
to the slump, and the role of the CPUSA therein, came to the fore. The issue of crisis was thereby positioned as
cultural rather than economic. Conversely,
today's pundits show an increasing willingness to compare present day
conditions directly to those which emerged from the stock market crash
of 1929. Contemporary anxieties
about the global economy invite dramatic comparison with the slump of
the 1930s. Predicting a possible
"return to the harsh world of John Steinbeck", Professor John Gray (1999) thinks "we could begin the new century struggling
to adjust ourselves to an older American model" (5). The
model he has in mind is Herbert Hoover’s America,
all breadlines and hobos. Grim
stuff indeed, if such doom-mongering reflects the reality of the world
economy today.
Before the events of 11
September 2001 provided a touchstone for discussions of economic
downturn, 1930s comparisons featured in numerous explanations of contemporary
conditions. Such characterisations
flowed thick and fast. Thus for
Larry Elliott, those "who want to know what the Great Depression
was like for America in the 1930s need look no further than Argentina
in 2002. . . . And unlike Americans in the early 30s, Argentina has
no Roosevelt to tell them that the only thing they have to fear is fear
itself." (2-4). Such analogies are not confined to discussions
of countries outside of the G7. Since the dot.com bust of 1999, economic correspondents
have repeatedly drawn parallels with the Great Depression when speculating
on future trends. Whereas during
the Cold War a combination of rising unemployment and failing construction
work was likely to be explained in terms of the business cycle, today
previously off-limits comparisons with the 1930s appear casually (for
example, Doward). "Seventy
years on, for the 'new era' read the 'new economy'" is how the
chair of the Financial Services Authority begins a comparative article,
in which he also notes Alan Greenspan borrowing the phrase 'irrational
exuberance' from those reflecting on pre-1929 speculation in order to
grasp 21st Century trends (Davies 29).
Thus, even before September 11 there was a widespread perception
– a discursive crisis if you will – that the US
economy was destined for recession.
"The attacks pushed its head under water" claimed John
Llewellyn of analysts Lehman Brothers; terrorism is simply the last
straw in an already gloomy prognostication.
Furthermore, such articles are almost invariably
illustrated with iconic photography from the Depression.
(Seabiscuit
plays its part in this resurgence of such imagery, with recurring documentary
inserts to help set the scene.) In
all probability, responsibility for this trend rests with art editors
rather than with journalists, but a distinctive 'visual culture', representing
the crash of 1929 yet building a bridge to the present, is symptomatic
of a shift both in popular perceptions and elite
discourse. Faced with this contemporary
catastrophism, it is worth reminding ourselves of the evolution of 'the
Thirties' as an historical and discursive construct. Whereas Cold War cultural histories have tended
to emphasise the CPUSA instead of economic trends, this legacy of carefully
argued apologetics is being swiftly discarded today.
It is striking just many mainstream commentators
are embracing the rhetoric of catastrophe.
The world economy has its problems, but these still pale in comparison
to the Great Depression, when one in four US citizens was unemployed
and much of the financial and banking sector was wiped out. So hard hit was the USA
that – despite the massive state intervention of Roosevelt's
New Deal – it took the Second World War to get the economy working again. These current comparisons seem excessive, but
they are gaining ground. In a
mindset once monopolised by orthodox Trotskyists, writers like John
Gray now perpetually live on the edge of an economic abyss. Continually sounding the alarm, they may eventually
be proven correct, but only in the way a stopped clock is right twice
a day.
This repeated harking back to Depression
era economics is unprecedented, as establishment commentators have been
almost invariably reluctant to discuss the inter-war period, as it graphically
exposed the flaws of both the market system and the political elite. Widespread business failure and mass unemployment
defied traditional explanations, in which idle workers were to blame. Government subsidies, nationalisation and state
control seemed to offer a way out, violating entrepreneurial principles:
the phrase 'we're all Keynesians now' allowed free marketers to express
their embittered acquiescence in the new ways of working. Needless to say, those who had sought fascistic
solutions emerged even more embarrassed.
Today the Great Depression is a key image
for spreading a message of economic gloom.
Although capitalism is not collapsing at the moment, the suggestion
that a 1930s-style slump is just around the corner is widespread.
By comparing the present and the 1930s, contemporary Cassandras
acquire an aura of history. They
scare the pants off their audiences and readers with their outlandish
claims yet are spared the effort of looking at what’s actually happening
to the economy today.
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Acknowledgements
Special thanks are due to John Baxendale, Mark Beachill,
James Heartfield, Chris Pawling and Alan Wald for their continuing
dialogue with me regarding the ideas in this essay. Needless to say,
I take full responsibility for the finished product.
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