Art and Literature in the Great Depression

Summary: Today we will consider the cultural ferment of Depression America, focusing on art, music, and literature. We will look at the striking relationship between art, politics, and movements for social change in the 1930s. We will also consider how Depression-era artists, musicians, and writers invoked traditional American ideals such as small town life, the family, and distinct concepts of manhood and womanhood in their efforts to define American cultural identity during a period of tremendous change and struggle.

I. Introduction

A. The literary and artistic accomplishments of the 1930s in retrospect

1. evidence of Depression-era art surrounds us (post office murals, etc.)

2. our familiarity with American folk music and other aspects of folklore dates back to 1930s

3. some aspects of 1930s cultural ferment have been forgotten, especially proletarian literature

B. Re-examining proletarian literature and other Depression-era arts enables us to understand 1930s America more fully

1. its preoccupation with defining Americanism

2. its willingness to entertain alternative aesthetic and political standpoints

3. its engagement with political alternatives such as fascism and communism

4. its engagement with issues of gender and class

II. Americanism in the art and literature of the Great Depression

A. Return to traditional ideals, including:

1. traditional gender and family concepts

2. small town vision of America

3. interest in "the folk" or "the people," and in documenting their cultural traditions

B. Benefits of this (preservation and promotion of America's diverse cultural traditions)

C. Relation between art and politics

1. breaks with modernist conventions separating art from politics

2. representational, populist

3. often radical or transformative in its political claims

4. "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism." -Earl Browder, 1936

5. big question: Was it "bad art" because of its political engagement?

III. Art (See the National Archives website on Depression-era art for examples)

A. "American Scene"/Regionalism

1. responded to crisis of modern American identity by idealizing small-town life (like Capra)

2. focus on American scenes and on patterns of everyday life

3. examples:

a. "Fishermen's Village" by Edmund Lewandowski, 1937

b. "History of Southern Illinois," by Paul Kelpe [mural], 1935-39

c. "Church in shacktown community . . . Near Modesto, Stanislaus County,California, May 10, 1940" by Dorothea Lange

B. Government-sponsored Art

1. controversial -- regarded as wasteful New Deal propaganda by some

2. themes:

a. lives and struggles of ordinary folk

b. patterns of everyday life, especially the world of work

c. strength and dignity of common men and women

3. the "activist arts"

a. politically motivated, sympathetic to labor movement and left-wing politics

b. examples:

i. "South of Chicago" by Todros Geller, 1937

ii. "Lest We Forget" by Ben Shahn, 1937

iii. "Mine Rescue" by Fletcher Martin, 1939

4. federal sponsorship of folk music and culture

a. field workers with the Music Project and Resettlement Administration drove across the ladn documenting American folk life

b. recorded and transcribed work songs, folk ballads, spirituals, and other music from diverse ethnic traditions

c. examples:

i. Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land" and "Pretty Boy Floyd"

(see original lyrics for "This Land is Your Land")

ii. Pete Seeger, "Which Side Are You On?" and "Ballad of Joe Hill"

d. songs overlap thematically with proletarian literature

IV. Proletarian Literature: Revolutionary Themes, Americanist Claims, and Complex Gender Accents

A. Radical literary culture masculinist just like union movement

1. assumed that industrial arena was the heart of struggle for social change

2. celebration of worker-hero

B. Women's Writing

1. several women did contribute to radical literary culture

2. common themes:

a. radicalizing experience of motherhood

b. bonds between women important

c. women's central role in cultivating class cohesiveness

d. revolutionary importance of traditional women's work

e. not all oppression reducible to class - also oppression between women and men

MIKE GOLD ON MASCULINITY AND PROLETARIAN CULTURE:
Send us a critic. Send us a giant who can shame our writers back to the task of civilizing America. Send a soldier who has studied history. Send a strong poet who loves the masses and their future . . . Send one who is not a pompous liberal, but a man of the street. Send no mystics - they give us Americans the willies. . . . Send us a man fit to stand up to skyscrapers. A man of art who can match the purposeful deeds of Henry Ford. Send us a joker in overalls. Send no saint. Send an artist. Send a scientist. Send a Bolshevik. Send a man.

LESUEUR ON BEING A PROLETARIAN WRITER:
"I am not a writer, just a recorder. The greatest poetry is in the people."

The strike is to be at midnight. I won't be held off from it. I won't be left out. I won't look at it lyrically. I'm afraid I won't be able to be IN it. I am afraid I will withdraw and not really see anything. . . . It's like a terrific test. I'm afraid I won't know how to bore in deep enough to what is happening. I would like to write . . . [a] terrifically hard, real, factual and yet emotional account with every implication in it external and internal at the same time. It's a kind of hoax to write about it looking AT it. I must be part of it. That's the devil about being a writer in America. Reporting is objective observing, and writing is subjective and each is only half -- without being a part so you become a special creature of a sort, neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring. So special and LOOKING ON. I am determined to get IN, to have an experience with it, in it, and not just look at it. I am determined.
from LeSueur's journal, v. 8, 1934-35, 68