Dickstein dancing in the dark; a cultural history of the great depression (2009)

DANCING in the DARK ALSO BY MORRIS DICKSTEIN A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World Leopards in the Temple: The Transformation of American Fiction, 1945–1970 Double Agent: The Critic and Society Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties Keats and His Poetry: A Study in Development EDITED BY MORRIS DICKSTEIN The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture Great Film Directors: A Critical Anthology (coedited with Leo Braudy) DANCING in the DARK A Cultural History of the Great Depression MORRIS DICKSTEIN W W NORTON & COMPANY / NEW YORK LONDON Copyright © 2009 by Morris Dickstein All rights reserved Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, on Illustrations and Permissions constitute an extension of the copyright page For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W W Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dickstein, Morris Dancing in the dark: a cultural history of the Great Depression / Morris Dickstein p cm Includes bibliographical references ISBN: 978-0-393-07691-2 Popular culture—United States—History—20th century United States—Civilization—1918–1945 United States—Intellectual life—20th century United States—Social life and customs—1918–1945 Depressions—1929—United States United States—History—1933–1945 United States—History—1919–1933 I Title E806.D57 2009 973.91—dc22 2009017389 W W Norton & Company, Inc 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10110 www.wwnorton.com W W Norton & Company Ltd Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT To Evan, Adam, Simon, and Anya, citizens of the future, and in memory of Stanley Burnshaw, in whom the 1930s lived on CONTENTS Preface Introduction: Depression Culture PART ONE DISCOVERING POVERTY The Tenement and the World: Immigrant Lives The Starvation Army The Country and the City Hard Times for Poets Black Girls and Native Sons PART TWO SUCCESS AND FAILURE Beyond the American Dream What Price Hollywood? The Last Film of the 1930s; or, Nothing Fails like Success PART THREE THE CULTURE OF ELEGANCE 10 Fantasy, Elegance, Mobility: The Dream Life of the 1930s 11 Class for the Masses: Elegance Democratized PART FOUR THE SEARCH FOR COMMUNITY 12 The Populist Turn: Copland and the Popular Front 13 Who Cares?: The World of Porgy and Bess 14 The People vs Frank Capra: Populism against Itself 15 Shakespeare in Overalls: An American Troubadour 16 Gender Trouble: Exposing the Intellectuals 17 Conclusion: The Work of Culture in Depression America Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Illustrations and Permissions † The point could be applied to many other romantic adventure fables of the period: San Francisco (instead of the Civil War, the famous 1906 earthquake), The Wizard of Oz (a cyclone), John Ford’s The Hurricane, even Mutiny on the Bounty, which fed the 1930s appetite for rebellion against unjust authority For one cogent view of the timeliness of Gone with the Wind, see Lawrence W Levine, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” Yale Review 74 (Winter 1985): 209 * Bergman, We’re in the Money, 149–65 The whole theme is summarized in the title of John Garfield’s first film, They Made Me a Criminal (1939), directed by none other than Busby Berkeley, doing his first “straight” film and his last for Warner Brothers before going to M GM Garfield was an icon of thirties radicalism from his work with Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre The movie also featured the Dead End Kids, who played in so many of the environmentalist movies about crime and delinquency * See Warren I Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 122–31 Echoing a distinction M alcolm Cowley had developed in Exile’s Return, Susman says that Barton’s “version of the success story helped ease the transition from an older, more producer-oriented system with its traditional value structure to the newer, more consumer-centered system with its changed value structure Barton’s inspirational writings (and in a way that includes his brilliant advertising copy) found a way of bridging the gap between the demands of a Calvinistic producer ethic with its emphasis on hard work, self-denial, savings and the new, increasing demands of a hedonistic consumer ethic: spend, enjoy, use up” (123) In many ways, of course, nothing better exemplified these new imperatives than the youth culture of the early 1920s, with Fitzgerald as its chief spokesman and interpreter * The mythically powerful father and monstrously corrupt daughter in Norman M ailer’s An American Dream would become a later variant of this motif So would the incestuous father played with menacing charm by John Huston in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown * The novels, each longer and more ambitious than the last, were first published as Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935) * Ralph Ellison would later adapt the Candide model for Invisible Man, as Kurt Vonnegut would for Slaughterhouse-Five and other novels It became a staple of the revival of the picaresque, a recurring portrait of injured innocence in a cruel and sadistic world * Ralph Ellison, like his friend Saul Bellow, shared West’s attraction to men and tricksters Besides updating Candide in Invisible Man, Ellison may have leaned on West along with black folk materials when he created his own trickster figure, the ubiquitous Rinehart, who epitomizes the shifting dodges and identities that enable a man to survive in the fluid street world of Harlem He certainly noticed Lem’s glass eye, which tends to pop out at inconvenient times, since this also happens at a crucial moment to Jack, who recruited Ellison’s hero into the Brotherhood, Ellison’s broad take on the Communist Party All in all, Invisible Man, set in the 1930s, is a remarkably Alger-like novel, not only in its sense of the city Like A Cool Million, it is a tongue-in-cheek bildungsroman about a young man from the provinces who is abused and misused by everyone he meets Ellison, like West, crosses Alger with Candide, and his book turns eventually into a political novel The wide-eyed hero’s ultimate disillusionment, his retreat to his underground lair, from which he narrates his story, is Ellison’s comment on a naive American optimism and on the American Dream of success and mobility—For Whites Only Having completed this exorcism, he promises to emerge * “Harold must lessen the gap between his first-rate critical perceptions and production intentions with a play of mine, and what he finally produces on the stage There is something positively weird and ununderstandable about his inability to work into a production the brilliant ideas with which he starts rehearsals.” The Time Is Ripe: The 1940 Journal of Clifford Odets (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 50 * At the opening of a 1934 revival in Boston, with Odets again understudying the role of Sol Ginsberg, he was so moved himself and so furious at the lukewarm reception (“the frozen silence, the terrorized silence…the antagonism of the aristocratic audience”) that he returned to his hotel and dashed off some key pages of a new play, Paradise Lost, a scene in which a mother tells her dying son the story of M oses and the Golden Calf See M argaret Brenman-Gibson, Clifford Odets: American Playwright: The Years from 1906 to 1940 (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 303 * M ary M cCarthy, “Odets Deplored,” Mary McCarthy’s Theatre Chronicles, 1937–62 (New York: Noonday Press, 1963), 9, first published in January 1938 in Partisan Review, a magazine noted for its uncompromising severity toward both the Popular Front and the theater as a middlebrow institution For example, M cCarthy, in a more-revolutionary-than-thou vein, attacks the ILGWU revue Pins and Needles for its New Deal attitudes: “You cannot produce trenchant political satire—at least not in America in this period—if your political horizon is the Wagner Act” (22) M cCarthy was surprised and a little embarrassed when she found herself actually liking Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with its folksy, small-town setting * Some sense of the original production can be gained from a historical album put out in 1977 by the Smithsonian, a compilation of early recordings that almost approximates an original-cast album There is also an excellent restored version by Tommy Krasker, conducted by Eric Stern, on Elektra Nonesuch (1992) * In the view of James Harvey, it also helped initiate the run of screwball comedy, along with three other films of 1934, Howard Hawks’s Twentieth Century, The Thin Man (adapted from Dashiell Hammett’s last novel), and Capra’s It Happened One Night See Harvey, Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, from Lubitsch to Sturges (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1987), 108–10, 125–30 * Taken from a best-selling novel by the Welsh writer Richard Llewellyn, the story reverses the direction of Odets’s best-known play, Awake and Sing!, where a young man, conveying the rebellious spirit of his generation, declares his independence from his cautious, controlling mother * Quoted in Lawrence W Levine, “Jazz and American Culture,” in The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, ed Robert G O’M eally (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 437 Levine also cites a 1924 piece in the New York Times saying that jazz “is to real music what most of the ‘new poetry,’ so-called, is to real poetry Both are without the structure and form essential to music and poetry alike, and both are the products, not of innovators, but of incompetents… Jazz, especially when it depends on that ghastly instrument, the saxophone, offends people with musical taste already formed, and it prevents the formation of musical taste by others.” Time chimed in that jazz “is merely a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tom tom beating of savages.” * The song was first called “God Blessed America.” It could be seen as the musical equivalent of Robert Frost’s poem “The Gift Outright,” which begins, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” ... unit of the Farm Security Administration, conceived as a way of bringing home the unthinkable pain of rural poverty to urban Americans If the FSA photographs give us the naturalistic art of the Depression. .. in combating the Depression actually paved the way for the New Deal He was anything but aloof, but his chilly demeanor lacked empathy He was incapable of doing what was needed to boost the nation’s... in magazines during the 1920s, at the height of Gold’s career as an imaginative writer Additional sketches, as good as anything in the book, appeared as a series of ten newspaper columns as late