Class, culture & politics in the great depression

1. Class, culture & politics in the great depression

5. Ford Hunger March, March 7, 1932

6. Troops drive out Bonus Marchers, July 17, 1932

7. Washington Post, April 11, 1930 New York Times, Jan. 9, 1931

8. Literature and Social Class in the Great Depression • art, politics, and movements for social change interconnect • traditional American ideals, including the “folk,” invoked to redefine American identity • Labor organizing and the New Deal

9. Art and Literature as Windows onto 1930s American Life: • cultural nationalism • alternative aesthetic and political standpoints • fascism and communism • Class, gender, and racial themes Lest We ForgetBy Ben Shahn, Resettlement Administration, 1937Gouache and watercolor in bound volume

10. Americanism in art and literature • Return to traditional ideals: • interest in "the folk" or "the people" Waiting for the Mail by Grant Wright Christian, Treasury Relief Art Project, 1937-38Oil on canvas

11. Relation between art and politics • Break with modernism • Representational, populist • Often radical • “Bad art”? Mitchell Siporin, “Workers Family,” from the portfolio “A Gift to Biro-Bidjan,” 1937. Woodcut. 8 x 9 5/8 in.

12. "History of Southern Illinois," by Paul Kelpe [mural], 1935-39 Illinois Federal Art Project, WPA, ca. 1935-39 Gouache

13. "Church in shacktown community . . . Near Modesto, Stanislaus County,California, May 10, 1940" Dorothea Lange, Bureau of Agricultural Economics

14. The “Activist Arts" We, as artists, must take our place in this crisis on the side of growth and civilization against barbarism and reaction, and help to create a better social order. -- Peter Blume, "The Artist Must Choose," 1936

15. "South of Chicago" by Todros Geller, 1937 Illinois Federal Art Project, WPA, 1937, Wood engraving

16. "Mine Rescue" by Fletcher Martin, 1939 Treasury Section of Fine Arts, 1939, Tempera on panel rejected study for mural in the Kellogg, Idaho, Post Office.

17. Fletcher Martin's executed mural in the Kellogg, Idaho, Post Office, showing the arrival of a prospector named Kellogg.

18. Federal sponsorship of folk music and culture Huddie William "Leadbelly" Ledbetter playing for John and Alan Lomax’s recording crew, Angola Prison, Louisiana, 1934-35

19. Other examples of folk music: • Woody Guthrie, "This Land Is Your Land" and "Pretty Boy Floyd” • Songs of Appalachia • songs overlap thematically with proletarian literature

20. THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND words and music by Woody Guthrie Chorus: This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me As I was walking a ribbon of highway I saw above me an endless skyway I saw below me a golden valley This land was made for you and me Chorus I've roamed and rambled and I've followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts And all around me a voice was sounding This land was made for you and me Chorus The sun comes shining as I was strolling The wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling The fog was lifting a voice come chanting This land was made for you and me Chorus As I was walkin' - I saw a sign there And that sign said - no tress passin' But on the other side .... it didn't say nothin! Now that side was made for you and me! Chorus In the squares of the city - In the shadow of the steeple Near the relief office - I see my people And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' If this land's still made for you and me. Chorus (2x)

22. Literature and the Left “In these terrible happenings you cannot be neutral now. No one can be neutral in the face of bullets.” Meridel LeSueur, “I Was Marching”

24. Langston Hughes Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek- And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

25. The free? Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay- Except the dream that's almost dead today.

26. O, let America be America again- The land that never has been yet- And yet must be--the land where every man is free. The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

27. Richard Wright

28. I am black and I have seen black hands, millions and millions of them They were tired and awkward and calloused and grimy and covered with hangnails, And they were caught in the fast-moving belts of machines and snagged and smashed and crushed. And they jerked up and down at the throbbing machines massing taller and taller the heaps of gold in the banks of bosses, And they piled higher and higher the steel, iron, the lumber, wheat, rye, the oats, corn, the cotton, the wool, the oil, the coal, the meat, the fruit, the glass, and the stone until there was too much to be used, And they grabbed guns and slung them on their shoulders and marched and groped in trenches and fought and killed and conquered nations who were customers for the goods black hands had made.

29. I am black and I have seen black hands Raised in fists of revolt, side by side with the white fists Of white workers, And some day — and it is only this which sustains me— Some day there shall be millions and millions of them, On some red day in a burst of fists on a new horizon!

30. Le Sueur, “I Was Marching” I can't describe what I felt, but perhaps it will come near it to say that I felt I excelled in competing with others and I knew instantly that these people were NOT competing at all, that they were acting in a strange, powerful trance of movement together. And I was filled with longing to act with them and with fear that I could not. I felt I was born out of every kind of life, thrown up alone, looking at other lonely people, a condition I had been in the habit of defending with various attitudes of cynicism, preciosity, defiance, and hatred.

31. Upstairs men sat bolt upright in chairs asleep, their bodies flung in attitudes of peculiar violence of fatigue. A woman nursed her baby. Two young girls slept together on a cot, dressed in overalls. The voice of the loudspeaker filled the room. The immense heat pressed down from the flat ceiling. I stood up against the wall for an hour. No one paid any attention to me. The commissary was in back and the women came out sometimes and sat down, fanning themselves with their aprons and listening to the news over the loudspeaker. A huge man seemed hung on a tiny folding chair. Open battle between striking teamsters armed with pipes and the police in the streets of Minneapolis, June 1934. National Archives. Occasionally some one tiptoed over and brushed the flies off his face. His great head fell over and the sweat poured regularly from his forehead like a spring. I wondered why they took such care of him. They all looked at him tenderly as he slept. I learned later he was a leader on the picket line and had the scalps of more cops to his name than any other.

32. Women's Auxiliary serving pickets at strike headquarters commissary I see that there is a bright clot of women drawn close to a bullet riddled truck. I am one of them, yet I don't feel myself at all. It is curious, I feel most alive and yet for the first time in my life I do not feel myself as separate, I realize then that all my previous feelings have been based on feeling myself as separate and distinct from others and now I sense sharply faces, bodies, closeness, and my own fear is not my own alone, nor my hope.

33. I was marching with a million hands, movements, faces, and my own movement was repeating again and again, making a new movement from these many gestures, the walking, falling back, the open mouth crying, the nostrils stretched apart, the raised hand, the blow falling, and the outstretched hand drawing me in.

34. Steinbeck There has been no war in California, no plague, no bombing of open towns and roads, no shelling of cities. It is a beautiful year. And thousands of families are starving in California. In the county seats the coroners are filling in “malnutrition” in the spaces left for “causes of death.” For some reason, a coroner shrinks from writing “starvation” when a thin child is dead in a tent.

35. The Associated Farmers, which presumes to speak for the farms of California and which is made up of such earth stained toilers as chain banks, public utilities, railroad companies and those huge corporations called land companies, this financial organization in the face of the crisis is conducting Americanism meetings and bawling about reds and foreign agitators. It has been invariably true in the past that when such a close knit financial group as the Associated Farmers becomes excited about our ancient liberties and foreign agitators, some one is about to lose something.

36. Faced with the question of starving or moving, these dispossessed families came west. To a certain extent they were actuated by advertisements and hand bills distributed by labor contractors from California. It is to the advantage of the corporate farmer to have too much labor, for then wages can be cut. Then people who are hungry will fight each other for a job rather than the employer for a living wage. "Children in a democracy. A migratory family living in a trailer in an open field. No sanitation, no water. They come from Amarillo, Texas."By Dorothea Lange, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, November 1940 National Archives, Records of the Bureau of Agricultural Economics

37. I talked to a man last week who lost two children in ten days with pneumonia. His face was hard and fierce and he didn’t talk much. I talked to a girl with a baby and offered her a cigaret. She took two puffs and vomited in the street. She was ashamed. She shouldn’t have tried to smoke, she said, for she hadn’t eaten for two days. I heard a man whimpering that the baby was sucking but nothing came out of the breast. I heard a man explain very shyly that his little girl couldn’t go to school because she was too weak to walk to school and besides the school lunches of the other children made her unhappy.

38. Common Themes?