American Experiment (311 page)

It was acutely ironic that the theater and other New Deal cultural programs should have been shut down because of their “radicalism,” for they were at the heart of the revival of cultural nationalism in the 1930s. That decade, in Charles Alexander’s look back four decades later, brought a “remarkable celebration in American thought and culture of the goodness and glory of the nation and its people.” This was true “as much in architecture, where modernists linked adaptable, utilitarian design to the task of social reconstruction, as it was in music, where composers were often willing to exploit native folk and popular resources, or in the literary or visual arts, where the social and artistic values of realism prevailed.” Coming home from European or spiritual exile, intellectuals and artists not only rediscovered the American present; “as the decade progressed they more and more explored the national past, seeking enduring values, precedents for action, even meaningful legends with which to fashion the most elaborate version thus far of a usable past.”

Throughout the decade public arts programs existed side by side with private ventures. The public was not always clear as to what was “socialistic” and what was “commercial.” Thus it was the FTP that put on the musical drama
The Cradle Will Rock,
but it was the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union that produced the equally pro-union and anti-capitalist
Pins and Needles.
The federal art programs covered public buildings with murals and paintings, but independent and established artists like Reginald Marsh, John Steuart Curry, and Grant Wood were painting on their own. Rather than crushing private or commercial ventures, the federal cultural programs appeared to stimulate them. On occasion, feds fought one another. WPA officials in Washington, fearful about the approaching Federal Theatre production of
The Cradle Will Rock
during the bitter struggle between labor and Little Steel, put off the presentation at the last moment. After vain protests and appeals, author Marc Blitzstein
and director Orson Welles led the opening-night audience from the Maxine Elliott Theatre twenty blocks to the old Venice Theatre, where actors and stagehands improvised a performance that would be talked about— and reenacted—decades later.

The Federal Writers’ Project was a prime example of the easy coexistence of public and private cultural enterprise. When the FWP came under the usual attack on Capitol Hill, forty-four publishers wrote a joint letter to the investigating subcommittee asserting that the work of the writers was a “genuine, valuable and objective contribution to the understanding of American life” and not a vehicle of propaganda. While the publishers unduly played down the left bias in enclaves of the project, prestigious houses such as Random House and Houghton Mifflin had enough confidence in the FWP to undertake cooperative publishing with it. Certainly the FWP needed every friend it could mobilize, as it suffered along with the other cultural projects from the usual congressional barrages about reds, waste, administrative incompetence.

The Federal Writers’ Project shared much else with its sister programs in the arts—a gifted leadership, though often erratic in the case of the writers’ program, the unswerving support of Eleanor Roosevelt and the cautious backing of her husband, the inadequacy of funds in view of the need, and the image of being a New York project despite the existence of strong state programs, fourteen of which were headed by women. It could boast of the usual huge output: around 6,500 writers in four years produced several hundred publications on a wide diversity of subjects, with the help of thousands of volunteer consultants, most of them college teachers, who helped prepare FWP manuscripts. And the quality of the output, as in the other projects, varied wildly. It was at worst pure hack stuff and at best enduring work, such as the two thousand slave narratives based on interviews with former slaves and collated in seventeen volumes.

The showcase of the Writers’ Project was its American Guide Series. Rising almost spontaneously from under the noses of the WPA planners, the idea was to employ writers, editors, historians, researchers, art critics, archaeologists, map draftsmen, geologists, and other professionals to prepare local, state, and regional “Baedekers.” But some hoped that these would be more than Baedekers—that they would dig into the roots of American history and culture and hence would become, as Alfred Kazin later put it, part of an “extraordinary national self-scrutiny.”

The series was most impressive for its sheer size and range—as though it wished to manifest the size and range of the nation it covered. By 1942 the collection consisted of 276 volumes and 701 pamphlets; even so, the FWP had still not published any of the regional guides originally planned.

Once again the quality was grossly uneven, but at its best the series presented known and unknown writers at their most creative and imaginative. For the Massachusetts guide Conrad Aiken anonymously described the “wonderful ghostliness” of old Deerfield as “the perfect and beautiful statement of the tragic and creative moment when one civilization is destroyed by another.” He also paid tribute to the “profound individualism” of which Massachusetts had been such a prodigal and brilliant source— only to provoke the wrath of leftists who argued that the good in America had stemmed from popular, collective action. The guide calmly published both views, “each in effect arguing against the other.”

Not all the difficulties of the Massachusetts guide were settled so easily. The day after the first copy off the Houghton Mifflin press was presented to the governor, the Boston
Traveler
headlined “Sacco Vanzetti Permeate New WPA Guide.” It seemed that the guide described the Boston Tea Party in nine lines and the Sacco-Vanzetti case in forty-one. Other “revelations”—and headlines—followed about the guide’s handling of the Boston police strike, the great 1912 strike of textile workers, child labor, and other skeletons in the Bay Stale closet. The governor denounced the book, declared that the writers should go back to where they came from if they didn’t like America, and collaborated with the state librarian in an effort to strike from the guide references to organized labor, welfare legislation, and Labor Day. In Washington, Harry Hopkins laughed off the affair, and in Boston the guide sold like hotcakes.

Other state guides came under literary attack for poor style or for history that was only guidebook-deep. But their critics missed the essential point of the guides and of the whole Writers’ Project—to mobilize hundreds of writers who in turn could dig into the heart and mind, the very bone and sinew, of the nation. They wrote mainly about people—famous and infamous, heroic and villainous, remembered and forgotten. “It is doubtful,” wrote Robert Cantwell in
The New Republic,
“if there has ever been assembled anywhere such a portrait, so laboriously and carefully documented, of such a fanciful, impulsive, childlike, absent-minded, capricious and ingenious people.”

So the guides abounded in people, presented often in exquisite and loving detail, like the jobless man whose opening words to the FWP interviewer were: “I admit it, I’m a hog. In other words human. I enjoy women and a pair of doughnuts like anybody else. Say tomorrow I wake up I’m covered in communism, say I can go and get what I want by asking—I want six wives. You maybe want twenty-four suits. .. .” Or like John D. Rockefeller golfing in Florida, wearing a straw hat tied with a shawl-like handkerchief under his chin as he bicycled “from stroke to stroke, followed by two
valets, one with milk and crackers, the other with a blanket to be spread on the ground when he wishes to rest.”

And so it was possible for Alfred Kazin to write that the enormous and remarkable body of writing of the Depression era, for all its shapelessness, offered the fullest expression of the national consciousness. It was the “story of a vast new literature in itself, some of it fanatical or callow, some of it not writing at all, much of it laboriously solid and curious and humble, whose subject was the American scene and whose drive was always the need, born of the depression and the international crisis, to chart America and to possess it.” And because much of this literature dealt with the 1930s, inevitably much of it dealt with economic hope and despair.

“Jus’ let me get out to California,” says Grandpa Joad. “Gonna get me a whole big bunch of grapes off a bush, or whatever, an’ I’m gonna squash ’em on my face an’ let ’em run offen my chin.” Getting to California—the Joads have been thinking of this for months. The real Joads were the half-million refugees created when the great dust storms swept through the Plains and border states, reducing almost 100 million acres to dust. For a time the uprooted became wanderers, traveling like sleepwalkers, but most were headed west in rattletrap cars and trucks, in a grim reenactment of the American dream. Headed west to California, the last paradise, where the land was rich and jobs were for the asking. But their hopes were blighted—as Ma Joad had expected, the promises had been “too nice, kinda.”

John Steinbeck had made this trek too. In 1939 he published the novel that documented the Okie experience,
The Grapes of Wrath.
In California his family, the Joads, encounter the people in paradise: farm owners who offer jobs to migrants at starvation wages—take it or leave—and sheriffs who move them like cattle from miserable camp to worse camp and Californians who hiss “Okie” at them no matter what state they hail from. The Joads’ meager savings evaporate; they find no place to rest; they are abused, tricked, exploited. The family falls apart—the grandparents die, a son-in-law deserts, a baby is stillborn, a son avenges a preacher by attacking a strikebreaker. In the end a tremendous rain descends, like a second Flood, and this ironic rain, whose absence had denied the Joads life in Oklahoma, now forces them to take cowering refuge in a barn. They must leave behind their truck, their belongings. They have nothing left.

Steinbeck’s book set off a fire storm of controversy and made the thirty-seven-year-old novelist famous. Inevitably attacked as a Communist propagandist, Steinbeck in fact had made one of the principal themes of an
earlier novel,
In Dubious Battle,
the darker side of Communist activists— their fanaticism, their subordination of the strikers’ needs to the party’s political goals, their provocativeness, and hence the “dubiousness” of the battle. Far from advocating communism,
The Grapes of Wrath
offered no coherent program whatever but rather a mystic union of Emerson’s transcendentalism, Whitman’s mass democracy, and Jefferson’s agrarian populism. It beckoned readers back to the time when men and the land were one, when greed yielded to selflessness, “for the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’ ” A federal migrant camp offers a glimpse of Utopia, where the life-principles are cooperation and sharing, and where the Joads have a few weeks to learn to “feel like people again.”

But Steinbeck speaks best through his characters. Ma Joad, indomitable defender of the family unit against all comers: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do.” Jim Casy, a preacher who accompanies the Joads to California and has given up conventional Christianity for the faith that “all men got one big soul ever’-body’s a part of.” Young Tom Joad, who lakes on Casy’s burden when the preacher is murdered for leading a migrant workers’ strike, assaults the murderer, and must flee. But, he tells his mother, “I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.… An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

Woody Guthrie was there too, a real-life Okie who rode the freights through the South and Southwest during the dust bowl years, playing and singing to anyone who would listen. Growing up in a disintegrating home, in his teens he was an “alley rat” living among old cowboys and onetime outlaws and plain down-and-outers, listening to their yarns about the glory days of the West. When the dust storms hit in the spring of 1935, Woody was still only a twenty-three-year-old soda jerk in Pampa, Texas, but then he began to travel. “This dusty old dust is a-getting my home / and I’ve got to be drifting along.…”

On the road, thrown among the dust-blown, Guthrie’s alley-rat “I” was transmuted into an impassioned “we.” He “had never considered himself part of any group before,” according to Joe Klein. “But here he was, an Okie, and these were his people.” And as more and more he saw what was happening to them, his music took on a new bite. “I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that
country was thinking.” Guthrie gathered a repertoire of old tunes—ballads, hymns, country blues—from hoboes and migrants and fitted his own lyrics to them. “The way I figure, there are two kinds of singing and two kinds of songs,” he said. “Living songs and dying songs.” He would sing both. Drawing from the Wobblies’ old
Little Red Songbook,
his lyrics became more pointed in pathos and politics:

We got out to the West Coast broke,

So dad gum hungry I thought I’d croak,

And I bummed up a spud or two,

And my wife fixed up a ’tater stew.

We poured the kids full of it.

Mighty thin stew, though: you could read a magazine right through it.

Always have figured that if it had been just a little bit thinner some of these here politicians could have seen through it.

Two thousand miles to the east, the trouble with Studs Lonigan is that he cannot speak his true feelings, deep and powerful feelings of revolt against Chicago’s drab Irish middle class, with its petty aspirations and empty values and spiritual poverty. Studs is crushed between a latent conscience desperate to emerge, which enables him to grasp vaguely that something is wrong with his world, and his lack of knowledge, either of himself or of society, that would make his rebellion effective. Robbed of any model for revolt, Studs falls back on the hackneyed American rebel of dime novels and juvenile fantasies, on the model of the tough guy as boxer, outlaw, hoodlum, soldier, or teen gang leader. Shadowboxing before a mirror, cursing his sister, drinking himself into a stupor, strutting among his adolescent admirers, Lonigan must constantly affirm to himself that he is indeed “real stuff.” But by adopting the pose and vocabulary of the tough guy, he can neither fully tolerate nor articulate genuine emotions and impulses.