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making it new

the emergence of modern american literature, 1900–1945

Changing National Identities

Attending the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, Henry Adams had found himself in a state of what he termed ‘helpless reflection’. ‘Chicago’, Adams recalled in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, ‘asked in 1893 for the first time the question of whether the American people knew where they were driving’; and ‘Adams answered, for one, that he did not know.’ What was more, ‘he decided that the American people probably knew no more than he did’. However, he went on, both for his own sake and other people’s, he felt that he would try at least to find out. And a crucial moment of discovery occurred seven years later, when visiting the Great Exposition in Paris. Standing in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition, he felt, while looking at all the machinery whirring and humming around him, that ‘in . . . seven years man had translated himself into a new universe which had no common scale of measurement with the old’. The old signs and scales, the old means of production, had been demolished; and along with them, the old modes of feeling too. ‘The child born in 1900’, Adams suggested,

would . . . be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple. Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it. He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved back into anarchy at last.

Instead of unity, there would be proliferation and change, what Adams christened ‘the law of the multiverse’; in place of systems there were only ‘charts of energy collisions’. Such alterations, Adams had believed, would affect all cultures, but particularly those strongly committed to the new ‘anarchical’ forces – and, above

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all, a ‘twenty-million-horse-power-society’ like America. Just because the American had embraced the ‘occult mechanism’ of the new age so fiercely, he or she would be especially susceptible to the consequences – whatever, as it turned out, those consequences might be. The American might become part of a new evolutionary cycle or part of a new, radically dehumanizing system; he, or she, might become ‘the child of new forces’, energetic and liberating, or might equally be transformed into ‘the chance sport of nature’, reduced to one more helpless atom in a random universe. Adams was not sure, although on the whole his patrician habits of thought inclined him towards the latter, gloomier series of possibilities. However, one thing he was perfectly certain about, the process of accelerating technological change would lead to an alteration of consciousness, vitally affecting every American’s structure of perception, the way they thought about themselves and the world – and new forms of education, new epistemological and aesthetic structures would be needed to grasp the conditions of contemporary life, to register and at least try to understand the ‘multiverse’.

Henry Adams’s apocalyptic prophecies about the direction of American history have proved only too accurate. The material culture (which is to say, towns, factories and so on) radically altered over the first half of the twentieth century; and, at almost the same time, the non-material culture (that is, belief, customs and institutions) altered too, in ways that were quite unprecedented and far-reaching. By the second decade of the twentieth century, the United States had become the most powerful industrialized nation in the world, outstripping Britain and Germany in terms of industrial production. Accompanying this growth of industry, there was a rapid expansion of urban centres. The ten largest cities in the United States in 1910 – New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, St Louis, Boston, Cleveland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit and Buffalo – had experienced an almost threefold increase in population in the previous thirty years; while, over the same period, new cities like Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Seattle had sprung into existence. Perhaps the main agencies for disseminating urban lifestyles, however, were the smaller cities. In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first one or two of the twentieth, thousands of quiet little townships with their few services for the surrounding farming population were transformed into small urban centres, each with its own paved streets, bank, cinema, department store, hospital, shops, factories and warehouses. There was a radical alteration in the material landscape, as more and more people crowded into the towns: the national census indicated that by 1920 the urban population exceeded the rural population – and it is quite likely that this change of balance had in fact occurred five or six years earlier. America was no longer a nation of happy farmers, even if it had ever been; and, regardless of where they lived, Americans found themselves a part of the emergent technological culture. The telephone ceased to be a curiosity and became a commonplace: by 1915, the ratio of telephones to population was one to ten. And the radio, along with other agencies of mass communication, began imposing its own imagery of the new normalcy on the nation at large. In 1926, the National Broadcasting Company, and the following year the Columbia Broadcasting Company, confirmed this trend,

when they hooked together hundreds of local radio stations in two giant national networks. So, along with the changes in the material landscape – as America evolved from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism, and from the ideal of the business buccaneer to that of the business executive – came change in the non-material systems of belief and behaviour. Along with alterations in the national economy came alterations in the national consciousness.

Some of these alterations in consciousness can be traced back to the new systems of thought that encouraged, and in some cases enabled, social change at the turn of the century. Darwinism, for instance, with its new view of human nature and society, was one of the first movements to threaten the non-material fabric of American culture, not only because it challenged the religious inheritance of places like New England, the fundamentalist South and the Catholic Southwest but because it called into question the humanist legacy of nineteenth-century intellectual America. Marxism placed a large question mark over the liberal orthodoxies of mainstream American culture. Freudianism helped to demolish the notion of unitary personality, the solidarity of the social and moral self – what D. H. Lawrence scornfully referred to as the old stable ego of the character, and, in its place, substituted a duality, the idea of two levels in the mind which might be not only discrete but at odds. In turn, the relativity theory of Albert Einstein offered nothing less than a new view of reality, since it implied a multiple perspective on the universe. There is no absolute view, the theory suggested, no ‘God’s view’ of events in the universe. The relationships of before and after, and simultaneous with, depend on the observer’s position in relation to events; things are determined by the viewpoint of the spectator and our knowledge of reality is inevitably contingent. Either as a matter of influence, or as part of the intellectual currency of the time, theories of relativity or indeterminacy such as these – or, for that matter, the ideas of Darwin, Marx and Freud – had an enormous impact. They contributed to a growing sense of what Adams had termed the ‘multiverse’, even or especially among a larger public who knew of such theories only in popularized, and probably simplified, forms. But perhaps nothing symbolizes the change in the direction of American thought, feeling and energy in the early decades of the twentieth century as something far more everyday and commonplace than theories of relativity, evolution, class conflict and the unconscious. And that is, the automobile.

In 1925, a woman in Muncie, Indiana, remembered that, as she put it, ‘in the nineties we were all much more together’. ‘People brought chairs and cushions out of the house and sat on the lawn evenings,’ she recalled. ‘We put cushions on the porch steps to take care of the unlimited overflow of neighbors that dropped by. We’d sit out so all evening.’ The citizens of Muncie were different now, she lamented: assaulted by advertising urging them to buy cars and ‘Increase Your Weekend Touring Radius’. ‘A man who works six days a week’, a banker was quoted as saying in one such advertisement, ‘and spends the seventh on his own doorstep certainly will not pick up the extra dimes in the great thoroughfares of life.’ Mobility had completely supplanted stability. In 1891, on 4 July, a Muncie merchant had noted in his diary that the town was ‘full of people’ celebrating Independence Day:

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by contrast, some twenty-nine years later, two observers found the streets deserted

– all the town had apparently left for the day and taken to the road. Some of those in authority might occasionally denounce the Model-T Ford, as one judge memorably did, by describing it as ‘a house of prostitution on wheels’. But one million models of the ‘Tin Lizzie’ were sold each year, and there were 26,500,000 vehicles on the road by 1929. Others might lament, as that Muncie woman did, the passing of the old folkways. But those ways were irrecoverable now: cars, along with radios, vacuum cleaners, record players and other consumer goods, had become the foundation stones of the new economy – and the precipitants of a new consciousness. Listening to network radio shows, seduced by the imagery of advertising and the cinema, encouraged to ride out of familiar locations in search of the unfamiliar or for the sheer experience of movement, Americans became part of a distinctively modern, discontinuous culture: a culture that was, and is, not specifically tied down to any individual locality, state or region – or, indeed, to any particular nation.

Such changes in culture and consciousness were accelerated by the experience of the First World War. The United States emerged from involvement in global conflict with an altered economic relationship with the rest of the world: from a debtor nation it had been transformed into a creditor nation, with loans to Europe worth thirteen billion dollars. For a while, under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson, it tried to assume the status of a moral and cultural creditor as well: in 1918, while war was still being waged, Wilson formulated his Fourteen Points, which outlined the need for a peaceful world and provided a ‘guarantee’ of continued peace through a ‘general assembly of nations’. It was this League of Nations that was rejected by Congress in 1919, after which American foreign policy seemed to move decisively towards isolationism. But while it is true that the United States did tend to withdraw from active political involvement in world affairs – at least, involvement to the extent that Wilson had hoped for – it was too deeply implicated now, economically and culturally, in what happened outside its borders ever to recapture the isolation, the sheer sense of apartness, that it had experienced in the previous century. Mass immigration from Europe and elsewhere, a mass communication system and a system of culture that ultimately denied national boundaries: all these, among other things, ensured that America was involved with the rest of the world regardless of whether or not its political leaders wanted it to be.

The most immediate and obvious sign of this withering away of cultural boundaries between the United States and the rest of the world, and in particular Europe, was the expatriate movement. After the First World War was over, hundreds of writers or would-be writers invaded Europe in a literary migration that has had no equal either before or since. A favourable rate of exchange was perhaps the immediate precipitant. Other motivating factors included a possible desire to escape from provincialism and puritanism and, as one expatriate, Gertrude Stein, put it, to be ‘all alone with English and myself ’. But whatever the reason, these writers soon found themselves involved with other, European novelists and poets who shared their hunger for new modes of thought and expression and absorbed into literary and artistic movements that ignored the existence of national boundaries.

The revolt against earlier norms of belief and behaviour was not, people like Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane discovered, a purely American prerogative; the anxious need to have the emergent culture, and the new sensations it engendered, adequately explained, was not the monopoly of either side of the Atlantic. So, while remaining American writers, they began to participate in the international experiments of Symbolism, Surrealism and Dadaism; the resources of language they carried with them from the New World were added to, and enriched, by their encounter with the Old. Whether they ventured to Europe only for a while, or stayed most of their lives, or whether, for that matter, they stayed firmly within the boundaries of the United States, very many American writers became involved in literary movements or tendencies that denied the traditional categories of history and geography. Above all, they became involved in what has become known as Modernism. Modernism, the major and most widespread response to what Adams had seen as the ‘multiverse’, can be defined in terms of its feelings: principally, of cultural exile and alienation. It can be defined in terms of its forms, which incline towards the innovative, the disjunctive, associative and experimental. It can be defined in terms of its more specific stylistic features: a willingness to disrupt traditional syntax and form, to mix together modes or levels of writing that had traditionally been kept separate, and to risk possible incoherence so as to challenge preconceived notions of order, stability and value. But perhaps the most fundamental definition stems from the historical perception shared by so many different writers of this period, American or otherwise, that things had altered beyond established means of recognition. As Virginia Woolf put it, in 1912 human nature changed; or, as D. H. Lawrence preferred it, in 1915 the old world ended. And the aim of Modernism was to place questions of form and structure, aesthetic vision, uppermost so as to achieve or move towards newer, more appropriate means of recognition – to enable writer and reader to begin to see things properly, truly, again.

‘Some people’, a reporter for the New York Sun commented in the 1920s, ‘think that women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is.’ For many observers, as this comment suggests, there was a connection between modernism as a process of social transformation, Modernism as a cultural movement, and feminism, the emergence of the ‘new woman’. Whatever the truth of this, the change in the position of women during this period was remarkable. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment giving American women the right to vote was adopted. At the same time, the spread of scientific, reasonably reliable methods of birth control was enabling women to exercise some, limited, control over their lives. The fall in the birth rate was dramatic. In 1800, white women bore on average seven children; in 1860, that figure was down to 5.21; but by 1920 it had fallen dramatically further, to an average per person of 3.17. Opportunities for education grew during this period, especially at higher level; women were making many of the new professions their own; and it was women who mainly led the successful campaign to establish female suffrage, just as they were to lead an equally successful campaign to prohibit the sale of alcohol, a prohibition that lasted from 1920 to 1933. Admittedly, the new professions women began to enter, like social work, nursing and librarianship,

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tended to be ones with low pay and social status; to that extent, they were like older, more established jobs, such as teaching, that had traditionally been a female prerogative. And the more lucrative professions, like medicine and the law, were still mostly closed to women for half a century. So, for that matter, were positions in business and finance, and in the skilled trades. But American women had a higher profile in public life and a greater freedom of choice in their personal lives than they had ever had before. And with the vote in their hands, some eighty years after the Seneca Falls convention, they had some degree of real political power.

Or, rather, white women of the middling classes had. Women of other ethnic groups, and white working women, like their male counterparts, continued to be mostly marginalized and dispossessed. Some 40 per cent of working women, especially African Americans, were still engaged in household labour. For that matter, while the ‘new woman’ or the ‘flapper’ might excite the public imagination with ideas of female freedom or female sexuality, most Americans still tended to believe that a woman’s proper place was in the home – and that the sexuality of anyone, but particularly the female kind, needed to be kept under lock and key. This was also the period of the Committee for the Suppression of Vice and a Motion Picture Production Code that prevented the depiction of a man and a woman, even husband and wife, together in bed. It was also the period when the editor of the Little Review – one of the little magazines that proliferated at this time, as an outlet for Modernism and other literary experiment – was fined one hundred dollars for publishing part of Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce. American culture, for all its general gravitation towards the social forms of modernity and the artistic forms of Modernism, was still a complex of different, conflicting interests, more a collision of cultures than a monolith. Labour fought with triumphalist and eventually triumphant capitalism: the Industrial Workers of the World, a union embracing all working people, was founded in 1905: Eugene Debs captured nearly a million votes as the socialist candidate for president in 1920; there were major if ultimately unsuccessful strikes in the coal and rail industries in 1922. Traditionalism fought with the new thought: in 1925, a young schoolteacher named Scopes was put on trial in Tennessee for teaching Darwinian theories of evolution. And various ethnic and immigrant groups, the other Americans, demanded attention, wanted their claims to an American identity to be heard.

In the 1920s, in particular, immigration to the United States reached new levels, comparable to those of the 1880s and provoking another moral panic: new immigration quotas were consequently implemented in 1924. Many of these newcomers ended up living in the cities. All of them supplied writers with a different twist on the Modernist theme of exile: these were strangers in a strange land in a different, more mundane and material sense than that often felt and meant by the major Modernist writers. And it often provoked those who wrote about them to favour the realism of social record to literary experiment. Native Americans continued to suffer their own forms of cultural dislocation. Subjected first to removal to reservations, then to the social experiment of the Allottment Act – which gave separate allottments of land to individuals who were then, very often, tricked out of them

– they suffered their own peculiar extremes of exile. Stripped of their tribal names, their land, their place in an ancient community, their predicament encouraged writers to socialism too, sometimes, but also to forms that mixed folk and native materials with other traditions. Wandering between cultures, like other ethnic groups and notably Hispanic and Asian American, they often inspired works that wandered between cultures too – that pursued the question of mixed identity, a conflicted history through a mixture of languages and literary forms. That was also the case with many African American writers of the period. W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), suggested that the black person in America was burdened with ‘a double-consciousness . . . two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body’. The African American is, after all, American and African; and the question was, and is, which is the more important? Should the primary impulse be towards absorption into the dominant culture or assertion of a separate national identity? Is assimilationism the priority, or black nationalism? To that, at the time, were added further traumas, other forms of exile or strangeness demanding writerly recognition. For this was the era of the Great Migration, when thousands of African Americans left the rural South for such urban centres as Detroit, Chicago and New York. And it was also an era of intensified racial violence: in 1900, for instance, at the dawn of the new century, there were 115 recorded lynchings, all but nine of them of blacks.

Caught between the pulse of the new and the rhythms of the old, as well as experiencing a ‘double-consciousness’, African American writers of this period are usually included under the heading of the Harlem Renaissance. Many wrote in Harlem, but not all; there were other centres of writing activity for African Americans located around the country; and another term sometimes used to describe these writers is less topographically specific, the New Negro Movement. It is taken from the work of Alain Locke, an influential black critic, whose essay on the New Negro and anthology of that title were both published in 1925. Whatever the preferred title for this new generation of black writers, what is notable about them is how they explored different literary forms to express the condition of African Americans in their times. Facing a racial experience the determining feature of which was that it was mixed and conflicted, they were prepared individually to confront and collectively to debate the question of just how their experience should be turned into literature. There were three particularly pressing aspects to that question. First, there was the matter of the balance between politics and art, the bargain to be struck between political message and aesthetic form. Second was the issue of the relative claims of literary experiment and verisimilitude: whether the black experience could best be caught in innovative structures, traditional forms or more socially conscious, strictly realist ones. Third, there was the problem of the racial inheritance, its relevance or otherwise. There was a rich vein of African and African American cultural tradition available for the writer to tap. In the African American traditions of the past, for instance, there were the conventions of folktale, slave narrative and spiritual; and in those of the present there were, say, the rhythmic forms of blues, gospel and jazz. The issue here was how, if at all, to use these

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resources to register the shape and meaning of the contemporary experience, to transform African American worlds into words. There was, of course, no settled answer to any of these aspects of the question; the writers of this time found multiple means for giving voice to the New Negro. And in their differences with each other, just as much as in their distances from white writers, they revealed just how much American literature continued to resist a monolithic reading – even the one supplied by Modernism.

Nor was double consciousness the monopoly of African Americans or those who became known, during this period, at the height of resistance to mass immigration, as ‘hyphenated Americans’. Dualism of a different kind was a characteristic feature of the dominant culture in America as, caught between optimism and nostalgia, celebration of the new and regret for the old, many Americans found themselves compelled towards the horizons of tomorrow but also drawn towards the golden landscapes of yesterday. The flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic in 1927, for instance, provoked quite different responses. On the one hand, Lindbergh became in the popular mind the living embodiment of the pioneer spirit, the ‘Spirit of St. Louis’, the young, independent and individualistic American, unaffected by public institutions and pressures. On the other, his achievement was also seen as a witness to the miracle of technology, what was possible with the help of teamwork, organization and commitment to the production economy. The same groups or individuals could and did respond to Lindbergh’s achievement as an anticipation of future technological miracles and as an affirmation of the values of the past. Committed to the power, leisure and wealth of the new, urban world, they could nevertheless feel irresistibly drawn towards what they saw as the simpler, purer values of the old. ‘We live in a new creation,’ one politician of the time observed. ‘Literally, the old things have passed away and all things have become new.’ The conviction of newness and uniqueness mattered to Americans of this period, profoundly affecting their thought and language; and while part of them was inspired by it, an equal part was clearly frightened. The compulsions that led, in literature, to the innovation and experiment of Modernism were countered by an impulse to look back with yearning to times that seemed simpler, morally more certain and socially more stable – to the quietude and contentment of a more pastoral age.

This yearning or nostalgia for apparently simpler and better times assumed many forms. In 1920, the newly elected President Warren Harding caught some of the mood when he told his fellow Americans that theirs was a period for ‘not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normality; not resolution but restoration’. In the same year, the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting the sale of alcohol showed how the progressive and nostalgic impulses could sometimes work together to support each other. Some of those advocating this amendment, certainly, were progressives who believed that it was as legitimate to preserve a person from the consumption of alcohol as it was to protect him or her against unhealthy or dangerous factory conditions. But many came from rural, Protestant districts and wanted to enshrine fundamentalist beliefs in law: for them, it was a symbolic reform, which gave institutional legitimacy to the norms and values of the old

America. ‘The Old America’, as one Southern newspaper of the time put it, ‘the America of Jackson and of Lincoln’, was also what those who objected to the influx of immigrants claimed they wanted to recover. At its worst here, fear of the new led not only to the trial of someone teaching evolution but to the Ku Klux Klan, which experienced a startling growth in numbers after the First World War. ‘When the Klan first appeared,’ its leader Hiram Wesley Evans declared in 1925, ‘those who maintained the old standards did so only in the face of constant ridicule’ and ‘the Nordic American’ was ‘a stranger in large parts of the land his fathers gave him.’ So, he argued, Americans had had to turn to organizations like the Klan, in the belief that nothing else could save them other than ‘a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overtly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized average citizen of the old stock’.

These nostalgic impulses that found convoluted, and sometimes corrupted, expression in such things as the Scopes trial, prohibition or immigration quotas also helped varieties of artistic traditionalism during this period. There was a new interest in the recovery of the past among both writers and critics of many different cultural groups. Observers of the cultural scene, like Van Wyck Brooks (1886– 1963) and Matthew Josephson (1899–1978), began constructing the idea of an American literary tradition. And writers began imaginative exploration of what one of them, Willa Cather, termed ‘the precious, the incommunicable past’. While Cather explored the uses of the Western past, others such as John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate considered the uses of the Southern past; and still others, like Jean Toomer and Mourning Dove, turned, respectively, to the African American and Native American past as an imaginative resource and a source of material. What these writers sought was, inevitably, different. Cather was intrigued, for instance, by the power of memory, and the grip the imagined past of the West, and of America, has on the present. Other Western writers turned to the Western past as a way of returning to the earth and ‘the real’. Southern writers, like Ransom, Tate and their colleagues in the Fugitive and Agrarian movements, were drawn to the idea of a fundamentally rooted, traditional and rural society as a bulwark, a means of resistance to urban anonymity and social change. Toomer and Mourning Dove were more inclined to find in the folkways and art of the past a healing agency or a way of restoring their own people. What all such writers had in common, however, was the belief that a return to and recovery of the past was not only possible but imperative: that an act of remembrance was vital to the restoration of personal and social health. This passage from Cather’s novel My Ántonia (1918) captures something of that belief. The words are attributed to Jim Burden, the narrator, but they clearly express Cather’s own views, and the impulses that fired so many of these backward-looking works into life:

While I was in the very act of yearning towards the new forms . . . brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past. They stood out strengthened and simplified now. They were all I had for answer to the new appeal.

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‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ observes a character in one of William Faulkner’s novels: which is another way of expressing this obsession with yesterday, the desire to reinvent past times. Other ways, many of them, were offered by writers of this era as they sought sure anchorage, moral and perhaps formal.

The cultural history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century is not, of course, simply the story of the encounter between different Americas – and the conflict or tension between optimism and nostalgia, the pull towards the future and the backward glance towards the past, the urge to experiment and the search for more traditionalist norms. Other forces were at work. And Americans were inevitably and profoundly affected, in particular, by what seemed to be the crisis of capitalism: when, on one Friday in 1929, the Wall Street Crash occurred. Within four years after the Crash, per capita income had dropped 100 per cent and unemployment, which had been remarkably low in the 1920s, had risen from 500,000 to thirteen million. Many of those who were unemployed had no economic assistance of any kind, and were forced to wander the country in search of work. They rode freight trains from one state to another, risking injury or even death, and erected shanty towns, ironically called ‘Hoovervilles’ after the then President Hoover. Farmers unable to meet mortgage payments were evicted from their holdings; beggars, street-corner orators demanding revolution, breadlines and soup kitchens all became commonplace. Those in employment fared little better: in 1932, the average wage in several major industries ranged between 20 and 30 cents an hour and the average income of Americans in general dropped back to what it had been at the beginning of three decades of technological revolution. Over all this chaos, Hoover presided with little sense of what to do: the measures he offered to alleviate or alter things were too little, too late. Farm relief, federal loans for business, public works, all these measures were tried half-heartedly because they went against Hoover’s own cherished philosophy of ‘rugged individualism’. He believed that the slump was a short-term affair that would gradually correct itself. Others, including the vast majority of the American public, tended to disagree. Hoover had been elected as ‘the Great Engineer’ in 1928; in 1932 he was defeated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a landslide. Even in his own home state of Iowa, Hoover was picketed during the election by two thousand men holding placards that said it all: ‘In Hoover We Trusted, Now We Are Busted’.

If the Crash and the Depression that followed it was a significant economic event, though, it was an even more significant cultural and psychological one, as those placards carried in Iowa indicated. For what it generated was a crisis in confidence: the ingrained American belief in the rewards due to hard work, the central importance of self-help, the inevitability of progress – all were called into question by an occurrence for which the word ‘panic’ seemed precisely right because it was at once devastating in terms of the human suffering it caused and unpredictable, more or less totally unexpected. When the Crash came, most bankers and financiers not only were unprepared for it, they tried at first to deny its implications and seemed oblivious to the sheer scale of the collapse. And, as it worsened, many were inclined to treat it not as a cultural event, susceptible to analysis and

explanation, but as a natural one: a natural disaster, like an earthquake or typhoon, for which little preparation was possible and which had to be endured for a while. The simple and terrible fact was that a failure of language occurred: Americans, to begin with, lacked the vocabulary, political, economic or imaginative, adequately to confront and possibly to deal with what had happened. Even the most realistic of the popular cinematic forms at this time, the gangster movie, was concerned as much with compensatory fantasy as it was with hard facts. For while it acknowledged that the urban-industrial surroundings, the cities of America, had become oppressive, bewildering and even terrifying places, it offered a series of dynamic, rebellious and above all individualistic protagonists who seemed to have achieved mastery over the urban jungle. Morally, these heroes might be subject to a disapproval that required them to be killed in the final reel. On another, subliminal level, however, they offered their audiences another version of the dream of freedom, the independence and mobility of the outsider – suitably darkened to reflect the darker times.

‘I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic,’ the novelist Franz Kafka once remarked, adding, when he was asked what he knew about America, ‘I always admired Walt Whitman.’ The Crash and Depression may have provoked people in the United States to bewilderment and anger and compensatory fantasies of power: but the economic situation could never quite extinguish that belief in possibility, in reinventing the self and society however shattered, of which Kafka was thinking – and for which, as Kafka realized, one of the most memorable spokesmen in earlier writing had been the author of Leaves of Grass. The election of 1932 foregrounded this belief: insisting that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself, the newly elected president helped to restore popular confidence at least a little. In the first hundred days of the administration – the first hundred days of what he called the New Deal – Roosevelt pushed Congress into passing a mass of legislation designed to restore some health to a radically sick economy. In the following years came other measures. The three Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933, 1936 and 1938 were attempts to maintain farm prices by artificially created scarcity; the Social Security Act of 1935 was an important welfare-state measure, providing for a system of old-age retirement payments and unemployment pay; the Works Progress (later Work Projects) Administration (WPA) was established to implement relief work on a vast scale and by 1939 had provided employment for eight and a half million people in a whole variety of occupations. It is possible to argue over the practical efficacy of all this legislation – and to suggest, for instance, that it took the demand created by the Second World War to restore the economy and full employment. What is unarguable, though, is that Roosevelt helped restore Americans’ belief in their power to manage things, the solubility of the problems with which they were confronted. In an ideological sense, this meant that most Americans never completely lost confidence in the system, the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise. And in a more specifically moral sense, this involved a recovery of the ‘can do’ philosophy, the conviction that everything is manageable, given hard work, pluck and luck, and the exercise of the independent, individual will.

346 The Emergence of Modern American Literature, 1900–1945

In the arts, this crisis of confidence and gradual recovery was reflected in many forms. There was, for instance, a renewed sense of the social responsibility of the artist: a sense that tempted both modernists and traditionalists along many different, cunning corridors of history and inspired a renewed interest in the possibilities of literary realism and naturalism. Ezra Pound, for instance, was to see a solution to contemporary problems in the politicization of poetry and the aestheticizing of politics and, eventually, in commitment to fascism. Others, like William Carlos Williams, tried to take the measure of the times in hard, spare distillations of the urban scene. While many of the traditionalists, notably those in the South, became even more intent on celebrating the values of an earlier, inherited American culture

– a system at once prior to and superior to the contemporary confusions of capitalism – as a means of staving off what they saw as the otherwise inevitable triumph of socialist revolution. There were ‘proletarian novels’ – books, that is, written by working-class people – such as The Disinherited (1933) by Jack Conroy (1899–1980). There were novels of protest like The Land of Plenty (1934) by Robert Cantwell (1908–78), The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck, or three novels dealing with a strike that took place in the textile mills of North Carolina: To Make My Bread (1932) by Grace Lumpkin (1893–1980), Call Home the Heart (1932) by Fielding Burke (Olive Tilford Dargan) (1869–1968) and Beyond Desire (1932) by Sherwood Anderson. There was fiction exploring the plight of dispossessed urban minorities, such as Call It Sleep (1934) by Henry Roth (1906–2000) or Native Son (1940) by Richard Wright. Writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway tried to secrete an awareness of contemporary problems into their narratives: Fitzgerald did so in Tender is the Night (1934) and Faulkner and Hemingway in, respectively, The Wild Palms (1939) and To Have and Have Not (1937). Others turned directly to the techniques of journalism or documentary to make their point: as, say, James Agee (1909–55) did in his account of three poor Southern tenant-farming families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). A sense of apocalypse or annunciation, which had always come relatively easily to American writers, now became even more pronounced. Apocalypse, for example, feelings of nightmare and catastrophe, are all clearly there in books like The Day of the Locust (1939) by Nathanael West, while Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930) is, to some extent, one long annunciatory act.

There is no simple way of summing up the artistic response to crisis: crisis in general, that is, or the specific crisis encountered by the American people between the two World Wars. It certainly encouraged a different cultural milieu. Writers on the right, like Allen Tate, wrote enthusiastically of the imminent ‘destruction of the middle class-capitalist hegemony, and the restoration . . . of traditional society’. Writers on the left, like Jack Conroy, wrote of the general need for socialism and a classless society, and the need for the contemporary writer, in particular, to pursue ‘social understanding, which is the life of revolutionary prose’. Communist Party intellectuals, in turn, like Michael Gold, developed theories of ‘proletarian realism’ based on Marxist theories, or what they termed ‘the higher sphere of dialectical development of character’. Accompanying such enthusiasm, there was fear of what