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INTRODUCTION

On the Road

In the summer of 1935 a gangling, fourteen-year-old Arkansas farm boy named Lee Webster hiked twenty miles from his home in Landis to the nearest paved highway, caught a ride, and went looking for work. Over the next six years Webster—this writer's grandfather—threshed wheat in Kansas; worked in a carnival in Nebraska; harvested corn in Minnesota; gambled in Kansas City; trucked melons in Missouri, stave bolts in Illinois, and lettuce in Colorado; surveyed the Wisconsin woods with the Civilian Conservation Corps; married; divorced; joined the U.S. Army Air Corps; and arrived in Hawaii just in time for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. His restlessness and wandering were typical: millions of Americans, both men and women, hopped freight trains and hitched rides just about anywhere trying to make ends meet during the Depression. No single locale defined America in the 1930s the way Chicago did in the 1920s or New York did in the 1940s. America was on the road in the 1930s. People clogged the highways looking for work, met strangers on back stoops and shared food, slept in jails overnight to keep from freezing. Jazz bands crisscrossed the nation and egged on jitterbuggers in dance halls. Aviators chased each other across the continent, setting and breaking records with their new and improved flying machines. Families took new parkways to new national parks, and streamlined Zephyr trains sped businessmen across the prairies. Writers such as John Steinbeck, Jack Conroy, and Nelson Algren and folksingers such as Woody Guthrie hit the pavement and rails by the dozens, writing stories, essays, songs, exposés, and travelogues of Depression-era America. Their accounts provide a rich portrait of a nation on the road and in search of itself. America in the 1930s had lost direction, and it was filled with restless, ceaseless, and unfocused energy.

Getting By

It was an energy born, for the most part, of desperation. Hard times, drifting—even hunger—were nothing new in American life. What made the Great Depression unusual was the scale of suffering and the almost apocalyptic sense that nothing would make it go away. The suicide rate rose 30 percent between 1928 and 1930. In 1930 a Pennsylvania man caught stealing a loaf of bread for his four hungry children was so overcome with shame that he returned home and hanged himself in his cellar. For the writers or a young man like Lee Webster, the rootless character of the decade spelled adventure; for most families, hard times meant misery and tough choices. Savings ran out; pensions disappeared; banks closed; charity funds were exhausted. Hungry children were sent to live with wealthier relatives. Mothers chose between buying bread or buying coal. Family farms were sold, and cars were junked for scrap. Bitter men wallpapered the walls of their houses with worthless stock certificates. Everyone stretched what they had to get by. Dandelions and catsup made passable soups. Darning clothes when one could find thread, fixing radios with scrap metal, and plugging cracks in walls with old newspaper became necessities for millions. The elderly suffered terribly. Too old to work, many lost their life savings to bank closures. Lacking shoes and clothes, children stayed home from school, ashamed of their poverty. In many places it did not matter: short of operating funds, schools closed by the thousands. Extreme actions were not unusual. In Washington State homeless men set forest fires so they would be hired to put them out. People ate grass and weeds in Arkansas and huddled together in cars to keep warm in North Dakota. Grocers went broke extending lines of credit to their neighbors. Teachers were paid in scrip that often could not be redeemed. Many teachers worked for room and board, as did millions of others desperate for work of any kind. Farmers saw their lands dry up and blow away. The dust storms were so severe that western Kansas and eastern Colorado were virtually depopulated. In the South share-croppers and tenants were thrown off their lands by the thousands; objections to the evictions were dealt with by Klansmen and lynching. Desperation fueled intolerance; intolerance fueled desperation. The expert advice for resolving the Depression, from President Herbert Hoover's millionaire secretary of the treasury Andrew Mellon, was brutal: "Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate."

Two Nations

Mellon's advice sat poorly with the nearly thirteen million unemployed Americans, as well as with the millions working reduced hours for lower wages and the millions whose jobs were threatened. The Depression opened a class division in American life that would not be healed until after World War II. Despite hyperbolic reports about the impact of the Depresion on the rich, America in the Depression was, as John Dos Passos noted in The Big Money (1936), two nations: a rich America and a poor America. The Depression wiped out the many in between. There were also an urban America and a rural America; an Anglo-Saxon America and an ethnic America; a wet America and a dry America. The country was divided into opposites as at no time since the Civil War, and the sense of anger and danger was akin to that of Abraham Lincoln's day. The deeper the Depression sank, the tighter the divisions became. "Brother Can You Spare a Dime" gave way to "Which Side Are You On?" as the representative song of the decade. At middecade the social divisions in the country overlay each other and the distinctions became acute. In the presidential election of 1936, it was rich, WASP, dry America versus poor, ethnic, wet America—the Liberty League versus the New Deal. The Liberty League lost, resoundingly. Yet it lost in an election, and that was significant. Despite the often strident rhetoric of the decade, no Bolshevik coup, no Nazi takeover, occurred in America. As adrift as America seemed during the Depression, it was guided by a surer sense of destiny than that which governed Europe.

New Deal Democracy

Much of the credit for stability in the United States belonged to the New Deal. Despite President Franklin D. Roosevelt's penchant for ill-considered experiment, for deployment of contradictory programs, for political vacillation, the New Deal he built consistently advanced democracy and the reform of capitalism. It also created the largest federal government ever; the postwar Democratic Party coalition of finance capital, big labor, African Americans, Southerners, and liberals; and the beginnings of a Supreme Court that would broadly extend civil liberties after World War II. Many found the creation of a large federal bureaucracy fascistic and the New Deal welfare programs communistic, but Roosevelt and his associates hewed closely to a democratic center. There was no confiscation of private property, no dissolution of Congress. Even the most reckless New Deal measure, the 1937 attempt to pack the Supreme Court, was within the realm of constitutional interpretation. In retrospect Roosevelt's support for civil rights for African Americans seems half-hearted—there was no antilynching law passed during the decade, despite sensational crimes such as the lynching of Claude Neal in 1934—but it reflected Roosevelt's understanding of his own political and constitutional limitations. Often Roosevelt worked within those limitations in surprisingly effective ways, a testament to his ability as a leader. He appointed prominent blacks to positions in the New Deal and nominated the first African American federal judge, William Hastie. Another example of Roosevelt's ability to pursue his objectives within constitutional limitations was in education. As the Depression struck American schools, reformers demanded federal financing of education, a radical break with the tradition of local control of schools. The New Dealers refused to take this step, but by threatening to withhold funding for more politically viable projects such as roads and dams, the New Dealers forced states to systematize their school-financing programs. New Dealers also provided education for children through agencies such as the National Youth Administration and the Civilian Conservation Corps. In this often indirect manner, the New Deal constructed a large federal government that responded to the needs of the common man in ways in which later federal bureaucracies failed. The New Deal succeeded in expanding the power of the federal government even as it kept strictly to government of, by, and for the people.

New Deal Capitalism

The New Deal also forced American capitalism to modernize and to act in a more socially responsible fashion. Government regulation imposed order, discipline, and honesty on chaotic markets—an order for which many businessmen clamored. It was Gerald Swope of General Electric who proposed the industrial cartels that would become part of the National Industrial Recovery Act; oilmen themselves drafted the Connelly Hot Oil Act; securities experts and investors clamored for the Securities and Exchange Commission; bankers suggested federal insurance as a way of reassuring depositors. Those who view the history of the 1930s as a contest between business and government—who view the New Deal as antibusiness—profoundly misunderstand the history of American industry during the decade. The New Deal was part of an evolution in American capitalism, the natural expression of a shift from industrial manufacturing to consumer production. The New Deal's support for big labor, Social Security, public-works programs, progressive taxation, and other measures to redistribute wealth lay the foundation for the consumer economy of the postwar era by raising wages and improving working conditions. Granted, much of the New Deal's success was due to good fortune. New Deal economists such as Raymond Morley or Rexford Tugwell had no more sophisticated grasp of the causes of the Depression than Hoover or Mellon. Countercyclical spending and Keynesian economics were doctrines they stumbled on rather than developed. The prosperity of the postwar era owed as much to the preeminent position of the United States in global trade as it did to New Deal planning. Yet it was important that the New Deal represented the interests of a growing consumer sector in American business and that it worked toward a solution to the Depression. The many critics of the New Deal never understood that it was popular because it tried to solve the Depression. That energy and activism, coupled with the ebullient confidence Roosevelt exuded throughout his life, stood in marked contrast to the standpatters in the Hoover administration and the Liberty League. It also exhibited a realism Hoover and his associates could never accept. Throughout the 1930s they called for a return to the business ethics and economic principles of the Roaring Twenties, never quite grasping that those ethics and principles had caused the Depression in the first place. There was no going back. America in the 1930s was entering a new age.

Decline of WASP culture

Part of the success of the New Deal in politics and economics came from its embrace of the cultural transformation of the 1930s. American culture was becoming more plural, more populist, more modern. The white, Anglo-Saxon, 100 percent Americanism of the 1920s changed. American society became more inclusive, in part because the Nazis became so obsessively exclusive, in part because the WASPs of the 1920s discredited themselves, and in part because ethnic Americans manned the New Deal and the new consumer and communications industries ushering in the new age. America before the Depression had been culturally monochromatic, so given to notions of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority that it disenfranchised African Americans and created the eugenics movement. Nativist Protestant groups succeeding in winning the prohibition of the sale and distribution of alcohol, fundamentally an antiimmigrant measure stripping the urban poor of beer gardens and saloons that had been at the center of their social life. Evangelists such as Billy Sunday, Bishop James Cannon, and Aimee Semple McPherson were national celebrities. But times were changing. Anthropologists such as Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict undermined the quasiscientific basis of white racism and the eugenics movement, and the Nazi embrace of racism and eugenics repelled many. WASP paragons of respectability were the subjects of scandals in the 1930s. Congressional investigations disclosed unethical and illegal business dealings by big businessmen such as J. P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, Mellon, Richard Whitney, and Charles E. Mitchell. Bishop Cannon and McPherson displayed less-than-saintly moral behavior. Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh became known more for their intolerance than their achievements. The straight-laced moral code of WASP culture was so irredeemably tarnished that even Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken stopped mocking it during the 1930s. The repeal of Prohibition in 1933, the first repeal of a constitutional amendment in American history, represented the eclipse of the old Anglo-Saxon, nativist, puritanical, rural American culture. As surely as the old economic order had fallen, so had the old cultural order. And a culture liberated from Anthony Comstock, Bishop Cannon, Lothrop Stoddard, the Literary Digest, and William Jennings Bryan was a culture full of possibilities.

Rise of Ethnic America

In the 1930s ethnic Americans refused to take a subordinate role in culture and society any longer. The great waves of European migration had peaked at the turn of the century; by the 1930s the first generation of Americans born to these immigrants was reaching its maturity. For most of their lives they had been burdened with slights, discriminations, and outright prejudice against them and their family traditions. In the 1930s they asserted themselves. Ethnic Americans shut out of WASP-dominated businesses such as banking, automobile manufacturing, and railroading moved into retailing, radio, and motion pictures. Although the distinction between WASP, Republican industrialists and ethnic, Democratic businessmen was not absolute, the New Deal depended on the financial support of new, ethnic businessmen such as Joseph Kennedy, Jack Warner, and David Sarnoff. These men often backed New Deal policies that had the indirect effect of punishing their business antagonists. More important, their financial future depended on the success of the New Deal in building a consumer economy and on their ability to produce goods desired by millions of ethnic Americans. The popular culture of the decade—pulp fiction, comic books, radio comedy, soap operas, and to a great extent the Hollywood movie—owed much to immigrant, ethnic experience. African Americans and poor white farmers, equally marginalized and ignored by society and culture before the Depression, also asserted themselves, their condition analogous to that of the children of immigrants. They too made their contribution to the new culture, especially in the realms of music and sports. The new culture thus brought people heretofore beneath the bar of respectability to the fore. Symbols of the success of these Americans were easy to spot: James Cagney, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Eddie Cantor, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe DiMaggio, and the Marx Brothers. The success of this new culture, however, was only partial. All-American Shirley Temple was a bigger movie star during the decade than Al Jolson or Robeson. While Italian American boys in the Bronx might thrill to radio programs with scripts by Jewish writers or pulp fiction written by Irish authors, it was equally significant that the protagonists of those pieces were WASPs of the old school.

The New National Culture

The culture of the 1930s was nonetheless distinctive in its search for a more inclusive, plural definition of America. These searches were conducted in two ways: by exploring new mass-media formats such as radio and jazz and by broadening the content of high culture. Mass media and lowbrow culture appropriated the WASP standards of the 1920s and supplemented them, adding ethnic sidekicks to WASP heroes or fusing vaudevillian comedy routines to classical standards of music, as in Marx Brothers films. By the end of the decade high culture was working in the opposite direction, embracing the new media, creating ethnic protagonists, or fusing high and low culture into something distinctly American. James T. Farrell made the ethnic experience the center of his Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-1935), and John Dos Passos portrayed the new ethnic Americans as the heroes of his U.S.A. trilogy (1938), as well as integrating newspaper stories and popular music of the day into his text. Often this fusion of high and low culture was midwifed by New Deal—sponsored programs such as the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, and the Federal Writers' Project, which carried artists through the lean days of the Depression. The Federal Art Project created a distinctive style of public art, adorning public buildings around the country with bold, nationalist murals. Painters such as Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, Georgia O'Keeffe, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, and Charles Sheeler searched for American icons in the landscapes, the cities, and the factories, and put them on canvas. John Houseman, Burgess Meredith, and Orson Welles took their classical training from the private stage to the Federal Theatre Project; from there they took their sense of the dramatic to the people on radio and in movies. Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) was the natural outcome of this experience—a Faustian tale of wealth and betrayal set in contemporary America and executed in a popular medium. Similarly, filmmaker John Ford tried to give a classical, epic scope to the western, heretofore a pulp-fiction favorite. Choreographers Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey gave dance a populist, accessible gloss and explored the meaning of America in pieces such as American Holiday and American Document Classical composers such as Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, and George Gershwin fused jazz to classicism and also explored the meaning of America in pieces such as Billy the Kid (1938), The Cradle Will Rock (1937), and Porgy and Bess (1935). The Federal Music Project had a hit with Swing Mikado (1939), a Gilbert and Sullivan piece set to contemporary rhythms. A host of classically trained musicologists, including Alan Lomax and Howard Odum, combed the rural South searching for blues and country music to archive and record. Jazz music, the most popular form of music during the decade, effortlessly synthesized African American music and European instrumentalism. It perfectly embodied the distinctly American art form so many artists were working toward: reflective and energetic, complex but accessible, dynamic yet simple. No surprise that artist Stuart Davis would be inspired by jazz to create a series of abstract paintings probing the meaning of America. Jazz was characteristically and unmistakably American.

Solidarity

The new national culture made an important but almost intangible contribution to Americans' sense of themselves within the broader society. Certainly African Americans identified their struggles with the career of boxer Joe Louis; Jews saw their story in the success of Jolson or Cantor; the Irish and Italians recognized the similarities between their lives and those of the Dead-End kids in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938); and poor whites heard their plight in Jimmie Rodgers's lonesome songs. The culture, in other words, built something like class consciousness, contributing to a deep sense of community. During the 1930s individual Americans tended to see themselves as part of a group, and a sense of community and solidarity often determined individual behavior. This communal consciousness manifested itself in a variety of ways, especially in identification with sports heroes, movie stars, and musicians. In the early 1930s it was reflected in public support for the National Recovery Administration (NRA) and the NRA slogan "We Do Our Part." Suffering disproportionately from the Depression, African Americans dedicated their efforts to improving their communities, especially in northern cities such as New York, where Harlem residents mounted the "DON'T SHOP WHERE YOU CAN T WORK" campaign, or in Philadelphia, where African Americans succeeded in desegregating the city schools. Tribal authority and the right to own land were restored to Native Americans with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. Dedication to the group took exceptional form among left-wing political activists, especially the Communists, who sacrificed their own desires (and sometimes their own good sense) for the good of the greater cause. A sense of shared destiny, of common culture and values, held labor unions together through this difficult decade. Solidarity was the key to winning strikes. At every major labor protest of the decade—the Harlan County strike, the San Francisco general strike, the sit-down strikes of 1936 and 1937—strikers pooled money and resources, and families supported their men on the picket lines or locked into factories. Helped by New Deal policymakers, workers won unemployment insurance, pension plans, grievance committees, higher wages, the forty-hour workweek, overtime pay, and the abolition of child labor. Solidarity was far from universal, of course. The labor unions, after all, struggled bitterly against each other for membership. But the pluralism and inclusiveness of labor unions set an admirable example for the rest of the nation. Many unions integrated during the course of the decade, setting aside years of racism. Women rose to levels of authority in unions far more often than they did in business. Union members overcame linguistic differences and conflicts of custom to work together for the good of the group.

Progress

Even during the bleakest days of the Depression, Americans maintained a sense of possibility. The belief in the ultimate success of the American experiment—in inevitable, gradual progress toward elimination of disease, poverty, and ignorance—was so profoundly embraced throughout American history that the period before the 1920s was known for its "progressivism." During the 1920s Americans focused much of their progressive idealism on the pursuit of wealth. The Depression dealt progressivism a harsh blow, as many of the "progressive" improvements of earlier decades, such as expansion of education, improvement of nutrition, and construction of good housing, came under the budget cutter's ax. New Deal economists talked of planning the economy. Yet they believed that once certain sectors of the economy were planned and maintained, the economy would resume its upward path, and there were other reassuring signs of progress during the decade. Although most Americans still lived in fear of diseases such as polio, syphilis, and tuberculosis, medicine was improving. Scientists discovered sulfa drugs, the first of the formidable chemical weapons against infectious diseases. Neocaine and other new anesthetics, blood typing, and transfusions revolutionized surgery. Despite the Depression public health improved with the introduction of high-speed X-ray machines to diagnose tuberculosis. The use of contraception increased. Technological advances led to new, faster airplanes that surmounted old barriers of distance. There were extraordinary feats of engineering: the Boulder Dam, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Empire State Building. Astronomers probed the outer reaches of the galaxy. Physicists probed the inner mysteries of the atom. Biologists investigated the structure of the gene. The development of plastics, nylon, and other synthetic materials promised to revolutionize daily life. Radio linked the nation. Television was introduced. Americans' confidence in progress was apparent in the vogue of "streamline" design, a style derived from aerodynamics and aviation that imparted to such prosaic items as vacuum cleaners, toasters, and pencil sharpeners a sense of curved speed and shiny futuristic progress. A sense of progress was also evident in the World's Fairs of the decade: the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition of 1933-1934 and the New York World of Tomorrow Fair of 1939-1940. The New York fair was especially given to visions of a future of luxury, ease, and efficiency, where illness was unthinkable, amusement was televised, and work was performed by robots.

Restoration and War

The 1939 fair offered proof of a restoration of Americans' faith in progress and confidence in the future. By 1939, although many sectors of the economy remained in the doldrums, economic prosperity had begun to return; political democracy seemed healthy. Yet the status quo in 1939 was much changed from the status quo in 1929. Americans were more sensitive to the social injustices that they had once ignored. Politics was governed by a much greater sense of distinct interest groups and partisanship and by a greater sense of responsibility for the welfare of the nation. The authority of the federal government had vastly increased. Though nine million people remained unemployed, the economic theories of the New Deal had been refined and improved, and they governed the prosperity of the 1940s. In every area of American life, the theories, attitudes, coalitions, and movements formed in the 1930s were responsible for the commanding power and prosperity of the nation in the 1940s. The experiment of the New Deal was the key to the successful war economy. Roosevelt's political acumen made the United States an international political power vital to the victory of the Allies in World War II. The new national culture offered Americans a sense of solidarity crucial to war morale. Lee Webster's road led to Pearl Harbor, and after the war, to prosperity and upward mobility using the engineering skills taught to him by the U.S. Army Air Corps. By the end of the 1930s the wandering of the nation had fixed on a path that led to prosperity, the gradual expansion of civil liberties, and a commanding position in world affairs.