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THE RED DECADE: SOLIDARITY AND INDIVIDUALISM IN THE 1930s

From Individual to Community

The 1930s were a decade of community and class consciousness unprecedented in American history. A 1937 poll revealed that the majority of impoverished Americans did not "think that today any young man with thrift, ability, and ambition has the opportunity to rise in the world, own his own home, and earn $5,000 a year." The traditional radical individualism of most Americans was abandoned, and people began to conceive of themselves as parts of communities and distinct interest groups. This consciousness was an important component of many of the important political events of the decade, responsible for the repeal of Prohibition, the success of labor organizations and strikes, the passage of the Social Security Act, and the creation of the federal bureaucracy. Most important, however, the collective consciousness Americans developed in the 1930s was instrumental in providing the social cohesion necessary to carry the United States through World War II. In the 1930s Americans began to conceive of themselves as a "people"; in the 1940s Americans realized themselves as a nation.

Progressives

The new community consciousness of Americans had several sources. One was simply the wide-spread misery of the Great Depression, Americans were by necessity forced to rely on one another, and that sense of mutual dependence strengthened families, communities, and labor unions. The influence of progressive intellectuals and social reformers such as Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, John Dewey, and Louis Brandeis was also important. At the turn of the century such Americans had challenged the concept of individualism by noting that industrial societies were defined more by productive interdependence than rugged by individualism. By the 1930s only the third of Americans living on farms could make a case for their absolute self-reliance. Everyone else was dependent on others for food, clothing, work, and amusement. Even farmers depended on the labor of urban workers to produce their farm implements and clothes. Social reformers such as Addams and Kelly had long argued that industrial society was as dependent upon its component parts as a family was upon its independent members; expanding on the analogy, they crusaded for a more humane, loving, familylike society, and pushed legislation such as the Social Security Act. Many such progressives became New Dealers, and the New Deal itself did much to develop class and community consciousness, through artistic products such as plays and books commissioned by the Works Progress Administration.

Conservatives

The New Dealers were often opposed by conservatives and businessmen who insisted that individual initiative was the key to American success. Although conservatives such as Hoover and advertiser Albert Lasker recognized that modern society was an interdependent entity, as the Depression proceeded their rhetoric became stridently individualistic. Their invective only served to advance the communal consciousness of the average American, as conservatives often tied their individualism to the economic and political practices of the 1920s, which, after congressional investigations and journalistic exposes, many among the public blamed for the Depression. Individualistic attitudes were also undermined by the sheer force of the Depression. Hardworking farmers, for example, each year witnessed diminished returns from their labor. While millions of Americans were burdened by guilt and shame for their destitute condition, especially early in the 1930s, many finally accepted the explanation of leading economists and New Dealers that their poverty was due to impersonal forces and poor policies, which affected each of them as members of a whole.

Socialists and Communists

Communal consciousness was also stimulated by the activities of socialists and communists throughout the 1930s. Although probably fewer than 100,000 Americans were members of socialist or communist parties in the 1930s, enough prominent intellectuals joined or gave their support to such parties, and enough strikes and demonstrations were led by such groups, to earn the 1930s the title of "the red decade" from some historians. For both socialist and communist groups the goal was not communal consciousness, but class consciousness—a recognition by the poor and the workers in America of their common plight and of their common exploitation by the rich. Socialist and communist political parties often required extraordinary dedication from their members to the cause—in the case of the Communist Party, the near-complete subordination of their individual lives to collective action and party leadership. Socialists and communists sponsored colleges, newspapers, journals of opinion, plays, art exhibits, folk-music concerts, parades, and summer camps to promote class consciousness. Socialists and communists led various labor and farm unions and sought to build class solidarity among these members.

The Popular Front

Although many socialists and communists initally opposed the New Deal, after 1936 Communists pursued the political strategy of the "popular front" and supported the New Deal, liberal reformers, and labor unions dominated by noncommunists. Earlier, Communists and many leftist intellectuals had argued that the New Deal and liberalism would lead to fascism, as they believed had occurred with powerful national governments in Italy and Germany. Leftist intellectuals sympathetic to communism, such as Lewis Mumford, George Soule, and John Burnham, looked at early New Deal programs as the last gasp of liberal reform. Burnham thought the New Deal was moving dangerously close to a dictatorship and that it could not remain neutral much longer in the struggle between fascist reaction and socialist revolution. Burnham believed Roosevelt would come down on the side of fascism. Mumford, in a typical indictment, saw the New Deal as nothing but "aimless experience, sporadic patchwork … an uncritical drift along the lines of least resistance, namely the restoration of capitalism." Such critics often advocated violent revolution to overthrow capitalism and were more critical of liberals—whom they believed retarded the development of class consciousness—than they were of conservatives and reactionaries. In Europe, however, such an outlook had helped fascist political parties such as the Nazis to political victory by dividing the Left and the center. The popular-front strategy was designed to prevent this by making common cause with liberals. Thus, from New Dealers, progressives, socialists, and communists, the public at the end of the 1930s were treated to newpapers, magazines, plays, and films stressing the importance of community and union.

Nationalism and War

Nationalism also played a role in forming communal consciousness. The fascist dictatorships of Europe, and the Soviet Union, had mounted massive propaganda campaigns to help their citizens identify themselves as part of a group; so did American intellectuals. Defining what was distinctly "American" was an intellectual and artistic preoccupation throughout the decade. Aaron Copland sought to define a distinctive brand of classical American music; Martha Graham established the uniqueness of American dance; Thomas Hart Benton and Stuart Davis sought to give the American spirit expression in art; writers struggled to produce the "great American novel." As in Europe, much of the artistic effort was an attempt to define what was unique to "the people," a catchall term that signified a distinct communal identity. Who "the people" were was never quite established; but by the time of Pearl Harbor the concept served to focus public attention on what many saw as America's unique mission in world history: to win the war and establish order in the postwar world. Beyond that, the communal consciousness of the 1930s served to advance distinct group identities: union member; Chicagoan; Democrat; African American; Italian American; southerner—identities that would become more sharply and precisely defined in the postwar era.