Maine Humanities Council | Let’s Talk About It

Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America, by Frederick Lewis Allen

The Disinherited, by Jack Conroy

Tender is the Night, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

Uncle Tom’s Children, by Richard Wright

“Market plunges out of control.” Headlines like this one have become familiar to Americans of all ages as of October 1987. No one, including those many citizens whose interest in the stock market is entirely minimal, has been able to ignore the fluctuations of the notorious Dow-Jones average of 30 stocks or the total number of shares traded daily on the New York Stock Exchange. We wonder over a 500-point plunge in a single day when 600 million shares changed hands. Not even the most prideful economist dares to predict with scientific precision the consequences of having learned from history, will not suffer another decade of economic privation in the Nineties as it did in the Thirties. Nevertheless, millions felt a chill of fear when the market plunged in 1987.

Older Americans, particularly those in their seventies and eighties, are especially chary of news of a stock market crash. These men and women remember another, in 1929, when in two days the Dow-Jones industrials lost a quarter of their market value and a then—astronomical 16 million shares were traded. That cataclysm on Wall Street was the prelude to one of the worst crises ever to strike the U. S. economy, the harbinger of a decade known to almost every American over the age of 40 as “The Great Depression.”

Fear, based on the insecurities and despair of an earlier era, leads a certain extra impetus to an examination of the Depression Decade in America. Yet many Americans will recount other emotions evoked by that period—a sense of commitment, a pride in place, and a tradition of sharing. For every destitute man shivering in a packing-box “Hooverville” in the frigid winter of 1935, there is a counterbalancing story about a college faculty voting itself a cut in salary so that two new instructors can be kept on. Violence against newly organized autoworkers may have been dreadful for Detroiters in the Thirties, but the New Deal produced the minimum wage ($ 0.25 an hour in 1938), a maximum workweek (44 hours), and prohibitions against child labor.

In fact, like all other complex national phenomena, the Great Depression cannot easily be characterized or explained. Rural, often religiously conservative, America saw the Depression as a national punishment for the excessive licentiousness and frivolity of the Roaring Twenties. The Leftist ideologue rejected the fundamental tenets of American political and economic traditions in favor of Marxist solutions to hopeless economic disintegration. Herbert Hoover symbolized caution and orthodoxy, but Franklin Roosevelt suggested innovation and experiment. That “something had to be done” was demonstrated by the rise of fascism in depression-torn Europe, but the United States preferred reform to radical solutions.

For all that, 15 million unemployed Americans in 1932 had scant perspective about the recovery that would eventually make their nation the world’s wealthiest and most powerful. President Roosevelt’s famous phrase—“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”—was hollow rhetoric to the South Dakota farmer whose mortgage had just been foreclosed. Decades later, we may be too smug because we know the Thirties ended happily. Yet one way we can recapture the spirit of the Great Depression is through the history and fiction of the era.

The story of the Great Depression, on the other hand, extends far beyond the perspective of any novelist, no matter how great he or she is. Novels have a timeless aesthetic and psychological resonance in addition to their significance as historical documents.

The novels in this series are extraordinarily well-placed windows from which to observe and understand the impact of the Depression on so many Americans. Novels dramatize the widely diverse ways that people coped with disaster; they can be viewed as fictional therapies for a virulent economic sickness. Some of our writers are made hopeful by a vision of social solidarity among Americans of traditionally antagonistic race and class. Others see tragedy in the symbolic exhaustion of heroism in figures who in any earlier period would have embodied an inexhaustible American optimism. Whatever the theme and tone of these novels written in the Thirties, they transport their readers into an age of anxiety, struggle, defeat, and despair; yet through it all, the fictional—and the actual—Americans managed to endure. As Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara so famously put it: “After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Fear and Hope: Writing from the Great Depression of the 1930s

Books from the Series

Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America by Frederick Lewis Allen

Although events of the Thirties like the stock market crash and the New Deal would seem to be too well known to need systematic recapitulation, we all can use some reminders of the historical period that we call the Great Depression. Probably no one has ever produced a more entertaining and interesting introduction to the Depression than Frederick Lewis Allen, for thirty years an editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Allen’s Since Yesterday: The Nineteen-Thirties in America is not the “New Social History” beloved of many academic historians. Rather, his is an extremely wide-ranging account of the Depression Decade, supplementing the usual reports on economics and politics with the stuff of everyday life—education, literature, the arts, religion, urban development, reform movements, fashions, entertainment, and fads.

Part of the freshness of Allen’s anecdotal history of the Depression owes to the speed with which he turned out the book. He wrote and published Since Yesterday in 1940, less than a year after the period encompassed by the book ended. Allen was probably a better journalist than professional historian—especially in the formal, analytic sense—but Since Yesterday is a triumph of amusing accumulation. Allen wants his regards to America together like a Depression-age craze, the jigsaw puzzle. Thus we read of “bank night” at the movies and Agriculture Secretary Harold Ickes, the Hindenburg and jitterbugging, Lou Gehrig and the sitdown strike, the New England hurricane of 1938 and Grant Wood. At times, younger readers may find the book’s pace a little too rapid, especially those who can feel no pang of nostalgia for momentary glimpses of Amos ‘n’ Andy or the Bonus Army.

But, for the older reader, Allen’s book is a treasure trove of memory. Although he is not prepared, as later historians like Warren Susman have been, to evolve a thesis which accounts for such seemingly disconnected cultural data as radio soap operas and Reinhold Neibuhr, Allen’s method and inclusivity have been imitated countless times in the years since his book was published; we read Allen-like social history in almost uncounted magazines, textbooks, and monographs today.

Allen gets it all in—labor troubles and the Dust Bowl and Joe Louis and Lost Horizon and “The March of Time.” Since Yesterday is an extremely fine product of the craft of popular history, and the voice of Frederick Lewis Allen narrating his chronicle is that of a humane and decent liberal who just happens to have a sense of humor.

Allen’s other books—Only Yesterday (the 1920s treated similarly) and The Big Change (the first 50 years of this century)—are also excellent introductions to their eras. He died in 1954, much honored for his work, which sold in large numbers from the date of publication. Since Yesterday seemed to readers then and now to be a fine starting place.

The Disinherited by Jack Conroy

One of the most hotly debated issues in literary circles in the Great Depression was the definition of the “proletarian novel.” The miserable economic plight of millions of working men and women, their helplessness and guilt, their rage and frustration in the Thirties seemed desperately to demand a fiction that would “tell the truth” about the contemporary tragedy that was the Depression. Only a person who had experienced privation and homelessness, despair, and unemployment first hand could write such a novel. Thus the age cried out for a worker’s voice to tell a worker’s story to an audience of workers. The proletarian novel was intended to play a role in the coming of the revolution—the “inevitable” Marxist revolution.

Jack Conroy’s background does much to explain his commitment to the proletarian novel. One of seven children of a Missouri coalminer, Conroy saw his father and two of his brothers die in the mines. He had a scanty formal education, but he was encouraged by his mother to fulfill his childhood dream of writing. His poverty and rootlessness led him inevitably to doubt the official optimism required of capitalism’s proponents. Conroy found ready acceptance of journals like The New Masses. When The Disinherited appeared in 1933, the Left seemed to have an eloquent new spokesman in Comrade Jack, an authentic proletarian novelist. Conroy, however, was not willing to limit himself to Communist propaganda. “Just to look at Das Kapital on the shelf,” he later wrote, “gave me a headache.” He is clearly sympathetic to the plight of America’s underpaid, unorganized, and exploited workers, but he also thought himself to be a fearlessly honest recorder of experience. “I, for one, considered myself a witness to the times rather than a novelist. Mine was an effort to obey Whitman’s injunction to ‘vivify the contemporary fact.’”

Conroy is probably a better observer than novelist. Daniel Aaron, a literary historian of writing by the Left in the 1930s, points out that The Disinherited is not a “great” novel, suffering as it does from episodic choppiness, flat characterizations, and pat conclusions. But Conroy was a naturally talented “beholder.” His narrator Larry sees clearly, speaks eloquently but simply, and feels authentically. The novel is scorchingly honest, but never excessively ideological, never “propaganda.” Larry’s picaresque journey to understanding is always realistic, and critics have consistently praised The Disinherited for “telling it like it is” in the mines, the factories, the barrooms, and the hobo jungles of Depression America. In 1933-34, the novel enjoyed a modest success for a book of its sort, selling 2700 copies.

Jack Conroy wrote two other novels, long since forgotten, and for years edited The Anvil, a Left-leaning magazine. He died in 1980, the grand old man of proletarian fiction at 81.

Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Most readers, in the 1930s and today, know Scott Fitzgerald as the chronicler of the Jazz Age, the poet of the opulent, the Golden Boy of the Twenties. Justly celebrated by literary critics for his insights into the hollowness of American popular culture in the 1920s, Fitzgerald nonetheless never was able to escape the public’s perception of him as the envious boy barred from the Saturday night dance at the country club.

For many Americans, the Depression had destroyed all the glamour and pathos in Fitzgerald’s flappers of the Twenties, and all the panache in his conventionally romantic heroes of that era. He became a kind of anachronism in the Hangover Years of the Depression, so much so that, introduced to a Hollywood starlet in 1937, Fitzgerald nearly cracked when she claimed that he was an imposter: the real Scott Fitzgerald had to be dead.

But Fitzgerald was far from dead. He was writing albeit sporadically, all the time. And the sharpness of his perceptions of the triviality and absurdity of life among expatriated Americans on the Riviera had been honed by his own personal struggles with hard times and misfortune. His wife Zelda, the Golden Girl, had been diagnosed as schizoid and confined to an asylum. His literary inventiveness had flagged, his personal health was increasingly precarious, and he was drinking too much. He had produced no novel since The Great Gatsby in 1925 – almost a decade.

It should be no surprise, then, that the public was not entirely supportive when Tender is the Night appeared in 1934. Just as the book’s hero, the psychiatrist Dick Diver, is a far cry from the coalmining Larry of The Disinherited, so the Divers’ villa on the Riviera contrasts with Larry’s Monkey Nest Camp. Notwithstanding, Tender is the Night is a Depression novel, as sharply critical of its times as Conroy’s proletarian fiction. At the center of Fitzgerald’s book is the pitifully psychotic Nicole Warren, abused to madness by her wealthy father. So taken is Dr. Diver by the pathos and need of this wretched but beautiful girl that he commits the unpardonable sin against medical professionalism: he marries his patient. Once allied to the super-rich Warren family, Diver can only serve and serve and serve, until his patient-wife is “cured” and he is himself emotionally bankrupt. Then Dick is laid off, just like any marginally successful worker in the American capitalist system.

Readers, caught up in the glamorous glow of the novel’s Riviera, and perhaps distracted by film stars, alcoholic composers, duels, soldiers of fortune, aquaplanes, and trips to Rome, may miss Fitzgerald’s disgust at the corruptive power of the Warrens. In addition, the book’s structure recounts the plot in a non-chronological and sometimes confusing way. However, the public bought 12,500 copies of Tender in its first year, a sale disappointing to Fitzgerald who expected a best seller, but not bad for a serious work of fiction in 1934. Still, Scott Fitzgerald, who died in 1940 in Hollywood, wrote a Depression novel that resonates a powerfully as any other in the decade. Tender is the Night tells it “like it is” too.

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Few Americans have failed to be touched in some way by Margaret Mitchell’s enormously popular novel, Gone With the Wind. Even those who lack the stamina to read the 1000-page book have sat spellbound in a darkened movie theatre as Atlanta burns and Scarlett waltzes. Because Mitchell’s evocation of the plantation-aristocracy South in the years of the Civil War is so memorable, most readers fail to associate the book with the Great Depression. It is, however, a kind of Depression epic, connected in special and subtle ways with the times in which it was written.

Literary historians have pointed out that one phenomenon of the 1930s was the huge popularity of the historical novel, particularly those recounting in minutely accurate (and often falsely vivid) detail an important period in America’s past. Thus Kenneth Roberts’ Arundel (1930) on Arnold’s march to Quebec and Northwest Passage (1937) on Rogers’ Rangers vs. the Indians. Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen evoked the Napoleonic era and led all best sellers in 1934-35. All of these historical romances were lengthy, all inclined to at least a soupcon of sexual license, and all featured plucky heroes struggling against seemingly overwhelming odds. Historians’ conclusions about this are probably too obvious. Long historical romances kept the Depression readers satisfied for days, and the optimistic themes of the books inspirited their readers with a tinge of hope. Americans had had it tough in the past, but they had managed to come through again and again. Frederick Lewis Allen accuses readers of these historical romances of “escaping into history,” but that accusation is rather too simple.

What really informs Depression-era interest in novels like Gone With the Wind is their celebration of good, old-fashioned American individualism. Mitchell and her cohort are touting ambition, hard work, single-mindedness, determination, and “guts.” Scarlett may be childish and egocentric, but when misfortune strikes, she’s competent to the task. Scarlett will save Tara. She not only endures, she triumphs.

And her pluckiness occurs in an idyllic agrarian community, replete with loyal darkies and dashing freebooters. Rhett Butler is Scarlett’s individualistic counterpart, similarly undaunted by war or the opposite sex. These stereotypes may be part of an escapist wish-dream, but that does not mean the book is wholly unrealistic or untrue. Scarlett and Rhett and Tara are myth figures, “truer than true,” goals for those readers who had to accept Mitchell’s optimism as a personal response to adversity. Gone With the Wind sold a million and a half copies in its first 12 months, the fastest selling novel in history. It also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Margaret Mitchell never wrote another book. She died in 1949, reportedly still answering her fan mail. Her famous novel continues, however, to console legions of Americans. At last count, an estimated ten million copies were in print.

Uncle Tom’s Children by Richard Wright

Historian Gerald Nash estimates that in 1932 some 15 million out of a total work force of 45 million were unemployed. Horrifying as that statistic was for white Americans, unemployment among black Americans was estimated to be almost twice as high. Last hired, first fired, seared by rural poverty, ejected from the land by the owners of their tenant farms, blacks fled north in large numbers, only to find that racial discrimination knows no regional boundaries.

One of those who left the South was Richard Wright, an archetypal “black boy” who left Memphis at the age of 19 for Chicago and freedom. Wright had suffered repeated humiliations in menial jobs in the South, which he described movingly in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” in Uncle Tom’s Children and more thoroughly in his 1945 autobiography Black Boy.

The stories that Wright wrote in his Chicago days were bitter tales of violence and intimidation in a racist South. Collected, the stories won the Story prize for the best work submitted by anyone in the Federal Writers’ Project. Wright’s stories were eventually published commercially by Harper & Bros. in 1940.

Uncle Tom’s Children moves from the futile to the semi-didactic in theme, stressing motifs of captivity and escape. Readers of fiction reflecting the Great Depression—Conroy’s especially—will recognize the importance of escape to the protagonists, but Wright’s black heroes suffer not only economic privation but also pervasive and violent racism. Some do not succeed in fleeing (Mann in “Down by the Riverside” forgoes escape to rescue a white family in a flood); others do flee (Big Boy in “Big Boy Leaves Home” catches a truck for Chicago where another kind of lynch mob awaits him). One black man futilely stands and fights (Silas in “Long Black Song” cannot win alone).

Only in Wright’s last two stories—“Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star”—do we detect clear ideological maneuvering. The black heroes here must forego racial solidarity in favor of class-consciousness. Like Conroy’s Larry, but much more painfully, protagonists like Reverend Taylor (who “sews” together white and black workers in a protest march) and An Sue (who kills for son and party) must learn how to fight class exploitation.

Richard Wright left the Communist Party, which in the 1940s, writing an affecting account of is disillusionment in The God that Failed (1950). He died in exile in France in 1960, regarded by critics as the most important black novelist of his generation.

Fear and Hope: Writing from the Great Depression of the 1930s

A Let’s Talk About It Book Discussion Series

Fear and Hope: Writing from the Great Depression of the 1930s

Books from the Series

Fear and Hope: Writing from the Great Depression of the 1930s

Further Reading