Thoughts on the Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s has passed into myth as essentially American, not global. The Wall Street crash ended the Good Times and led, apparently inevitably, to the crisis of Capitalism. Europe suffered from the effects, but had the glum fun of watching the dollar lose its almightiness. America’s internal response was dramatic and, literally, moving: the migration of John Steinbeck’s Joad family of ‘Okies’, from the dust bowl towards the golden mirage of California, exemplified a general restlessness.

At much the same time, Richard Wright’s Native Son spoke up, for the first time, for the mute, oppressed southern Blacks who would find no promised land in their northward drift to Chicago; Michael Gold’s 1930 novel, Jews Without Money, gave an angry voice to the tenement dwellers of New York’s Lower East Side. Caroline Bird is quoted, from her 1966 The Invisible Scar, saying: ‘The poor had been poor all along. It was just that nobody looked at them.’ In the 1930s, they also began to look at themselves.

The vision of the Depression as an exemplary disaster helps to explain why communism — which had recruited inevitability to its prospectus — enrolled both Wright and Gold. Marxist futurology became the faith to which 1930s writers — the principal subject of Morris Dickstein’s long book — were disposed to turn. Everyone politically aware was, it seemed, ‘Waiting For Lefty’. After the first performance of Clifford Odets’ 1935 agitprop play, the audience became one with the cast and called ‘Strike!’ The fantasy of theatre as super-politics continues to give actors and directors delusions of significance.

For the uncommitted, Dancing in the Dark, a Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz number and Bing Crosby’s greatest early hit, supplied the key-note image of the 1930s as a time of despair and of its routine Hollywood alleviant, romance.