The People, No
Page 9
Whatever else you may think of labor unions, their advance represented a gigantic step forward for popular self-determination. The growth of the CIO opened a vast new territory—the industrial workplace—to democratic participation. Suddenly, millions of workers got a say on the conditions of their employment, a development that would in turn bring about enormous changes in this country, making possible the middle-class society of the post–World War II years.
Thus began a flowering of populist culture that we would recall as spectacular were it not so familiar. “During the period from 1935 until the end of World War II,” writes the cultural historian Warren Susman, “there was one phrase, one sentiment, one special call on the emotions that appeared everywhere in America’s popular language: the people.” 15 Entertainment as well as politics became saturated with reverence for “the common man,” for the “average American,” for the authentic democratic community.
In art and literature, thirties populism took the form of “social realism,” a genre populated with heroic workers, salt-of-the-earth farmers, and ostentatious multiculturalism. Experimental or abstract techniques were suddenly out of vogue, replaced by the famous “documentary impulse,” a determination to represent unflinchingly the actual lives of the stricken and the lowly. Always the new style incorporated attacks on elites and aristocracy and bankers and rich kids and highbrow dilettantes and pretense of every description.
The individual most responsible for the triumph of the documentary style was probably Roy Stryker of the government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA), who sent a platoon of famous photographers out to record the lives of impoverished farmers and thus “introduce America to Americans.” Stryker was the son of a Kansas Populist, and, according to a recent study of his work, “agrarian populism” was the “first basic assumption” of the distinctive FSA style. Other agencies pursued the same aesthetic goal from different directions. Federal workers transcribed folklore, interviewed surviving ex-slaves, and recorded the music of the common man. Federally employed artists painted murals illustrating local legends and the daily work of ordinary people on the walls of public buildings. Unknowns contributed to this work, and great artists did too—Thomas Hart Benton, for example, painted a mural that was actually titled A Social History of the State of Missouri in the capitol building in Jefferson City. 16
There was a mania for documentary books, photos of ordinary people in their homes and workplaces that were collected and narrated by some renowned prose stylist. James Agee wrote the most enduring of these, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , in cooperation with photographer Walker Evans, but there were many others. The novelist Erskine Caldwell and the photographer Margaret Bourke-White published You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, while Richard Wright, fresh from the success of his novel Native Son , published Twelve Million Black Voices in 1941, with depictions of African American life chosen from the populist photographic output of the FSA. Wright described the awful conditions of sharecropping in the South and squalid rentals in the ghettos of the North, but nevertheless ended his essay on a hopeful note of solidarity and even of patriotism. “We black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America,” he wrote. “What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is .”
Leaders of organized labor, meanwhile, embraced what used to be called “Americanism,” a flamboyant identification of their own quest for justice and equality with the national flag, with patriotic tradition, and with the country’s political heroes: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. As the historian Gary Gerstle has shown, Americanism helped workers’ organizations to reverse decades of propaganda casting their members as anarchists, aliens, foreigners, subversives, and so on. Now, and regardless of ethnic background, they were the people, demanding their rightful place under freedom’s sun. 17 Here is what this variety of populist rhetoric looked like, drawn in this case from a CIO pamphlet dated 1944 and titled This Is Your America :
If you are a worker, earning your living honestly—
If you are a farmer, a small business man, or a housewife—
If you are against people who think only of themselves and never of other people—
If you have faith in America as a good place to live in for the common people—
America belongs as much to you as to any other citizen. 18
Through all of the proclamations of the era ran the ubiquitous, inevitable incantation, “the people.” “Whatever was truly built the people built it,” wrote Archibald MacLeish in his somber 1939 poem, “America Was Promises.” Similarly, in the final seconds of the 1940 movie version of The Grapes of Wrath , Ma Joad says (as her luckless family heads off in their old truck for another low-wage agricultural job):
We keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.
And here are the words with which Franklin Roosevelt closed his successful 1940 campaign for a third presidential term:
Always the heart and the soul of our country will be the heart and soul of the common man—the men and women who never have ceased to believe in democracy, who never have ceased to love their families, their homes and their country. 19
The Common Man. Americanism. The People. Even the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a lavish corporate spectacle, was officially supposed to be “The People’s Fair.” What did this glut of rhetorical populism mean? The obvious goal of some who used these phrases was to depict their left-wing views as extensions of the country’s traditions of democracy and patriotism, rather than as subversive or alien, as they had always been in the past. For others, populism was a way of calling for social solidarity in the face of economic catastrophe and a world war against fascism. It provided reassurance, a reminder of the old Jeffersonian faith. It lent a sense of overwhelming righteousness to the new ideas of the era. 20
The literary critic Kenneth Burke, in a 1935 speech to a left-wing writers’ group, explained the decade’s populist turn in an unusually forthright way. Movements need myths and symbols in order to bring people together, Burke explained, and the highest symbol for those on the Left should be “the people” rather than the conventional one, “the worker.” Burke’s audience was largely made up of party-line Communists, and they did not appreciate his suggestion. But his reasoning rings true. “The people” was a “positive,” aspirational symbol rather than a reminder of oppression and hard times, Burke figured, and besides it was better attuned to American traditions.
Here is Burke’s key insight: “We convince a man by reason of the values which we and he hold in common .” The alternative, Burke pointed out, is to scold your audience, to assume “antagonistic modes of thought and expression” and to “condemn” the unenlightened. What we ought to be doing is not scolding but persuading, trying to “plead with the unconvinced.” 21
Kenneth Burke may not have grasped the power of his observation, but he had touched the very core of a basic political dilemma. In politics, we can choose to apply purity tests to the public, or we can work to spread knowledge. We can embrace the people or we can scold them for not getting it. It is a subject to which we shall return later.
* * *
ANOTHER CHARACTERISTIC DILEMMA of the 1930s was the problem of the demagogue. Modern-day anti-populists would no doubt dismiss the kind of rhetoric I have been quoting here as the talk of unscrupulous scoundrels. After all, according to their theories, almost anyone who speaks of “the people” in opposition to “the elite” is some kind of anti-pluralist Trumpian extremist.
Curiously enough, however, many of the writers and politicians who generated that language were also concerned with the very same problem—with false leaders who stirred up the mob out of nothing but a desire for self-aggrandizement. One reason opportunists of this kind fascinated them was because they wanted to establish that not everyone who honored the “common man” was a racist or a mercenary
; that there was a clear distinction between the genuine public servant and the smooth-talking con man. 22
One could scarcely avoid the demagogue problem in thirties America. People who stirred up mobs were all over the place—the nightmare flip side of the era’s populist hopes. There was Louisiana politician Huey Long, whose name became synonymous with demagoguery; Father Charles Coughlin, a radio priest from Detroit who eventually became a dealer in the vilest kind of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories; and newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst, who constantly used the symbols of patriotism to smear progressives.
Each of these men found ways to use the language of anti-elitism for gross personal advancement and for shocking antidemocratic ends. Coughlin started out protesting hard times and inequality but became a more or less open fascist by the beginning of World War II. Hearst admired the Nazis, and his papers actually ran columns by Hermann Goering, Hitler’s right-hand man. Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement, which at first had admirable social-democratic aims, was taken over by a racist crank after Long was assassinated. The stories of all three men show how the vocabulary of protest can be imitated and swiped by the Right. *
The culture of the period was obsessed with demagogues like these men. The 1941 Frank Capra movie Meet John Doe , for example, tells the story of a quintessential average guy who somehow becomes the figurehead for a movement that celebrates average guys. The movement, however, turns out to be controlled by a fascist newspaper owner, an evil rich man with a private army who wants to use the cult of the average guy to cantilever himself into power.
But Meet John Doe does not denounce populism itself or conflate it with demagoguery or teach viewers that the people are too ignorant to rule themselves. It does the opposite. While it shows us the millionaire puppet master deceiving the public, it also introduces us to individual members of that public and urges us, in its corny Capra way, to admire these average Americans for their neighborliness and democratic goodness. The elites are grotesque, despicable, manipulative; they weave ugly plots as they conspire around their fancy dinner tables. But average Americans are honest and truehearted; one character even calls Jesus “the first John Doe.” In the movie’s final scene, the fascist tycoon is confronted by a delegation of average folks, one of whom delivers a classic Hollywood kiss-off: “there you are, [rich guy]: the people. Try and lick that.” *
Or take Citizen Kane , the greatest Hollywood movie of the era, which is about exactly the sort of public narcissists and liars who are today indicted as “populists.” The movie is a history of yellow journalism told through the biography of a man who seems a lot like William Randolph Hearst, and naturally “the people” is one of the movie’s running themes: the newspaper owner’s somewhat pathetic need to be loved by them and his belief that he can make people think “what I tell them to think.” This master of fake news is eventually brought down, of course, but only after launching a campaign for governor of New York in which he makes vague promises to “the underprivileged, the underpaid, and the underfed”—and also to prosecute and lock up the other party’s candidate. (There’s a reason it’s Donald Trump’s favorite movie.) 23
Does the movie’s central story of a demagogue on the make mean that the grievances of “the underprivileged” were phony? No. Just as in Meet John Doe , the existence of fake populism doesn’t discredit the real deal. “You talk about the people as though you own them, as though they belong to you,” one of the characters rebukes Kane, the press lord:
As long as I can remember, you’ve talked about giving the people their rights, as if you can make them a present of liberty, as a reward for services rendered. Remember the working man? … You used to write an awful lot about the working man. He’s turning into something called organized labor. You’re not going to like that one little bit when you find out it means that your working man expects something as his right, not as your gift! … When your precious underprivileged really get together, oh boy.
Orson Welles, the star, director, and co-writer of Citizen Kane , was no anti-populist. On the contrary, he was a prominent advocate of what was called People’s Theatre; his obsessive concern (according to historian Michael Denning) was anti-fascism. He was given to denouncing the powerful in the same thirties manner as everyone else I have described in this chapter. 24
How is this possible? How was Orson Welles able to embrace the people and simultaneously attack demagogues? How was Frank Capra able to do it? Or, for that matter, Franklin Roosevelt, or Henry Wallace, or Floyd Olson? How could they see something so clearly that has entirely escaped our present generation of political experts?
It was because the word these people used to describe demagogues like Coughlin or Hearst was not “populist.” It was “fascist.” Or, to be precise, “pre-fascist.”
The distinction was easy enough to make: leftists and liberals who spoke the language of “the people” in such a fiery way aimed to use democratic instruments to make the country’s economic system more democratic. They did not try to shut democracy down in order to stave off changes that were displeasing to the elite. In the 1930s that kind of thing was the preserve of fascists. *
* * *
ANOTHER DISTINCTION IT’S important to recall: for all its populism, the Depression was not really a period of mob rule, or of wisdom trampled by public ignorance, or even of plebiscitary democracy. The Roosevelt administration did not put every detail of its program up for a public referendum, despite its many invocations of the “common man” and despite the overwhelming landslides it won. The Age of Roosevelt was also the age of regulation, the period when the administrative state came into its own, launching the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Social Security Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Federal Communications Commission. I am aware that in recalling all this I am breezing by decades of controversy and thousands of pages of carefully considered history, but that’s because the point I want to make is a relatively simple one: the populist tradition just isn’t as stubbornly hostile to representative bodies as anti-populist theory makes it out to be.
Nor did the populism of the Roosevelt era translate into a renewed suspicion of international trade and globalism. For all the isolationist agitation of the period—and, yes, lots of good progressives were leery of foreign entanglements—FDR and his State Department were America’s all-time champion believers in international organizations and free trade, constantly attacking the high-tariff policies of their Republican predecessors and, later on, working to build the United Nations.
What surprises the modern observer is that even globalism was cast in populist terms back then. For example, when the publisher of Time and Life magazines announced the “American century” in 1941, Vice President Henry Wallace gave a radio speech pushing back against him: it was not our century at all, Wallace declared, but the “Century of the Common Man,” a “people’s century” in which cartels and monopolies must come under “international control for the common man.” 25 A short while later, with World War II having engulfed the United States, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles delivered a famous address in which he anointed the conflict “a people’s war” and then explained why the postwar world had to reject protectionism, a policy in which, he said, “small vociferous privileged minorities” had once tried to choke off trade and thus “brought ruin to their fellow citizens.” 26
And I must confess it astonished me to discover that, in his closing speech to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference—the very font and source of globalization—Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau described the launch of the World Bank itself as though he were addressing a meeting of the Farmers’ Alliance. The new organization, he predicted, would destroy the power “certain private bankers have in the past exercised over international finance.” Under the World Bank’s program of handing out cheap loans, Morgenthau continued, “The effect would be … to drive only the usurious money lenders from the temple of international fin
ance.” 27
* * *
POPULISM’S SUPPOSED HOSTILITY to intellect, so widely condemned today, becomes something very different when seen through the lens of the 1930s. It is true that the Depression discredited economic scholars and captains of industry and that, in the depths of the economic crisis, Americans laughed bitterly at the country’s former wise men. One of the most popular books of the decade was made up of bum predictions by economists, politicians, and bankers, reprinted verbatim with no commentary except headlines giving the true facts. Its title was literally a sneer: Oh Yeah?
That was pretty crude, I suppose, and Lord only knows the thousands of ways the populist culture of the Depression years has been criticized since then for its vulgarity and philistinism. A whole generation of artists and thinkers, it is said, abandoned the experimental styles of the 1920s in favor of corny folksiness. They stopped exploring the vacuous stupidity of American life in order to paint pictures of farmers and workers and compose sentimental odes to the sons of toil and write books with titles such as I Like America and American Stuff . Suddenly even the most highbrow culture workers were writing and painting for an audience of ordinary people.
But regardless of what we think of the art of the Depression, there is no denying that it was produced by people who took ideas seriously, figures like Kenneth Burke, Orson Welles, Diego Rivera, Carl Sandburg, John Dos Passos, Ben Shahn, and James Agee. We might not appreciate the low-rent direction in which they chose to take modernism, but it remained modernism nonetheless. This isn’t the place to get into it, but perhaps the real philistines in this picture are the ones who dismiss artists and writers because they started to care about the experiences of ordinary people. 28