American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  And so it was possible for Alfred Kazin to write that the enormous and remarkable body of writing of the Depression era, for all its shapelessness, offered the fullest expression of the national consciousness. It was the “story of a vast new literature in itself, some of it fanatical or callow, some of it not writing at all, much of it laboriously solid and curious and humble, whose subject was the American scene and whose drive was always the need, born of the depression and the international crisis, to chart America and to possess it.” And because much of this literature dealt with the 1930s, inevitably much of it dealt with economic hope and despair.

  “Jus’ let me get out to California,” says Grandpa Joad. “Gonna get me a whole big bunch of grapes off a bush, or whatever, an’ I’m gonna squash ’em on my face an’ let ’em run offen my chin.” Getting to California—the Joads have been thinking of this for months. The real Joads were the half-million refugees created when the great dust storms swept through the Plains and border states, reducing almost 100 million acres to dust. For a time the uprooted became wanderers, traveling like sleepwalkers, but most were headed west in rattletrap cars and trucks, in a grim reenactment of the American dream. Headed west to California, the last paradise, where the land was rich and jobs were for the asking. But their hopes were blighted—as Ma Joad had expected, the promises had been “too nice, kinda.”

  John Steinbeck had made this trek too. In 1939 he published the novel that documented the Okie experience, The Grapes of Wrath. In California his family, the Joads, encounter the people in paradise: farm owners who offer jobs to migrants at starvation wages—take it or leave—and sheriffs who move them like cattle from miserable camp to worse camp and Californians who hiss “Okie” at them no matter what state they hail from. The Joads’ meager savings evaporate; they find no place to rest; they are abused, tricked, exploited. The family falls apart—the grandparents die, a son-in-law deserts, a baby is stillborn, a son avenges a preacher by attacking a strikebreaker. In the end a tremendous rain descends, like a second Flood, and this ironic rain, whose absence had denied the Joads life in Oklahoma, now forces them to take cowering refuge in a barn. They must leave behind their truck, their belongings. They have nothing left.

  Steinbeck’s book set off a fire storm of controversy and made the thirty-seven-year-old novelist famous. Inevitably attacked as a Communist propagandist, Steinbeck in fact had made one of the principal themes of an earlier novel, In Dubious Battle, the darker side of Communist activists— their fanaticism, their subordination of the strikers’ needs to the party’s political goals, their provocativeness, and hence the “dubiousness” of the battle. Far from advocating communism, The Grapes of Wrath offered no coherent program whatever but rather a mystic union of Emerson’s transcendentalism, Whitman’s mass democracy, and Jefferson’s agrarian populism. It beckoned readers back to the time when men and the land were one, when greed yielded to selflessness, “for the quality of owning freezes you forever into ‘I,’ and cuts you off forever from the ‘we.’ ” A federal migrant camp offers a glimpse of Utopia, where the life-principles are cooperation and sharing, and where the Joads have a few weeks to learn to “feel like people again.”

  But Steinbeck speaks best through his characters. Ma Joad, indomitable defender of the family unit against all comers: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody. Worse off we get, the more we got to do.” Jim Casy, a preacher who accompanies the Joads to California and has given up conventional Christianity for the faith that “all men got one big soul ever’-body’s a part of.” Young Tom Joad, who lakes on Casy’s burden when the preacher is murdered for leading a migrant workers’ strike, assaults the murderer, and must flee. But, he tells his mother, “I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.… An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”

  Woody Guthrie was there too, a real-life Okie who rode the freights through the South and Southwest during the dust bowl years, playing and singing to anyone who would listen. Growing up in a disintegrating home, in his teens he was an “alley rat” living among old cowboys and onetime outlaws and plain down-and-outers, listening to their yarns about the glory days of the West. When the dust storms hit in the spring of 1935, Woody was still only a twenty-three-year-old soda jerk in Pampa, Texas, but then he began to travel. “This dusty old dust is a-getting my home / and I’ve got to be drifting along.…”

  On the road, thrown among the dust-blown, Guthrie’s alley-rat “I” was transmuted into an impassioned “we.” He “had never considered himself part of any group before,” according to Joe Klein. “But here he was, an Okie, and these were his people.” And as more and more he saw what was happening to them, his music took on a new bite. “I never did make up many songs about the cow trails or the moon skipping through the sky, but at first it was funny songs of what all’s wrong, and how it turned out good or bad. Then I got a little braver and made up songs telling what I thought was wrong and how to make it right, songs that said what everybody in that country was thinking.” Guthrie gathered a repertoire of old tunes—ballads, hymns, country blues—from hoboes and migrants and fitted his own lyrics to them. “The way I figure, there are two kinds of singing and two kinds of songs,” he said. “Living songs and dying songs.” He would sing both. Drawing from the Wobblies’ old Little Red Songbook, his lyrics became more pointed in pathos and politics:

  We got out to the West Coast broke,

  So dad gum hungry I thought I’d croak,

  And I bummed up a spud or two,

  And my wife fixed up a ’tater stew.

  We poured the kids full of it.

  Mighty thin stew, though: you could read a magazine right through it.

  Always have figured that if it had been just a little bit thinner some of these here politicians could have seen through it.

  Two thousand miles to the east, the trouble with Studs Lonigan is that he cannot speak his true feelings, deep and powerful feelings of revolt against Chicago’s drab Irish middle class, with its petty aspirations and empty values and spiritual poverty. Studs is crushed between a latent conscience desperate to emerge, which enables him to grasp vaguely that something is wrong with his world, and his lack of knowledge, either of himself or of society, that would make his rebellion effective. Robbed of any model for revolt, Studs falls back on the hackneyed American rebel of dime novels and juvenile fantasies, on the model of the tough guy as boxer, outlaw, hoodlum, soldier, or teen gang leader. Shadowboxing before a mirror, cursing his sister, drinking himself into a stupor, strutting among his adolescent admirers, Lonigan must constantly affirm to himself that he is indeed “real stuff.” But by adopting the pose and vocabulary of the tough guy, he can neither fully tolerate nor articulate genuine emotions and impulses.

  In the park with Lucy, the fifteen-year-old Studs has a feeling “that seemed to flow through him like nice warm water,” but he feels “goofy and fruity about having it, and felt that he hadn’t better let anyone know he had thoughts like that. … If some of the kids knew what he was doing and thinking, they’d laugh their ears off.” How can he express his feeling to Lucy? “He couldn’t even say a damn thing about how it all made him want to feel strong and good, and made him want to do things and be big and brave for her.” So when he parts from her in frustration he feels “more and more of a hell of a Goddam goof.” After this moment of feeble perception the shutters close once again, and Studs spends the rest of his life caught between growing apprehension of early death and pathetic nostalgia for lost chances. He dies in 1931 at the age of thirty, of heart failure.

  The man who created Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell, himself was raised in an Irish middle-class home in Studs’s Chicago neighborhood. The author believed that only his critical instinct and his intellectual curiosity had saved him from Studs’s fate. He was lucky enough to have had good teachers, who encouraged
him in his writing and wide reading, strengthened his self-confidence, and opened the shutters wide for the literary and intellectual worlds that lay beyond. Studs never had such teachers, such leaders, who could have responded to his wants and needs, protected and bolstered his self-esteem, taught him some skills, and encouraged him to self-fulfillment. In leaving Studs as a youth of suppressed conscience unable to rise to moral consciousness and hence unequipped to move on to political or some other collective action, Farrell personified the masses of Americans imprisoned in enclaves of self-doubt, self-hate, and self-destruction.

  The fictional Studs Lonigan of Chicago would never have met the fictional Bigger Thomas of Chicago, except perhaps during the real-life race riot of 1919, which began when a black youth at a segregated beach stepped into “white waters” and ended with the deaths of twenty-two blacks and fourteen whites. Studs and his gang were there. “The streets were like avenues of the dead. They only caught a ten-year-old Negro boy. They took his clothes off, and burned them. They burned his tail with lighted matches, made him step on lighted matches, urinated on him, sent him off running naked with a couple of slaps in the face.” Bigger Thomas might have been there, momentarily freed from his cage. He lives with his mother, brother, and sister in a squalid one-room apartment in Chicago’s black belt. Unlike the Joads, the Thomases do not even begin as a prideful family; they taunt and nag and torment one another. Bigger is locked in a cage of unemployment, ignorance, petty criminality, fearful hatred of whites and even blacks. He knows that the moment he becomes fully conscious of what his life means, he will kill himself or someone else. In the apartment he encounters a rat, also trapped, and explodes. “Bigger took a shoe and pounded the rat’s head, crushing it, cursing hysterically: ‘You sonofabitch!’ ”

  Later Bigger does kill two persons—a young white woman without meaning to, his girlfriend Bessie meaning to. His criminality liberates him: “He had murdered and had created a new life for himself. It was something that was all his own, and it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him.” Filled with elation, he is transformed from a victim of his environment into an existential actor: “Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions; never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and flight.” When Boris Max, his communist lawyer, a kindly white whom Bigger trusts, offers the judge an impassioned plea that Bigger’s crimes are the result of circumstances, that “we must deal here with a dislocation of life involving millions of people,” Bigger resists this view of him. Max’s argument robs him of his freedom, his individuality. And so when Bigger, in his cell—his final cage—hours away from execution and longing more than ever to talk with Max, insists passionately upon his responsibility, Max’s eyes fill with terror as he gropes for his hat “like a blind man,” uncomprehending that for Bigger:

  “What I killed for, I am! … What I killed for must’ve been good! … I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em.”

  The creator of Native Son’s Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright, had grown up in the South and then in Chicago, “ringed by walls,” as he later put it. “Tension would set in at the mere mention of whites,” he remembered. “It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted,” as though he had been the “victim of a thousand lynchings.” But, unlike Studs and Bigger, he found a way out—reading. Resorting to a ruse to borrow books from a whites-only library, he began with Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces. It startled him. “What was this?” he wondered. “Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words.” Then perhaps he too could use words as weapons. But he could not wholly break out of his own cage. By the late 1930s, Daniel Aaron speculated, Wright was leading a double intellectual life: the black Marxist who sought to bring “scattered but kindred peoples into a whole” and the private man, the novelist who idealized the isolated, existential individual.

  Many of the authors and artists of the 1930s were trying to bring scattered but kindred peoples together, striving to release them from their separate cages and to raise them to an individual and collective consciousness they had never known, hoping to complete the task of psychological and political mobilization that the New Dealers had started but not finished. It was altogether fitting that one of their most articulate creations was a man who never said a word, never even appeared in a book or on a stage. By 1935 the Group, an experiment in collective theater, had scored some striking successes by importing the Stanislavsky method, which taught actors to inhabit their characters, and by insisting that “the blood and bones of a living stage must be the blood and bones of the actuality around us.” In January 1935, amid many doubts, the Group put on Waiting for Lefty by a rather untried playwright, Clifford Odets.

  A somewhat simplistic play, like all agitprop, about a taxi strike, Waiting for Lefty dramatized a drivers’ meeting, with the entire theater serving as a union hall and the audience as union members. As the tension and oratory mounted, the first-night audience took on the call for “STRIKE!” with such fervor that the actors stood frozen on the stage, gaping at the cheering, stamping mass. “STRIKE! STRIKE!” But strike for what? Against what? The audience did not seem to know or care. Liberated, it felt unencumbered by the need to act or even choose. How had Odets achieved this magic that night after night brought suburban matrons and Wall Street tycoons to stamp their feet and shake their fists?

  In part by never producing Lefty. For Lefty was dead.

  PART II

  Strategies of Freedom

  CHAPTER 4

  Freedom Under Siege

  IN APRIL 1939 THE “winds of war” were swiftly enveloping Europe. With decisive help from Hitler and Mussolini, General Francisco Franco had just clamped his grip on all of Spain. The Nazis had completed their occupation of Czechoslovakia and were now turning to the conquest of Poland. Mussolini had sent troops into helpless little Albania as a springboard against Yugoslavia and Greece. Franklin D. Roosevelt, like the other leaders of Western democracies, had stood by impotent while the aggressors moved from attack to attack. But if Roosevelt could not act, he could at least talk. On April 14, 1939, he sent an appeal personally to Adolf Hitler, Chancellor of the German Reich. A similar message went to Premier Benito Mussolini.

  “You realize, I am sure,” the President began, “that throughout the world hundreds of millions of human beings are living today in constant fear of a new war or even a series of wars.” Three nations in Europe, one in Africa, and vast territory of another in the Far East—he did not identify these nations—had had their independence crushed or had been occupied. Then Roosevelt came to the point.

  “You have repeatedly asserted that you and the German people have no desire for war. If this is true there need be no war.…” Could Roosevelt, as “a friendly intermediary,” have a frank statement as to the Führer’s intentions—a statement that he could pass on to other nations?

  “Are you willing to give assurance that your armed forces will not attack or invade the territory or possessions of the following independent nations: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and Ireland, France, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Russia, Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, the Arabias, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Iran.” If the President received such assurance, which would have to cover the next ten years at least, the United States “would be prepared to take part in discussions looking toward the most practical manner of opening up avenues of international trade to the end that every Nation of the earth may be enabled to buy and sell on equal terms in the world market as well as to possess assurance of obtaining the materials and products of peaceful economic life.”

  In Hitler’s Chancellery and Mussolini’s Palazzo Venezia, men stared at this message with amusement and incredulity. Hermann Görin
g said that Roosevelt must be “suffering from an incipient mental disease,” and Mussolini thought the message a result of the illness that had crippled him. At first disdaining to respond to so “contemptible a creature” as the “present President of the United States,” Hitler then saw a superb opportunity to dish this hypocritical moralist of the West. First he demanded—and received—from the nations Roosevelt listed assurances that they did not feel threatened by Germany. When little Latvia sent an obscure reply, the German minister in Riga was instructed to inform Latvia that unless a clear negative was received, its leaders would be considered accomplices of Roosevelt; Latvia quickly complied. Next Hitler summoned his puppet Reichstag to meet in the Kroll Opera House for a direct response to Roosevelt. Sitting through the two-hour harangue, CBS correspondent William Shirer judged it probably the most brilliant he had heard Hitler give, for “sheer eloquence, craftiness, irony, sarcasm and hypocrisy.”

  While Göring in the President’s chair grimaced and snickered, Hitler ticked off the “threatened” nations one by one and announced their negative responses. Ireland had more to fear from English aggression than German. The deputies roared when the Führer assured Roosevelt that he did not plan an attack on the United States either. He castigated the President for talking about conferences when the United States had not joined “the greatest conference of all time,” the League of Nations. Roosevelt, he said, had spoken of the general fear of war, but Germany had had nothing to do with the “fourteen wars” that had been waged since 1919, or with the twenty-six “violent interventions” since that year, of which the United States had committed six. Germany respected the Monroe Doctrine and did not interfere in Central or South America; why should the United States meddle in Europe? Roosevelt talked about disarmament—but Germany had for all time learned her lesson since appearing unarmed at the Versailles conference table and being “subjected to even greater degradations than can ever have been inflicted on the chieftains of Sioux tribes.” Mocking laughter swept through the old opera house as the Führer scored his points.