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AMERICA
IN MIDPASSAGE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK BOSTON - CHICAGO - DALLAS
ATLANTA - SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LIMITED
TOKONTO
AMERICA IN
MIDPASSAGE
CHARLES A.BEARD
&* MARY RJBE ARD
'Drawings
WILFRED JONES
VOLUME II
1939
THEMACMILIAN COMPANYiTMEWYORK
COPYRIGHT, 1939, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
SET UP AND ELECTROTYPED.
FEINTED IN THE "UNITED STATES OP AMERICA
BY THK HADDGN CJtAPTSMEN, INC., CAMDEN, N. J,
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.
Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
XI URBAN AND RURAL LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 501
XII SOURCES AND FORCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 577
XIII MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 653
XIV ESTHETIC AFFIRMATIONS 745
XV SCIENCE IN THE WIDENING OUTLOOK 822
XVI FRAMES OF SOCIAL THOUGHT 860
XVII TOWARD A RECONSTRUCTION OF DEMOCRACY 920
INDEX 951
AMERICA
IN MIDPASSAGE
CHAPTER XI
Urban and Rural Labor in Evolving Economy
UNDERNEATH the stage on which the giant pageant of
politics and business swirled and marched amid the
pomp and circumstance of great affairs, labor kept
on at tasks in town and country, as always in the long history
of mankind. Nothing did or could change that necessity.
Neither the delights that gleamed under the evanescence
of the golden glow nor the detonations of the depression nor
inquiries into the operations carried on by the Lords of Crea-
tion nor the tumults of popular elections nor the vicissitudes
in the fortunes of leaders called statesmen nor the contests
of court, executive, and legislature, nor all the bluster of
war chieftains and pronouncements of diplomats across the
borders of nations did or could alter that basis of industry,
statecraft, and war. Whatever editors, columnists, elucida-
tors, commentators, radio announcers, apologists, retainers,
publicists, professors, and all the chorus of condemners and
praisers felt moved to say, exclaim, or print, labor continued
in town and country, supplying the goods and services upon
which participants in the giant pageant depended daily for
501
502 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
their very existence, without which they themselves would
have been sent to field or shop to scrabble for their livelihood.
In every age, pagan and Christian alike, master minds had
recognized the truth of the axiom that civilization, however
low or high its superstructure of magnificence, rests upon
labor and that its mutability turns upon the forms and proc-
esses of labor. More than three hundred years before the
birth of Christ, Aristotle had said: "If every instrument
could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the
will of others, like the statues of Daedalus or the tripods of
Hephaestus, which, says the poet, 'of their own accord en-
tered the assembly of the Gods' ; if, in like manner, the shut-
tle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a
hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants
nor masters slaves." But instruments did not produce
articles of use without minds and hands to guide them ; hence
slaves and workmen were necessary to operate them and
merchants to exchange commodities of use. "In the state
which is best governed, citizens . . . must not lead the lives
of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble and
inimical to virtue. Neither must they be husbandmen, since
leisure is necessary for the development of virtue and the per-
formance of political duties/' As to slaves, Aristotle thought
that they were human and deserved some consideration and
yet were mere servants of culture for others for the strong
and virtuous.
More than twenty centuries after the death of Aristotle,
an American statesman, John C. Calhoun, strongly confirmed
the judgment of the Ancient : "There never has yet existed a
wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the
community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the
other. Broad and general as is this assertion, it is fully borne
out by history. This is not the proper occasion but, if it were,
it would not be difficult to trace the various devices by which
the wealth of all civilized communities has been so unequally
divided. . . . The devices are almost innumerable, from the
brute force and gross superstition of ancient times, to the
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 503
subtle and artful fiscal contrivances of modern rimes. , . .
It is useless to disguise the fact." The rule had ever applied,
Calhoun maintained, and would ever apply to societies en-
joying the benefits and blessings of civilization ; and neither
soft phrases nor words less shocking to beneficiaries than the
old term "slave" could fundamentally alter the constitution
of things human.
After the advent of Christianity, those idealists known as
Utopians had also made labor the center of their dreams and
speculations but had sought to give to it both dignity and
freedom. The Utopia of Sir Thomas More was based on
labor in agriculture and the crafts ; all men and women were
instructed and exercised in agriculture; and besides every
man had a trade to which he applied himself. "In a great
city and in all the territory that lies around it, you can scarce
find 500, either men or women, who, by their age and
strength, are capable of labor, that are not engaged in it. ...
The slaves among them are only such as are condemned to
that state of life for the commission of some crime, or, which
is more common, such as their merchants find condemned to
die in those parts to which they trade, whom they sometimes
redeem at low rates ; and in other places have them for noth-
ing." This was labor in a dreamland and yet Sir Thomas
More's Utopians were the most highly civilized people that
imagination had yet envisaged. Another famous Utopian, of
the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, saw in labor the source
of the thought and energy which were to sweep all humanity
into everlasting freedom and build a civilization shared by
all. After Marx, William Morris, the princely esthete, whose
works of mind and hand gave intense pleasure to idealists,
in his News from Nowhere made labor an agreeable and
beautiful manifestation of the noblest purposes in the human
spirit. Perhaps in origin this utopianism was an expression
of Christian ethics which deemed of one blood all mankind,
exalted labor, and emphasized the eternal brotherhood of the
great and the humble.
504 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
During the tensions of the midpassage, labor remained in
town and country, at the tasks permissible or allotted, in the
status which it had achieved, in its thought of its role in the
social processes, and in the position of thought to which it
was assigned by others ; and it was both an active and a pas-
sive element in all that occurred. By measures public and
private, designed to cope with the depression, labor was, of
course, vitally affected. In their efforts to cut costs of pro-
duction and make profits in spite of contracting markets,
capitalists and managers scrapped old tools and methods,
introduced new machines and processes devised by inventors
and scientists, and stepped up industrial operations, thereby
displacing industrial workers and often throwing additional
strains on laborers engaged in mass production enterprises,
In agriculture, the most conservative of the arts, as well as in
machine industry, this subversive movement went forward
with terrific speed. Illustrations of the havoc thus wrought
were provided for public consideration by Paul Taylor in his
Power Farming and Labor Displacement in the Cotton Belt.
Theorists might argue whether this ruthless dynamism was
the logic of technology, the drive of capitalism, or the out-
come of human perversity ; anyway, the rushing facts were
realities in their span of time.
While private enterprise, doing as it liked with its own
within the social constrictions, kept blasting at surviving
features of the inherited "order," the Federal Government
was helping to bolster up banks, railway companies, shipping
concerns, farmers, and industrial corporations by loans,
subsidies, and heavy purchases for public works, armaments,
and other uses of State; that is, helping to underwrite
enterprises which were constantly striving to cut costs and
reap profits by the displacement of labor. With shifts in
fact went modification in theory. The old conception of the
automatic market, maintaining a just and efficient distribu-
tion of wealth through rents, profits, and wages, was disin-
tegrating. The fundamental assumption of that theory was
peppered with citations from reality the crack of 1929,
LABOR IN EFOL7ING ECONOMY 505
continuous unemployment on a large scale, government in-
tervention, inflexible prices, contracting investments, and
increasing concentration of corporate control. With these
citations went a countervailing theory that an enlarged
buying power for labor in town and country was absolutely
indispensable to the high-level functioning of dynamic mass
production. Since employers rarely increased wages on their
own motion , the color of economic justification was given,
even by participants in the giant pageant, to legislation
strengthening the bargaining power of labor for the purpose
of enlarging buying power.
Into the dynamism of internal economy were injected ideas
and forces emanating from revolutionary events abroad
which impinged steadily and immediately upon the fortunes
of American labor as well as upon the foreign policies of the
United States. In Italy and Germany the free organizations
of industrial and rural workers were suppressed by the ap-
paratus of the State, supported by the middle classes. In
Italy and Germany democracy was officially derided and the
capacity of labor for self-government of any kind was offi-
cially denied. In Russia, where government was nominally
carried on in the name of labor, assassinations, purges, and
executions provoked more than suspicion that proletarian
control in the Soviet Republic was growing weaker. News of
these events filled columns of journals and magazines in the
United States. American capitalists, politicians, and labor
leaders were compelled to think again about the monitory
experiences of the Old World in labor relations, as they had
been made to think about them in the days of the French
Revolution of 1848 and the Commune. Even the republic of
letters and arts, despite many attempts, conscious or auto-
matic, to provide insulation against the rude jars of practice,
resounded with the searchings and arguments of the debate
over labor relations beyond the seas, on its borders, and in its
midst.
In all ages, indeed, the course of civilization had been
marked by labor disturbances the slave insurrections of
506 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
antiquity, the peasants' revolts of the middle ages, the popu-
list outbreak of Daniel Shays in the eighteenth century, and
in the nineteenth century widespread revolts of industrial
workers everywhere in western civilization. Could the his-
tory of labor be closed in the twentieth century by dictator-
ships of any kind, in the name of the middle classes or of the
proletariat? Was the American ideal of free farmers and
free mechanics, men and women endowed with equal suf-
frage, merely a transitory illusion ? With the inherited sys-
tem of economy running at a tempo far below its potential
efficiency, with millions of men and women unemployed in
town and country, with old crafts constantly disrupted by
technological changes, could organized labor in the United
States continue to function on traditional lines, merely, or at
all? Were its responsibilities limited to bargaining with
industrial employers over hours and wages ? In these issues
the mission or fate of the American labor movement was now
defined. What was more, so all-embracing were the for-
tunes impending for the workers in factory, in mine, in office,
and on the land, that all the apparatus of wealth, culture, and
State resting upon labor became entangled in its destiny.
Thus the labor problem stood at the center of American
civilization in this latest age.
From the foundation of the American republic, acute
thinkers had recognized the basic relation of labor on the land
and in the shop to the forms and functions of government,
and indeed to the very course of civilization. They had be-
lieved that the security of popular institutions depended
upon the existence of free land, Jefferson had declared that
when Americans were piled upon one another in cities they
would go to eating one another as in the Old World, but he
had no solution for the problem to be raised in coming years.
His close friend, Madison, who also served as President of the
republic, forecast a time when the great mass of people in
America would have no property of any kind and prophesied
that statesmanship would then be really tested. How and
with what outcome, Madison did not venture to say. Later,
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 507
the humanistic wing of American democracy led by
Horace Greeley, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Wendell
Phillips, for example clearly understood the tendency to
separate labor from property, suspected that a crisis was
creeping over the country, and sought ways out of the
dilemma. Acquainted with ancient and contemporary politi-
cal thought, including American speculations on that imme-
morial theme, Karl Marx, long a European correspondent of
Greeley's Tribune, declared the conflict thus comprehended
to be inevitable. In the Communist Manifesto published in
1848, he maintained that such struggles had ended in the
reconstruction of society or in the destruction of both con-
tending parties. Nevertheless in his social philosophy, he
formulated a solution : With the spread of mechanical manu-
facturing, the class of industrial workers will be enlarged,
members of the middle classes will be driven down into the
proletarian ranks, and in the end the overwhelming majority
will take possession of and socialize private instruments of
production.
In the earlier analyses of the economic course a number of
tendencies were missed or at best dimly discerned. Nor did
the materialistic view of things always take into sufficient
reckoning the psychological forces of culture, taste, and
prestige influencing class inclinations. It was generally
thought in the nineteenth century that, with the expansion of
industry through machine processes, an ever-larger propor-
tion of all industrial societies would be composed of industrial
workers living in cities. As a matter of fact, however, after a
long period of rapid growth, the number of industrial workers
in relation to the total population of the United States began
to decline. Automatic machinery and the rounding out of
giant construction projects contributed to the downward
tendency. Contrary to prophecy there was a relative increase
in the size of the middle class, defined as including merchants,
lawyers, doctors, teachers, government employees of the
508 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
upper range, service workers, writers, architects, painters,
and other white-collar attendants upon economic processes.
It was by the disintegration of freehold agriculture, rather
than by the weakening of the middle class, that the propor-
tion of landless, toolless, and homeless laborers was aug-
mented. In the same agrarian shift the landlord class was
enlarged and united by "natural" sympathies with the ur-
ban middle class rather than with workers in industry and
propertyless laborers on the land.
The changing scene had been affected by the reduction of
immigration. During the nineteenth century the flow of
immigrants had contributed heavily to the ranks of indus-
trial workers. And yet, curiously reversing the theory that
capitalists could dictate all public policies, American trade
unionists demanded limitations on immigration and, before
the twentieth century had advanced far, were able, with
collateral aids, to force restrictive legislation through the
Congress of the United States. Bars were erected against
foreign laborers willing to work in mill and factory for any
wage or content to slave from sun to sun on the soil if they
could only own a little patch of land however small or barren.
When the laws were tightened by administrative measures
after the economic crash of 1929, the stream of immigration
from Europe dwindled to a trickle. Thus, largely through the
efforts of American labor leaders, bans were placed on any
proportionate increase in the number of industrial workers
as compared with the size of the middle class. Whatever the
causes, wherever the responsibilities lay, the fact was of
deep significance to the course of American civilization.
Dialectics reckoned with it. Realistic thought took note of it.
Within the ranks of the industrial workers so declining in
relative strength of numbers, unemployment counteracted
the natural trend toward unity and organization. In other
words, the labor movement was weakened by the idleness
of its members and of its potential recruits. With from seven
to eleven million urban workers more or less unemployed
permanently, it was feared and kept alive only by doles or
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 509
mere makeshifts of one kind or another, the economic and
political power of labor organization was reduced. In ex-
planation of this situation the phrase "technological unem-
ployment " attained a wide circulation, although the dictum
rested on no investigation of facts both comprehensive and
precise. Unquestionably machines had displaced multitudes
of men and women from time to time. On the other hand
new machine processes, with their almost infinite subdivi-
sions, had given employment to workers in manufacturing
plants, and increasingly to deft-fingered women.
But no system of accountancy offered a balance sheet.
If there was no such thing as technological unemployment,
as often alleged, there was indisputably a large amount of
technology unemployed and millions of industrial workers
were positively idle. Moreover the problem for labor organ-
izers was complicated by the increasing use of women, mostly
young, and children in the lighter machine industries. Labor
officials could cut the competition of children by securing
drastic child labor legislation in the progressive states, al-
though the ratification of the national child labor amendment
seemed to be impossible. They could attack the competition
of women through minimum wage laws after the Supreme
Court had sustained this type of enactment. And they could
take women into their regular unions; women organizers
had long struggled to bring this about in the interest of better
living standards. But the swarms of adult men seeking a
wage adequate for family care, of young women often bur-
dened themselves with dependents, and of children helpless
to exert effective pressure anywhere all facing the terror
of permanent unemployment presented problems of or-
ganization which the most skillful union leaders were unable
to solve. As members lost their jobs, they tended to drift out
of the unions, whether dues were charged or not. When the
contracting economy had no place for them, straight and sim-
ple unionism offered no immediate and evident advantages.
The process of organizing industrial workers and holding
them in unions was further hampered by seasonal fluctua-
510 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
tions in employment, intimately associated with many phases
of the machine process. Since fluctuations were due in part
to methods of advertising and marketing, their worst ravages
could be prevented in some industries by longer-range plan-
ning, by deliberate cooperation between management and
labor. Demonstrations to this effect were made in several
industries, notably in the men's garment trade where the
Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the heads of the indus-
try clipped off the peaks and raised the valleys of unemploy-
ment by concerted efforts. Yet such arrangements were fre-
quently offset by the spread of general unemployment, the
introduction of displacing machines, and the turbulence of
strikes. That control over seasonal fluctuations was possible
on a larger scale could not be denied. That, if accomplished,
it would diminish the adverse fortunes of many industrial
workers was clear enough. But labor leaders could see in such
control no material increase in the total volume of hour or
day employment by the year ; nor could they hope by that
method to stem the trend toward the spread of labor-elim-
inating machinery.
In some respects the plight of workers ousted by the con-
traction of the market and the introduction of new machines
recalled scenes in the early years of the industrial revolution,
such as George Eliot described so vividly in Silas Marner.
Plant after plant installed amazing inventions. As workers
with hand tools and crude implements had been displaced in
former times, so now even skilled technicians, experienced in
operating complicated machines, were turned into the streets
by the introduction of apparatus still more complicated or
automatic. Often the discharged workers were so old that
mastery of an unfamiliar trade was beyond their opportunity
or capacity. Despite all the treatises on the economics of
industry, despite the experiences of previous times, American
labor leaders in 1938 were almost as much at sea over policies
as were their forerunners a hundred years before. A dismis-
sal wage might be secured to tide them over hunger for a
while, but such concessions added no strength or assurance to
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 511
a labor movement essentially concerned with a decent living
standard and continuity of employment for the working class
as a whole.
Nor did efforts to "stabilize" industry by "spreading"
work among selected groups of employees add strength to
labor organization. At the beginning of the depression,
many employers tried to keep their labor forces together,
sometimes at a material sacrifice, in expectation of a quick
recovery and recurring need. In response to the desperate
call to "spread the work/' men and women still earning a
livelihood undertook to share their wages with others. Al-
though a larger proportion of workers won continuous wages
by this process, in smaller amounts by the month or year,
such earnings were below the standard of full employment
and the operation afforded no aid to workers for whom even
this limited assistance could not be provided. "The living
wage" was frequently broken down, even for the employed.
Wage earners lowered their own standard and shared their
plight with their companions in the downward drift. Despite
the fine spirit of sacrifice made manifest, "dividing work"
generally meant extending disillusionment and diminishing
the strength of labor.
Still another feature of the disintegration lay in multitudes
of workers regarded as "unemployable" according to the
rigorous requirements of new machine processes. High ten-
sion industry fed upon the strength of youth and shoved older
men and women out into the streets to fend for themselves if
they could. Minds and hands that might have been busy in
handicrafts until near the close of life were often unable to
keep up with the drive and speed of assembly lines or the
stretched-out tasks at looms.
The number of such "unemployables" had been large in
times of prosperity. The number grew with the collapse of
prosperity. When the business curtailment of the depression
came, the older workers were generally the first to be dropped
by the wayside. Prolonged idleness diminished their powers.
With no work to do for months or years, possessors of skills
512 AMERICA IN MWPAS&AGE
could easily forget their cunning, lose interest in work, and
fall into a deep and shiftless discouragement. Men and
women, even boys and girls, slid down the scale of stamina
and ingenuity into or toward the abyss of unemployability.
How many hit bottom was not officially reported. With all
the statistical searching of the time, this mass of phenom-
ena escaped a national survey. Undoubtedly the army of
"economic derelicts" was large. Furthermore: it furnished
the materials for demagogy, not for rational and effective
labor organization. It might respond to romantic nostrums
in the absence of sane remedies.
In some measure, usually overstated, the amount of un-
employability, especially in the skilled trades, was due to
craft-union policies. The strength of craft unionism had
always depended to a large extent on the limitation of
training and apprenticeship. Between sponsors of technical
and vocational education, generally affiliated with employer
interests, on the one side, and leaders in craft unions, on the
other, there had always been friction if not violent antago-
nism. In their efforts to save something for their membership
amid the devastating disruptions of the depression, craft
leaders battled hard against the infiltration of new and
cheaper workers by way of vocational schools and apprentice-
ship. Consequently, as industry rose slowly A out of the
trough, it sometimes found difficulty in discovering enough
highly skilled workers to fill the new openings, among the
six or eight million unemployed men and women who hung
around on the outside. Compelled to consider the instant
need of things, heads of craft unions placed limitations upon
the rapid expansion of their own organizations and thus
unwittingly enlarged unemployability that menace to an
all-embracing labor movement.
With the proportion of straight industrial workers declin-
ing, with widespread unemployment continuous, with efforts
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 513
to stabilize seasonal fluctuations and spread work relatively
ineffective in stemming the depression, with the army of un-
employables large and perhaps increasing, the outlook for
organized labor, compared with times called " normal," was
gloomy in the extreme. As the years passed, it became in-
creasingly evident that there was to be no steady march of
industrial workers to the position of an overwhelming ma-
jority in the population. Within the ranks of labor, the
strength of skilled craftsmen, relatively well-paid, fairly
secure, and reasonably content with the shape of things
present and to come, was clearly diminished. As long as
private enterprise had earnings to share, the organizing of
labor for bargaining purposes had been a task of relative ease.
However, when in large areas earnings became non-existent,
when whole sectors of economy depended for survival on
money from the Federal Treasury, when the army of the
unemployed and the unskilled swelled in size to mammoth
proportions, the call to collective bargaining on old lines
sounded more or less futile to the masses of the poor. At
this conjuncture of realities, a crisis was reached in the labor
movement ; leaves were turned in the book of labor history ;
new methods were evolved. Those leaders accustomed to
using their minds looked beyond the bargaining technique
of the craft unions into complexities that could not be pierced
by analysis according to any of their historic formulas.
To some extent, impossible to estimate and often exagger-
ated, the crisis in the labor movement was accelerated by
practices which had grown up in unions long affiliated with
the American Federation of Labor. Deriving their strength
in part from their monopoly over employment within their
respective crafts and from policies deemed advantageous to
the crafts, labor leaders in certain fields had often found it
possible to apply coercive measures to employers, members
of their unions, and independent workers, even to enrich
themselves in the process. In fact labor "rackets" appeared
in nearly all the large cities and ranged from mere decrees
imposed on employers and workers to brutality and murder.
514 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Under the dictation of labor "czars/' employers were com-
pelled to hire more men than they needed or adopt operating
methods for which there was not the slightest justification in
economy or even in the welfare of employees. Heavy dues
and special assessments were levied on members of unions
and blackmail on employers. Destruction of life and prop-
erty accompanied collections and terror reigned in whole
trades. Workers were promised jobs in return for high initia-
tion fees, given positions for a week or two, and then cast
into the streets. A cafeteria " racket " in New York City
brought $2,000,000 a year into the treasury of the labor
bosses. Every now and then when gangsters shot things out
among themselves or the Federal Government caught^ labor
dictators who had failed to report their true "earnings,"
labor cases were aired in the courts and the broad ramifica-
tions of racketeering were revealed to the public at large,
On the basis of documentary evidence, Harold Seidman
described the types and methods of such rackets under the
heading, Labor Czars : a History of Labor Racketeering
a worthy companion of Max Lowen dial's important volume,
The Investor Pays, both memorials of the age. According to
Mr. Seidman, "miners, sailors, musicians, cloth shrinkers,
furriers, shoe workers, waiters, cooks, barbers, janitors,
window cleaners, milliners, laundrymen, and bakers have at
one time or another come into the toils of the greedy labor
leeches/' In the building trades, the electrical trades, public
markets, the restaurant business, and the motion picture
business, such "czars" arose again and again in various parts
of the country, spreading terror, and levying tribute. Some-
times they held power for years. At other times they were
quickly discovered and prosecuted. Many were sent to
prison. Many seemed to enjoy legal and political immunity
despite the fact that their operations were well known. So
far did the disturbances extend that legitimate unions suf-
fered from the disreputable and criminal activities of the
racketeers, unions were disrupted, and revolts broke out in
the rank and file against domineering and dictatorial labor
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 515
bosses, augmenting the industrial unrest that accompanied
the course of the depression.
Immediately after the crack of 1929, William Green, speak-
ing for the American Federation of Labor, expressed anxiety
over the diminishing strength of his organization as its dues-
paying members fell into the abyss of unemployment. Called
into counsel with business leaders by President Hoover, he
urged the maintenance of union wage scales to uphold buying
power and keep the wheels of mass production turning. As
such precepts failed to work and unemployment widened,
Mr. Green warned President Hoover that he could not
vouch for the passivity of labor if the strain was not relieved
by some process. Representatives of the Railway Brother-
hoods also protested against the wholesale dismissals made
by managers in frantic efforts to pay dividends or to avoid
bankruptcy.
Warnings and protests did not stay the course of economic
disruption. On the other hand the tightening depression did
not raise at once the volume of warnings and protests to
unmanageable proportions. The Marxian prediction that a
progressive impoverishment of labor would produce revolu-
tionary action, rather than reform, failed to materialize.
As a matter of fact, that calculation was not on the program
of labor officials at all. Organized labor made no official
break with the established rules for carrying on either politi-
cal or economic transactions. It did not swing wholesale to
socialism or independent action in 1932. Although Demo-
cratic, on the whole, in its sympathies, it was divided politi-
cally, and when the Roosevelt administration was first in-
stalled, the American Federation of Labor had no large pro-
gram of action ready, despite its resolutions on the need for
"planning" adopted at previous conventions. Like the
Roosevelt administration, the Federation entered upon a
career of improvisation.
In the various attacks upon the depression, the Federation
516 AMERICA IN MWPASSAGE
assumed no separate leadership but was satisfied with col-
laboration. When the demand was made for a federal, state,
and local program of public works to set industry in motion
and provide jobs for the unemployed, it attended conferences
of business men and politicians and merely insisted upon its
historic maxim the eight hour day and the prevailing rate
of wages on public enterprises. To secure the formal adop-
tion of this prescription was generally a simple thing. Yet
the victory was a minor gain for labor. The public works
undertaken by government action consisted mainly of roads,
bridges, dykes, dams, and similar types of construction in
which machinery and unskilled labor were extensively used.
The number of craft unionists set to work by such activities
was small in comparison with the total volume of unemploy-
ment. When federal efforts to increase employment took
the form of "work projects/' other than heavy construction,
organized labor was again able to force the adoption of a
limited prevailing-rate-of-wages clause for the meager
number of hours allotted to men and women on the projects.
Granting that it was carried against the protests of men bent
on holding relief expenditures to the minimum, still the sec-
ond victory for organized Ubor scarcely touched the fringe of
the economic dislocation.
If public spending stimulated industry, perhaps kept it
from a more general collapse, it left large bodies of industrial
workers still bogged in the tragedy of unemployment. The
appropriation of millions, even billions, for military and naval
purposes, culminating in the super-navy program of 1938, did
offer more opportunities to workers in the heavy industries,
especially to skilled machinists, although the employment
aspect of that bill was not impressive. Here also labor wel-
comed wages, without inquiring very thoroughly into the
foreign policies or the war potentials involved. Labor might
be given employment in using the war machines as well as in
making them.
At best the armament business was limited and perilous.
Carried forward at an increasing ratio, it might in time break
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 517
the backs of taxpayers, culminate in war, and lead to the
supremacy of the military over all labor as promised by the
mobilization bill, reported to the House of Representatives
by its military affairs committee in 1938. That prospect in
the relations of labor to government and employment was
not a happy one to contemplate. If, on the other hand, the
armament program reached an end, a huge industry would
be disrupted and labor would feel the consequences. That
prospect was not encouraging either. While Marxists of the
Stalinite direction supported the enlarged armament expendi-
tures, with eyes on direct aid to Russia, some American labor
leaders regarded the business with anxiety concerning the
long outcome. John L. Lewis, for example, foresaw that labor
might be buried under the ruins of the war monster. What-
ever the secret wishes of individual labor leaders respecting
foreign policies, there were no grounds here for jubilation by a
labor movement.
When the Federal Government turned from "public
works," as a means of moving industry, to direct efforts in
stimulating private business through the National Recovery
Act of 1933, organized labor received a kind of left-handed
recognition. As originally drafted, the Act had been a pure
business proposition conceived by the United States Cham-
ber of Commerce ; but in some curious maneuvering a labor
clause was inserted in the bill the now famous Section
7 a. How it got there was never fully explained to the public.
When the recovery proposal came on the carpet, Congress
had before it a bill prescribing a national thirty-hour week,
designed to increase employment and enlarge buying power.
The very sight of that measure, however, was alarming to
business and to the Roosevelt administration. So the bill
was scotched. Sponsors of the recovery measure then added
to the original bill a section assuring to labor the right of
collective bargaining under the new codes to be drawn up by
industries. Just what was meant by the language of Section
7 a no one seemed to know, not even the President of the
United States, though a placation of labor was presumably
518 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
needed. Whether this was the true history of labor's appear-
ance in the Recovery Act or not, efforts to enforce the Sec-
tion in question brought labor into a somewhat novel rela-
tion to government, to industry, and to the vast body of
hitherto unorganized workers in private enterprises large and
small.
While industries were engaged in drawing up their codes
of fair practices under the Recovery Act, representatives of
organized labor participated, on a national scale, in the proc-
esses that involved wages, hours, and collective bargaining.
As soon as steps were taken to put the codes, including labor
provisions, into effect, in factories, stores, offices, and other
establishments, leaders in unionism had to reckon with mil-
lions of workers who did not fit the old craft categories.
Stirred by the drum beating that accompanied the concerted
effort to bring about national recovery and invited to share in
collective negotiations, industrial "misfits" by the hundreds
of thousands acquired an interest in labor unionism which
astounded most of all the American Federation accustomed
to slow and tedious methods of organization. Thousands of
the workers flocked to the unions long affiliated with the
Federation. For others, perhaps the larger share, special
organizations had to be provided.
Owing to the fact that miscellaneous workers were involved,
the new organizations took on the tone, if not always the
form, of industrial unions ; that is, they were based as to
membership on the nature of the commodity produced, such
as rubber, cement, or automobiles, and included all the
workers in each plant who helped in its making, as distin-
guished from unions based on special operations, or crafts,
and split up in each plant along craft lines. Whatever the
intention of the Federation when it sponsored Section 7 #,
its decision helped to stimulate a flood of activities and agita-
tions destined to shake the American labor world from center
to circumference.
If the words "collective bargaining" seemed lucid as
printed in the lines of the Recovery Act, practice under them
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 519
was intricate and full of turmoil. At least five parties were
drawn into the processes of enforcement throughout the
country. Of labor organizations to carry on bargaining there
were now in existence four distinct types : craft unions,
which might number many separate bodies in a single plant ;
company unions, comprising all the workers in a plant, organ-
ized and controlled, more or less, by the management ; indus-
trial or vertical unions including workers of every type, inde-
pendent of management, enjoying some degree of self-govern-
ment, within the American Federation or outside ; and the
bodies of hitherto unorganized workers called upon by the
law to bargain collectively. On the other side of the bargain-
ing table were the employers, acting individually or collec-
tively, who formulated their proposed wage and hour agree-
ments. Framed in vague language, Section 7 a established
no one stereotype of labor association for bargaining pur-
poses and, in the circumstances, neither the federal agencies
in charge nor the employers nor the labor organizers had
any precise guidance. Perhaps an attempt to provide speci-
fications would have defeated the adoption of the Section by
Congress.
In the absence of clear guidance, labor actions under the
law were chaotic, with federal officials, courts, and even
President Roosevelt playing irregular parts in its application.
Some employers, especially in the steel industry, resisted the
enforcement of Section 7 a in their plants, in the courts, and
in the forum of public opinion. Among the steel industries
in general, company unions under the control of manage-
ment practically monopolized labor relations and similar
unions were organized in plants that hitherto had possessed
no collective bargaining apparatus whatever. To meet the
formalities of the Recovery Act, such corporate devices for
keeping labor well in hand were altered in minor respects and
declared to be in accord with "the new spirit."
Against independent unionism of any kind, the steel indus-
try offered an almost solid front. Efforts by the Federation
of Labor to organize the rubber industry also encountered re-
520 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
sistance and collapsed. Attempts to introduce independent
collective bargaining in the automobile industry precipitated
sharp conflicts, involving management, the American Feder-
ation of Labor, independent industrial unions, and the Gov-
ernment. The upshot under Section 7 a was agitation and
confusion. From its inception the automobile industry had
been marked by seasonal and cyclical fluctuations, insecurity
of employment, low annual earnings despite high daily wages
in certain divisions, speed-up, espionage, and the rapid dis-
placement of workers at an early age ; but experiments in
unionization under the auspices of the Recovery Act effected
few material changes in the employment policies of the
industry.
To some extent, certainly, the ineffectiveness of projects
for the mass organization of industrial unions under Section
7 a was due to the policy pursued by the American Federa-
tion of Labor. The executive council of the Federation an-
nounced in 1934 that it would "encourage whatever form of
organization seemed best suited to meet the situation and
requirements of the mass production workers." Yet in
practice the chief officer, William Green, insisted that or-
ganizers in the field must respect the rights and claims of
craft unions already affiliated with the Federation. Strictly
interpreted, his decree meant that when the workers in a
plant were organized, they must be divided into as many
separate unions as there were crafts represented in the con-
cern, with the non-craft members as an appendix or the main
body, according to the nature of the industry. Such was the
theory. In practice, as organization proceeded under federal
supervision, leaders of craft unions, in their struggle for in-
creased membership, repeatedly clashed with leaders of in-
dustrial unionism. For the anticipated unity was thus sub-
stituted internal divisions among the workers themselves.
Collective bargaining under Section *ja did not always
mean, therefore, that a representative of labor sat down at
the table with management and in conciliation arranged a
schedule of hours and wages for all the grades and types of
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 521
workers employed "in and around" the plant. On the con-
trary, it was frequently a multiple operation in which the
heads of all the crafts represented in the industry partici-
pated ; and if any one of the crafts was dissatisfied with the
settlement^ it might refuse to accept the proffered terms.
Although a small minority, a single craft might order a strike
after all the other labor bargainers had accepted the pro-
posed contract. In fact jurisdictional warfare among unions
themselves was a large part of the labor strife of the time.
Frequently managers of good-will, prepared to arrive at a
general peace, were baffled by divisions within the ranks of
labor. At the same time managers opposed to independent
unions welcomed the opportunity to divide and rule and to
represent all independent unionism as "utterly irresponsi-
ble." Nor could the most faithful supporters of organized
labor deny the occasional truth of such charges. In the con-
fusion so engendered, augmented by the use of espionage and
intimidation on the part of many large employers, the public
and the politicians found it hard to take their bearings.
Nevertheless, under the National Industrial Recovery Act,
the organization of labor was definitely stimulated, the
membership of the American Federation rose from approxi-
mately 2,126,000 in 1933 to more than three million in 1935
and then the Act was declared unconstitutional by the
Supreme Court.
Notwithstanding the difficulties encountered under the
federal intervention provided by Section 7 a y labor leaders
were generally agreed that they must demand new legislation
of a similar nature after the Supreme Court had invalidated
the Recovery Act. They believed that it would strengthen
their position as against company unions formed, guided,
and dominated by employers, against managerial espionage,
against the intervention of company and local police forces
sometimes armed with machine guns and tear gas. In re-
sponse to their arguments and to other considerations, partly
522 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
political, Congress passed the Labor Relations Act, in 1935,
to which was given the name of its leading champion. Sena-
tor Robert Wagner. The Wagner Act reasserted the princi-
ple of collective bargaining in industry, assured to labor the
right to be represented by agents of its own choosing, and
forbade employers to interfere with the freedom of organizing
and holding elections in industry. The general task of super-
vising the enforcement of the law was entrusted to the
National Labor Relations Board, endowed with power to
hear complaints against violations of the Act, to investigate,
to scrutinize elections within industries, to issue orders, and
to defend cases appealed to the federal courts of proper
jurisdiction. Immediately contested by employers, the
Wagner Act was carried before the Supreme Court of the
United States; and, shortly after Roosevelt had launched
his campaign for the reorganization of the judiciary, it was
sustained, in the spring of 1937. At last industrial workers
had something that really looked like a "Magna Carta,"
offering federal intervention to guarantee their right to or-
ganize and hold elections for the determination of leadership
and policy.
Although called by its foes "a radical departure" and
"revolutionary," the Wagner Labor Act was, in fact, an ex-
tension of principles incorporated in older legislation, state
and federal. The right of collective bargaining had long been
recognized both by state and federal law and by practice.
Again and again, disputes within unions over elections and
control had been submitted to courts for adjudication. The
Norris-La Guardia Anti-injunction Act of 1932, expanding
the terms of the Clayton Act of 1916, had sought to protect
organized labor against the free use of injunctions in labor
disputes, against "yellow dog" contracts penalizing union
members, and against other employer practices interfering
with the formation and conduct of independent trade unions.
These doctrines the Wagner Act elaborated by specifications.
Reliance upon the courts for enforcement was now supple-
mented by the creation of a lay agency for administrative
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 523
supervision the National Labor Relations Board, ap-
pointed by the President by and with the advice and consent
of the Senate.
While federal legislation in support of collective bargain-
ing was by no means a novel feature of the depression, taken
in connection with the circumstances of the depression it
gave impetus to the labor movement. Workers in regions
that had once been the scenes of union outlawry now had a
larger sense of freedom even in the coal and iron districts
of Pennsylvania black with soot, livid with the memories of
Homestead and 1892. "A man can talk in Homestead,"
wrote John A. Fitch, a close student of labor history, in Feb-
ruary, 1936. The very managers who had been accustomed
for twenty-five years to discharging men for joining a union
now began to use a new labor language. The mood of the
country seemed altered. "Times have changed," explained
Mr. Fitch. "New laws are on the statute books, many of
them of a character that could never have been anticipated.
WeVe had a 7 a and now we have the Wagner law both of
which in effect prohibit discharging men for joining unions.
We are not lawbreakers. We go along with the government.
. . . These laws and other things have created a great
nation-wide sentiment about the right to collective bargain-
ing and the idea that a working man has a right to join a
union has gained widespread currency." With exuberance,
some labor organizers inscribed on banners the words : "Pres-
ident Roosevelt wants you to join a union." Such was the
spirit of the new day.
A "changed" attitude also seemed to characterize many
great business executives. They, too, expressed a desire "to
go along with the government." In the spring of 1933 they
had hurried to Washington and urged the President to as-
sume large powers in guiding the country out of the economic
morass into which they had helped to lead it. If to many of
them the "going along" meant clamping company unions
upon their employees, while secretly resorting to industrial
espionage, business leaders in general did not openly defy
524 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
the government's officials as they had often defied labor
organizers in times past. Some of them turned to the federal
courts, to be sure, in the hope and expectation that the col-
lective bargaining statutes would be declared unconstitu-
tional ; but they did not hire "finks'* and "undercover men"
for the express purpose of beating up and driving out of
town representatives of the Department of Labor or agents
of the various labor relations boards created under the Re-
covery Act and the Wagner Act. Usually the most anti-
union manager, devoid of all respect for a labor delegate,
had some respect for that part of the law which was repre-
sented by government officials and enforced in some measure
at least. Even the hatred of vigilantes for labor leaders was
not fierce enough to inspire the lynching of men and women
who came as public representatives in the name of federal
authority, to make inquiries, hold hearings, and supervise
labor elections sanctioned by law.
Under the chairmanship of Joseph Warren Madden, the
National Relations Board assumed one of the most difficult
tasks ever undertaken by any agency of American govern-
ment and, if the actions of federal courts in upholding its
decisions formed criteria of judgment, it discharged its obli-
gations with a judicial temper scarcely to be expected in the
circumstances. It had not gone far, however, when it ran
into a tempest of criticism. Of necessity, the Board was
plunged into the controversy between craft unions and indus-
trial unions and had to make rulings one way or the other on
the basis of votes cast by the rank and file. Very soon the
directors of the American Federation of Labor began to
insist that their type of unionism was receiving "unfair"
treatment from the Board and, besides assailing it in strong
language, they demanded a revision of the Wagner Labor
Relations Act. The Board was also attacked by employers ;
and conservative members of Congress, after demanding an
investigation of its proceedings in vain, called for a drastic
modification of the law under which it operated. Apparently
disturbed by this conflict, Roosevelt ordered careful studies
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 525
made of labor relations in England and Sweden, while de-
fending the general course pursued by the Board in the en-
forcement of the law. As the time drew near for the conven-
ing of Congress in 1939, signs multiplied to the effect that an
effort would be made to amend the Act.
In anticipation of the coming contest, the editors of the
Fortune magazine, in the autumn of 1938, made a survey of
the operations under the law and reached the conclusion that
most of the proposed changes lay against collective bargain-
ing itself. Usually the alterations suggested were not based
on a temperate study of the law and the actual proceedings
of the Board. Fortune's analysis of the controverted inter-
union cases dispelled the contention that the Committee for
Industrial Organization had been favored over the American
Federation of Labor. Warning the public against a rush to
tear open the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the editors said :
"The balance is a critical one. And nothing can so easily
upset the balance as confusion concerning the motives and
purposes involved."
Whether as a consequence of the new federal legislation or
as another incident in a long stream of economic and intellec-
tual tendencies, a terrific clash among labor leaders and within
the ranks of industrial workers tore into the labor system and
intensified the conflict of other interests in America. Labor
leaders had not always seen eye to eye on organization and
its objectives. There had been in times past many insurgent
outbursts within the American labor movement and to one
manifestation the newest upheaval was intimately related.
After the Knights of Labor had been undermined and sup-
planted by the Federation of Labor, disputes had continued
between the advocates of organization by crafts and the
advocates of organization by specific industries between
craft unionism and industrial unionism. Owing to the very
nature of certain industries where the output was the product
of many hands, skilled and unskilled, such as mining and
526 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
automobile manufacturing, the idea of one all-embracing
union seemed to be fitting and was attractive to organizers
and workers. But from the beginning industrial unionists
experienced opposition when they sought to penetrate the
entire labor movement, carrying into practice their ideal of
the One Big Union.
Despite many historic reverses, they attempted it again on
a large scale in the throes of the depression ; and over this
issue, in part, the labor movement was now ripped wide open.
Craft unionists appealed to history in defense of their posi-
tion and listed the failures of industrial unionism as con-
trasted with the successes of craft unionism. But the indus-
trial unionists could not be silenced by history already made ;
they appealed to contemporary " facts," such as the non-
craft character of mass production industries, the failure of
craft unionists to organize more than a ninth or tenth of the
industrial workers, and the inability of such limited unions
to deal effectively with what John L. Lewis, head of the
United Mine Workers, called "giant combinations of capi-
tal." Again political and industrial events were sharpening
the struggle within the sphere of labor organization and
giving it the quality of a life-and-death combat.
Between the rise of the American Federation of Labor
near the close of the nineteenth century and the great depres-
sion, marked by the rush of labor to unionism after 1933, the
two types of organizations had managed to adjust their dis-
putes. For years, a large proportion of the Federation's
members had belonged to unions primarily industrial in
character, such as the United Mine Workers, composed of
"all men employed in and around the coal mines, regardless
of their skill or calling." Meanwhile mass production indus-
tries, such as the steel, rubber, automobile, and cement in-
dustries, had been occupying an ever larger share of national
economy. Responding to new tendencies, the upswing of the
Federation's membership after 1933 came in the industrial
unions rather than in the craft organizations. Figures were
confused but careful estimates gave the crafts a thirteen per
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 527
cent increase in membership and the industrial unions a rise
of more than one hundred per cent. At all events the balance
of power within the Federation was moving from the old
center.
Unmistakable evidences of the shift appeared at the San
Francisco convention of the Federation in 1934. In response
to a vociferous demand, the convention adopted a resolution
approving "vertical," or industrial, unionism in basic in-
dustries and directing the executive council to charter unions
among the automobile, aluminum, and cement workers,
"and other mass production and miscellaneous industries."
As a result of this decision industrial unionists expected a
more active campaign on the part of Federation officials to
organize the mass production workers. Their expectations
were not fulfilled.
When the Federation's convention assembled at Atlantic
City in the following year, 1935, its industrial-union bloc
presented a series of resolutions calling for the establishment
of more industrial unions in specified industries and for
modifications in the constitution of national unions already
in existence. In support of these propositions, John L. Lewis
pointed out that, after twenty-five years of effort, the craft
unionists had failed to organize the thirty-six million unor-
ganized workers in the country and could not present a solid
front to organized industry. On the other side, industrial
unionism was decried as "an exotic importation of groups
who do not believe in the American Federation of Labor."
Many interests and personalities were involved and the
debate was ferocious. The proposals of the industrial union-
ists were forcefully presented but, in the end, were rejected
by a majority of about three to two.
Yet the victory for craft unionism at Atlantic City was
not unmitigated. The opposition minority was large and
apparently growing. Uncompromising words were spoken.
The executive committee of the Federation was charged with
making "raids" on industrial unions and disrupting them by
pulling out craftsmen for separate organizations ; with block-
528 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
ing effective organizations in great industries, such as radio,
rubber, steel, tin, and iron ; and with gross neglect of organ-
ization work in the aluminum, cement, gas, coke, and other
industries. It was accused of sabotaging the resolutions
adopted at San Francisco and deliberately opposing the only
type of unionism calculated to reach the huge body of unor-
ganized workers. To the indictment equally curt replies
were made ; sponsors of craft unionism accused the leaders of
industrial unionism of being agents of an alien and disruptive
communism.
On its face the minority report presented at the Atlantic
City Convention by Charles Howard of the Typographical
Union seemed reasonable enough. It read: "We declare the
time has arrived when common sense demands that the
organization policies of the American Federation of Labor
must be moulded to meet present day demands. In the great
mass production industries and in those in which the workers
are composite mechanics, specialized and engaged upon
classes of work which do not fully qualify them for craft union
membership, industrial organization is the only solution/'
But, mild as it was, the proposal warmed the memories of old
conflicts over "one big union'' and "revolutionary union-
ism." It defied the leadership of the craft executives well
entrenched in official positions the "bureaucrats" of the
labor movement as they were called by the opposition. Thus
a contest over organizing principles became an irrepressible
contest for power in the labor world and in the larger
sphere of politics and culture where labor exerted decisive
influences. This was no mere quarrel among kites and crows.
It was a clash of powerful personalities, and, owing to the
magnitude of the interests now at stake, the outcome of the
struggle might well condition or determine fundamental
phases of American civilization.
Outvoted at the Atlantic City convention, leaders of the
industrial-union bloc held a meeting in Washington Novem-
ber 9, 1935, and there formed a Committee for Industrial
Organization under the direction of John L. Lewis. The
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 529
purpose of the Committee was "to encourage and promote
the organization of workers in the mass production and unor-
ganized industries of the nation and affiliation with the
American Federation of Labor." In this declaration of
purpose there was no revolutionary fire, no communism ;
there was not even a breach with the Federation. In effect it
merely said that, since the Federation already embraced
industrial unions and endorsed the formation of more indus-
trial unions, the Committee proposed to perform the function
which the executive committee of the Federation had failed
to discharge.
Alarmed none the less by this aggressive organizing force,
William Green warned the members of the Committee
against factionalism in the labor ranks. In reply the Com-
mittee cited precedents for its action in the history of the
Federation itself, denied any intention of raiding craft
unions, and declared its desire to bring new unions into the
Federation. At the same time it reaffirmed its resolve. John
L. Lewis crisply informed William Green that rather than
abandon the rights of thirty million workers his organization
would leave the Federation if necessary to achieve this essen-
tial object of all organized labor. Claiming to be within the
constitution and laws of the Federation to which its members
belonged, the Committee took up the work of organization
with an energy unexampled in the history of the American
labor movement.
Fearing that the growth of industrial unions within the
Federation might soon overwhelm by numerical strength the
historic dominance enjoyed by the crafts, the executive
council, in 1936, called upon the industrial unions of the
Committee for Industrial Organization to defend themselves
against a proposed order for their dissolution. Failing to
receive a satisfactory answer the council "suspended" those
unions ten in all, with a membership of approximately a
million workers. On the argument that only a convention of
the Federation, not an executive body, could suspend unions,
the council turned its back. It could see its fate without a
530 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE ^
diagram : if the rate of growth among industrial unions within
the Federation continued, the craft unions would shortly be
outvoted in the convention and on that day leaders of the
industrial type would supplant the existing official hierarchy.
Such seemed to be the tendency of events. At any rate the
executive council decided to expel nearly one-third of the
unionists from the Federation rather than countenance the
struggle within the general organization. A wide cleavage
was made in the American labor movement.
Hitherto when unions and labor leaders had been expelled
from the Federation., the deed had been done rather quietly
and the general public had paid little attention. In 1936,
however, the heat engendered produced an explosion and,
owing to the stresses and strains of the depression, the rever-
berations were felt throughout American economy. There
was, in other words, a conjuncture of circumstance and per-
sonalities that could not be blotted out by an executive decree
from the council of the Federation. Against the Federation-
ists, such as William Green, Matthew Woll, John Frey, and
William Hutchinson, seasoned and experienced, were now
pitted John L, Lewis, David Dubinsky, Sidney Hillman,
Philip Murray, Homer Martin, and other organizers, also
strong in character and ingenious in negotiation. These
opponents were not theoreticians or dialecticians of the type
that had often been suppressed on the floor of the Federa-
tion's conventions. They were not Marxists arguing fine
points up in the air. They were men of formidable strength
with their feet on the ground. They represented unions
already numerically powerful. They were social forces in-
carnate and dynamic. Their collision with the stalwarts of
the Federation was no by-play. It was head on, and efforts
at compromise failed to reduce the battle to a tea party.
The chairman of the Committee for Industrial Organiza-
tion, John Llewellyn Lewis, was a veritable son of the
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 531
American industrial conflict. Born in Iowa in 1880, gradu-
ated from the public schools into coal mines, where his
ancestors for generations had toiled, early drawn into union-
izing efforts, rising rapidly as an organizer, Lewis became the
head of the United Mine Workers in 1919. In that official
position he wound his way through internecine strife, played
the game of politics in the fold of the Republican party, used
his big fists on more than one occasion, suppressed Red the-
orists, learned and practiced both the fierce and the subtle
arts of negotiation and domination. Yet in the process he
received an education in the higher learning of the most
realistic sort. No one in a professor's chair or in any lofty
position of government or business was able to give a calmer
or more penetrating analysis of the structure and course
of American economy its manufacturing and mining in-
dustry, the transportation business, and the financing of
corporate enterprise. Few, if any, among his contemporaries,
had a keener appreciation of the perils in the way of labor
organization or a wider comprehension of its role in civiliza-
tion. While he could deliver orations on the platform and
pound the table at conferences, he could keep his temper in
the presence of a tumult when that was the better part of
valor, or sit with the repose of a philosopher at a private
discussion of things high and wide, asking questions quietly,
venturing conjectures, suggesting qualifications, exploring
probabilities, looking at all the angles of vision. Certainly
with any Lord of Creation, Lewis could hold his own, when
holding his own was an affair of knowledge, skill in argument,
and tenacity of will.
That Lewis was more than a mere bargainer over hours and
wages, that he had a broader view of politics and economics
and culture, was demonstrated in a broadcast which he made
on March 15, 1938. After summarizing the achievements of
the Committee for Industrial Organization in respect of
hours, wages, and civil rights, he discussed the state of the
nation to whose fate that of labor was linked. He drew atten-
tion to the millions unemployed. "Their numbers," he said,
532 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
"are steadily increasing, as the nation drifts with terrifying
and deadly sureness to the never, never realm of financial
bankruptcy, economic collapse, and human tragedy/' He
spoke of agriculture, banks, and business enterprises leaning
upon the Government, subsidized by it. And what of intelli-
gence and leadership in politics and economics? "In the
months that have ensued neither industry nor government
has come forth with constructive proposals designed to meet
the problems of the depression. The federal Congress, lack-
ing adequate or competent leadership, in continuous session
for months past, has failed to devise or enact a single statute
that would cause a glimmer of hope to penetrate the minds
of millions of despairing Americans."
While Congress floundered around, the Politicos and the
Lords of Creation fled from reason. "Meantime, cavilling
and confusion prevail, and our statesmen and those carrying
the responsibilities of the nation's manifold enterprises are
reviling each other with an anger and bitterness that defiles,
sears, and destroys. Meantime, the population suffers, and
a creeping paralysis progressively impairs its functions.
What is to be done ? Reason calls for a change. More ra-
tional policies are indicated. America is menaced, not by a
foreign foe that would storm its battlements, but by the
more fearful enemy of domestic strife and savagery. It is
time for Americans to cooperate. It is time for Americans to
recognize each other's right of individual existence. It is
time for capital to recognize labor's right to live and partici-
pate in the increased efficiency of industry and the bounties
of our national resources. It is time for labor to recognize the
right of capital to have a reasonable return upon its invest-
ment. It is time for statesmen to recognize their nation's
peril and to decide to cooperate with labor and industry, to
rationalize the nation's processes, and alleviate a nation's
distress. Labor is willing to cooperate now. Let the
leaders of the nation's business step forward. Let the states-
men of the nation do the same. Let the council of reason and
mutual toleration be convened. American leadership can
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 533
accomplish this task, and in so doing will preserve its gov-
ernmental structure and its democratic institutions." While
he did not give a bill of specifications in that speech, Lewis
made it plain that, in his judgment, an immense, rational,
and cooperative effort was necessary to halt the creeping
paralysis and set productive industry on its feet. That fail-
ing, trade unionism pure and simple could merely share the
impending calamities.
Behind the force of his personality Lewis had the force of
the United Mine Workers. He was the head of half a million
men already organized and operating as a mass union, not as
a congeries of craft unions. Its jurisdiction covered all
workers laboring "in and around the mine." Its growth had
been associated with one of the stormiest industries in the
United States, beset by crises, cut-throat competition, price
fluctuations, unemployment, and resistance to unionism.
In his miner's post of observation, Lewis had seen his organ-
ization expand with the demands of the world war and con-
tract in the post-war depression. He had witnessed the slight
recovery and then the burst of 1929. But in good times and
evil, he had fought to maintain miners' wages, to gain an
inch here or a yard there for the mining population, and had
gone through many a prolonged strike with that end in view.
In attempts to effect unionization in "captive mines" owned
by steel companies, he had secured contracts from those
giants, while other organizers had tried in vain to unite steel
workers. Rebellions against Lewis had broken out in the
miners' ranks. Yet he had managed to ride every wave and
he commanded greater loyalty and affection in 1936 than at
any time in his tempestuous career. As head of the Mine
Workers as well as the Committee for Industrial Organiza-
tion, Lewis was no petty disturber of Federation peace.
In other respects and in his own right, Sidney Hillman,
who was associated with Lewis in the Committee for Indus-
trial Organization, was also a labor statesman. In his think-
ing he too had gone beyond trade unionism "pure and
simple/' and was both analytical and philosophical in his
534 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
grasp of the social forces conditioning the labor movement.
At the same time he was a positive genius as an organizer and
an executive. In 1911 he had carried the United Garment
Workers forward along the line of mass unionism and had
effected with the management of great manufacturers, Hart,
Schaffner, and Marx, an arrangement providing for an in-
dustrial board composed of employer and employee repre-
sentatives authorized to make continuing adjustments under
general terms. Three years later, Hillman became the head
of the union which took the name of the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers, and assumed direction of its fortunes
fortunes marked by an expansion of membership, a peculiar
responsibility for industrial output, and a growth in social
activities.
Throughout his career, Sidney Hillman had studied the
men's clothing industry in which his union operated and had
conceived unionism as a way of life, not merely as a pecuniary
enterprise. The slogan " bread and roses/' associated with
the Amalgamated, if it sounded peculiar to business circles
and garden clubs, expressed the union's desire for the good
life. The son of a Lithuanian wool merchant, Hillman had
come to the United States at the age of twenty and started
work in a Chicago clothing factory at $7 a week. But he had
lived at the Hull House and had taken advantage of its rare
opportunities for training in languages, the arts, and social
democracy.
When he entered upon unionizing activities, Hillman
" shattered union precedents" and continued in that path.
He insisted that unions should understand the state of indus-
try, consider its problems of production and marketing, and
seek to promote efficiency in its operations. Under his leader-
ship the Amalgamated also assumed responsibility for the
welfare of its members, even to the length of embarking upon
housing projects. It undertook economic research, employed
statisticians, often showed managers how to cut costs and
maintain wage scales, and managed a bank of its own.
Stranger still, it frequently came to the aid of embarrassed
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 535
employers and lent them money from the union's treasury to
form a bridge over hard times and keep up the rate of employ-
ment. By sheer force of intellect and moral courage, Hillman
could accomplish results where others merely raged. He was
a formidable member of the Committee for Industrial Organ-
ization, and the men's clothing workers formed a heavy sup-
porting arch.
More akin to Hillman than to Lewis in social background,
David Dubinsky represented still a third type of philosophy
and energy. Polish in origin, with a childhood spent in the
Ghetto of Brest-Li tovsk behind him, Dubinsky had migrated
to America at the age of nineteen and started on his American
way as a low-paid worker in a clothing shop on the east side
of New York. His career synchronized with the rise of sweat-
shop workers to a position of decency and self-respect through
the organization of the International Ladies Garment Work-
ers Union. As low-paid laborers, Jews had not found the
doors of craft unions wide open for them. They had been
compelled to develop their own organization and gain nego-
tiating strength through their own solidarity. Although
associated with the American Federation of Labor, the
Garment Workers, in their struggle for a share in the bene-
fits of civilization, had gone beyond mere wage and hour
bargaining. Under the leadership of such indefatigable
workers as Fannia Cohn, they had established an educational
program, built summer camps, founded institutions for
recreation, health, and mutual aid, and experimented with
dramatics and art. Economic democracy they were seeking
to enrich by social democracy. Trained in this school, a
leader of this association, Dubinsky combined with hard-
headedness in organizing activities an appreciation of the
social and political implications connected with labor activi-
ties.
Men of such calibre as Lewis, Hillman, and Dubinsky were
commanding forces. When they set out to organize, organ-
536 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
ization moved, backed by the miners and garment workers
nearly a million strong. With unprecedented swiftness, the
campaign swept into its train, through the strategy of the
Committee for Industrial Organization, casual laborers,
transport workers, white-collar employees ranging from
clerks and stenographers to engineers, college professors, and
journalists, and every type of worker in the mass production
industries. Entering plants where company unions seemed
entrenched, where in some cases independent unions had
been crushed again and again, organizers carried strong-
hold after stronghold. In February, 1937, the Committee
" breached the united front of the basic industries in winning
a contract with the General Motors Corporation/' hitherto
an adroit and indomitable foe. Checkmated by Henry Ford,
the Committee made encircling movements by applying
propaganda and by invoking federal aid under the National
Labor Relations Board which compelled him to present his
claims for exemption to the agencies of the law.
In the course of its advance the Committee moved on
"Big Steel/' with Homestead, the old battleground, as a
center of activity. There, more than forty years before, the
secretary of the Carnegie Company had issued the employers*
declaration of independence ; now the new labor leaders pro-
claimed theirs. "The lords of steel. . . ." ran their mani-
festo, a have set up company unions. They have sent among
us swarms of stool-pigeons. They have kept among us
armies of company gunmen. Today we do solemnly declare
our independence. We shall exercise our inalienable rights
to organize into a great industrial union, banded together
with all our fellow steel workers. In support of this declara-
tion, we mutually pledge to each other our steadfast purposes
as union men, our honor, and our very lives." The conflict
had been revived. Seven men in it had just lost their lives*
When the reading of the declaration was finished, the
crowd of auditors marched to the graves of the dead and there
pledged themselves to the cause of labor. All through the
steel districts flew the news and then it produced a national
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 537
sensation. While the country was watching the outcome with
anxiety, "Big Steel" came to terms with industrial unionism
in March, 1937 ; but "Little Steel/' personified in its spokes-
man, Tom Girdler of the Republic Steel Company, refused to
sign on the dotted line and presented a solid front of resist-
ance. For the moment the tide stood still, as the economic
recession gave caution to the leaders on both sides of the line.
Even so, at the close of that year the Committee for Indus-
trial Organization boasted a membership of more than four
million workers.
The rapid rush to industrial unionism was accompanied by
new tactics, provoking and reflecting dissensions within the
movement itself as well as outside. Included in the novel
methods was the "sit-down" strike, evolved perhaps in
imitation of contemporary labor innovations in France.
Whatever the source of inspiration, the sit-down became
epidemic for a time in the United States, spreading alarm and
anger through middle class circles from coast to coast. It
was especially virulent among industries in which company
unions prevailed or where employers had refused to negotiate
with independent organized labor. In industrial plants,
hospitals, chain-stores, and other centers of work, men and
women, boys and girls, stopped machines or other transac-
tions and camped on the premises for the duration of the
struggle. Instead of marching out and leaving their places
to be filled by strike-breakers, they stood where they were,
sat down, ate, and slept in the quarters of their employers.
In many establishments strikers prepared for a siege by form-
ing broom and dusting brigades to keep the rooms clean;
they organized classes for instruction in various branches of
learning, conducted by their better educated associates. In
one store, religious services were held on a Sunday and
prayers offered. Food and other supplies were passed through
the lines by relatives and sympathizers and efforts of the
police to dispossess the occupants jeopardized limbs or lives
for everybody concerned.
To owners of property, their legal advisers, and guardians
538 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
of law and order, sit-down operations presented knotty
problems. As the result of a long historic struggle, finding
expression in legislation and judicial reasoning, certain rights
in connection with labor organization and collective bargain-
ing had been won, such as the right to form trade unions for
the purpose of raising wages, to strike in relation to that
purpose, and to picket, subject to specific and general limita-
tions. None of these rights, however, had been exercised
within the premises of employers. Nor was there any overt
threat to property relations in the 'Vacation/' occasionally
used as a bargaining device, that is, in the sudden stoppage of
work by remaining away from the place of employment.
Sabotage in the form of breaking machines or putting sand
in gear-boxes had been clearly an attack on property, unlaw-
ful from the beginning and later stigmatized as criminal.
But the sit-down did not fit into established legal categories
of any kind. Under the existing interpretation of law it was
an illegal occupation of premises in defiance of the owners
and in many places the police used tear gas and force to eject
the occupants. In other places, where it was endured by
owners and proved effective, its legality was not conceded.
Since the sit-down strike was frequently a spontaneous com-
bustion, even labor leaders shrank from assuming official
responsibility for it, at least in such cases, although they
sometimes took advantage of it to press for negotiations and
terms. Some attempts were being made to formulate legal
rights for workers who held " their places " when the epidemic
died away almost as quickly as it had flared up.
Had it proceeded alone as a manifestation of labor unrest,
the industrial-union movement might have immediately
provoked a counter movement tightly solidified and able to
use force against it without the formal restraints of law. But
it did not proceed alone. Exponents of the "normal''
countervailing opinion were shaken by doubts of their own
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 539
virtue as a result of disclosures at congressional hearings
paralleling this labor advance disclosures which enlight-
ened the public with respect to munitioneering, the manipu-
lations of railways by banking cliques, and the employment
of spies, private gunmen, fomenters of false labor troubles,
and the assemblage of arsenals at plants by corporations high
and low in the scale of Respectability. As these sordid fea-
tures were unfolded at the congressional hearings, great
metropolitan dailies carried vivid accounts for those who ran
to read. Reporters began to fret over their diverse obligations
to owners, publishers, editors, and the people at large, and to
divulge secrets of their trade. Disputes between editors and
publishers on the one side and the makers of so-called "ob-
jective news" on the other, the organization of the News-
paper Guild among journalists, and a strike against the
Hearst press in Seattle with its anti-labor policy, con-
tributed to the unsettling and churning of public opinion.
Into this ferment of facts and opinions, professional propa-
gandists, known as public relations counselors, and, more
openly, radio announcers flung their agitations. Seeing an
opportunity to fish in troubled waters, many communists
thrust their activities into industrial unionism. Their num-
ber was small in relation to the total membership of unions
under the Committee for Industrial Organization; their
doctrinal creed was disavowed by its leadership to which
communist proclivities could not be justly charged. But
since communists were interested in promoting class conflicts
or taking advantage of them, they pushed into the limelight
and made disturbances incommensurate with their numerical
strength. Their very presence in industrial unionism, how-
ever, furnished the pretext for opponents of that movement
to brand it -as "Red/' Once more leaders in the work of
labor organization were compelled, as they had been again
and again in American history, to meet charges of revolu-
tionary, alien radicalism while they pressed forward to im-
prove labor conditions against hostile interests on the side of
ownership and management.
540 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Yet the communists themselves did not in truth present a
united front toward the labor movement in America. Though
capitalist ideologues and conservative craftsmen, lumping the
communists all together, did their best to discredit the Com-
mittee for Industrial Organization as communist in intention
and leadership, really the communists were as divided on
principle and tactics as the labor movement itself. The
division revolved around the issue of Stalin against Trotzky
communism within Russia, for the time being at least, as
against world revolution and world communism in one vast
conflagration and reconstruction.
This controversy added inflammatory elements to the
strife between capital and labor in the United States. De-
spising theStalinite wing of communism with the intensity of
disillusionment following utter confidence in Utopia, Trotz-
kyites took delight in pointing out and exaggerating the
communistic element in the industrial unions. A small
fraction themselves, they would have wielded slight influence
had it not been for the energy of the general opposition riding
full tilt against the Committee. Riding with it, they ob-
tained for their testimony and for their " revelations'* a
degree of publicity that could not have been won otherwise,
In this state of affairs their writings and agitations gave the
press an opportunity to whip up resentment against the only
form of unionism that, in the nature of mass production,
could offer any method of accomplishing the wholesale organ-
ization of labor in the United States.
From one point of view, of course, the ebullition of labor
unrest seemed to the worried upper classes like a volcanic
eruption, without much rhyme or reason, offering no ad-
vantages even to labor. Strikers clashed with the police and
state troopers. Heads were cracked and bodies broken. Men
and women marching toward the industrial plants were shot
down in their tracks. Sit-downers were ousted by gusts of
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 541
poison gas. While dual unionism was splitting the workers
into warring camps, stevedores, cooks, waiters, clerical work-
ers, teachers, government employees, nurses, and doctors
were making common cause with miners, automobile workers,
actors, and reporters. On labor days, instead of the former
united front on parade, there were now sometimes two fronts
and two parades in many cities, with hooting and jeering on
the side lines. Irresponsible strikers, not amenable to any
union discipline, broke contracts signed by their representa-
tives and business management. In their haste to avoid the
impacts of industrial unionism, employers raced to make
terms with the American Federation of Labor and praised
where they had once damned. Leaders in the two divisions
of labor sniped at one another amid the applause of their
respective supporters and their common enemies. Then as a
climax to all the uproar came the business recession of 1937.
Men and women who had recently sat down in plants now sat
down outside in idleness - or marched on relief agencies
and Works Progress officials with demands for "work or
bread." With an impatience fanned by the conflict between
the Committee for Industrial Organization and the manage-
ment of "Little Steel," President Roosevelt exclaimed:
*' A plague on both your houses !"
If, in the circumstances, employers could view with pleas-
ure the wide-open split of the American labor movement,
politicians as the brokers and mediators in government were
denied the privileges of such a complacent attitude. In 1936
organized labor had penetrated politics with unusual force.
While the Lords of Creation were pouring hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars into the Republican war chest, the Commit-
tee for Industrial Organization tossed more than half a
million into the Democratic fund. Under the auspices of
labor's Non-partisan League, sponsored for a time by both
wings of the labor movement, Republicans and Democrats
were pitted in a rivalry for "the labor vote." In the state of
New York an independent organization calling itself the
American Labor Party entered the field and threw its sup-
542 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
port to the Democratic side in national affairs, while insisting
on separate representation in local affairs. The size of its
vote was surprising, even a source of anxiety, to " the old-line
politicos." In the autumn of 1937 the American Labor Party
spurned the Democratic machine in New York City, backed
Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, a nominal Republican, for re-
election, and helped to rout Tammany Hall, blessed against
such a fate by Postmaster General Farley. Repercussions
were felt in all the industrial states already rent by labor
agitations. John L. Lewis supported a labor candidate for
governor in the Democratic primaries of Pennsylvania and,
when this move was unsuccessful, cast about for another
way to make the force of labor felt in the politics of that key
state. As Democrats and Republicans girded themselves for
coming congressional elections, the hopes of labor rose. Al-
though the substantial gains made by the Republicans were
interpreted by such outstanding friends of labor as Senator
Burton K. Wheeler to mean a set-back, the future was still
open.
Dependent in a considerable measure upon the labor vote
in his struggle against the conservatives in his own party and
against the possible revival of the Republican organization,
President Roosevelt found himself in a dilemma. In an effort
to hold things in balance, he sought to keep on good terms
with both wings of the labor movement the officials of the
craftsmen and the officials of the industrial unionists. An
offense to either side might swing it into the Republican
camp. While he kept his channels of communication free, his
Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, whose branch of gov-
ernment could be called in the circumstances a Department
of Domestic Warfare, tried to confine the conflict within the
bounds of negotiation. A representative of the Department
attended the national labor conventions in 1938 to urge a
compromise in the interests of unity, and Secretary Perkins
continued to pursue the policy of conciliation.
All in vain, apparently. Committees appointed by the two
labor organizations could not arrive at an agreement and
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 543
politicians were equally helpless. It seemed as if no formula
could permanently resolve the contradiction between craft
unionism and industrial unionism. Craft unionism, embrac-
ing "the aristocracy" of high-paid labor and depending for
existence upon a certain supremacy over skilled trades, was
necessarily limited in its range and its possible membership.
Reaching out for the whole body of workers, some thirty-six
million strong, industrial unionism claimed to be "the democ-
racy of labor/' Asserting its claim to permanence, the Com-
mittee for Industrial Organization without the cooperation
of Dubinsky and the Ladies Garment Workers Union
changed itself into the Congress of Industrial Organizations
at a convention held late in 1938, and adopted a regular
constitution for the new association of industrial unions.
In keeping with the urbanization of economy which ac-
companied the apparently illimitable expansion of machine
industry, the swift advance of industrial unionism, with its
strikes, sit-downs, and social turmoil, almost monopolized
the attention of that portion of society given to imagining
itself the whole of society. Yet events no less crucial for that
society were taking place in another division of labor labor
on the land. Tilling the soil had continued through all the
ages of human history to bring forth some kind of livelihood
whatever the varying fortunes of politics, industry, and com-
merce. As Miriam Beard pointed out, near the conclusion
of her History of the Business Man, dealing with his role in
more than forty centuries, "men suffered on the land but
survived ; while in the cities, they flourished and faded."
Craftsmen in the metropolis of Rome lost their occupations
in the dying city ; slaves once flogged to labor on the lati-
fundia kept on tilling the earth as it slipped from the hands
of their masters who were sinking into dissolution and death.
Until the great modern illusion of urbanism, for its brief span,
conquered thought, statesmen, poets, and agronomists had
544 AMERICA IN MWPASSAGE
regarded the condition of agriculture the distribution of
the land among yeomen and the rewards of labor on the soil
as an indubitable barometer of social security and stabil-
ity.
Once more, after the severe contraction of capitalism be-
came indisputable even to its economists, and especially after
the great debacle of 1929 enfeebled the centers of industry
and commerce, concern about agriculture, or rather about
the buying power of those that labored in the earth, rose in
the consideration of all who had capacity for consideration.
This revival of concern found expression in the Agricultural
Adjustment Act of 1933 and kindred legislation. But on the
frank confession of the Secretary of Agriculture, federal
activity affected primarily "the top third of the farmers in
the country," that is, principally landowners great and small,
in the upper ranges of well-being. If it saved a multitude
from foreclosure and ruin, it conferred few benefits, often
personal losses, on tenants, share-croppers, migratory work-
ers, and field laborers, in the much-advertised effort to
establish "parity between agriculture and industry."
In the midst of their deprivations the disinherited made
their woes heard. They held meetings and protested. They
organized unions and struck against the conditions of tenure
and labor. At that point their activities were countered by
acts of vigilante terrorism in rural regions, raising a noise that
reached the White House. Late in 1936 President Roosevelt
responded by creating a Committee on Tenancy authorized
to inquire into the facts of the case and report remedial
measures. With the caution of understatement he re-
marked: "The rapid increase of tenant farmers during the
past half century is significant evidence that we have fallen
far short of achieving the traditional American ideal of
owner operated farms/'
The findings of the President's Committee, expressed in
mathematical language, described an economic tendency of
sinister import not only for working families on the land but
also for the upper circles of the American system. Compre-
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 545
hended in human terms, the naked facts depicted a widening
area of servitude and misery. " For the past forty-five years/'
the Committee stated, "the entire period for which we have
statistics on land tenure, there has been a continuous and
marked decrease in the proportion of operating owners and
an accompanying increase in the proportion of tenants.
Tenancy has increased from twenty-five per cent of all farm-
ers in 1880 to forty-two per cent in 1935. " In the decade from
1920 to 1930 the number of tenant farms rose while the total
number of operated farms actually fell. Estimated in terms
of monetary value, forty-seven per cent of the land was tilled
by tenants or wage laborers. In some of the states four-fifths
of the equity in the land was in the hands of landlords and
mortgage holders, and only one-fifth in the possession of
operating farmers.
In this record of increasing economic degradation on the
soil, there was just one little countervailing fact : the pro-
portion of tenancy declined slightly between 1930 and 1935.
Farm owning seemed to be on a rise, if a trivial rise. But
Rupert Vance entertained doubts. It was true, he admitted,
that in the sixteen states of the South a twelve per cent rise
in owners had occurred in the period, to offset the growth of
tenancy, but "the increase was entirely among white owners
with small farms, and most of the gains were in rough upland
areas of poor soil. Over one-fourth of the new owners' farms
were located in the Appalachian counties of West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Tennessee where between 1930 and 1935
many unemployed miners had returned to their submarginal
farms. This development can scarcely be regarded as ad-
vancing the course of farm ownership. The loss of tenant
farms occurred largely among the Negroes in the South/'
Degradation in the mining industry had driven workers back
to soil from which they had fled in despair. The slight down-
ward turn in the rising line of tenancy, on its face indicative
of better things, in truth carried evidences of additional
worse things.
Nor was the whole story told in the figures of tenancy.
546 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
In value, forty-seven per cent of the land of America was
tilled by non-owners. Bad as it was, that did not complete
the story. Nominal owners were saddled with mortgages,
amounting to eleven per cent of the total value of their
property. "The true ownership by farmers in the land they
till," Vance went on to say, "has reached its lowest point in
the Midwestern states of South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois
where it falls below thirty per cent. Next comes the Cotton
Belt where the farm operators' equity ranges between thirty
and forty per cent/' Land, buildings, machinery, stock, and
tools were mortgaged. On top of this pyramid stood short-
term debts usually representing money borrowed to pay
current expenses. In some states more than fifty per cent of
the farmers freeholders , and tenants combined had
such outstanding obligations, often secured by liens on com-
ing crops. The past, the present, and the future were bound
by debt servitudes.
By statistical studies another cheerful American dream was
shown to be deceptive. Armchair philosophers had fancied
that tenancy marked a rung in the "ladder of progress" up
which the stout young farm laborer climbed to ownership.
In many cases he had no doubt made that climb. But the
President's Committee on Tenancy dispelled the illusion as a
general proposition. Its examination of the facts "indicated
that in recent years movement from rung to rung has been
predominantly in the direction of descent rather than ascent.
It has also indicated an increasing tendency for the rungs of
the ladder to become bars forcing imprisonment in a fixed
social status from which it is increasingly difficult to escape."
While the motion upward slowed down, collateral motion
extended. Tenants wandered from farm to farm, from land-
lord to landlord, from region to region, on foot, in battered
wagons, or in dilapidated automobiles, commonly dragging
families with them, usually to conditions lower in the scale of
living than those from which they had fled. In the spring of
1935 more than one-third of all the tenant farmers in the
United States had gccupied their present land merely for one
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 547
year and in many areas the proportion exceeded fifty per
cent. White tenants moved more frequently than colored
tenants. Had it not been for laws binding debtors to their
landlords, the amount of nomadism would have been still
larger and the disintegration of communities and steady
habits by locomotion would have been intensified; for settle-
ment on the land did not always signify a poignant desire to
be there to pursue life, liberty, and happiness on the soil
under any and all circumstances.
Between the growth of farm tenancy and the restless
migration of tenants, on the one side, and the depletion of
the soil, on the other, immediate relations were evident.
Tenant occupancy of land did not last more than two years
on the average. Having no long-term interest in the soil he
tilled, and little or no capital, the tenant applied only those
fertilizers calculated to yield a quick cash crop. "The shorter
the operators' time on the farm, the higher the percentage of
crop-land in corn tends to be, and consequently the higher
the degree of erosion," reported the Iowa Experiment Station.
At the same time the transient tenant had slight if any in-
terest in improving the drainage system, the house, barns, or
other structures on his temporary holding. From start to
finish the tenant process worked for the wastage of the soil
and the degradation of human life in all its aspects. Recipro-
cally, in its turn, soil depletion "contributed materially to
the expansion of tenancy and the further impoverishment of
tenants and croppers.'* In the domain of legal relations, state
laws respecting the rights and obligations of landlords and
tenants provided terms and conditions that made for an
acceleration of the degradation. Considering for a moment
merely the material features of the situation, the President's
Committee reported that the jproper use and conservation
of the soil " require modification of our present system of land
tenure." The bottom was sliding out from under the Ameri-
can dream, with " the degradation of the democratic dogma."
Correlated with increasing tenancy and ceaseless migra-
tion were unsanitary dwellings, ill health, biological deteriora-
548 AMERICA IN MIDPA&SAGE
tion, meager education, and the disruption of community
ties. As the top soil washed out to sea, the physical and moral
resources of human beings were also depleted. Stark in the
figures, photographs, and reports stood this brutal reality.
When to migratory tenants in this plight were added farm
laborers and field "hands," the situation appeared even more
tragic. In 1930 more than one-fourth of all persons "gain-
fully" employed in agriculture were casual farm wage-
laborers; " hired men" who shared the life of the farm
families were a diminishing group. Having no permanent
abode, few comforts, deriving no immediate advantage from
the conservation of anything, deprived of all benefits arising
from insurance and unemployment legislation, farm laborers
had even a shorter shrift than farm tenants. "The situation
of the hand laborers in intensive agriculture is especially pre-
carious," laconically remarked the President's Committee,
That, at least, was not an overstatement. And the Com-
mittee concluded: "Approximately one farm family out of
four occupies a position in the nation's social and economic
structure that is precarious and should not be tolerated."
This, also, was a modest deduction from the facts pertaining
to tenants, croppers, laborers, families on submarginal land,
families on holdings of inadequate size, owner-families hope-
lessly in debt, and young people stranded at the bottom of
"the agricultural ladder."
Here was a field at least ready for agitation and agitation
sprang up abundantly. Tenants, croppers, and laborers
began to hold meetings and discuss their common problems.
They formed local organizations. The Southern Tenant
Farmers' Union was established and quickly reached out for
membership and contacts with organized industrial workers.
Calls went forth for modifications in land tenure, in the rights
of tenants and croppers, in the laws of debt and indenture.
Then this movement toward agricultural unionism evoked a
counter-movement among landlords and the collateral
property interests, industrial and agricultural. Families con-
nected with union activities were evicted from their shacks ;
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 549
the power of the police and county sheriffs was invoked;
vigilante groups fell upon "the agitators/' irrespective of
their sex, inflicted violence upon them, shot some, drove
others into neighboring counties or states, called them " Reds "
that last word of insult. Thus the frailty of the civil
liberties enjoyed by the landless and toolless was again and
again illustrated. Members of farm unions were blacklisted
or subjected to discrimination in the allotment of such oppor-
tunities as agriculture offered. Complaints soon reached
Washington. For a time they were little heeded by an acbnim
istration engaged in subsidizing the "upper third" of agri-
culture ; but eventually they awakened reverberations in the
Department of Agriculture and in the corridors of the
Capitol. The President's Committee on Tenancy took cbg-
nizance of the situation and Secretary Wallace went forth to
see with his own eyes the plight of those who cropped and
toiled in Southern fields.
Though tentative and conservative in the presence of
American folklore of property, the Committee on Tenancy
accepted the fact that the unlimited individual tenure pr<>
vided in the Homestead Act of i86a had been a complete
failure in large areas. Having made that confession, the Com-i
mi t tee advocated the purchase and leasing of land by a
federal corporation, the limitation of re-sale to farmers by
provisions checking speculation, the reservation of certain
rights to the public, and a guarantee of soil conservation
against exploitation. '
In other words, traditional freehold tenure under whidh
degradation had come about was to be restrained in the coml
munity and the national interest. Farming predominantly
commercial was to be supplemented by production for home
use, by cooperative enterprises, by the construction of camps
for migratory workers, by health services and education j
that is, public ownership, limited and conditional tenures:,
and cooperative undertakings were called for on an ''ex-
perimental footing. ' *
Changes in state legislation affecting tenures and landlord-
550 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
tenant relationships were also recommended. Restraints
were to be placed on land speculation a favorite outdoor
sport in America for several centuries. More adequate safe-
guards for civil liberty were to be maintained. All in all, the
report of the President's Committee, cautious as were all its
terms, was a revolutionary document when placed beside the
myth of the upstanding and independent American farmer
and his family. A. R. Mann, provost of Cornell University,
felt compelled to announce "strong reservations concerning
the proposal for federal landlordism contained in the report/'
: At this point in time, in the midpassage, all comprehending
thought, whether sophisticated or rude, took into account
the obtrusive fact that the future of American society, in-
cluding the form and process of government, was being con-
ditioned by the vicissitudes, activities, and ideas of urban and
rural labor ; that the forms of culture to come turned upon
the lot to be won by or assigned to labor. How profound was
the antagonism or affinity between farmers as owners, debt-
ors, tenants, or field hands on the one side, and labor in towns
and mining communities on the other ? How solid or fragile
was the unity of that sector of society called "the middle
class" which sought to be self-contained and so often came
into conflict with labor, rural or urban ? Was there anything
more than the demagogue's machinations in the monotonous
clashes between big business and little business, the "trust-'
busting" furor based upon the real or alleged opposition be-
tween the petty bourgeoisie and the plutocracy ? Amid the
swish and swash of contending groups, interests, and ideas,
where lay the center of gravity, if there was one ? Where was
the controlling gyroscope for dominating and giving stability
to the course of civilization ?
' To none of these questions were positive answers provided
by the tumult of events. Efforts to unite farmers of vari-
ous types with industrial workers continued unabated, but
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 551
immediate results were limited and future outcomes were
obscure. A party called " farmer-labor" surged to the top in
the government of a great state Minnesota. Across the
border in Wisconsin the Progressives, under La Follette
leadership, got , possession of the government, mainly on
appeals to farming and laboring groups, without assuming
the Minnesota label. In the House of Representatives in
1938, five of the nine members from Minnesota were enrolled
under the Farmer-Labor banner, with Paul J. Kvale and
John T. Bernard capably leading. Of the Wisconsin repre-
sentation, seven of the ten members were listed as Progres-
sives and two of them certainly, Thomas Amlie and Harry
Sautoff, were essentially farmer-labor in sympathies. In the
Senate both members from Minnesota, Henrik Shipstead and
Ernest Lundeen, belonged to the Farmer-Labor affiliation.
In the main, however, Senators and Representatives from
industrial constituencies, who manifested strong interest in
labor, belonged to the Democratic party. In the chamber
with the Progressive Senator from Wisconsin, Robert M.
La Follette, for example, sat a Democratic Senator from that
state, F. Ryan Duffy. In the Solid South, where conflicts
were almost entirely confined to the Democratic party,
Senators and Representatives of conservative, bent were
occasionally replaced by members more keenly alive to the
agitations of tenants, croppers, field laborers, and industrial
workers. From time to time blocs were formed in Congress
to promote or oppose certain types of legislation, and bar-
gains were driven between representatives from farming and
industrial districts to create majorities for particular bills.
But in these shifting configurations were few signs of per-
manence and unequivocal direction, and in the elections of
1938 labor and progressive forces suffered severe losses in
many sections of the country.
Through the history of labor in town and country in the
United States since the early years of the nineteenth century,
its spokesmen and philosophers had vainly sought unity in
some acceptable conception of economy. For a time near
AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
the middle of that century they thought they had ^found it
in the homestead movement, which brought agrarians and
even socialists into a common cause, and culminated in the
enactment of the Homestead Act of 1862. By this process
they hoped to guarantee holdings to farmers and permit
industrial workers, suffering from low wages and unemploy-
ment, to escape from city tenements to free acres in the
tountry. In fact, however, the Homestead law, viewed in the
light of the buoyant hopes which inspired its original framers,
proved to be almost a fraud upon farmers and industrial
workers, as Fred A. Shannon and Paul W. Gates conclusively
4emonstrated on the basis of extended researches, the con-
clusions of which were published in The American Historical
Review for July, 1936. Vast areas of land went to railway
companies and speculators, sadly diminishing the areas of
: > free homesteads/' And, whatever may have been the effect
of free land on the lot of industrial workers in the East, it
provided no "safety valve" for any huge number of them;
tior did it overcome the evils of low wages and unemploy-
ment. This much was also established on the foundation of
researches by Carter Goodrich and Sol Davison and incor-
porated in articles appearing in the Political Science Quar-
terly for June, 1935, and March, 1936. Allowing for diver-
gencies of opinion on details of history, it was to be reported
factually that the first immense effort to unite agrarians and
industrial workers had attained an elusive success culmi-
nating in a default if not a complete failure.
! Since the circumstances of 1850 could not be repeated in
1929 or 1938, what were the signs of a new unity ? Psycho-
logical, as well as economic, differences were evident in
thought and action. The memories, skills, and propensities of
the handicrafts, which had kept artisans for countless cen-
turies close to the life and ways of agriculture, had been
diminished by the machine process. That was known to
every one, but neither the philosophers of the labor move-
ment nor the leaders in organization gave much thought to
the agricultural end of the economic process. This was
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 553
especially true of modern communistic thinkers. Marxism-
was essentially urban in origin and nature. Its heroes, Karl
Marx and Friederich Engels, lived long in England and-
brought their ideological system to its perfection in a society'
highly industrialized, where agriculture had already lost its
grip ; and they both felt scorn for old-fashioned tillers of the
land. Their disciples in the United States, likewise having
little or no contact with the earth, conceived labor mainly in;
industrial terms, as they pored over Marxian texts in city
tenements, apartments, and libraries. When they thought of
labor in the country they thought principally of tenants,
field hands, and casual workers the weakest elements on x
the land ; thus pity for the tillers of the soil exceeded interest
in agriculture as the basis of all society. it ^
On the other hand, workers in the earth, whether they
were owners, tenants, or casual laborers, had, either from
inheritance or experience, few affiliations with industrial
workers, and were likewise mentally isolated. They often
formed associations among themselves. They conducted
milk strikes in the urban fashion. They blocked sheriffs tryu
ing to sell farms under foreclosure. They knew what it was
to labor with bent backs and bruised hands. But the scheme
of capitalism and its labor forms had unfamiliar, almost alfenj
features. Struggling along with a meager cash income o*
working for twenty-five or thirty dollars a month and
often less farmers could not instinctively sympathize with
industrial workers carrying on strikes to raise wages wjrich
seemed magnificent in comparison. Though with the cost of
living in cities taken into account, urban wage-earners migHt
still be about on the same economic level as the farmers,
differences in ways of life naturally checked unanimity c(f
understanding and hindered cooperation on any scale. 1 >
Even so, as conferences, agitations, pamphlets, and debates
indicated, a growing consciousness of common interest^
marked the course of leadership among farmers and indus-
trial workers. If the soil continued to erode and wash out to
sea, if the standard of life on the land fell, if the buying
554 AMERICA IN MWPASSAGE
power of farmers sank, how would things fare with indus-
trial workers engaged in producing goods and machinery for
use on farms ? The question was asked, again and again with
impressive repetition, by public officials, students of society,
and publicists. If, on the other hand, the wages of urban
workers declined, if unemployment for millions meant no
wages at all, where could labor on the land find markets for
its produce ? Farmers with the narrowest outlook could see,
when their attention was directed to the matter, how their
fate, to that extent at least, hung upon the state of industry,
on labor organization, on outcomes of collective bargaining.
Ag industry and agriculture contracted, as the web of a
mutual fate drew tighter around urban and rural workers,
thought followed, if haltingly and at a distance.
The renewal of agrarian unrest broke in upon the beati-
tudes while the golden glow was still shimmering. During
the dissolutions and detonations of the depression, its intru-
sion widened and its effects deepened ; and then amid the
crashes in industry the agitations of urban labor were added
to the agitations of the agrarians. If not united by bonds of
immediate and palpable interest, labor in town and labor in
country were engaged in a common quest for a livelihood and
both disturbed the course of politics conducted in the tradi-
tional manner. Their quest for a living on modern levels also
brought discomfort to specific economic interests. For years
the possessors of great fortunes and the members of the
''middle class/' so-called, had largely dominated, while they
directed, the transactions of politics and the currents of
thought; but they had often been in antagonism them-
selves, concealed or above board. Indeed no small part of the
political and social agitations culminating in party demon-
strations had sprung from the struggle between "big busi-
ness*' and "little business," between "big men" and "little
men." In 'this contest the former had been denounced as
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 555
"economic royalists/' and "trust-busting" campaigns had
been waged against the masters of corporations, with agra-
rian and labor leaders often cheering on the side lines. Then
as farm tenancy increased and industrial workers formed
huge independent unions, fresh agitations jostled the classic
politics of big business and little business and hinted at the
desirability or necessity of unity against a common disturb-
ance. With efforts to get American economy on a high pro-
duction level baffled over a long stretch of years, these
agitations assumed more serious aspects. Whether the
struggle between the plutocracy and the middle class could
be narrowly delimited and carried on indefinitely with the
weapons and arguments evolved during the past fifty years
became a question of social philosophy, historical interpre^
tation, and time. If it could not be so delimited and con-
tinued endlessly without resolution, what forms were the
future relations of the two groups to assume, especially in th$
presence of labor pressures in town and country ? And in -a
showdown what position would labor take ?
A mere analysis of the two groups from the standpoint of
income yielded no categorical answer. The boundaries of
neither were sharply defined, but one striking feature of the
period consisted of efforts to disclose the composition and
propensities of the respective interests. Though it is true
that William J. Ghent and Thorstein Veblen had made such
attempts earlier, their findings were only dimly remembered,
if at all. So fresh inquiries were "timely." Lewis Corey's
analyses, The Crisis of the Middle Class and The Decline of
American Capitalism, for instance, applied the Marxian
hypothesis and lent countenance to the idea that the country
was headed toward a proletarian dictatorship. Alfred Bing-
ham's statistical study in Insurgent America yielded conh;
tradictory evidence : the middle class, not that of the indus-'
trial workers, was increasing in relative proportions. Franklin
Charles Palm's 'The Middle Classes Then and Now, while
tending to confirm Bingham's conclusion, ended with no
upshot in respect of policy or proximate tendency. Nor did
556 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
'Ferdinand Lundberg's Sixty Families, an indictment of the
plutocracy, throw much light on the problem of the coming
relations between the middle class and the possessors of
: great wealth. Still, the fervid controversies aroused by such
inquiries betrayed a public interest in the subject and the
existence of a tension in popular psychology that might con-
ceivably snap if no general economic relief came in sight.
The fact that the boundaries of the plutocracy and the
middle class could not be precisely drawn did not mean that
their centers of economic gravity and their general character-
istics were beyond the grasp of understanding. Whether
sixty or six hundred families constituted the dominant ele-
ment in the plutocracy a question much debated was
irrelevant. Researches substantiated the general proposition
that less than one and one-half per cent of the nation's
families at the top of the economic ladder in 1935-36 received
a total income which equalled the combined income of forty-
geven per cent of the families at the bottom. A high con-
centration of wealth was a reality, if not strictly measurable.
Nor could the exact number of families in the middle
class be statistically determined. In composition it included
lawyers, doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, government
employees running into the millions, army and navy officers,
business men and women, small employers by the thousands,
the police local, state, and federal members and officers
0f the national guard, editors, publishers, actors, artists,
nearly all the professional entertainers, clerks, stenographers,
and the white-collar careerists in general. According to an
analysis by Donald S. Bridgman, published in The Yale Re-
view in the autumn of 1938, the census returns of 1930 showed
that "of all the men in gainful occupations 26% were in white-
collar positions, professional, managerial, or clerical; 16%
were in the skilled crafts; 15% were farm owners or tenants ;
33% were semi-skilled or unskilled laborers, very largely in
industry, and 10% were farm laborers. Of the gainfully
employed women, 43% were in white-collar positions ; 22%
iraera household servants; 25% wears semi-skilled and unskilled
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 557
laborers in industry, and 8% were in agriculture, mainly as
farm laborers. In the twenty years before 1930, the most
rapidly increasing occupations had been in the white-collar
group, principally those of the teacher, engineer, and clerk ;
the major decline had been in agriculture/' If to the white-
collar occupational groups were added the huge leisure class,
women not gainfully employed, the total student body above
the grade school level, and the millions of farming families
enjoying a certain degree of prosperity, the combination
doubtless outnumbered the strictly industrial workers, farm
hands, and other blue, brown, and no-collar workers.
There was another consideration of prime importance.
The division between members of the middle class and the
handworkers in town and country was by no means com-
pletely economic. Indeed the income of skilled craftsmen
was often far above that of many teachers, lawyers, or
stenographers. Furthermore, in the struggle over the dis-
tribution of national income, thousands of white-collar
employees flocked to trade unions, at least temporarily.
In the characteristics of the middle class and its tenden-
cies were psychological elements which did not perfectly cor-
respond to the statistics of income or property ; and these
psychological features seemed to become more conspicuous
as the depression deepened, the unionization of industrial
workers advanced, and the unemployed showed some inclina-
tion to organize.
Hitherto native oracles had indignantly scoffed at the idea
of "class" in the United States as "un-American." The
absence of a fixed nobility at the top of the social ladder
presumably made the term "middle class" inapplicable to a
central grouping in the economic scene. A remarkable degree
of mobility from rail-splitter to President, from farm girl
to candy queen had given the signs of fluidity to Ameri-
can society that obscured the permanence of the gradations
behind the screen of rising and falling particles or individuals.
When, however, the organization of mass production workers
by the millions got under way, evidences of a growing con-
58 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
sciousness of identical interests appeared among elements of
the middle class, tending to effect a closer solidarity within
their own ranks.
An outward sign of this consciousness was to be seen in
the changed usage of the term "middle class." For more than
a century the British nobility and industrial workers had
employed it freely as a phrase fairly exact or invidious. The
French had long distinguished the bourgeoisie, as they called
the middle class., from the remnants of the old aristocracy on
the one side and the peasants and industrial workers on the
other. In France the bourgeoisie had been regarded as " that
portion of the community to which money is the primary
condition and the primary instrument of life." Late in the
nineteenth century Veblen had described pecuniary Ameri-
cans as the "leisure class/' dedicated to conspicuous waste
and demonstrative thimblerig. Still later Sinclair Lewis had
characterized its members as "Babbits/' at first with a tone
of ridicule and afterward with a positive affection, which
helped to make them conscious of their position in society
and then proud of their merits. The outburst of stories about
life in "the raw" and the flood of proletarian novels accen-
tuated the idea of opposites. In terms of sober scholarship,
the publication of such frank treatises as Arthur Holcombe's
The New Party Politics, in 1933, served as an index of
tendency and a measure of advance toward unification.
Fifty years earlier, Holcombe's book would have been as
offensive to the American intelligentsia of the Hamilton
Wright Mabie school as Marx's Communist Manifesto
actually was to the Victorians of 1848. With time a psycho-
logical alteration had been effected.
This development in psychological imagery arrested the
attention of Franklin Charles Palm who published his opin-
ions on the subject in 1936. While declining to formulate
any rigid definition of the term "middle class/' he gave a
certain approval to an older definition as the "not-so-rich
and not-so-poor individuals between the proletariat-labor
group and the wealthy capitalists and social aristocracy."
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 559
Yet Palm warned his readers against ascribing too much
importance to the theory of income or the theory of deriva-
tion. He insisted that the members of the middle class must
be thought of as possessing "subjective impulses." For
instance, the true middle-class person "prizes education
because he firmly believes that education is power and
because he thinks it essential to democracy. He boasts of
impartiality in politics and often observes a suicidal neu-
trality; but he is easily swayed by demagogues, for deep
within him are biases and prejudices. He wishes to be known
as a self-made man, capable, independent, self-reliant. . . .
Profit has become the center of his thought and every action
is in terms of that one purpose to make money." In the
past, money-making had been deemed an occupation on the
way to a comfortable retirement; in the present, it had
become a kind of continuous steeplechase, monopolizing
energies, directing activities, and creating the values of cul-
ture.
While Lewis Corey, applying the Marxian theory, thought
he saw the middle class diminished in numbers and force by
the course of economy and furnishing some potential mate-
rials for the labor movement, other observers agreed with
Palm in emphasizing the permanence of subjective conscious-
ness and the growth of class awareness among the middle
group. Unemployed industrial workers may have regarded
themselves as covered by Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase,
"the forgotten man," but Herbert Hoover, pleading for a
return of the Republicans to power, placed the forgotten
man in the "great economic middle class." Noting the
preponderance of cities in public affairs, Arthur Holcombe
declared that "our new urbane politics will be middle-class
politics" less selfishly conceived than in previous times.
Using income as his measurement, he claimed that, if one-
half of the white-collar workers and one-fourth of the skilled
workers stayed in the fold, the middle class "would surpass
the proletariat in the adult population as a whole." Hewing
to the median line of the Greek thinkers in antiquity, Hoi-
560 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
combe concluded that "a State which is governed by the
middle class is not only safer than proletarian and bourgeois
class States, but the best State practically obtainable/'
This was no surrender to the theory of middle-class defeat ;
it was a declaration of faith and a call to liberal action.
Moreover, a study of small enterprises, conducted by the
Twentieth Century Fund and published in 1936, reported an
enormous area of economic activities still occupied by small
enterprisers, despite the concentration of wealth, demon-
strating the tenacity with which members of the middle class
clung to their way of life and subjective purposes. Taking
up this line, Robert L. Duffus contended nearly ten years
after the crack of 1929 that there were no signs that the
middle class was being crushed. "We are still overwhelm-
ingly a middle-class nation," he maintained. "It is harder
today to conceive of a solid proletarian lump in the United
States than it was a generation ago. We can, of course, con-
ceive a proletariat in fact President Roosevelt defined
one when he referred to the 'one third' which is ill-nourished,
ill-clothed, and ill-housed. This one-third would include the
worst-off portion of farm renters, share croppers, and labor-
ers, the unskilled worker in every field, and no doubt many
clerical workers. The Negro, largely for historical reasons,
would contribute heavily to it. But it is doubtful if the
Mississippi field hand, the tenant farmer in Arkansas, the
migratory fruit picker in California, the 'mucker' on an
excavation job, the young clerk in Houston or New York,
the country school teacher whose rewards certainly place her
in the lowest third of the income groups, the textile opera-
tive, the Maine fisherman, have a sense of unity among
themselves merely because their incomes are low. The
routine of their lives, the geographical conditions which sur-
round them, and the local cultures in which they are em-
bedded, forbid/'
If the Wagner Labor Relations Act, the National Wages
and Hours Act, the heavy taxes on incomes in support of
social legislation, and the growth of organization among the
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 561
industrial workers all indicated that by some process labor
in town and country was exerting pressure on members of
the middle class, despite its disunity,, the middle class was
still motivated by the old subjective forces. "The upper-
bracket owning classes can take care of themselves/' ex-
claimed the editor of a small newspaper. "The unorganized
middle class has no lobby, no special pleaders. It is largely
the middle classes who pay the taxes, take out insurance, own
their own homes, support the charities, and form the consum-
ing public. When taxes go up they are the first to suffer.
When prices go up their more inelastic incomes feel the hard-
est pinch. When monopolies expand their stores, shops, and
little factories are gobbled up. And if inflation comes their
savings are wiped out." Having put forward this thesis, by no
means perfect in its economics, the same editor warned his
readers that the middle class would not be trampled upon,
that it would revolt before it succumbed to the tendency of
things.
Other features in the drift of human relations fortified
rather than uprooted the subjective interests that charac-
terized the middle class. Although thousands from that
general order affiliated with industrial unions, other thou-
sands, forced downward in the wage scale or into unemploy-
ment, developed resentments against the more fortunate
laborers and skilled workers. Even within the working class
in the strict sense were cultural propensities over-reaching the
limitations of the class line. The ability to buy furniture,
radios, rugs, musical instruments, automobiles, and other
signs of the middle standard on the installment plan, often
with no payment down, awakened ambitions among rural
and urban workers, which countered the acceptance of
proletarian ways.
Still more significant, in this relation, was the curtailment
of child labor state by state as the depression dragged on,
the raising of the working age by legislation, and the enlarge-
ment of the school population. Boys and girls in the high
schools were not taught merely the drafts of their parents, if
562 AMERICA IN MIDPA&SAGE
any; they studied languages, literature, science, and the
other branches of learning once deemed the peculiar posses-
sion of the middle and upper classes. The chances of sat-
isfying the tastes thus awakened might be relatively declin-
ing; the subjective valuations were not thereby eradicated.
Girls, hoping to leap the economic gulf by marriage,
asserted the appropriate airs and manners. Wives of indus-
trial workers, though often standing stanchly by their hus-
bands in economic conflicts, naturally felt the pull of the
middle-class ambitions exerted by their children.
Amusements, no less than education and refinements,
flowed in the middle-class direction, especially the most popu-
lar: radio entertainments and the moving pictures. The
sales " talks" that accompanied music, the news, jokes, and
crooning over the radio stimulated wants not to be satisfied
by the meager earnings of the ordinary worker. By the hour
and day, wives listened to appeals to vanities and aspirations
beyond the reach of the low wage level.
In endless profusion, the moving pictures portrayed the
lives of the rich, the luxurious, the idle their palaces,
yachts, sports, manners, and morals. The delineation of
plain labor on the screen offered no glamourous escape from
the humdrum and appeared seldom in the repertoires of
the blocked picture houses, seeking the patronage of the
workers. To be sure, the portrayal of crime and racketeering
did suggest outlets for sons and daughters of the proletariat
into the world of high living, and moving-picture producers
took advantage of the " appeal " an appeal scarcely dimin-
ished by the hackneyed retribution that now and then
sicklied over the primordial drive of the main argument.
But as against the steady and remorseless flicker of middle-
class valuations in script, costumes, and actions, the repre-
sentation of crimes of crude passion seemed merely collateral
or incidental. While millions might belong to industrial
unions, the pressure of education and amusement worked
against belief in the nobility of plain labor against reliance
upon the organization of labor as more than a negotiating
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 563
convenience and in favor of other valuations essentially
middle class in origin and development.
For the fortification of their interests, deliberately or
incidentally, members of the middle class were closely knit in
innumerable organizations peculiarly their own : chambers of
commerce, local, state, and national women's clubs, the Sons
and Daughters of the American Revolution and other patri-
otic societies, trade associations, fraternal orders, teachers',
lawyers', and doctors' associations, and kindred groups, with
branches in every community and head offices in great cities.
Whenever by direct action or through political pressure, in-
dustrial workers achieved some gain irritating to the middle
class or rejected the middle-class idea of American values,
reverberations followed in the form of resolutions, protests,
and counter-measures. Despite the best occasional efforts to
be "objective" in reporting, the metropolitan press by head-
line, position, selection, and emphasis in news presentation,
was primarily middle class in attitudes.
That conspicuous organization in the domain of politics
and police, the American Legion, together with its feminine
auxiliaries, was likewise primarily middle class in official
direction, notwithstanding the number of industrial workers
among its members and among the veterans as a whole.
Although it early berated war profiteers and plutocrats, the
Legion grew more circumspect in statements, especially after
securing the outright payment of the bonus in 1936 ; and its
weight was, on the whole, against the independent organi-
zation of industrial workers, against sit-down strikes, and
against all similar manifestations of labor power. While it
sometimes frowned upon members who wore soldiers' uni-
forms in making anti-labor demonstrations, its code of public
and private morals was middle class in materiality.
With mechanical regularity until 1938 the National As-
sociation of Manufacturers, at its annual conventions, re-
peated stereotyped doctrines. The manufacturers* economic
science long consisted of formulas taken from the body
of true faith evolved by classical or middle-class economics.
564 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
None of its committees investigated the actions of employers
in hiring industrial spies, planting provocative agents in
the midst of trade unions, setting working men against
one another, importing thugs and ex-criminals as strike
breakers. Not unnaturally, it was more concerned with
racketeers in the labor movement, with making labor or-
ganizations responsible before the law, with preventing the
growth of powerful bargaining organizations among indus-
trial workers.
"The closed shop," ran its manifesto in 1937, "limits and
prevents the free and full exercise by both employees and
employers of their bargaining rights. . . . The practical
problems of employment relations the handling of com-
plaints and grievances, and questions of wages, hours, and
working conditions can best be met by management
dealing with its own employees in the light of the local plant
and community conditions." Corporations might be na-
tional in scope and power; labor relations must be controlled
by local management. In other words, at the end of eight
years of depression, organized manufacturing in the United
States had little more affection for independent trade union-
ism or its tactics than had the National Socialistic dic-
tatorship in Germany. It was lack of power rather than of
will that prevented it from laying down the national law on
the subject.
But at its convention of 1938 the National Association of
Manufacturers modified its former program in many respects.
The faction that demanded forthright denunciations and
assertions of doctrine in the historic style was overborne by
the more liberal wing. The customary attacks on the New
Deal were omitted, the usual criticisms of recent federal
legislation were toned down, and an olive branch was
offered to organized labor. In a program adopted without
dissent, the Association called for a " united effort of in-
dustry, commerce, agriculture, and labor in cooperation with
the Government/* Instead of condemning the Labor Re-
lations Act wholesale, it recognized that " employees who
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 565
wish to bargain collectively are entitled to do so, in what-
ever form they determine, through their own freely chosen
representatives and without intimidation or restraint from
any source." Through many lines of the program gleamed
the old animus of intransigence, but it was significant that
the Association felt it necessary in deference to facts and
opinions to move a little "leftward" toward the center of
the line.
That section of the middle class represented by little
business men and women was, on the whole, as rigid in its
hostility to industrial or any other kind of unionism as the
business men of larger affairs in the Manufacturers' Asso-
ciation. Perhaps more so. When the National Recovery
Administration was launched in 1933, little business men
did, it is true, cooperate with government agents in the
drafting and enforcement of fair practices codes. They
were as eager as their larger brethren to take advantage of
the opportunity to raise prices by collective action. In the
process they also accepted the collective bargaining Section
of the Recovery Act but that Section, loosely drawn, did not
outlaw the company or shop unions organized under the
auspices of the employers. Nor, in enforcement, did it com-
pel employers to deal with independent unions wherever
they appeared. After the dissolution of the Recovery Admin-
istration under judicial decree, little business men in general
joined their colleagues in welcoming a return to the "imper-
fect competition" that had prevailed before the advent of
the experiment in collective recovery. A resurgence of
economic activity the following year brought a temporary
release of the tension.
After the recession of 1937 set in, little business men and
women were on pins and needles again, all the more on ac-
count of the rapid advance of industrial unionism and its
strike tactics in many centers. At a national conference
called by the Department of Commerce early the next year,
they freely expressed their sentiments and resentments in
resolutions which were later modified by their executive
566 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
committee for presentation to President Roosevelt. In the
original resolutions they declared that " unwarranted and
malicious attacks on business by administration representa-
tives should be permanently stopped/' and that "all forms
of federal wage and hour regulation and legislation" should
be resisted. Coming directly to the point of labor organi-
zation, the little conference demanded nothing less than
a total repeal of the Wagner Labor Relations Act, and an
investigation of the National Labor Relations Board, then
under fire as unduly sympathetic to labor. It called for more
curbs on monopolies and on government enterprises, and
it went even beyond big business in demanding a total re-
peal of the undistributed profits tax and a curtailment of
public expenditures. Having urged the Government to stay
out of the labor relations field, the conference called on it to
create an agency for the purpose of making loans "where
financial institutions failed to function," that is, where little
men and women failed to get credits at the banks- These
expressions of middle-class valuations seemed illuminating for
the hour and the tendencies.
Into the effervescence of subjective valuations were thrust
the ** lessons" of Italy and Germany. On the pretext of a
communist danger, Mussolini had completely liquidated all
independent trade unions and had penalized all independent
labor politics. At the same time he had, beyond doubt, laid
restraints on small private business and showed a special
tenderness for great corporations. Would such "regimenta-
tion" be regarded in the United States as a small price to
pay for the suppression or execution of labor leaders and the
liquidation of "trade union domination" ?
Still more instructive had been the "lesson" from indus-
trialized Germany. There also the communist danger had
been highly capitalized by Hitler and his party. Neverthe-
less it was obvious that, while putting down the communists
with a strong hand, Hitler had been equally stringent in
abolishing independent trade unions, in confiscating their
funds, and in imprisoning or shooting labor leaders. The
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 567
trade-union movement in Germany had been far stronger
than in Italy. It embraced a larger proportion of the indus-
trial and casual workers. It was powerfully organized and
had large sums of money in its central and local treasuries.
Yet independent unionism had been completely destroyed
by the police and by the National Socialist storm troops,
with only a little more shedding of blood than had accom-
panied some of the major strikes in the United States. Had
this object lesson not been associated with the cruel treat-
ment of Jews in Germany, it would doubtless have been
more impressive as indicating the ultima ratio.
The simplicity of the formula was startling: Brand all
labor unions, especially of the industrial type, as communist
and, while making a social war on communists, suppress all
labor organizations. It had been done. It could be done.
Although such suggestions were probably depressing to tender
minds in the middle class, the employment of spies and
provocative agents by great corporations, the speed with
which the business forces of any industrial center could be
mobilized against "labor agitators," and the tenacity of the
vigilante and Ku Klux tradition indicated the existence of
volcanic forces beneath the white surface of law and order
and the smooth flow of " democratic processes." "If Fascism
ever menaces America/' wrote an editor, "it will be because
we have allowed the big pressure groups of society to squeeze
the middle classes into revolt."
That the editor's middle class and the Lords of Creation,
with whose fortunes, instincts, and methods it was so inti-
mately affiliated, were possessed by no spirit of genial toler-
ance in the presence of labor agitations, urban or rural,
became manifest in endless declarations and actions. In his
volume, You Can't Do That, George Seldes gave a multitude
of illustrations well authenticated, and added, for the benefit
of those who cared to know more, a list of books, pamphlets,
and documents occupying more than forty pages of fine
print. Stark and staring before such intelligence as the
nation commanded were the pages of testimony presented
568 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
by informed witnesses to the Senate committee on education
and labor, headed by Robert M. La Follette, instructed to
investigate " violations of the rights of free speech and assem-
bly and undue interference with the right of labor to organize
and bargain collectively."
Indelible in the record were reports of third-degree tortures
employed by police in violation of the law; arrests on
trumped-up charges and no charges ; police beatings in all
parts of the country ending often in deaths that went
unavenged; parties engaged in tarring and feathering eco-
nomic dissidents ; lynchings in North and South ; the expul-
sion of critical professors and teachers; the Chicago " memo-
rial day incident" at the Republic Steel Works; the use of
spies, finks, gas, and bombs by reputable employers of labor ;
espionage and murder in the Harlan, Kentucky, mining
regions; Mayor Hague's "little dictatorship" in Jersey
City ; the insistence of the Daughters of the American Rev-
olution, members of the American Legion, the Liberty
League, the National Civic Federation, chambers of com-
merce, shipping interests, Crusaders, Sentinels, Vigilantes,
Paul Reveres, and other associations wearing the mantle of
patriotism, on branding as dangerous citizens well-known
persons of independent minds, ranging from Nicholas
Murray Butler to Jane Addams, from Eleanor Roosevelt to
William Allen White all denoting violent reactions to
labor agitations, to the advocacy of peace, or to the defense
of the civil liberties offered in constitutional guaranties
advocacy or defense even when it expressed the most timid
liberalism. What anything really challenging would produce
could be easily imagined, by the imaginative.
The spirit of the times which prevailed in the military
establishment of the United States Government, at least from
1928 to 1932, was given official form in its Army Training
Manual No. 2000-25, issued for the instruction of officers and
soldiers. Not content with its own function, the War Depart-
ment entered the domain of civic education and among other
things gave its verdict on democracy, for which presumably
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 569
soldiers had fought and died, and in the name of which, per-
haps, a quarantine war was in preparation. In a single
paragraph it described democracy for the benefit of its men
in training: "Democracy: A government of the masses.
Authority derived through mass meeting or any other form
of 'direct' expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude
toward property is communistic negating property rights.
Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall
regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation or governed
by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or
regard to consequences. Results in demagogism, license,
agitation, discontent, anarchy." For five years this manual
of "instruction" was used officially by the War Department
until protests from outraged citizens and members of
Congress led to its withdrawal. After that action a request
for a copy brought a reply that the Department had no copy
available ; a three-hour search in the Congressional Library
unearthed none ; everywhere in official circles, silence on the
subject reigned, when inquiries were made. Was the spirit
that animated military opinion on democracy dead ?
Two years after the Manual was formally withdrawn,
doubts on that subject were allayed by Harry H. Woodring,
Assistant Secretary of War under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In the Liberty Magazine, of January 6, 1934, Mr. Woodring
published an article on the Army, opening with the words :
"People who believe that the United States Army is not
ready and able to take charge of this nation in an emergency
simply do not know the facts. Our Army happens to be the
only branch of the Government which is already organized
and available not only to defend our territory ', but also to cope
with social and economic problems in an emergency. [Mr.
Woodring's italics.] It is our secret insurance against chaos*
It is our 'ace in the hole' for peace as well as war." In this
vein he continued, to prove the point. The execution of the
Army's plans for industrial mobilization, he said, will "accom-
plish in a large measure the purpose of those who have advocated
a 'universal draft* of property ', money, and civilian labor"
570 AMERICA IN
[Mr. Woodring's italics]. He went on: "It is my opinion
that the Army should take over immediately some of the
activities which are now being handled by some of the new
executive agencies. Whether or not it is true, as many hold,
that the C.C.C. camps are the forerunners of the great
civilian labor armies of the future, I believe that this activity
should be expanded and put under the control of the Army.
... If the Army were so directed, it could organize the
veterans of the world war, the C.C.C. men, and through
them the administration of the emergency relief, into a
system of economic storm troops that could support the
Government's efforts to smash the depression. If the Army
is not so directed, it will, as always, stand by and await
orders."
"Let's speak frankly!" Mr. Woodring declared in large
italic type; "If this country should be threatened with foreign
war, economic chaos, or social revolution, the Army has the
training^ the experience, the organization, and the men to support
the Government and direct the country in the national interest"
Up until 1934 both law and innocence had supposed that
it was the duty of the Army, when officially ordered, to wage
foreign war or suppress domestic insurrection. They had not
supposed that its obligation included a responsibility in case
of "economic chaos" to "direct the country in the national
interest." Evidently the War Department, under the New
Deal, had made progress of some kind in a direction
straight as a bullet's course.
When a deluge of telegrams and letters deprecating Mr.
Woodring's manifesto in the Liberty magazine flowed into
the White House, accompanied by demands for a removal or
resignation, President Roosevelt called the author on the
carpet. Shortly after the conference, Mr. Woodring gave
out a statement to the effect that his words did not mean
what they meant to anybody acquainted with the English
language. The President did not ask him to retire. He did
not resign. The oblivion common to a people that lived on
the day's sensations passed over the episode. On the death
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 571
of Secretary Dern, President Roosevelt made Assistant
Secretary Woodring head of the War Department.
Against all such tendencies, protests were made contin-
uously in press, pamphlets, books, meetings, and the courts of
law. The American Civil Liberties Union, directed by Roger
Baldwin and a group of determined colleagues, innumerable
associations concerned with the preservation of rights guar-
anteed by the Constitution of the United States and the
constitutions of the several states, innumerable individuals,
and members of Congress kept close watch on activities,
organizations, and officials connected with "red baiting," the
suppression of legal rights, and propaganda intended to
prepare the way for the day prophesied by Harry H. Wood-
ring, President Roosevelt's Secretary of War.
Another sign of determined resistance to the arbitrary
spirit was the Southern Conference for Human Welfare held
at Birmingham, Alabama, in November, 1938, representing
agriculture, industry, labor, and social work. Every form of
effort designed to raise the standard of living in that region
and to assert the human values of society was discussed with
freedom and comprehensively. Tenant farmers, representa-
tives of labor defense organizations, Negroes from various di-
visions of economy, employers, and specialists in housing,
relief, and taxation presented their cases without let or
hindrance. And at the close, provisions were made for a
permanent pooling of interests and for moving in a solid
phalanx upon the menaces to liberty and welfare everywhere
in the South.
If a crisis was to come, victory for tyranny would not be
easy or be won in a default. Many lawyers, including Frank
Walsh, Morris Ernst, and Arthur Garfield Hays, offered
their services to defend men and women in celebrated cases
involving freedom of press and speech; and even the
American Bar Association, spurred on perhaps by the forma-
tion of an independent legal society, the Lawyers' Guild,
announced in 1938 that it would give special attention to
civil liberty. From term to term the Supreme Court of the
572 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
United States handed down ringing decisions sustaining civil
liberties, North, South, East, and West, in opinions worthy
of a place beside the memorable arguments of Mansfield,
Burke, Erskine, and Brougham, which featured the slow and
toilsome advance of human rights in times past. It might so
turn out that those who had been most severe in criticizing
that tribunal's judgments in other causes would find it the
last refuge against sheer force if Secretary Woodring's
"economic chaos" and "emergency" came, and dust
gathered in the silent chamber of the United States Senate.
Given the numerical supremacy of the middle class, as the
term was casually defined, over urban workers and rural
laborers, given its subjective valuations and the lessons of
Italy and Germany, limitations on the power of industrial
unionism were apparent to all informed observers in the
labor movement and outside. The tensibility of those cir-
cumscriptions could not be discovered by any method of
scientific inquiry at hand. Efforts to test them by practice,
if pushed too far, might produce the explosion faintly sug-
gested by "A plague on both your houses." Anything like
an exact prognosis was, therefore, out of the question. The
amount of elasticity or good-will on both sides remained
indeterminate if not indeterminable in both economics and
politics. That astute, persistent, and viable statesmanship
in the two domains might mitigate conflicts and keep them
within the confines of debate and adjustment, apart from
sporadic disorders, was probable. As Edmund Burke had
said in the eighteenth century, greater changes may be
effected gradually over a long period of time than by even
the violence of revolution. But how much of this statesman-
ship was available ?
Only one feature of the situation seemed fairly plain. If
the prevailing system of economy could be kept running at
a certain tempo, a major crisis could be avoided for the time ;
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 573
that is, if production could be maintained on a level of output
that would furnish employment for a large part of the indus-
trial workers, provide revenues for supporting the unem-
ployed on some scale of existence, and sustain the main body
of the middle class, a disruptive tension could be indefinitely
postponed. The size of the social and State apparatus at the
command of the middle class seemed to demonstrate that
proposition.
Could production be held on the requisite level and for
how long ? No one could settle that question. Only one
aspect of the problem presented deterministic marks. For
three hundred years the high productivity of American
economy had been accompanied by the steady exhaustion of
land and other natural resources either irreplaceable or
replaceable at a high cost. A continuation of that process
for another fifty or hundred years, as the engineers of a
Mississippi Valley survey had reported, would lead to a
wholesale impoverishment of the resources on which Ameri-
can economy had thrived. Only costly collective action
coupled with incalculable inventive genius could prevent
that impasse in the years immediately ahead. Was the col-
lective action possible, the genius available ? Not even the
highest competence in the middle class could answer that
question.
If domestic tension grew perilous and the productive
economy slowed down too far, the explosion into a foreign
war was always possible. There had been international fric-
tions ever since the establishment of national States in
Europe at the end of the middle ages. Such frictions had been
somewhat mitigated in the nineteenth century while the
resources of virgin continents were being exploited to feed
Europe's pullulating millions, but with the closing of such
economic frontiers everywhere the tensions seemed to be
increasing. At all events, the statesmen of the leading powers
of the world were lecturing and threatening one another,
either in earnest or "for domestic consumption/' "Inter-
national" incidents were matters of almost daily occurrence, '
574 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
War and costly preparations for war were at command*
War would speed up industrial economy and once more
provide employment. It would enable the Federal Govern-
ment to put through its "mobilization bill/' impose the
discipline of martial law upon all recalcitrant persons, and,
by "constitutional methods," suppress strikes and labor
disturbances as effectively as Hitler or Mussolini had done
under a different ideology. But what would a war do to
American civilization as historically understood, even if
victoriously waged ? Or if it ended in defeat for the United
States a possibility, given the shifts and clashes among
the great powers what then ? Neither event could be
precisely prophesied, but both questions were vibrating in
the minds of all Americans who employed intelligence in
exploring the relations of urban and rural labor to grand
policy,
In terms of civilization, the fortunes, the future, of
America, what then did the activities, agitations, and organ-
ization of labor in town and country actually mean ? To
that quandary many solutions, more or less relevant, were
proposed. Anthropologists and measurers of intelligence
responded that a large proportion of Americans consisted of
" morons" and little or nothing could be done about that
"fact." In a similar vein practitioners replied that, on the
whole, tenants, croppers, and field laborers were "lazy and
shiftless"; that they had received their "just deserts"; that
the plight of agriculture as mirrored in the report of the
President's Committee was simply the outcome of human
nature operating on the land; and that restless industrial
workers possessing no craft or special skill got all or more
than they deserved in the natural, that is, the current, run
of things. A multitude of "misfits" had always existed in
industry and agriculture and always would. On the basis of
such interpretations, the upper third or fourth, or whatever
it was, in industry and agriculture could and should proceed
as in the past, relying ^upon the agencies of government for
the protection of the fortunate position accorded to them by
LABOR IN EVOLVING ECONOMY 575
their merits. If not completely reassuring, this was comfort-
ing to the beneficiaries in the upper ranges.
Yet when it was conceded that the situation was due to
the moronic., shiftless, and casual nature of labor in town and
country, other quandaries remained. Were the white misfits
to be deprived of the vote, as Negroes had been in large
areas of the country ? A strong movement in this direction
took form in the North, with a nervous woman as its insti-
gator. If not, how could the upper third or fourth, or what-
ever its size was, be indefinitely protected against the inroads
of politicians and "demagogues" upon their apparently
impregnable position ? If not, how could prolonged agitation
of the business be avoided? Assuming that the "misfit"
men and women could be deprived of the suffrage extended
to them during the early fevers of democracy in the United
States or that the use of the ballot could be rather effectively
nullified by a temporary or prolonged use of military power,
what of the democratic ideals to which fervent appeals were
made, for diplomatic and other purposes, against dictator-
ships in Europe and the Orient? If these vaunted ideals
could be rendered harmless, or supplanted by other devices,
there remained a final enigma not to be solved in terms of
"just deserts for morons" : Is mankind a maker or a victim
of history ?
Underneath the course of the great argument and the
emotions that attended it was the drift of economic activities
and physical facts upon which even the upper ranges
depended for their rewards and security against which
the rhetoric of satisfaction or criticism could avail little.
These facts were recorded in the reports of corporations and
business concerns industries and railways and in the
findings of engineers who surveyed the state and utilization
of natural resources. Instead of the swift expansion in con-
struction and capital goods industries, which had long
furnished the lan of advancing capitalism, had come a
576 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
definite contraction; in that sense, the real capital of the
United States was declining, not rising. The mileage of
railways was shrinking; no huge demand for steel rails and
locomotives in the old style was anywhere in sight. Nor did
the "backward places" of the earth Latin America, the
Orient, and Africa to which imperialism had looked for
such expansion, present the familiar aspects of the nineteenth
century. Unemployment on a large scale continued per-
sistently, with no substantial relief in sight. As capitalism
contracted, the depletion of crude natural resources upon
which industries had flourished and still depended went on,
if abated somewhat by the depression.
Both tenancy and freehold agriculture as historically prac-
ticed had led and were still leading to a depletion of vast
regions, the erosion of the soil, the destruction of fertility,
and the impoverishment of the land. If nothing effective
could be done in respect of rising tenancy, then physical
exhaustion would persist, perhaps at an accelerating speed.
If the standard of life on the land, the buying power of
farmers, sank, what of the industry, commerce, and profes-
sions upon which hung the fate of the upper ranges in cities
and towns, all the more now that the promises of imperialism
had been exploded by history as actuality ?
CHAPTER XII
Sources and Forces of Entertainment
HEAVILY as the pall of the depression rested upon the
country perhaps partly on account of it enter-
tainment assumed functions of increasing signifi-
cance for the tendencies of culture. Springing from biological
and psychological characteristics common to humanity in all
times, it perdured in this time and was adjusted to alterations
in the economic conditions in which politics, business, and
labor operated, by which they were nourished. Originally,
and still in some measure, what Veblen called "a non-me-
chanical factor of culture," entertainment, was imbedded in
the social heritage acquired from the pre-machine age. Primal
in emotional sources, apparently as necessary to life as labor
itself, entertainment was among the powerful forces that held
society together, afforded diversion in the midst of its diffi-
culties and burdens, and yet expressed its tensions and values
too, contributing withal to the shaping of its evolution in
gross and detail. When commercialized, entertainment could
cut two ways : it could thrive like business enterprise on the
social heritage; and, like business enterprise with which it
577
578 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
became increasingly associated, it could work disintegra-
tions in the social heritage. Its twofold nature was not
overlooked in the drift of events.
Throughout the ages of civilization the amusements, spec-
tacles, and ceremonies of the people had borne an intimate
relation to politics, economy, poverty, riches, labor, leisure,
the arts, tools, and intelligence of mankind. Among primitive
and rural peoples they were, in origins at least, more or less
spontaneous expressions of usages, ecstasies, and motor pro-
pensities connected with life and labor processes, such as
planting, sowing, harvesting, and with religious interpreta-
tions and rituals. Among such peoples diversions were com-
munal, non-pecuniary, little affected if at all by importations,
and not devised for export or sale abroad. Processions in
propitiation of harvest gods and goddesses, for example, were
connected with economic activities indispensable to life, but
they were not designed to propitiate the god of the box office
or to serve the purposes of the State.
After the State had risen upon the foundations of com-
munal life, its masters seized upon and used, for their pur-
poses, amusements, spectacles, and entertainments, employ-
ing and adding to ancient rituals. State diversions were
connected with both domestic and outward relations. In
Sparta, for example, wrestling and horse racing served a
double purpose : they kept the ruling class and its animals
physically fit to maintain supremacy over helots and slaves
at home and to wage war abroad. In the days of Spartan
power, young people of the ruling families, boys and girls
alike, took part in athletic displays and pageants and the
laurel wreath was deemed a sufficient reward for demonstra-
tions of strength and endurance. When a king's daughter,
Cynisca, who kept racing horses, won a victory at a spec-
tacle, she received no purse of gold ; the feat and the acclaim
were sufficient in themselves. Spartan youths were trained
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 579
in legends and music and dancing, intrinsically delightful.
And yet, like such gymnastics as ball playing, dancing was
directed toward the cultivation of martial vigor.
^ Likewise in the development of the Roman State from
kingdom through the republic into empire, the character of
amusements and entertainments followed the course of its
civilization, until it reached a climax in the deadly gladiato-
rial contests. As Rome expanded, city mobs were spurred to
militaristic hysteria by pageants of conquerors coming home
with kings and queens chained to their chariots. Whether
really essential to a militaristic polity or not, savage specta-
cles certainly accompanied the rise and flowering of that
system. Generally associated with the fighting passion was
sex sadism and this was fed by the tossing of Christian maid-
ens to hungry lions in the circus.
Originating, it seems, in the ancient Etruscan custom of
sacrificing slaves and prisoners on the tombs of great war-
riors, the gladiatorial spectacle became a favorite device of
emperors, employed to illustrate their prowess and satisfy
the growing mania of multitudes inured to cruel sights and
sounds. Titus, it was said, ordered a continuous combat ex-
tending over one hundred days, and Trajan celebrated a
triumph by the exhibition of ten thousand gladiators. The
victims thrown into the arena were taken from prisoners of
war, criminals, and slaves men and women alike being
driven into death grapples for the amusement of cheering
and jeering throngs. Black lusts were drained to the dregs
when human beings and wild beasts were pitted against each
other for the pleasure of the Roman proletariat and the
lords and ladies of the upper classes. A Marcus Aurelius
might turn away from such spectacles to write state papers
or to meditate upon the nature and sorrows of mankind, but
the crowds that applauded and sustained the empire gloated
over such displays of violence and judged successive rulers
by the number and magnitude of the brutal shows which they
staged for "the people." Such were the diversions of despot-
ism at home while imperialistic wars were waged on the
580 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
frontier until the twin monstrosities perished and owls
cried from out the palace of the Caesars.
Also intimately associated with the State were the amuse-
ments, spectacles, and entertainments of Japan under the
Tokugawa shogunate. Athletic exercises for men and women,
designed to keep bodies lithe for military purposes contin-
ued ; but the supreme design of the Tokugawas was to sub-
due belligerent feudal lords to the discipline of the State
and hold Japan insulated from conflicts with the outside
world. To this polity diversions were subordinated, even
when ancient rituals were retained or modified. The State
desired concord at home and refrained from aggression
abroad. Hence the fighting class had to be entertained in
the interests of peace. Gladiatorial contests would have
been out of line. It was rhapsodies over cherry blossoms and
plum trees, over moon and mushroom, over fans and the
holy mountain, Fujiyama, that were lifted to the height of
cults. The ritual of the tea ceremony in an esthetic setting,
made still more exquisite by poems, music, and specific ap-
parel, was devised to soothe the nerves of feudal lords ; while
pilgrimages to view scenes of beauty and holy places supplied
pleasure for peasants, serfs, and artisans. For the ends of
State, under Tokugawa management, diversions took on
pacific forms and lusty fighting men were restrained by the
bonds of ceremony and esthetics. Though these bonds
quickly gave way after the imperialist powers of the West
blew open the gates of Japan and the Japanese State in its
turn embarked on conquest, the diversions themselves did
not immediately disappear. The tea ceremony became more
and more the prerogative of women, but all the ceremonies
lingered to give a "quaint" flavor to a civilization grown im-
perialist in ambition and taste.
If to Americans with little interest in history the records
of entertainment in the past and of current practices in-
herited from distant times and countries seemed mere musty
documents in the days of the golden glow, the development
of fascism and communism and the rise in western civiliza-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 581
tion of the Nazi cult of " Blood" gave to the unhistoric-
minded immediate and astounding examples of the relations
which could exist between the State and diversions. Playing
upon the instincts of wanton cruelty. Hitler turned his men
loose on the Jews in a manner reminiscent of Roman holidays
when Christians were the victims, without organizing this
operation into a State pageant. He laid his heavy hands on
every form of amusement. Mussolini and Stalin did the
same. Giant parades and rituals, the tramp, tramp, tramp
of men and women drilled in military manners, with modern
lighting casting its exotic appeal, furnished spectacles that
might have made a Claudius or a Nero green with envy.
The theater, the film, athletics, and even ancient folkways
were bent and twisted and subdued to the designs of a mili-
tary State a dictatorship whatever avowed social and
economic ends were associated with it. Down to the kinder-
garten in Germany and Italy were forced the militaristic
rituals of amusement. Almost as soon as they could toddle,
little boys were supplied with implements of war and their
supple limbs and minds were trained to the configurations of
war games. Huge masses of people, young and old, were
goaded along the path to political and military aggression by
the very diversions arranged for them, with the privilege of
dying for the dictator as the crown and perfection of hys-
terical entertainment.
In the United States, with its democratic traditions and
practices, with the historic subordination of the military
arm of the Government to civilian leadership, with the State
regarded as an instrument not an end, with the prevalence of
pecuniary over political considerations, amusements, spec-
tacles, and entertainments presented aspects appropriate to
the milieu and the trend of affairs. Here too were survivals
of diversions associated with ancient folkways, kept alive by
aborigines, by white natives in farming regions, and by immi-
grants from rural communities abroad. But in the main,
582 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
since the rise of cities, other forms of diversion had occupied
the principal interest that is, commercialized amusements,
whatever their sources, substance, and appearances. Artifi-
cial entertainment, shaped with reference to the financial
returns of managers and participants, occupied an ever-
larger area of diversion, ranging from prize fights, with huge
receipts for directors and fighters, to the gigantic spectacles
manufactured by the moving-picture industry. Being essen-
tially pecuniary in motive and thus depending directly upon
the state of economy prosperity or depression the for-
tunes of commercial entertainment varied with the for-
tunes of the middle class, industrial workers, and farmers
who supplied box office receipts. For the moment, at all
events, the people of the United States showed few signs of
devotion to drill-sergeant pleasures. Although standardized
products spread, the regionalisms and polyglot population
of the country still afforded variations. In the Far West,
Indians could indulge in their ceremonies and go so far as to
ridicule the white man's tin cans, archaeologists, and social
workers. Throughout the nation Jews, Irish, Yankees,
Italians, and Negroes could figure in the moving pictures,
have theaters of their own, and be amused by themselves
and one another. The subjection of them all to a Nordic,
Roman, or Muscovite diagram would have been a difficult
undertaking, notwithstanding susceptibilities to nostrums
during the economic distress.
For a long time, the democratic manners, the comparative
freedom, and the relative ease of life in the United States had
found expression in corresponding diversions often called
trivial and vulgar by European commentators on American
civilization. Though Europeans also had prize fights and
music halls, critics of America were inclined to remember
only the amusements provided for the upper classes at home,
such as fox hunting and cricket, royal garden parties and
pageants, and coronation shows. In the United States
"everybody" took part in shows of some kind, if only in
rollicking laughter over representations of human follies.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 583
Americans were fond of parades, but they did not want
parades all the time. They displayed marked propensities
for violence in widely scattered, though numerous, cases, but
they were neither attuned to the mass shock of the totali-
tarian violence, deliberately organized and buttressed by
fear, nor to the inelastic class distinctions of England and
continental countries.
More than once in their history Americans had been sub-
dued to the imperialistic or militaristic psychosis, but they
had always displayed resilient powers of release. A nation
that had been almost one hundred per cent for war in 1917
could, twenty years later, cast a majority vote in a popular
poll for the proposition that it had been a big mistake. When
veterans of the world war held annual reunions, they listened,
more or less dutifully, to speeches on preparedness and mili-
tary virtues ; but they were more interested in pranks than
in anything else. After a week of reunion, they would dis-
band amiably and ride home with their wives in their "old
busses" to take up again their customary entertainments
poker playing, bridge, moving-picture shows, baseball games,
back slapping, and joke cracking in barrooms and clubs.
All this was in keeping with the physical ease corresponding
to democratic liberties a safety valve for distempers and,
what is more, a certain pledge against the wholesale fanaticism
required for the totalitarian State. If argument could not
overcome a Caesar nourishing personal ambitions, people
who preferred laughing at slap-stick comedies on the screen
to goose-stepping for anybody or anything might conceivably
be unable to take a dictator seriously enough to underwrite
his schemes.
The old democratic practice of applauding, hissing, and
talking back, so foreign to life in Power States, helped to keep
alive the looseness and diversity of amusements that in turn
nourished democratic sentiments. Since he was not watched
by the police, a radio owner could simply turn off the bore-
some propagandist, crooner, story teller, politician, or an-
nouncer, without the risk of a police summons to answer for
584 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
his conduct. When the people did not like an advertised
moving picture they could stay at home or walk out of the
theater. Though much given to bathos themselves upon
occasion, they also had a flair for the absurd and were restless
under any harping on one string. If they approved a film,
they sent in "fan" letters voluntarily. If they disapproved,
they could and often did deluge producers with protests,
criticisms, and denunciations, write letters to the news-
papers, and form organizations to strengthen their opposi-
tion. And the efforts of commercialized entertainers to catch
pennies from every direction kept them alert to the endless
turbulence of dissidence.
"To give the people what they want" was to swell box-
office receipts; and evidently the people wanted, not one
pattern of life, but many. Buying their pleasures in an open
market, crowded with competitive offerings, they insisted
on exercising the powers of choice vouchsafed to them by
their impulses and the opportunities before them. Whether
amid this swirling, buzzing diversity, definite and irreversible
tendencies were leading toward social forms, higher or lower,
or fundamentally different from prevailing customs, was a
subject of unwearied speculation, culminating in no settled
conclusions.
Nevertheless the very clarity with which the relation of the
State to entertainment was brought out in imported films
and plays, coupled perhaps with the contraction of American
economy and the attendant agitations, excited a finer sensi-
tiveness to the relations between so-called diversions on the
one side and government and society on the other. The prob-
lem, well known to the historians of morals, came under
wider discussion, both popular and philosophical; for even
the most casual seeker after release in the United States was
subjected to the impacts of scenes depicting armies, red,
green, brown, blue, or black, with flags waving and bands
leading them on the march. The goose-step of the mind
might be vague and shadowy. The pictured goose-step on
pavements and roads was visible and definitive.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 585
If such was the upshot of entertainment dominated by a
totalitarian State, where was the increasing commercializa-
tion of entertainment in the United States headed and what
would be its forms and influences in the proximate future ?
So far the offerings were certainly varied. People were still
free to choose and to buy. If the commercial entertainers
were giving them "what they wanted/' what did the pur-
chases mean in terms of social tendencies ? In searching for
the lowest common denominators effective at the box offices,
would entertainers more and more arouse "the beast that
is within us," play upon fears and passions, resort to war
propaganda, and portray women in approving attitudes?
Or would they, by visual education, offer the people knowl-
edge respecting the good life, the values of creative labor,
and the issues of American economy, thus forwarding the
quest for the maintenance at least of such civilization as had
been developed out of ideals and practices ? Since entertain-
ment was now highly commercialized and concentrated,
would it follow the practices of centralization so common in
capitalist economy and induce regimentation under private
auspices? Obviously such questions were far more funda-
mental than the thought of ordinary dramatic and theatrical
criticism.
Cultural interests were given new forms of expression by the
general introduction, in 192.8, of the talking picture which, by
rapid inroads upon the industry, soon captured the business.
Talking-picture entertainers had to supplement acting by
speech and the necessity of employing speech involved the
use of words, that is, ideas of some kind. As a result the
whole structure of the motion-picture play could be and
indeed had to be reorganized. For the vast spectacles of the
silent picture, costly to film, could be substituted in the
talking pictures the simpler and more compact drama of
life in home, club, resort, field, or office, in which mere con-
versations, orders, and repartee helped to carry the story.
586 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Gesture and facial play had been the reliances of the silent
picture the pantomime. Now sound was geared to ideas,
to emotions, and to their visible expressions. But ideas could
be conventional, trivial, and commonplace or creative,
provocative, and powerful, whether on high planes or low.
Suddenly, therefore, a pantomime industry faced new in-
tellectual problems of some sort. At the same time audiences
were brought into a changed relation to the cinema: they
now had to use ears as well as eyes and were incited to talk
back or at least think back. Thus the psychological aspects
of the screen entertainment became more complicated.
As the talking-picture industry made strides in production
and projection, the mechanical features were refined. Dic-
tion was watched. There were improvements in photog-
raphy, in the manipulation of light, and in other technical
matters, all of which enriched the flexibility, phantasy,
power, and artistry of motion-picture entertainment. Color
was even introduced though its cost hampered its general
use. Taken in combination with various original and sup-
plementary devices, the talking film transformed the motion-
picture industry as the country groped its way from one de-
pression to another.
Meanwhile the economic basis of the motion-picture indus-
try underwent a revolution. As the devices employed in pro-
duction and projection increased in number, intricacy, and
cost, many sorts of industries engaged in manufacturing and
processing were brought into close relations with the business.
This was especially true of the electrical industries. Scenting
potential profits in a growing enterprise, financiers showed
an increasing interest in the cinema and applied to it the
methods which had been so successful in railways, steel, and
utilities successful, that is, from the standpoint of bankers.
At early stages in their development, production and distri-
bution in the picture industry had taken corporate form;
stocks had been issued and sold to the public ; and in some
cases bonds had been laid under the stocks. In the natural
course, the securities of leading picture concerns were listed
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 587
on the exchanges and the customary devices of Wall Street
adopted in "churning" picture stocks in the market* While
related industries and financiers were becoming more closely
interlinked with the picture industry, producers and dis-
tributors, as their undertakings enlarged, often found it
necessary to resort to bankers for credits, short-term loans,
and other facilities. As a result, when the panic arrived in
1929, the chief producers and distributors were entangled in
the corporate structures of general industry and in the bank-
ing and stock-exchange practices soon to be ventilated by
Senate committees bent on discovering how large-scale busi-
ness was actually conducted in the United States.
By 1937 the major portion of the commercial production
and distribution in the cinema industry was controlled by
corporations, usually with complex financial structures.
Some were merely producers, neither owning nor operating
theaters for projection. Others combined production, dis-
tribution, and exhibition, thus maintaining studios, selling
agencies, and theaters. One concern was engaged in the proc-
essing of films and, if newspaper reports could be believed,
its insiders were engaged in manipulating its stocks. The
Universal Corporation, organized in Delaware, the home of
high finance, was a holding company. Warner Brothers, one
of the leading producers, operated a chain of exhibition
theaters numbering about 445. In 1938 Loew's, Incor-
porated, with producing and distributing subsidiaries, had
outstanding $13,604,000 in bonds, a subsidiary debt of
nearly $17,000,000, subsidiary preferred stocks, preferred
stocks, and 15599,053 common shares of no par value.
Like most other industries, the motion-picture business
was "over-expanded." On the basis of paid admissions, it
was estimated by Standard Statistics, each available theater
seat was occupied less than once daily and, in view of the
fact that most houses gave two or more shows daily, the
industry was operating at far less than capacity at from
twenty-five to fifty per cent capacity. It was under the
terrific strain that marked the conduct of business in general
588 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE ^_
a strain to get a larger share of the consumer's dollar by
reaching deeper and deeper into primordial urges.
The grip of the interlocking corporate interests on the pro-
duction of motion pictures was strengthened by their control
over chains of theaters for exhibition and by the practice of
" block booking." Under this practice independent exhibitors
were offered sets of pictures and required to take all of them
as a condition of receiving any, or at least were allowed
favorable discounts on quantities. In other words, in order
to secure films of undoubted quality and fascination, exhibi-
tors were forced to accept a number of mediocre films, "the
run of the works."
Against the requirement, loud grumblings went up to
Washington from independent exhibitors and thus the
"trust-busting" issue was introduced into the motion-picture
business. The Federal Trade Commission conducted investi-
gations, members of Congress threatened drastic legislation,
and from year to year the controversy continued, with the cus-
tomary denunciation of corporate control and the customary
praise of "the little man." On each side of the quarrel a
plausible case was presented, while the practice continued in
spite of the orators. Irrespective of its merits or demerits,
block booking marked a tendency to centralization and
standardization, and it provided outlets for numerous mo-
tion pictures of the most mechanical type, characterized by
no distinction in acting or themes. The best that could be
said for it was that it helped to stabilize the picture business,
as a business.
Studies of the film industry showed that the larger corpora-
tions were, on the whole, in a more secure position. Profits
for all producers depended mainly on success in securing
"stars" who caught popular fancy and lured millions of
persons to box offices. With huge funds at their disposal,
the great concerns could command higher managerial talent
and more "stars" than could their smaller competitors.
Minor establishments that relied on two or three luminaries
for success might be hopelessly crippled by the loss of a
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 589
single actor or actress, while the chief establishments could
weather such a loss. But large or small, motion-picture
corporations ran into troubles as the depression deepened
throughout the country. Estimated box-office attendance
fell from 3,660,000,000 in 1929 to 2,800,000,000 in 1933. A
number of companies were pinched. Radio-Keith-Orpheum
went into the hands of receivers in January, 1933. The
Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation passed through
"the financial wringer," exhibiting in the process a fantastic
maze of inside manipulations that made some of its imagi-
nary screen stories tame in comparison. . Even the collapse of
the Van Sweringen's railway empire, so extensively under-
written by the Morgan Company at public expense, was
scarcely more bizarre than the "reorganization" of the Fox
Film concern.
In the end, as far as there was any end to anything in 1938,
the motion-picture industry was highly centralized in finan-
cial structure, despite the intense competition for stars and
box-office receipts. Bankers and Lords of Creation from
other industries were vitally concerned in its operations and
fate. On the boards of motion-picture companies appeared
persons whose primary interest was financial. A few actors
and actresses of competence and talent might still organize
companies and secure audiences at one or more "legitimate"
theaters, but such an operation was out of the question in
the motion-picture industry, with its hordes of distributing
agents and chains of exhibition houses. However whimsical
prima donnas might like to be in the cinema business, cor-
poration directors and managers were in control of the situa-
tion, combining dominance in production with the selection
of artists, plays, ideas, and features for presentation to the
eighty or ninety million occupants of theater seats each week.
Of course corporation managers and directors, engrossed in
securing large financial returns, had to consider popular
interests, tastes, and vagaries, and that was frequently a
gamble. What they could be sure of was that nothing dis-
tasteful to corporate trustees and managers-in-general flick-
590 m AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
ered constantly, if ever, on the silver screen. Depending
upon the emotions of millions, their enterprise was precari-
ous ; but, having a certain power of choice, they could assure
the supremacy of what Will Hays, the Picture Czar, called
"escapist" presentations. The production of such pictures,
he declared, was the legitimate function of the motion-picture
industry ; and the result was innumerable " beautiful bores."
Carrying a huge burden of fixed and contingent obliga-
tions, the motion-picture industry had to keep its mind on
receipts from admissions. No audience, no profits ; no profits,
no films. Bound by this necessity, producers and playwrights
were forced to bend their energies to making pictures ac-
ceptable to the populace. In so doing they were by no means
blind to the difference between art and "the business that
brought home the bacon/' Actors, it is true, were permitted
occasionally to indulge in "skits " on their trade or profession,
or whatever it was, as in Boy Meets Girl and Once in a Life-
time. And in the seclusion of his elegant office near Wall
Street, New York, one of the "top-flight" Hollywood execu-
tives, while twirling his Phi Beta Kappa key, could "discuss
agreeably" with an interviewer "the gaucheries and vul-
garities of the cinema, as a worldly bishop might discuss
the regrettable but unavoidable flaws of revealed religion."
Since success in the cinema, however, like success in preach-
ing, was based upon the magnetism of appeals to the senses
of the multitudes, the educated executive was as quick as a
worldly bishop to recognize the role of the "unavoidable."
Of course popular films cost a great deal of money and
bankers who advanced short-term credits on the basis of
hopes were mindful of the risks. Hence there could be little
room for bold experimentation. In the opinion of producers
what the people most wanted to see was the sex appeal.
Films on that theme, devoid of any social ideology, pre-
sumably could be sold in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, per-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 591
haps in Communist Russia, and in Japan, the land of the Sun
Goddess ; and Hollywood, like Secretary Hull in the State
Department, gave prayerful attention to the foreign market.
So "colossal" picture producers made the most of the sex
theme. And to meet the universal demand of the sexes, men
and women physically attractive were given fabulous salaries
for film performances some running into hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars a year.
An unusual feature of the latest appeal was the flaunting of
sex before little boys and girls who crowded the moving-pic-
ture houses day and night. Though in countries accustomed
to sex slavery, nautch girls, sing-song girls, and geisha girls
learned to participate in sex entertainment in their early
years, never before in America had boys and girls ranging
from six to ten years of age been permitted by the millions to
witness daily displays of sex enticements approaching, as
near as censorship would permit, to the climax itself. Just
what effect "a century of progress" in that kind of education
would have upon the morale of human relations and upon
the institution of the family no one could say with knowledge
but, given the lust for motion-picture profits, joined to the
passions of sex, that form of "progress" was certainly rapid-
It was accelerated by the fact that the young persons who
paid daily or weekly attendance upon their favorites in the
picture theaters were also among the avid readers of the film
magazines and tabloid papers in which the divorces, esca-
pades, and scandals of the stars were explained in words as
plain as the gestures, postures, and scripts of the cinema. On
the screen, the stars lived and played in romantic settings,
In Hollywood they lived, played, quarrelled, and made
ready for divorces, remarriages, and redivorces, in mansions
no less pretentious and gaudy all befitting their incomes
and the morality of the motion-picture industry, of which
they were a part.
But the cinematic adults and "the universal infan tiles'*
who everywhere streamed past the box offices, seemed to like
magic and fun as well as biology, especially weird stories
592 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
about the animal kingdom. Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse,
for instance., swept through the country and around the
world. Only when a Disney picture imputed some dis-
respect for royal authority did it meet a setback abroad.
After the dictator of Yugoslavia banned one such break from
the strictly neutral line, the producers of Mickey Mouse had
a lesson to take to heart. Untold millions had laughed when
Charlie Chaplin in City Lights swallowed a policeman's
whistle and then "hiccoughed a high wheeze." Untold mil-
lions laughed also at animated cartoons, such as the Silly
Symphonies with their dance motifs, at illusions created by
painstaking drawing and photography. In the winter of
1937-1938 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a modified
version of the famous fairy tale, drew throngs to ticket
booths.
Apparently, the perfect entertainment, apart from sex, was
the perfect illusion snatched from a world of fantasy occupied
by gnomes, talking animals, and dancing quadrupeds. When
George Pal arrived from Europe in 1938 with "animated
puppets," speculators in the domain of profits foretold new
money-making triumphs. Puppets operated by strings had
been popular for more than a thousand years. Puppets made
in "movie animation studios" might last longer and awaken
the glee of peoples for centuries to come. At least the success
of Edgar Bergen's talking automaton, Charlie McCarthy,
seemed to promise huge laughs and gate receipts for inter-
minable years. Being permitted to say what human beings
wanted to say but suppressed, Charlie McCarthy became
everybody's prize scapegoat.
Judging by sales returns, historical romances were appar-
ently third in the popular appeal. Like the puppets, they
offered a retreat to the land of make-believe, by using exotic
scenery and costume, by placing action in remote circum-
stances. According to estimates of film experts, Disraeli was
the favorite picture in 1929 a story of the Jew who long
promoted Tory imperialism in Britain. In the following
years, while the agonies of the world war were still in memory
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 593
and before preparation for another world war had approached
ecstasy, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western
Front, an importation from Germany, was enthusiastically
acclaimed ; so was a picture about Abraham Lincoln, who led
a great war to its conclusion. In 1931 a story of pioneering
in Oklahoma, Edna Ferber's Cimarron, found high favor.
Then came the full force of the financial crash, interrupting
somewhat the flow of historical pictures since films of that
type were expensive to produce. But as business took an
upward turn, the historical romance rebounded. American
democrats were entertained by kings and queens in a suc-
cession of historical pictures and still more historical plays
were promised during an upturn in the recession of 1938.
Sex dramas, animated fantasies, and historical romances
led in a bewildering variety of pictures but the total range
was wide from news reels depicting events and personali-
ties in the four corners of the globe, to travel reels portraying
labor, economy, topography, flora, and fauna in every part
of the world. Industries, laboratories, operations in hospi-
tals, eroding fields, slashed forests, flooding rivers, growing
crops, wild life, functions of government, airplane flights,
battleship launchings, and social work were filmed and ex-
hibited in large theaters for the masses or to selected audi-
ences. Only one note was lacking in the wholesale production
and distribution of moving pictures : the note struck by the
authors of the dissident fiction which bulked so large in the
literature of the time. In the general motion-picture output,
bare portrayals of labor conflicts or films showing the plight
of a third of the nation were conspicuous by their absence.
Why was this so ? Those given to an economic interpreta-
tion of events had one answer : the bankers, financiers, cor-
poration trustees, stockholders, and managers for the huge
and complicated motion-picture industry, with hundreds of
millions at stake, for their own reasons, did not want the con-
flicts of labor and the misery of a third of the nation to be
advertised to their millions of customers. Possibly, however,
even participants in labor struggles and sharers of the misery
594 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
did not themselves wish to see their hard and drab existence
represented on the screen when they were seeking forgetful-
ness, Louis Adamic discovered that the proletariat did not
read proletarian literature. Probably it did not want to work
in factories and mines in the daytime and behold factories
and mines at night in the theatre. It might be that the pro-
letariat itself preferred the realm of fantasy and romance.
One film showing a labor war between the Chicago police and
strikers at the Republic Steel works could arouse national ex-
citement, but a daily stream of such graphics might have cut
down the sustaining box-office receipts.
Struck by the dearth of the labor note in the mass produc-
tion of the moving-picture industry, a reporter sought an
explanation from Rouben Mamoulian, a foreign-born artist,
who had caught glimpses of American potentialities beyond
the range of most natives inured to daily use and wont. The
inquirer received an expert's answer. In High, Wide, and
Handsome, Mr. Mamoulian had presented a saga of oil spec-
ulation. In Porgy and Bess, based on DuBose Heyward's
novel, he had given a picture of servant life in the South,
enlivened by the music of Gershwin. Knowing this record,
the reporter suggested that the full-length saga of American
labor awaited Mamoulian's creative energies the saga cov-
ering the insurgency of the old Knights of Labor, the Molly
Maguires, the leadership of the American Federation of
Labor^ the uprising of the I. W. W., the company union, and
State intervention under the New Deal.
Mr. Mamoulian, in replying, contrasted the comparative
freedom of music, writing, and painting with the limitations
of a mass-production industry dependent entirely upon huge
audiences for support. "The picture industry," he said, "is
no different from the underwear business, for example. It is
completely governed by the law of supply and demand."
Many workers in the cinema did try to put as much into
pictures as they could "get away with," and "imperceptibly
the audience is being influenced to look for more and more
in the films. Some day the screen public may be ready for
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 595
your saga of labor." But the time had not come for it in 1929
or in 1938. Evidently it was not to be expected until a huge
national audience was ready for it. Whether such an audi-
ence would ever be ready depended upon factors outside as
well as within the picture industry.
Insistently as mass-production and commercialized enter-
tainment penetrated the texture of society upon which gov-
ernment rests, its relation to the State received scant con-
sideration until the vast rearmament program was author-
ized under the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In
other places and times, the State itself had maintained spec-
tacles that regimented its subjects while undermining the
morale upon which it depended in the long run. In the
United States, on the other hand, the motion-picture enter-
tainment seemed to lie wholly outside the sphere of govern-
ment.
Yet, in part, the appearance was unreal. The industry
was mainly corporate in form and the corporations which
conducted it obtained their charters from state governments.
In issuing stocks and bonds, picture companies came within
the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission
in Washington. Concerns that stumbled upon evil days and
underwent reorganization encountered congressional investi-
gations and had to answer for their conduct before judges
in charge of bankrupts. Under state boards of control, exhibi-
tions were reviewed and censored. Campaign-fund collectors
for political parties took cognizance of the industry's re-
sources and in this respect the Democratic party, perhaps as
the party in power, was especially favored in 1936. Rumors
of legislation pertaining to antitrust practices and block-
booking were bruited abroad. Far more germane to the
course of civilization in America, however, was the relation
of this form of mass entertainment and mass "education" to
the ultima ratio of government, namely, armed force.
596 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
During American participation in the world war, the mov-
ing-picture industry had been the willing and abject servant
of propaganda from Washington. After a brief season, while
the war-sick nations were washing off the blood of the last
conflict, the tension was relaxed. Then as politicians and
warriors began to gird themselves for "strong foreign poli-
cies" and the anticipated consequences, the motion-picture
industry came back into line. War pictures streamed from
the studios at home and abroad for the American screen,
notably The Singing Marine, Submarine D-i, Annapolis
Salute, Navy Blue and Gold, Wings over Honolulu, Hold
'Em Navy, 23^- Hours Leave, Sweetheart of the Navy,
You're in the Army Now (with none of the humor of the
post-war comedy, You're in the Navy Now), The Road to
Glory, Suzy, Professional Soldier, and Charge of the Light
Brigade. British imperialism furnished two outstanding
films : Lloyd's of London and Wee Willie Winkle. If Ameri-
cans needed any cues in matters of production, they were
aided by a British "saga in patriotism," The Big Parade of
the British Navy, turned out by the British film industry
in cooperation with the British Admiralty for release around
the world in 1935.
To these sources of emotional incitement a few offsets were
available. The production of Remarque's The Road Back
showed the irreducible antithesis between trench habits and
civilian habits ; and They Gave Him a Gun suggested dangers
lurking in the mere private possession of destructive weapons.
An import from England, Things to Come, presented a
phantasmagoria of awful events, and the French description
of Carnival in Flanders ripped the tinsel and gilt from war-
fare.
Films inclined in the direction of peace were overwhelmed,
however, after President Roosevelt's quarantine speech on
October 5, 1937, and the launching of his super-navy program
in January of the following year. The transition was not
difficult, for the military and naval branches of the Govern-
ment were willing coadjutors. Their position had been
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 597
clearly revealed in the Army and Navy Register for April 10,
1937, in an article praising Wings over Honolulu., which
called it "a story of naval aviation of some future war."
Indebtedness for professional aid was acknowledged by the
director of the film: "We are very grateful to the friendly
and helpful spirit of the officers and crew of the Ranger and
the air station. We are working hard to make Wings over
Honolulu a picture of which the entire Navy can be proud.
If this can be achieved, it will be because of the splendid
cooperation of the Navy and the Navy people, officers, en-
listed men, and some of their wives." Later in that year,
when a superintendent of schools in a midwestern city
objecte4 to showing certain war films to the children under
his care, naval reserve officers carried on a campaign of
criticism against him. Such was the passion of the times.
After President Roosevelt announced his naval expansion
policy on January 2.8, 1938, and encountered unexpected
opposition in Congress and outside, his administration turned
to the motion-picture industry for assistance in propaganda.
Besides helping the newsreels in exploiting the Panay inci-
dent in the Japanese war on China, as a part of a campaign
for new preparedness, the Roosevelt administration strength-
ened its cooperation with the picture industry. On April 13,
1938, Variety, an authentic voice of entertainment enter-
prise, was able to report "progress" in a dispatch from
Hollywood: "The Government is showing a more friendly
attitude toward pictures since the big naval appropriations,
and a closer cooperation is pledged to pictures built around
the military arms of service. . . . Washington now is trying
to win over picture-goers to need of adequate defense and
present the U. S. show of strength."
About the same time the syndicated moving-picture col-
umn of the International News Service explained this closer
connection between Government and the industry in an
illuminating sentence: "Perhaps the reason Hal Wallis ob-
tained such ready permission for Warner Brothers is because
Wings over the Navy is propaganda tied up with the recent
598 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
billion-dollar appropriation for added naval protection."
The President was determined to have his way and was eager
to see aid given to the production of films that would swing
the people over to his line of policy. For all practical pur-
poses, the picture industry had become a servant of the
Roosevelt administration in respect of foreign, naval, and
military designs. The Secretary of War, Harry Woodring,
had said through the columns of the magazine, Liberty, that
the Army was ready to "take over the country" in time of
a domestic crisis. If the people could be convinced that no
military or naval appropriation could be unnecessary, the
way would be prepared for the ideology of things to come,
for any mask to cover the face of war.
Not content with making sure that the right "slant" was
given to moving pictures connected with its armament propa-
ganda, the Roosevelt administration took care to keep out
counter-suggestions of a pacific nature. When Paramount
Pictures, apparently with the sympathetic "cooperation" of
the Government, was preparing Men with Wings, a saga
dramatizing the development of aviation, it arranged for the
heroine to deliver a vigorous denunciation of war; but,
according to reports of high authenticity, the Government
issued a ban against that speech in opposition to war. A
dispatch in The New York Times, May 28, 1938, declared:
"Government pressure on Paramount Pictures to eliminate
all pacifist preachment in Men with Wings has brought a
rewriting of the final twenty pages of dialogue." The follow-
ing day, The Times' Hollywood correspondent, Douglas
Churchill, in an article, entitled Peace vs. Propaganda,
reported that "Paramount swaps principles for planes," and
described the way in which government pressure had forced
a reconstruction of the play's conclusion with a view to
eliminating the anti-war note. Commenting on the event,
Variety circumspectly remarked that "unofficial suggestions
from officials in Washington" had been responsible for the
redirection of Men with Wings in harmony with President
Roosevelt's armament policies and propaganda.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 599
Although for a long time it was denied by federal authori-
ties and film producers that they were deliberately united in
any scheme of armament propaganda, facts belied the denial.
It was a fact that film after film had been made with the
cooperation of the armed forces of the United States. It was
a fact that recognition of this cooperation was given in tech-
nical journals. It was a fact that a full page advertisement of
Submarine D~i in motion-picture trade journals paid tribute
to the Navy Department, officers, and men in the submarine
service "in grateful acknowledgement of inspiration and
assistance/' It was a fact that a journalist for the motion-
picture industry openly boasted that the film, Wings over
the Navy, was "propaganda tied up" with Roosevelt's agita-
tion in support of naval expansion. It was a fact that the
Government gave official sanction to cooperation with War-
ner Brothers in the production of this film. Thus., as a com-
mentator on the facts remarked, the citizens who had to
pay taxes for wars and shed blood in them also paid for war-
propaganda in the form of "entertainment." An Aeschylus
could scarcely have done justice to the scene.
Experience had demonstrated that motion-picture produc-
ers and directors were masters of the propaganda technique
and knew how to condition popular reflexes for any war that
politicians might decide upon in Washington. In 1918, while
America was making the world safe for democracy, Cecil B.
De Mille, an authority on the screen, had bluntly described
the art: "I consider the development of the motion picture
. . . into a conspicuously vital factor for the dissemination
of governmental propaganda ... to be most important. . . .
And so, Pride of Patriotism Grim Determination to Win
the War Calm Decision to support every measure of the
Government unreservedly to that end, is finally through
nightly and daily iteration instilled with telling force, into
the breast of the spectator a spectator taken from every
class of American." Even before the United States entered
the world conflict war films had pointed out "the enemy"
and intensified the passions to which President Wilson
600 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
appealed when he decided to take the country into the
combat at arms.
In a republic whose Constitution provided for civilian
supremacy over armed force, that vigilance which is the price
of liberty took into account the trend of events. Every popu-
lar poll showed that the overwhelming majority of the Ameri-
can people wanted to stay out of all imperialist adventures
and wars on other continents, although ready to defend
America itself to the last ditch. Reflecting this positive
public opinion, the National Council for the Prevention of
War established a motion-picture department, under the
direction of Albert Benham, formerly of Hollywood, studied
the film offerings that bore on war and peace, kept close
watch on the connections between the Government and the
picture industry, and issued bulletins on this traffic. If the
Naval Intelligence service of the Government, as alleged in
the Senate, investigated and shadowed such observers and
critics, politics had not yet reached the point in the American
scene where either the War Department or the Navy Depart-
ment could round up and shoot opponents of super-expendi-
tures for the army and navy bureaucracy.
Within the industry itself and among reporters and critics
associated with it were also watchers of events. Right *on
the spot where "the hope of heaven" burned brightest,
Welford Beaton wrote in The Hollywood Spectator: "Each
morning the newspapers demonstrate afresh that, of all His
creations, Man is the one of whom God must be most
ashamed. ... In our own country today are children being
reared in luxury on the profits their parents make by selling
Japan war material which murders Chinese children. And
we call ourselves civilized! . . . Nations have become the
playthings of maniacs their unwise people blindly follow. A
great theme for a great motion picture, but we have no pro-
ducer with brains enough to see it or guts enough to make it."
To one of the two or three true artists that the picture
industry had produced in the course of its long life, Mr. Bea-
ton turned with the plea : "Shoulder arms, Charlie Chaplin !
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 601
The World needs your Little Man now as it never needed
him before/'
The news had been whispered that Charlie Chaplin was
working on an anti-war picture. But it did not appear.
From every "practical" angle, the production of such a film
seemed impossible. Costs would be enormous. No "hearty
cooperation" from the Government of the United States
would be forthcoming twenty years after the end of the
war to end war. If produced independently, distribution
could scarcely break through the grip of the corporate indus-
try upon chain theaters and block-booking. Sales abroad
to Germany and Italy, Spain and Japan at least would be
out of the question ; nor could Soviet Russia, thirsting for
American aid against Japan, be expected to import this film.
Even its exhibition in the United States might bring about
retaliations curtailing the export of other American films.
Time and circumstance seemed prohibitive. Anyway gov-
ernment propaganda held this sector of entertainment.
It was one of the ironies of American entertainment that
thfc picture industry could produce no film for wide domestic
distribution if it was unpleasing to Hitler and Mussolini.
Under the economic theory of " the more foreign trade the
better for the country," according to which Secretary Hull
proceeded with his so-called reciprocity treaties, the great
American film producers received a substantial percentage of
their total income from other lands. With foreign govern-
ments limiting American exports by "quota" legislation and
other restraining devices, with the industry materially de-
pendent upon receipts from foreign sources, with censors
abroad scrutinizing every inch of film, American producers
would lose huge profits, might be thrown into bankruptcy,
by offending in the slightest degree any dictator in Europe.
The President of the United States could exert a positive force
in the production of war films ; foreign dictators could exert
602 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
a telling influence against democratic films and against films
of peace. The most frenzied promoters of the armament race
throughout the world had access to American armament
films to illustrate "the imperious necessity of the case."
The situation was neatly illustrated by the fate of Sinclair
Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, a novel dealing with fascist
tactics, methods, and spirit and representing the American
democratic spirit in strong resistance to the cruelties, lies, and
enormities of such despotisms. In all the years of depression
and turmoil, no novel written in the United States portrayed
more dynamically the ideals of democracy pitted against the
tyranny of the demagogic dictator. Moreover the writer's
name and fame had already commanded immense audiences
readers and "picture fans" in America and Europe.
Soon after publication came an announcement that a
screen version was "in the works" at Hollywood. Months
passed. No film emerged. Questions were asked. Gossip
said that agents of Hitler and Mussolini had clamped the
iron censorship on the picture. Producers denied the allega-
tion. At all events the anti-fascist film was not produced.
From the American people was withheld the privilege of see-
ing a great national ideal in conflict with fascism personified
on the screen. Instead they were offered the "entertain-
ment" of naval and military films. No longer could it be
said that the State had no relation to the commercialized
amusements of America. What that meant for 1950 or 1960
no one could foretell precisely, but guesses could be made
and all realists made them, if the world imagists looked
the other way. Mussolini had shouted that democracy was a
"farce" and "a mask for capitalism." History yet to come
would test the validity of the thesis.
In the present, behind the smooth front of corporate and
official control, restlessness existed among the writers, editors,
actors, and actresses who were necessary to the profitable
conduct of the motion-picture business. This ferment had
been manifested in the agitation over the efforts to unionize
the industry, especially after the appearance of the Com-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 603
mittee for Industrial Organization in Hollywood. It found
tumultuous expression in 1937 when the popular slap-stick
comedian, Hal Roach, a member of the Liberty League,
attempted a kind of coup d'etat among producers by bring-
ing to the seat of the industry Vittorio Mussolini, the son of
the dictator, fresh from his bombing exploits in Ethiopia.
Expecting a fanfare of favorable publicity, Mr. Roach en-
countered a revolt.
On receiving advance news of the young Mussolini's com-
ing, the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League released counter-
publicity, stirred up local trade unions, won the support of
important stars, and held the threat of a general strike over
producers. When the conquering Vittorio appeared on the
scene with his host, he met stony glares. Parties organized
for his entertainment were suddenly called off; he was pub-
licly snubbed by famous stars ; beauties did not dance with
him. Screaming circulars quoted his statement that bombing
natives in Ethiopia had been "exceptionally good fun."
Later it was explained that Vittorio's actual words had been
"molto divertente" and should have been translated as
"highly diverting," not as "exceptionally good fun." But
Hollywood was not troubled about philology and it turned
"the social heat on him" until he literally fled from the
place, slipped back across the continent, and quietly sailed
away for his father's land. The "international incident" was
symptomatic. It revealed underlying tensions in the enter-
tainment industry itself. Certainly that; perhaps nothing
more,
Shortly after the successful commercialization of the sound
picture, the newsreel entered the market as a standard fea-
ture of exhibitions and entertainments and was soon asso-
ciated, like armament films, with great politics. Unlike
motion-picture plays, the newsreel was free from official cen-
sorship, resembling the newspapers in that respect. Operat-
ing under such general titles as The Talk of the World, The
604 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Eyes and Ears of the World, and The March of Time, it was
often called the "educational branch of the theatrical motion
picture." But it was, in fact, a medium for supplying sensa-
tional news ; and newsreel photographers, in the manner of
reporters, went into the field in constant search for "hot
stuff." In reality, the picture reporters were forced to under-
take far more daring adventures, to incur the risk of battle
and sudden death, for they had to go into action with their
cameras at the very center of scenes to be snapped. They
were compelled to keep up a stream of "thrilling novelties"
to prevent their goods from becoming a drug on the market.
Since they could not be present at every "stirring" episode
that occurred, they had to supplement fortunate "catches
of hot news" by the deliberate selection of stated occasions
that could be known and prepared for in advance. And it
happened that a large proportion of such occasions was
"official," that is, governmental in nature.
Although on dull days newsreel photographers in the
United States had to be satisfied with reporting bathing
beauties, carnival queens, and tennis players, they frequently
had political events to film : the launching of battleships and
cruisers, naval displays, military parades, army maneuvers,
new bombing planes taking off, and bigger tanks going into
action. When mere instrumentalities of violence paled at
home, actual scenes of wars abroad could be employed to
"tone up audiences." When pictures of death, destruction,
and suffering on the battlefields of China began to arrive
after the summer of 1937, at least one newsreel concern em-
ployed them to promulgate the doctrine that American
"rights" were being endangered after the fashion of 1914-
1917, with the implication that another war for the defense
of American rights would become the necessary and proper
thing.
That some producers of newsreels were fully conscious of
just what they were doing was indicated by an arrangement
for a private "preview" in Washington of a film dealing
with China, attended by the Chinese ambassador, members
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 605
of his staff, and officers of the United States Government,
including cabinet members. To appear as mere reporters of
news, "impartially transmitted/' the producers invited Sec-
retary Daniel Roper and Senator Bennett Champ Clark to
make addresses to the prospective audiences through the
sound track. While on the surface the balance was appar-
ently even, in fact it was the jeopardy to American busi-
ness interests in China that received the emphasis. Even so,
when the film was exhibited in Washington, the public lis-
tened to Secretary Roper's appeal with stony silence and
gave hearty applause to Senator Clark's plea for staying
out of war.
After the films showing the bombing of the American gun-
boat, Panay, by Japanese airmen had reached the United
States, official facilities were tendered to expedite the exhibi-
tion of the pictures. To use the language of The New York
Times' picture expert: "Aroused by the bombing of the
Panay and compelled to crystallize quickly the nation's for-
eign policy under pressure of disputed incidents . . . Presi-
dent Roosevelt asked the motion-picture industry to show
the public exactly what happened to the little American
gunboat on the Yangtze." The industry eagerly complied
with the request and supplied announcers who made flam-
boyant speeches calculated to lash popular emotions into
frenzy. After reviewing newspaper editorials and newsreel
narrations, Walter Winchell reached the conclusion that edi-
torial writers "refused to get hysterical," but "the newsreel
narrators put on the big jingo act noticeable to those over
soldiering age," And yet, despite the furious efforts of nar-
rators to whip up the war spirit, theater-goers in general
looked at this newsreel and heard the announcement without
going into hysterics. From the military point of view, the
"big scare" was an almost total loss. Had American citizens
at large read in the newspapers that the Panay was in a war
zone convoying Standard Oil tankers ? In any case, the out-
come of the exhibition was a disappointment to the Roose-
velt administration, especially to the State Department, if
606 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
its press releases on foreign policies gave the correct version
of its attitude.
Whether the newsreel was a device for education, sheer
entertainment, whatever that might be, or propaganda, it
became the stormy petrel of Czar Hays' quiet sea of escape.
When newsreels of Mussolini's swank troops or Hitler's
thumping goose-steppers were shown, friends and foes of the
dictators sometimes cracked heads and smashed seats.
Shouts of anger attended the showing of a newsreel made
in Connecticut in which New London boys appeared as
German Storm Troopers engaged in persecuting Jews. Fore-
seeing fights in theaters, Ohio censors banned this film as
detrimental to public morals ; it was also kept out of the
"Aryan" districts of New York City and similar regions in
parts of the West* College boys at Princeton and Amherst
hooted and boycotted the Hearst Metrotone News. In fact
opposition to his exhibitions became so widespread that pro-
ducers found it expedient to drop the name of Hearst from
the title. Minneapolis audiences broke up in factional fury
over pictures of an industrial conflict in that city. The fan
mail that poured into the managerial and editorial offices of
newsreel companies, following hoots and cat-calls at exhibi-
tions, warned them that their patrons would not quietly
accept the fiction that newsreels merely gave "the news
that's fit to print." In respect of newspapers that illusion
had about disappeared and it was too late for newsreel editors
to succeed with pretensions to such "objectivity."
Although no comprehensive survey was made of the news-
reel contents over a period of time, the accent in reportage
was unmistakable. Acts of violence, whether public or pri-
vate, "made news" for pictures as well as papers and one
impression readily gained from the reels was that violence
ruled the world. If actual violence was not enough to fill the
screen, preparations for violence on a large scale supplied
any deficit. Where the pictures themselves lacked an appeal
to hysteria, as in the case of the Panay affair, announcers
tried to furnish the stimulating force by vehement words and
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 607
roaring vociferation. Of course no one claimed that newsreels
covered all civilization, including acts of kindness, wisdom,
and virtue. But with the regular motion pictures concentrat-
ing so heavily on crime and the biology of sex and the news
films crowded with scenes of crime and war, the emphasis
was on the side of destruction, passion, and brutality.
What relation did the technics, art, and emphasis of the
moving-picture industry bear to the maintenance and devel-
opment of society, especially a republican and democratic
society ? That question rose above all minor points of criti-
cism and appreciation and it could only be answered, if at
all, with reference to the characteristics of such a society as
set forth by men and women competent to speak through
experience and knowledge. High on the list was knowledge
of the forms and functions of society and government and
the issues arising in their time unfolding. "A free, virtuous,
and enlightened people," James Monroe had said more than
a century before, "must know well the great principles and
causes on which their happiness depends/' No less funda-
mental, equally requisite was virtue, above all in the sense
of devotion to the public good as distinguished from the
overweening pursuit of private gain or the irresponsible en-
joyment of personal passions. In the third place, it had long
been an axiom of political observers that while a State rest-
ing on force, buttressed by a hierarchy of power, lay and
ecclesiastical, and fortified by awe-inspiring ceremonials,
might, at least for a time, dispense with virtue, this quality
of the human spirit was the active, indispensable require-
ment of a republic. Also embedded in the necessities of such
a society was the supremacy of civilian agencies over that
immense interest which had helped to lay all the States of
antiquity in ruin, namely, the military interest. And under-
lying all this were habits of moderation, respect for human
rights, prudent conduct of private affairs, without which no
society could long endure on a civilian basis.
608 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Accepting as valid the axiom that virtue is an absolute as
well as a relative value. Will Hays, shortly after he retired
from the Harding administration to serve as the czar of
morals in the motion-picture industry, issued his declaration
of faith : "We must have toward that sacred thing, the mind
of a child, toward that clean and virgin thing, that unmarked
slate we must have toward that the same sense of responsi-
bility, the same care about the impressions made upon it,
that the best teacher or the best clergyman, the most inspired
teacher of youth would have." Without taking this lofty
sentiment as an eleventh commandment, it could be said
that everyone who thought about the moving-picture indus-
try in relation to society agreed with Mr. Hays that it did
and might have a profound influence on the sustaining
morale of American habits and institutions.
Whether Mr. Hays intended that teachers should take his
dictum as an unequivocal command or not, they did mani-
fest a persistent and continuing interest in the influence of
motion pictures on the children whom they were training for
life in American society and citizenship in the republic. In
efforts to get at the elusive nature of this influence they
devoted attention, of necessity, to the content or emphasis
of the pictures, as distinguished from the nominal theme.
Through the Committee on Educational Research, formed
under the auspices of the Payne Fund, with W. W. Charters
of Ohio State University as chairman, a group of teachers
and specialists made extensive inquiries into the components,
or ingredients, of motion pictures for four years, 1929-1932,
with a view to arriving at some consensus of opinion respect-
ing their influences upon youth. One survey, made in this
connection by Dr. Edgar Dale of Ohio State University,
covered fifteen hundred pictures for the years 1920, 1925, and
1930 and the results were incorporated in The Content of
Motion Pictures.
During those three years, according to Dr. Dale's classifi-
cation, the "love theme" led all the others; crime ranked
second with a rating only two per cent lower in 1930; sex
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 609
as biology came third in 1920 and 1925 ; comedy stood fourth
in 1920 and 1925 and third in 1930., showing signs of increase
as the economic depression deepened. War was at first sixth
in position, but its status showed signs of rising as the
world's rearmaments expanded; after 1930, especially under
the stimulus of President Roosevelt's naval and military
policy, and with the cooperation of the army and navy, the
war theme mounted swiftly, events in Spain and China pre-
sumably giving it warrant in the factual substance of con-
temporary history. So low in the statistical scale were pic-
tures of constructive significance for American democracy
that they could be easily overlooked. The heroes of the
films, in an impressive measure, were "great lovers/' por-
trayers of biological urges, parasites, criminals, gangsters,
and warriors engaged, under law, in killing, burning, and
destroying.
In respect of background, the big cities, particularly New
York and Paris, were utilized for scenes of wealth and power.
These were varied by pictures of splendor in the palaces of
princes, from Europe to India, with special attention to sleep-
ing quarters. According to reports on forty pictures showing
residences, studied in detail, sixty-nine per cent of the accent
was upon life among the rich and only four per cent upon
the simple annals of the poor. Most of the actors were young
men ranging in age from twenty to thirty, while the actresses
on the average were still more youthful ; for heroes, the age
limit was about fifty-six ; for heroines, about thirty-five. A
villain might be in his sixties and the vixen in the late fifties,
but no hero or heroine was that old. Among the economic
occupations represented in 115 pictures, commercial business
led the list. About half the women and a few of the men had
no known lawful occupations. Little girl actors, effusively
advertised, were, as a rule, smartly gowned and coiffed in
Hollywood vogues, though toward the end of 1938 young-
sters were being drilled for tougher roles. According to one
student of the pictures, three-fourths of the output of forty
pictures examined made a feature of intimate clothing. The
610 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
pajama fashion originated by Gloria Swanson continued in
vogue, with bathing suits of scant proportions sharply com-
peting^ and the "strip tease" gaining.
Only lines from Juvenal describing the diversions of decay-
ing Rome were applicable to the facts in the case. Among
1500 pictures examined, Edgar Dale found that only a small
percentage treated love as romance, as enduring personal
happiness, as possessing deep social importance. The kiss, so
profusely and obtrusively exhibited, lost most of its meaning
save as a gesture of biology. Some producers seemed to
delight in the innuendo of the promiscuous ; but whether it
was also preferred by audiences only the admissions could
indicate. With love so depicted, crime was closely associated.
Every gangster had his "Moll" and interest in crime itself
was fanned by manifestations of sex. Criminals were rarely
caught and punished in the films. Nor were the subtler forms
of retribution often graphically or artistically treated ; where
punishment did follow crime, that was usually the end of the
matter.
In studying 115 pictures in detail, the Payne Fund re-
searchers found that the heroes were responsible for 13 mur-
ders, the villains and villainesses for 30. In all, 54 murders
were committed; there were 59 cases of felonious assault,
17 hold-ups, 21 kidnap ings, and numerous other crimes. The
total number of deaths by violence was 71. In short, in 1 15
pictures, 406 crimes were actually committed and 43 addi-
tional ones were attempted, making a total of 449 crimes in
115 pictures, or nearly four crimes per picture. Inasmuch as
there were about thirty million admissions of boys and girls
under twenty-one years of age to the moving-picture houses
every week, such detailed specifications, however discounted
and interpreted, was certainly pertinent to the maintenance
of the American republic and the basic institutions of Ameri-
can society.
The findings and conclusions reported by the surveys
under the auspices of the Payne Fund, coupled with criticism
from other sources, produced more than a flurry in the mo-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 611
tion-picture industry, with its eyes ever on the box office and
public relations. Disturbed by the growing revolt, repre-
sentatives of the industry cast about for some David to
destroy Goliath and found in Raymond Moley, former mem-
ber of President Roosevelt's brain trust, the appropriate
person for the mission. His reply was made in a slender
volume entitled Are We Movie Made? published in 1938.
Although an expert investigator himself, Moley chose to base
the burden of his argument upon a book on Art and Juris-
prudence by Mortimer Adler, a professor in Chicago Uni-
versity, passionately engaged in teaching the doctrines of
Thomas Aquinas to midwestern Protestants. With little
difficulty Moley, aided by Adler, tore up the thesis that sci-
ence could demonstrate a "causal" connection between rep-
resentations of crime and anti-social acts on the screen and
specific instances of crime and anti-social acts in everyday
life. Having done this, Moley treated as unimportant the
informed judgment of teachers and other investigators actu-
ally in daily contact with children subjected to motion-
picture influences ; and substituted his judgment, tinctured
by cautious qualifications, to the effect that on the whole,
by and large, in general, the moving pictures were good for
the public, that teachers should stick to their last, and "that
each should attend to the perfection of his own business."
No doubt, conclusions on the dispute were largely matters
of personal opinion in respect of everyday experience and
knowledge; and all the controversy about the "science" of
the business simmered down to issues of common sense. It
required no elaborate statistical calculations and correlations
to convince bystanders that the probabilities were on the side
of those who maintained that the strong emphasis in the
moving pictures on crime, sex, violence, racketeering, and
high living was not conducive to the development and preser-
vation of those virtues essential to the health of a democratic
republic.
Most pictures that were well patronized had to have a
"kick" ; in other words, they had to violate the conventions
612 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
of rational and prudent behavior. In supplying these sur-
prises, demonstrations of delinquency, open passion, and
overt cruelty were commonly employed. In an age of bank
crashes and defaulting bonds, intrigue and blackmail were
more likely to be portrayed on the screen than devotion to
fiduciary trust and to the tender consideration of others
perhaps unwittingly a portrayal of democratic culture as its
course was then being shaped. No doubt there was creative
intelligence in America, cooperation for the common good,
and heroism as social action; but such aspects of society
necessary to its continuance and vital to its improvement
received relatively little attention from directors of the regu-
lar motion-picture industry. For Horatius at the bridge was
substituted the gangster preying upon society ; for morality,
a-morality ; for the ethics of religion, incalculable mysteries.
If "morality" was drawn upon for inspiration, it was gener-
ally to reveal the "horrors" of race suicide, labor conflicts,
bolshevism, socialism, and all forms of radicalism in contrast
with the "heroics" of patriotism depicted as subservience to
the valuations of the pecuniary Respectability.
With physical passions and energies so glaringly empha-
sized, the theory of the motion picture as a release, as an
escape into a world of phantasy, as a pleasing antidote to
the monotony and hardships of life was clearly defective, at
least as applied by a vast number of commercial films. Far
from offering sedatives to audiences, such films suggested
stimulation to overt action in line with the portrayals of the
screen. This aspect of the business was analyzed and set
forth by Herbert Blumer in his volume on Movies and Con-
duct. After a long study of the subject, Blumer came to the
conclusion that the moving pictures are not "merely a device
for surcease." For many patrons of the business, Blumer
decided, they were "authentic portrayals of life" from which
were derived patterns of behavior, incitement to conduct,
ideas of reality, and "content for a vigorous life of imagina-
tion." In other words, day and night, the motion pictures
were arousing in millions of boys and girls, men and women,
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 613
impulses to actions of passion and violence that defied the
moralities necessary to the rational conduct of affairs in
society. Resting his case on this ground Blumer stated his
summary: "Because motion pictures are educational in this
sense, they may conflict with other educational institu-
tions. . . * This is likely to be true chiefly among those with
least education and sophisticated experience."
Confirmation of this general finding came from the News-
paper Guild, the national organization of reporters and other
newspaper workers. Among the various participants in
American life, men and women of the press were not espe-
cially addicted to sentimentality and petty moralities. On
the whole, among the intellectuals of the country, they were
the most realistic in experience and thought. But in 1937
even the Newspaper Guild was moved to protest against the
films that touched upon the reportorial occupation. It com-
plained that seventeen pictures produced that year vilified
reporters and made workers in the business appear indecent ;
that five pictures treated them as innocuous persons playing
no useful role in society ; and that only two pictures presented
them as having intelligence and character. It called special
attention to the film They Won't Forget, in which a colum-
nist was made to be a home wrecker, and to Back in Circula-
tion, which showed a reporter so devoid of humanity that he
could whimsically send a woman to execution or as lightly
secure her acquittal. Rumors circulated to the effect that
Hearst and other employers close to Hollywood were thus
secretly waging war upon their reporters and employees in
response to the organization work so successfully carried on
by the Guild but, entirely apart from this allegation, it was
evident that many newspaper workers were as indignant
against the films as some intransigent members associated
with the Legion of Decency.
To indict the whole picture industry was as foolish as to
indict a nation, and yet there was so much social dynamite
614 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
exploding before millions day and night on the screen that
protests and counter-actions came from every quarter of
responsibility in the United States. If some objections devel-
oped from the overwrought imaginations of puritans, Protes-
tant and Catholic, by no means all sprang from that source.
In fact, as early as 1922, leaders in the picture industry had
become so alarmed by the back-fire that they had organized
the Motion Picture Producers and Exhibitors of America,
Incorporated, with Will H. Hays, President Harding's Post-
master General and the former manipulator of Republican
campaign funds at the head, with the official title of czar of
the business and the functions of a water boy. This agency
of the industry continued to analyze complaints, consult
with objectors, arrange for "previews" before religious socie-
ties and women's clubs, and form committees of advice and
counsel. Meanwhile the National Board of Review, a private
organization established in 1909, operated directly and
through local committees as a voluntary agency of criticism
and approval. To such private agencies were added official
boards of censorship in a number of the states, which imposed
various restraints upon the scenes, actions, and lines of pic-
tures before exhibition to the public.
Still protests mounted. By 1934 a Catholic association, the
Legion of Decency, had entered the fray with a national cam-
paign that frightened the leaders of the industry and led to
the imposition of limits approved by Catholic authorities*
Inasmuch as the Catholic hierarchy was engaged in the pur-
suit of its own ideals and interests, had great economic stakes
in all parts of the country, and was connected with a complex
of economic and political interests in all parts of the world,
its control in practice went far beyond mere matters of faith
and morals, into spheres where political contests raged. Nor
was its control merely confined to moral suasion. According
to Elizabeth Yeaman, in The New Republic of October 5,
1938, it induced film executives, "ninety-nine per cent Jew-
ish/' to employ at a high salary Joseph I. Breen, a Catholic
of Irish descent, to act as its dictator-censor for the moving-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 615
picture industry. So with the censorship exercised through
threats of exclusion and retaliation by Hitler and Mussolini
was associated the iron discipline of the greatest authorita-
rian church on earth. Against this combination, Protestants
sometimes fumed and chafed, but they were unable to affect
it in any material respect. In the circumstances the prospects
of libertarian democracy receiving any consideration at the
hands of the moving-picture industry were not flattering ; in
fact amounted to something near zero.
Within the picture industry itself, individual directors and
actors subjected their products to more critical examination
and sought to improve the artistic quality and intellectual
standards of their films. Within and outside the studios,
some playwrights and players displayed a strong sense of
integrity and an interest in the currents of lay opinion that
ran through the years. Out of pressures from audiences and
criticism, out of genuine artistic impulses, and out of a
sincere desire to end the tyranny of biology and the rawness
of crime, came many productions of undoubted, if limited,
quality. Among them was The Story of Pasteur, of the
indomitable French scientist dedicated to the idea of serving
humanity through the elimination of disease. Another was
The Life of fimile Zola, portraying the great French humanist
who valiantly challenged class intolerance and racial bigotry
at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Pearl Buck's The Good
Earth, a picture of fundamental life and economy in China,
conformed to canons of universal value and artistry. If these
were products of criticism, then the industry was not lacking
in sensitiveness. At the same time idealistic and independ-
ent playwrights, directors, actors and actresses were passing
severe judgments on their own trade in letters, articles,
and books under the very eyes of producers and reviewers.
From other angles appraisal and criticism fell upon the
motion-picture industry. Teachers and leaders in organized
education encouraged the production of films that were in-
formative in character dealing with inventions, nature,
travel, manufactures, discoveries, and the useful activities of
616 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
normal social living. They urged local houses to exhibit pic-
tures that could be approved for children and to enlarge
their offerings of pictures appealing to adult intelligence and
aspiration. From year to year various associations of teachers
carried on studies and issued analyses and lists of pictures
deemed appropriate for use in the schools. In 1938, for ex-
ample, the National Council of Teachers of English issued a
Handbook in Moving-Picture Evaluation., prepared by Helen
Rand and Richard Lewis, with the "advice and counsel" of
Edgar Dale and Sarah McLean Mullen, specialists in the
content of film productions. In communities scattered over
all the country, parents and teachers, in regular and special
associations, brought the picture output under review and
swelled the volume of criticism and appraisal that rolled
over the directors, actors, producers, and exhibitors. Going
beyond criticism to constructive action, two hundred dis-
tinguished educators, artists, civic workers, playwrights, and
politicians, disturbed by the growth of intolerance and re-
action, organized in 1938 Films for Democracy to produce
pictures dealing with the pressing issues of the time in the
spirit of humanistic democracy.
The Federal Government itself supplied contradictions to
its war propaganda by producing for public use a large num-
ber of films showing its scientific and humane enterprises,
from the work of the Coast Guard saving lives in storms at
sea to the labors of the Bureau of Mines rescuing miners from
underground disasters. Flood control, for example, was por-
trayed in The River, fighting fires on the public domain in
Forest Fire, and agricultural extension in Helping Negroes
to Become Better Farmers and Homemakers. Since govern-
ment undertakings touched most phases of American life in
their physical settings, motion pictures of public officials in
the discharge of their duties covered a wide range of economy
and culture. To the large store of federal films, teachers and
leaders interested in the future of American democracy
could turn for concrete information respecting democracy at
work and for inspiriting scenes of public service.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 617
In the contest for popular interest, enthusiasm, and patron-
age, the moving-picture industry pressed hard upon the
regular theater, affecting the forms of drama offered and the
talents of dramatic artists, if in ways difficult to grasp and
measure. Conflict was, no doubt, in accord with the line of
experience in the past open to comparison. After the art of
the theater in ancient Rome had developed to a fine point
through a mixture of Greek learning and principles with
Roman originalities, it confronted, despite imperial favors,
the growing rivalry of spectacles in amphitheaters and "the
maddening excitement of the circus." At length, as A. W.
Ward, the British dramatist, described the outcome, "the art
of acting had sunk into pandering to the lewd or frivolous
itch of the eye and ear ; its professors had, in the words of a
most judicious modern historian, become *a danger to the
peace of householders, as well as to the peace of the streets.
The majestic lines of the great dramatists were heard no
more, the appeal to the mind and to humane sensibilities
died away, and finally the theater crumbled with the circus
into ruins as Roman society itself dissolved into fragments.
That a deep gulf separated the moving picture from the
drama on the stage was universally admitted even after the
talking film succeeded the silent film. Actors in the theater
could, if they would, give expression to subtler involutions of
thought, to complex ideas of life and destiny, to judgments
explicable only in terms of tone and gesture immediately
conveyed to auditors. The theater brought actors and
audience into direct contact, both creating and stimulating
psychological relations essential to the supreme illusions of
drama. These distinguishing characteristics of the theater
were not and could not be duplicated by the moving-picture
industry, with its mechanical devices, its commercial re-
straints, its performances in the glare of freakish lights, in
the presence of technicians and roustabouts, all so obtrusively
artificial. Nor was the theater absolutely bound through
618 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
the box office to the lowest common denominators in Amer-
ica, Europe, and Asia ; it could appeal to selected groups in
cities and sustain on the boards for years a single play which
no motion-picture corporations could afford even to produce
on account of its limited audience or which, if produced,
would have quickly dropped into the oblivion accorded to
the greatest of films.
So attractive was the opportunity offered by the theater
for the expression of ideas and the subtler skills of artistry
that many film actors, despite alluring salaries, chafed at
their routine, deadened by performances in mere studios,
before mechanical apparatus, piecemeal, to photographers
and stage hands. The inspiring essentials of drama char-
acter, personality, and nuances were difficult, if not impos-
sible, to preserve in such circumstances. From year to year
theatrical journals and reviews reported the discontents of
writers, actors, craftsmen, and directors in Hollywood who
were not satisfied intellectually and emotionally, though
bound physically by the charm of their earnings. Some of
them actually turned away from mechanics and luxury, real
or potential, to assume the obligations and enjoy the com-
pensations of the stage.
But the transition was not always happy or successful for,
in returning to the theater, prodigal sons and daughters were
Hkely to carry the tattoo of the cinema; and experienced
dramatic critics were quick to discern the signs of the mechan-
ical studio. When, for example, Alfred Lunt and Lynn
Fontanne undertook to interpret Greek legends on the stage,
J. Brooks Atkinson, critic for The New York Times, re-
marked that they might as well have stayed in Hollywood.
Their performance, he declared, was clearly "show business "
a "suave and crackling performance of a bawdy jest,"
admittedly, but a mixture of classical brawling, intrigue, and
gossip for the sheer purposes of masquerade. Although such
was not the outcome of all translations from the screen studio
to the stage, even of other adventures by Lunt and Fontanne,
the difficulties involved in movement from the one medium
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 619
to the other served to widen and deepen the gulf that sepa-
rated them*
While huge financial corporations with expensive mechan-
ical devices at their command, newly invented, used the
moving picture to effect a transformation in historic enter-
tainment, the theater kept its roots in the past, though re-
sponding to the spirit of changing times. Its wellsprings of
inspiration and ideas, its sources of economic support, its
wide range of experimentation in the subtler arts of thought
and acting remained substantially unaffected by the revolu-
tion that overtook entertainment by the cinema, even if its
use of light reduced the use of paint. Groups in small towns
and in great cities, moved by dramatic urges as in the most
ancient days of the human race, could test their impulses
behind the footlights, at a financial hazard exceedingly trivial
in comparison with the outlays for Hollywood spectacles.
An individual producer could employ an unknown play-
wright, assemble a few players, and assume risks beyond the
daring of huge picture corporations. After all, playwrights
and actors, with rare exceptions, had been forced from time
immemorial to endure the buffets of pecuniary misfortune ;
neither prosperity under President Coolidge nor the second
depression under President Roosevelt made much difference
in that respect.
The motion picture moved along a straight path from
highly centralized workshops, under corporate trustees, to
the multitude of consumers who took what they got, whether
they liked it or not. On the other hand, the theater, large and
small, professional and amateur, regular and irregular, chose
to twist and turn in town and country. Whereas seven or
eight great corporations virtually dominated the commercial
picture business, innumerable small theater proprietors had
a fairly free hand in controlling stage performances. No
little group of playwrights and actors could rent a huge Holly-
wood plant even for a few weeks, but it could engage a vacant
theater, or even a barn, for an experiment. Owing to the
relatively small pecuniary commitments of the single theater,
620 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
mere playwrights and foot-loose actors with the dramatic
sense and talents could work up from the bottom, from the
ranks of the nameless and unknown, to failure or success on the
stage. To use a hackneyed phrase, by no means irrelevant
for the times, the theater was far more democratic in sources
of inspiration and control than the motion picture. It offered
more elbow room. It was more hospitable to the expression
of popular opinions. It helped to form stereotypes as well
as to impose them. Protected by constitutional guarantees
of free press and free speech, the theater permitted a freer
ventilation of ideas and interests in the discussion of all
great and petty themes of the age.
So constituted, the theater in relation to the moving-
picture industry stood somewhat in the position of the farmer,
artisan, and small business man as against corporate enter-
prise in the field of economy and of politics. It possessed a
certain degree of economic independence. It allowed a high
degree of movement, if only from failure to failure, as in the
case of grocers, bakers, and vegetable gardeners. Players
could set themselves up in business about as easily as a
garage mechanic could establish a wayside gasoline station.
Indeed all over the country, barns and small auditoriums
were converted into theaters in which local groups or strolling
players entertained farmers, villagers, and "the summer
people." Individually often unimportant, in mass the mul-
titude of independent theaters and playing groups signified
the will to a free public expression of taste in drama, as
against the centralizing and standardizing tendencies of the
film corporation. Beside the commercial theater there could
be the art theater. Although remnants of chain theaters
survived the competition of the screen, the theatrical busi-
ness, in the main, was still u a little business/' Its unme-
chanical whimsies, its reliance upon the strange processes that
throw up talent in one year or one decade and mediocrity in
the next, made it unattractive to most financiers. The mov-
ing-picture business was hazardous enough, but the theater
defied all hopes of steady mass production and calculable
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 621
profits. In remaining precarious, however, like life, it per-
mitted more life.-
Those branches of theatrical enterprise which were essen-
tially, if not predominantly, commercial in control continued
in their historic role, with an eye to box-office receipts. Yet
they too underwent some changes with the vicissitudes of the
time. As the masses were swept into the moving-picture
houses, the old ten, twenty, and thirty cent melodrama, for
all practical purposes, disappeared and the heyday of pure
vaudeville was also ended. When the country was plunged
into the depths of the economic depression, theaters, like the
banks, were often closed if not thrown into the hands of
trustees or receivers. Having lost the ten, twenty, and thirty
cent patronage and pinched by the steep decline in employ-
ment, strictly commercial theaters became more dependent
upon the classes, that is, the middle and moneyed classes.
In response to market exactions, the eternal triangle, the
bedroom play, and commonplace though sometimes titil-
lating scenes from small lives were endlessly reiterated, with
minor fluctuations as the economic depression tightened,
relaxed, and intensified.
As a matter of course also the regular theater kept on pre-
senting crime and mystery plays as well as the eternal tri-
angle, often importing them from England, the original
home of the redoubtable Sherlock Holmes. In 1932, when
the graph of the business indices dipped almost to the bot-
tom, Edgar Wallace's Criminal at Large, a story of frenzied
murder, "enjoyed" a long run in New York to crowded
houses. Regional and special aspects of American civiliza-
tion, always a source of dramatic inspiration, received their
customary consideration. Taking a series of Negro legends
as a basis, Marc Connelly produced Green Pastures, a vision
of heaven, with God presiding, in which religion, philosophy,
and the comedy of life were treated with gentleness and
sincerity in a medley of folk fantasies. Besides commanding
622 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
an immense popularity, the play won the Pulitzer prize for
the year 1930. As to what it signified critics did not agree
but they were united in proclaiming it "a work of art/'
Life in a little midwestern community flared up before the
footlights for a brief season in Torch Song, with characters
"pleasantly imagined." Business, reporting, crime, and pro-
fanity blazed out during the days of the "bull" market of
1928 in two newspaper dramas : The Front Page and Gentle-
men of the Press. With representations of mystery, localism,
and particular enterprises ran the usual "revivals," ranging
from Shakespeare to Moliere, from Ibsen to Bernard Shaw,
indicating a continuity of interest in history and in the
thought of undoubted Old Masters of the dramatic art.
Although women appeared in the triangle as ever, they
received a peculiar treatment on the stage in the age when
Nazism was denouncing feminism as a phase of "Jewish
liberalism" not to be tolerated. In the play written by Clare
Booth and captioned The Women, an all-woman caste of
forty actors depicted a set of "city slickers" as a futile crowd,
futile even in the home ; their chatter was the chatter of the
"smart set" ; they were devoid of friendship for one another
and satirical even in references to maternity ; if there was a
heroine, she was the economically independent woman who
might be called a feminist.
Audiences packed the house night after night to see this
play in New York an outstanding "comedy hit" as its
manager boasted. Men laughed and laughed. Was the
interpretation of women in this drama a mere portrayal of
frustrated and quarrelsome creatures belonging to the
bourgeoisie, defeated and befuddled in a realm of conspicuous
waste ? Or was it a symbol of a sex about to be subjected to
the function of rearing soldiers under a fascist ideology?
These questions were asked and found no categorical
answer even in the reply made by the playwright to the
prohibition ordered by the British censor when her drama was
sent to England for review and possible production. The
reason put forward by the censor for his action was the
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 623
speech against maternity in which one of the women had in-
dulged ; that much was illuminating. While The Women was
still very popular in New York, arrangements were made to
send it on the road as "the nearest thing to an old time
carnival on a tour of one night stands in which he [the
manager] had ever been implicated."
In Susan and God, Rachel Crothers gave woman another
interpretation, with Gertrude Lawrence as its spokesman.
She challenged the spirit of war and hatred exemplified in
violent political movements and in such a drama of despair
as Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. With "death
stalking the earth, death in the morning and evening and
night, on land, in the sea, and in the air/' it seemed to
Rachel Crothers that evil rather than good was dominant on
the earth through the folly and indolence of people men
and women alike. Her Susan, accepting God as a symbol of
the good, was just an average person, observing and taking
part in the affairs of the hour and day. "Personally/* said
Miss Crothers, "I believe all that Susan says, though not
quite as she says it, and I'm with her when she declares 'It's
the only thing that will stop war/ but I am afraid her * bright
and shining army which can't be stopped and is marching
gloriously on ' will have to march very fast indeed now and
recruit many new soldiers, or it will be overtaken by the
hideous one which is on our heels." Besides attracting
theater-goers night after night, the drama of Susan and God
won the Theater Club's award as the "outstanding play"
for the season of 1938.
If many theater-goers did not want to see on the stage,
night after night, the visible and outward signs of political
and economic conflicts daily reported in the headlines of news-
papers, playwrights and actors could not entirely evade the
spirit of the times, the drum beats of the economic depression,
the reverberations of the New Deal, uprisings among debt-
burdened farmers and tenants, or the conflicts of labor that
624 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
produced the Committee for Industrial Organization. The
truth is that dramatists and performers were frequently
immersed in the surge of opinions and emotions which
accompanied the making of history, great and small, in the
United States, itself a part of world history. Workers in the
dramatic arts, no less than the Lords of Creation, were
certainly alert to the detonations, dissolutions, and bewilder-
ments that followed the wild days in Wall Street in the late
autumn of 1929. And it was a proof of elasticity and vitality
that the American theater could present, in many cases with
notable success, convulsive episodes, realistic scenes, and
intellectual clashes, illustrating and, in some measure, com-
prehending the main clusters of events. Perhaps never before
in the history of the American theater were so many and such
varieties of crucial political, economic, and cultural experi-
ences presented on the stage within so short a span of years.
Whatever the verdict of critics, especially concerned with
"art for art's own sake," on this profusion of "social dramas,"
the very profusion itself was indicative of ideas and moods
commingling in the central tendencies in American life.
Was it merely a unique flare-up in history for example, the
affair of Sacco and Vanzetti, two "social rebels" put to death
in Massachusetts on charges of robbery and murder, which
provoked outcries and riots from Boston around the world ?
In a message to the legislature, the governor of Massachusetts
urged that body to relieve future governors of the " difficulties
which were forced upon him in 192,7 by zealous defenders of
persons convicted of first-degree murder" and to consider re-
visions of the law pertaining to appeals, exceptions, and
motions for new trials in capital cases the exact points of
law against which many cogent objections had been lodged
during the long contest over the trial of the two defendants.
The very year following the execution of the accused, Max-
well Anderson and Harold Hickerson seized upon the raw
materials of the trial, the agitations, and the outcome, and
wrote for the stage their Gods of the Lightning a play of
harsh and powerful realism. J. Brooks Atkinson, a dramatic
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 625
critic who kept his head in storms, calmly remarked of the
play as acted : "The authors had told their story so forcefully
and the actors played with such simple fervor that the effect
was cruelly disturbing in the theater. As special pleading,
Gods of the Lightning was one of the most effective plays
ever produced." From the box-office point of view it was not
a "smashing success/' but at all events there it was in the
repertory of the year 1928 as dramatic idea in action. Within
a similar category, involving the administration of justice,
came John Wexley's They Shall Not Die, a representation
of the Scottsboro case, in which a group of Negro boys on trial
for their lives were the center of another national agitation.
While banks were bursting in 1933, depositors were hold-
ing their breath, and the New Deal was being inaugurated
amid party uproar, Maxwell Anderson launched his political
play, Both Your Houses, to which the Pulitzer Prize was
awarded. Far more penetrating, more understanding in its
grasp of politics and business than The Gilded Age, written
by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in the period of
"Grantism," Anderson's drama of Washington in the period
of New Dealism spared neither business nor politics, while
taking account of idealistic forces operating under the mantle
of intrigue. In its personnel appeared the hard-headed
manager of machine politics and the young "progressive"
from the hinterland bent on " serving the people." The tragic
conflict between the real and the ideal, which had torn
western thought since the dawn of Greek civilization and
beyond was brought down to cases in the national capital
of the United States. The very texture of "practical affairs "
was dissected that everlasting contest between good and
evil that had marked the whole course of world history.
Playgoers seethed in politics and acquainted with Washing-
ton lost the illusion of illusion as they followed the movement
of the play, and Both Your Houses was acclaimed as "the
most conspicuous success" of the year.
The following year, 1934, Elmer Rice, whose Street Scene
had excited both New York and Chicago a short time before,
626 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
gave theater-goers an acid test of Fascism and Communism,
then the sources of physical riots and verbal battles in various
parts of the earth. On the burning of the Reichstag in Ger-
many and the trial of the accused as a basis, Rice built, in
Judgment Day, a drama of clashing ideologies and fighting
ideologists. Witnesses were divided over its ideas and merits,
and critics differed in their opinions, with some reference to
predilections, of course, but chroniclers of the theater felt
compelled to set it down in the records as among the events
of the season. Rice's second play, Between Two Worlds, was
another attempt to dramatize the conflict of social philos-
ophies this time on an ocean liner literally between two
worlds. Its lukewarm reception discouraged the author and
he withdrew for a time from the theatrical world, but only
for a time.
While the mirage of recovery seemed to lie ahead, despite
signs of an approaching recession, the authors of You Can't
Take It with You put on, in 1937, the good-natured musical
farce, I'd Rather Be Right, and won that year's Pulitzer
prize. In this skit on national politics, the ideas and actions
of President Roosevelt were the target, but the arrows were
tipped with humor; the art of balancing the budget was
treated jocosely; and the conflicts between the executive
and judicial departments of the government were made
amusing. In the process the "dignity of government" was
reduced to the level of a "romp." Everybody was happy in
confusion. Democracy, despite the plight of its economy,
had no ground for fearing disaster. The jolly George M.
Cohan, who impersonated the President, resolved the budget
dilemma in a " skitting, waggling dance." An effort was made
to treat unemployment as a matter of fun by having a labor
chorus sing :
We work all day
For the PWA.
Let the market crash,
We collect our cash.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 627
We sing as we work,
And we work as we sing.
Skit-skat Beety-o !
Skit-skat Beety-o !
Labor is the thing, my lads,
Labor is the thing.
Whether the comedy had animus or not, Liberty Leaguers,
smarting under the defeat of 1936, found satisfaction in be-
holding the victor ridiculed. And so sharp indeed were some
of the barbs that timid bourgeois, forgetting the thrusts of
"Mr. Dooley" at an earlier Roosevelt, wrote letters to the
press in protest against this musical "harlequinade," lest
it be popularly deemed lese majesty against the American
form of government.
As the lines between advocates of collective security and
advocates of abstention from foreign quarrels tightened, the
Theater Guild offered to the public Sidney Howard's The
Ghost of Yankee Doodle. In this play "liberal" men and
women appeared as Yankee Doodle resuscitated and rushing
to a new war for democracy in foreign lands. Its time was
set "eighteen months after the commencement of the next
world war." Its "hero" was an aviator who placed himself
at the disposition of France despite the sinking of an Amer-
ican ship by a French submarine. Its upshot seemed to be a
commentary on the folly of mankind and on Americans as
prize sentimentalists. "You make that one out! I can't,"
grumbled the critical Jean Nathan, "unless the mumbling
and gargling of the actors played havoc with the playwright's
intention. . . . One thing is obvious. The play in its
entirety indicates anew that the place for playwrights who
have been spending most of their time in Hollywood is still
Hollywood. . . . Howard evidently believes that a pregnant
play of ideas is to be achieved through a painstaking restate-
ment of the platitudes of the late Herbert Croly [Progressive
Republican] indignantly crossed with those of young Mr.
Corliss Lament [Communist] and periodically interrupted
628 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
with a wistful quotation from Ruskin or Milton." Whether
in this case the critic was "just/' whatever justice might
mean, the play itself held up to play-goers' view a number of
ideas that might help to burn the world if European nations
made repetitions in history.
The uncertain ty, alarm, horror, and indignation associated
with the very thought of another world war for anything
democracy ? commerce, fascism, communism, or any other
symbol or image found expression in Robert Emmet
Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, a title that carried the author's
own interpretation. In the course of the play, the thesis was
advanced that intelligent men and women do not want war,
that they abhor war, and that conscience and self-interest
alike spurn this ancient heritage. Why then does war come ?
Characters in the play gave their various answers : capitalism,
munitioneers, and nationalism. Neither the agonized cry
nor the ready answer could enclose all history and solve the
problem, and yet so great was the success of the play in the
United States and at the capital that it caught the attention
of England and was taken to London in the spring of 1938,
to be given in a country furiously engaged in rearmament, ap-
parently against its own will, in sheer desperation.
In conception and lines, Idiot's Delight was so effective
that it evoked debates far and wide. Critics who shared the
view that war is madness spared no praise. Adverse com-
mentators employed all the well-known arguments that had
been heard in parliaments and public assemblies since the
eighteenth century, especially the formula that war for
"defense" is supreme heroism. No student of war had ever
been able to draw the exact line between defense and aggres-
sion. Professors who had climbed mountains of documents
and memoirs still quarrelled over the "guilt" of the last world
war, without reaching consensus of decision. In fact, the
author of Idiot's Delight and his critics, unable like all
mortals to "explain" history, left the mystery veiled. Only
one thing was certain in the play : the blame for war could
not all be laid upon women.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 629
The theme of war, always thrusting itself up in domestic
affairs, as if incompetence, fear, and evasion could not have
it otherwise, formed the burden of the argument in Paul
Green's Johnny Johnson, a play of 1936, voiced by a veteran
of the world war engaged in trying to allay the new war
fever. With the aid of modern stage settings, the ex-soldier
sought to bring the idea of peace to life. Eschewing the
tumult and rattle of What Price Glory and other exhibitions
of battle and sudden death, even in his trench scene Paul
Green relied upon the subtler arts of bewilderment and in-
quiry. Does anybody know what this is all about ? How do
we get in ? How do we get out ? What is the upshot for
plain people scurrying along streets and around corners ?
No clear answers were forthcoming. Folly was apparent,
but perplexity colored the scenes and the lines. Lloyd George
had said that the great powers had "stumbled" into the
world war in 1914, and perhaps that was the just word. The
playwright seemed to suspect as much in reference to war in
general. Though far from a major favorite, Johnny Johnson
had its special vogue.
Into the lines and tunes of musical shows also crept notes
from the conflicts in economics and politics. Among other
playwrights George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, and Morrie
Ryskind bent their talents, singly or in combinations, to the
art of depicting politics, not too seriously or at least not too
blatantly. While President Hoover was wearing himself out
with efforts at "recovery," amid the slurs of Democratic
criticism, and making little headway, Kaufman and Ryskind,
aided by the musical geniuses, the two Gershwins, Ira and
George, satirized the political show in a glittering slapstick
circus entitled Of Thee I Sing. Friends and foes of the
administration alike laughed, and the committee of Columbia
University bestowed the Pulitzer prize upon the authors.
In the years when wiseacres were suggesting that President
Roosevelt was really the Kerensky of the political crisis,
Let 'Em Eat Cake was offered as a kind of sequel to Of Thee
I Sing. After the New Deal had made great progress into
630 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
the depression of 1937, Ed Wynn took the center of the
musical comedy stage with Hooray for What, in which four
playwrights had collaborated, for which Agnes de Mille had
arranged a dance satirizing the hero as warrior. Without any
reference at all to music, many citizens were saying off Broad-
way : For what indeed ? The great referendum of 1936 had
not answered the question. Neither did musical jibes at col-
lective security, war, the administrative alphabet, or handing
out political jobs. But they lightened the gloom and eased
the tension between "economic royalists" and the "dicta-
torship" in Washington.
For those who thought politics, and probably history,
senseless, Kaufman and Hart provided consolation and pleas-
ure in You Can't Take It with You. In lines that must have
fascinated persons who attributed the troubles of the times
to "lack of confidence," old Grandfather Sycamore sug-
gested to the befuddled world that "life is pretty simple if
you just relax." To members of the audience whose heads
were still above the financial waters, the prescription doubt-
less seemed excellent; perhaps no others had passed through
the box office to the auditorium. Yet there was something
heartless in the suggestion. After seeing the play, a sociolo-
gist had the temerity to contend that "when Rome burns,
the least a playwright can do is to say that he is sorry." The
comment, however, was scarcely pertinent; nor was the play
itself to people outside the theater, who had nothing to take
away with them when the judgment day came. If the theme
was a trifle irreverent to economic royalists, it afforded no
comfort to the millions that had not entered the Economy
of Abundance. Anyway Hollywood thought it a good gamble
for the screen and borrowed it from the regular theater.
As a rule the plays which struck into the main current of
American life were concerned with urban ideas and conduct,
but the most successful drama, in terms of the long run,
touched upon the sickness of agrarian economy. That was
Tobacco Road, a dramatization of Erskine CaldwelPs novel
of life among the Southern lowly not the dynamic lowly,
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 631
but people crumbling into dust. Politicians and agitators,
Huey Long and union organizers were making the nation
conscious of bottom poor and Caldwell thrust the problem,
if with no issue, into the face of theater-goers. He made no
concessions to melodrama to sustain the interest. Virtue did
not conquer vice, nor did the heroic triumph over the villain-
ous. To all appearances the denizens of Tobacco Road were
immersed in a tragedy of poverty and ignorance far beyond
their control or the possibilities of escape hungry Ameri-
cans, hungry. Did their plight strike chords of defeatism in
popular consciousness and so attract the large audiences, one
after the other, on and on through the years ? Was this the
explanation of the popular appeal ? Did audiences really
know why they liked this story ? Critics found difficulty in
answering the question, as the play ran through the months
and the years from 1934, on and on far outstripping in
success the dramas of urban realism and revolt. In some
cities expurgation was demanded, but New York City took
the play straight. Long after Gods of the Lightning was
forgotten by casual visitors of theaters, Tobacco Road was
being played day and night, a kind of mystery, yet maybe a
challenge.
Taking up another phase of the tragedy emerging from the
agrarian dissolution in America the life of casual laborers
on large ranches, of lonely, wandering men and derelict
women John Steinbeck dramatized his novel Of Mice and
Men for the season of 1937. Told in the powerful simplicity
that characterized the story of the Prodigal Son, this tale of
two men journeying in search of work, finding work, caught
in the iron grip of things, tender in their humanness, finally
brought to a frightful climax, had held readers of the printed
page in its spell. On the stage it translated itself to pit and
gallery and wrung response from even old and weary critics.
In every scene and nearly every line it portrayed with
throbbing life actualities reflected in statistical tables of the
Department of Agriculture, in the report of President Roose-
velt's Committee on Farm Tenancy, and in Paul Taylor's
632 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
monumental studies of migratory labor on the land. The
grandest dream of one of the men was to have just a little
land of his own, a rabbit, some chickens something to care
for and love. For a moment it seemed as if the earth hunger
of fifty centuries, the human hunger of all time, was epito-
mized in living symbols. Did all the defeated hopes merely
suggest faults in the law of land tenure ? Or something pri-
mordial ? Was any other upshot to this tragedy possible ?
Since economists had not answered these questions, the
novelist and the actors were within their rights in leaving the
issue of labor on the land staring quizzically from the stage.
After the economic collapse of 1929, playwrights, actors,
and theaters were carried into an unprecedented relation
with the Federal Government. Far-seeing leaders among the
makers of the American Republic, with William Dunlap
in the advance guard, had called for a national theater to
serve as an instrument for the inculcation of republican ideas,
manners, and morals. But the early republic let this oppor-
tunity slip by and with the passing of John Quincy Adams
the idea of associating government constructively with the
arts was only kept alive by a stray advocate here and there,
such as Julia Marlowe and Kenneth Macgowan. After the
Jacksonian uprising little was heard of the "elegant arts" as
instruments of public policy, and the theater was left to
private interests.
Like most private enterprises, the theater had made for-
tunes for a few and kept the main body of entrepreneurs and
actors in a precarious state, with poverty always just around
the corner for the lesser lights of the stage. Long before
stocks hit bottom in 1932, the theater, like agriculture, was
in the throes of a crisis. The industry was " overexpanded" ;
there were too many theaters for the effective demands of
box offices. Like the railways, the stage was suffering from
competition in this case from the moving-picture industry.
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 633
Clever playwrights and actors were lured away by the giant
corporations at Hollywood, with huge sums of money as the
bait ; the cinema was draining off theater-goers ; the demand
was falling; and famous houses were already going dark
when the night came in 1929,
For the theater, as for holding companies, railways, and
construction industries, the economic debacle was devastat-
ing as it widened through the years. Great producers went
into bankruptcy. Theaters were sold at auction. Lights went
out in cities all over the country. Thousands of actors,
thousands of men and women who had lived by writing and
playing, were turned into the streets with the makers of
automobiles, cement, and shoes. In the friendly spirit that
had always characterized the profession, their colleagues who
remained in employment raised funds, gave benefits, and
shared their wealth. But in time the burden passed beyond
the limits of private philanthropy.
When at length the Roosevelt administration faced the
total economic situation squarely, it confronted the theater.
By general consent the country was opposed to the dole, for
it kept recipients in idleness and tended to degrade the na-
tional morale, while producing no wealth whatsoever. This
point of view Roosevelt expressed in a message to Congress
and in 1935 the Works Progress Administration was estab-
lished to create and provide projects that would give employ-
ment, occupy beneficiaries at tasks for which they had some
experience and competence, and tide them over "until private
industry could take up the slack." Among the divisions of
this Administration was the Federal Theater Project. The
undertaking was at best experimental and delicate but it was
carried out with skill and circumspection under the super-
vision of Hallie Flanagan and her associates.
Of necessity under the continuous pressure of politics, the
Theater Project steered its course with ingenuity, pleasing in
the process neither the extreme Right nor the extreme Left,
but allowing a substantial margin of freedom, befitting the
variety of interests in America. It attempted and attained
634 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
a notable success in reinstating poetry in the drama, using
T. S, Eliot's poetic narrative. Murder in the Cathedral, as
this experiment. It was the patron for a dramatic version of
Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, after this play had
been suppressed or rejected by Hollywood, following a protest
from places where it had happened. In harmony with more
democratic conceptions, the Federal Theater Project organ-
ized a number of companies to present It Can't Happen Here
in all sections of the country, and "for the first time in the
history of the American theater, the curtain rose simultane-
ously on twenty-one stages in eighteen cities from the Atlan-
tic to the Pacific, presenting twenty-one different versions
of a new play by a distinguished American author," With
propriety, it was presented in Washington, the capital of
the nation, where decisions significant for the future of
democracy were being made from year to year. While irate
citizens were flinging charges of dictatorship at President
Roosevelt, throngs of theater-goers all over the country were
watching in this play a conflict between power and freedom,
on the stage, under federal patronage.
By remarkable unanimity of opinion The Living News-
paper in a strict sense the creation of the Federal Proj-
ect was accorded the honor of being a "lasting contribu-
tion" to American drama. Under government auspices a
number of researchers, reporters, and writers dramatized
the leading issues of the time and presented, by means of
actors on the stage, events and personalities that made head-
lines for the daily press. Into this Living Newspaper were
introduced, for example, the question of agricultural relief:
Triple-A Plowed Under ; a resum of the news : Highlights of
1935; labor disputes and the law: Injunction Granted; and
public utilities : Power. These plays were crowned by a more
difficult undertaking : One Third of the Nation the housing
issue with its elements of fire hazards, disease, and crime-
breeding tenements, against a background of rack-renting.
When the Federal Theater Project announced a dramatiza-
tion of the theme for an opening in February, 1936, the
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 635
advance sale was so large that bookings were made for the
following May. Finally George Bernard Shaw became suffi-
ciently interested in the American federal theater by 1938 to
grant it the right to produce his plays ; he cut his royalties
to the low figure established by the Project, and his dramas
were widely performed. Eugene O'Neill consented to a
similar arrangement.
The limited funds allocated to the various federal projects
helped to restore the primal elements of ideas and character
interpretation to the American theater, so long confused and
overlaid by the expensive operations of scenic painters,
costumers, mechanical inventors, and allied artists and
craftsmen. Under the financial limitations of the Federal
Project administration, complicated and costly scenery was
out of the question, and so was elaborate costuming. Besides,
all parts of the country called for the privilege of seeing the
plays produced by the Project, and its companies could not
carry around with them cars full of scenic properties. To
be sure some setting was necessary, and so managers turned
to the lighting effects developed by the motion picture. Light
was relatively cheap and almost infinite in flexibility and
variability. Where special results were required or were
appropriate, it was employed, as the director explained, " to
emphasize the living bodies of the actors." At the same time,
with its limited funds, the Project was able to employ at its
peak in 1937 approximately 12,700 workers who had been in
or on the edges of poverty and despair.
According to reports for that year, nearly ninety-five per
cent of the Government productions were written by Ameri-
can playwrights. The Project operated in twenty-eight
states, as well as the District of Columbia. It sought to
stimulate interest in the theater in communities, "sixty per
cent of whose adults and children have never before seen
living comedy and drama/' The cooperation of local organ-
izations, clubs, societies, and civic associations was solicited
and, it was hoped, the foundations of permanent activities
were laid in all regions of the country. Experiments in
636 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Atlanta and Savannah, for instance, were taken over by
local organizations as regular civic enterprises. Plays were
given in villages that had never seen actors on the stage,
in Civilian Conservation Camps, in orphanages, hospitals,
prisons, veterans' homes, schools, and colleges, ranging from
the Dakotas to the Mississippi delta, from Maine to Seattle.
More than twenty-two million people, it was estimated in
I 937? had witnessed performances under the auspices of the
Federal Project, and thousands of local communities, hith-
erto beyond the theater belt, had been brought into some
acquaintance with playwriting and acting.
About all the activities of the Federal Theater Project, as
about all the devices of the New Deal, criticism foamed.
Commentators, passing judgments born of their particular
frames of experiential and intellectual reference, often scoffed
at the federal plays, rating them as deficient in construction
and poor in performance. Why waste money on "bum
writers" and "ham actors" ? it was freely asked. This ques-
tion could be answered as quickly and easily as the other
question: "Why shouldn't the poor and unemployed every-
where be allowed to starve?" Such questions involved,
of course, matters of taste and insight by no means as exact
as problems in Euclid. If only the plays approved by Jean
Nathan, for instance, were admitted to the stage, would there
be any reservoir of theatrical resources from which to derive
the best ? And what in fact would be the best ?
When fitted into the larger context of cultural history and
cultural resources, the Federal Theater Project's operations
suggested a connotation far wider than that of particular
theatrical criticism, namely, the obligation of the Govern-
ment toward the arts as source and force in social life. How-
ever considered, the Federal Theater Project was more than
a spasmodic event in American history. The organization
and administration of the project, notwithstanding the short-
comings, criticisms, and failures, were among the extraor-
dinary upthrows of the economic crisis. Whether for good
or ill, whether for the enrichment or impoverishment of the
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 637
cultural resources upon which society, industry, and govern-
ment depend for existence, whether permanent or imperma-
nent in influence, judgment would be rendered, as in all cases,
by history as actuality yet to come, not merely by the ver-
dicts of contemporary critics, dramatic or social.
While full judgment waited on time, the legislature of
California took up the idea of public responsibility and coop-
eration in relati'on to the drama by designating the Pasadena
Playhouse as an official State Theater. For several years
The Playhouse had been functioning. Summer after summer
it had held a Drama Festival built on some particular theme.
In 1937 the subject was the Great Southwest, the historic
unfolding of which was enacted gravely and with reference to
authentic characters and events. This festival opened with
an English version of Gerhart Hauptmann's poetic play of
the Spanish conquest, Der Weisse Heiland, under the English
title of Montezuma, but critics called the performance
"passionless and lifeless" and attributed its pallor largely to
the German playwright's lack of clarity in interpreting that
series of historic events. Nor did the attempt to portray the
rise and fall of the Catholic conquest of California fare better
in the criticism ; the result was described as a " Chamber of
Commerce entertainment, with white velvet charro costumes,
bespangled china poblanas, and the singing and dancing
which belonged to neither Old California nor Mexico/' In
short, the effort was dismissed as merely a " civic pageant,"
not true drama. A third play, however, Night over Taos, by
Maxwell Anderson, originally produced by the Group The-
ater in New York in 1932, was ardently defended as "a
production which in poignancy, power, and moving force is
worthy to be set alongside some of the most thrilling experi-
ences in the contemporary theater/' A second European,
Franz Werfel, was drawn upon for a fourth play, Juarez and
Maximilian, but the poetic fire of its printed lines burned low
638 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
in the spoken lines. In the American play, The Girl of the
Golden West, a natural quality of acting was regained, only
to be lost again in The Rose of the Rancho. Then "signifi-
cance" returned with the closing bill, Miner's Gold, the
story of quick wealth won in the Southland seeking social
recognition in San Francisco a tale carrying the theatrical
series to the period of the twentieth century.
That the Federal Theater Project was not limited in in-
fluence to its own operations received confirmation from
many quarters. To the International Ladies Garment
Workers Union, for instance, it furnished aid to the Union's
musical skit. Pins and Needles, which became a Broadway
success and then was taken on a national tour. As employ-
ment rose with the progress of recovery in 1936, actors from
the Project returned by the hundreds to the regular theater
and many playwrights found outlets for talent in private
fields. Definite borrowings of techniques were made from
federal projects, as in the case of Kaufman and Hart's The
Fabulous Invalid, a defense of the living theater.
Meanwhile, two young "graduates" from the federal
theater, Orson Welles and John Houseman, organized the
Mercury Theater in New York and opened with Julius
Caesar in modern dress, to a highly interested audience in the
theatrical metropolis of the country. Making use of modern
lighting and sound devices, they accented the play itself,
quickened its speed of action, and intensified its passion.
So appealing was the contemporary implication of Julius
Caesar presented in this style that the audience clamored for
other "great plays of the past presented in the modern way/'
for other "classical plays excitingly produced." Once more
the illusion of permanence amid the illusion of change was
conveyed to theater-goers. With dictatorship weighing
heavily on the public mind and bulking large in the daily
press, with refugees from its persecutions daily walking down
the gang planks of steamers docked in this New World, as in
the early days of the republic, Americans again hurried to the
theater to behold "resistance to tyranny," to see the resur-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 639
gence and challenge of Caesarism embodied in personalities
and events on the stage.
When The Cradle Will Rock an operetta by Marc
Blitzstein dealing with a steel magnate's war on trade union-
ism was banned by the Federal Theater Project, following
an indignant outburst among some of the taxpayers, Welles
and Houseman took over the production on their own respon-
sibility. In performance as well as theme, it was unques-
tionably radical. As for technique, it adapted a method
developed by Clifford Odets. The actors were at first seated
in the audience and the musician remained on the stage to
play accompaniments at the piano. From their seats in the
audience actors sang their lines, including martial hymns of
labor, thus transforming the illusion of "play acting" into
the appearances of a militant labor meeting.
A forerunner of the Mercury group was the Theater Union
which enjoyed a four-year career, from 1933 to 1937, on the
outskirts of Broadway, specializing in the struggles of labor
in the modern world, with occasional thrusts at the menace
of war. Eight plays were produced during its brief existence.
It opened with Peace on Earth, more argumentative than
dramatic, in the opinion of austere critics. It followed
with Stevedore, Sailors at Cattaro, Black Pit, Mother,
Bitter Steam, Let Freedom Ring, and Marching Song, the
titles of which proclaimed the themes. With a view to
attracting "the mass of the people," otherwise diverted to
the moving pictures, admission charges were fixed at low
figures. To make possible cheap admissions, costly scenery
was eliminated in favor of the irreducible minimum. Al-
though in time an unbalanced budget halted these leftist
producers in their mass appeal, the production of John
Howard Lawson's Marching Song was so well received that
it finally reached the main theatrical district of Manhattan.
Less definitely located in the spectrum of political colors,
the Group Theater opened a more successful career with Paul
Green's The House of Connelly, in 1931, and managed to win
the plaudits of the metropolitan press as well as full houses
640 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
for a number of its performances. Among other things, the
Group pioneered with plays in which actors were placed
among the members of the audience and the theater was
transformed from stage to gallery into a single meeting. So
attractive was the novelty to novelty-loving New Yorkers
that middle-aged dowagers of the middle class, who normally
supplied a large part of all theater patronage, seemed to
enjoy active participation in labor meetings, as drama, with
revolutionary fire and action sweeping through to a conclu-
sion. Although, naturally, the Pulitzer prize was bestowed
upon the Victorian romance, The Old Maid, enthusiastic
audiences, including many maiden ladies, clapped lustily at
Clifford Odets' series of labor plays : Awake and Sing, Wait-
ing for Lefty, Till the Day I Die. The politics of the nation
might not be going left, or anywhere on its way, but Clifford
Odets demonstrated that there was an audience for drama
built upon the conflicts of the industrial world, reported in
newspapers and uncovered by the Senate committee inquir-
ing into civil liberties under the direction of Robert M.
La Follette.
''These young people are succeeding in doing what they
set out to do," wrote Winifred Smith in The Survey. "In-
stead of turning back to sentimental versions of our fore-
fathers' conflicts whether with a foreign enemy, as in
Valley Forge, or with their own traditional inhibitions and
conventions, as in The Old Maid . . . these strong, fresh
talents are living the life around them, probing its tragic
depths, pointing out its inherent contradictions and its pain-
ful injustices, and making theater-goers wince with the
realization that, for all our boasted high standards of living
in America, our day is one of the cruelest eras in human
civilization." But she quoted a declaration of Virginia Wolff
in another connection to point a moral in this relation : "This
force of theirs, this smouldering heat which breaks the crust
now and then and licks the surface with a hot and fearless
flame, is about to break through and melt us together, so
that life will be richer and . . . society will pool its posses-
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 641
sions instead of segregating them, and ... all this is going
to happen inevitably." Having made this positive assertion
relative to the midpassage, the writer concluded her opinion
with the question: "What more can the theater contribute
to our common life ?"
In some cases a playwright could get a hearing at the
Group Theater in the byway and a commission from a pro-
ducer more centrally located at the same time, showing that
the division between art and pecuniary considerations was
not as sharp as cynics sometimes asserted. In a single year
Robert Ardrey's Casey Jones was announced for the Group
Theater, and How to Get Tough about It for the Martin
Beck Theater. According to rumor the latter was really a
propaganda play revolving around a steel strike, cement
workers, and the "socially unassorted." To the gossip the
playwright replied that it was nothing of the kind; that it
refuted, or attempted to refute, the theory that the meek
shall inherit the earth and to raise the issue whether anybody
with ideals can make headway in the tough world. To leave
that query unanswered was possible to meditation, but words
and action, even in drama, did make an answer in fact, if
only provisionally and tentatively.
The vitality of the sociological group was again illus-
trated in 1938 by the organization of the Playwrights'
Company composed of men with cc wisdom and experience/'
not " fledglings." Under its auspices were immediately pro-
duced two successful' plays : Knickerbocker Holiday and
Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Once more the power of collective
effort was demonstrated. It was on the basis of group ex-
periences that the American Theater Council was formed
in 1937 for the purpose of criticizing manuscripts and induc-
ing a greater flow of high-grade plays for the country.
With bold experimentation shaking the traditions of play-
wrights and productions, what was taking place in that much
acclaimed source of dramatic expression the world of
642 AMERICA IN MID PASSAGE
schools and colleges ? With what themes was it concerned ?
What creative imagination did it foster or display ? It was a
poor institution of learning indeed that did not "do some-
thing in dramatics." After all, Eugene O'Neill had studied
at Harvard and Princeton, Maxwell Anderson at the Uni-
versity of North Dakota and Leland Stanford ; and Archi-
bald MacLeish at Yale and Harvard. Turning from inspira-
tion purely academic, Stephens College in Missouri called
Maude Adams to give instruction to girls in dramatic expres-
sion. Undoubtedly there were relations, if often tenuous,
between the schools and the stage. Playwrights and actors
did not burst into full power without encountering some
educational experiences, somewhere.
But judging by the collegiate plays produced on campuses
and frequently outside, the formal world of dramatic educa-
tion was little affected by either the regular theater or the
course of national affairs. In the year 1937 the fifty-year-old
Mask and Wig Club of Pennsylvania University presented
Fifty-Fifty, a bit of fluff, as light as air, the mimicry of women
by an all-man cast attaining the acme of masculine interpre-
tation. At the center of the banter was Mimi, a gypsy, a
child-woman of Hawaii, who persuaded her father to modern-
ize the tribe by adopting fifty trailer gadgets tendered by her
salesman-lover ; and so equipped with modernity, the gypsies
glided to a new habitat in the fiftieth state to the delight
of old graduates in the audience. Afterwards the student
players slipped away to their dancing. The flight from sub-
stance was almost complete. But in 1938 the Club took a
sociological turn in All Around the Town, a satire on cele-
brated features of contemporary civilization, ranging from
night clubs to dictators and radio broadcasting.
From the Workshop at Yale, with its superb theatrical
equipment, a group of six persons organized as the Eastern
Collegiate Players, came forth with two one-act plays, Gift
of Gold and The Bride Wore Red Pyjamas, written for
motion-picture devotees. The leader of this group lamented
that audiences "had been sitting through the same old
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 643
Westerns, domestic dramas, and gangster operas for years
without a whimper/' and concluded: "We know that we
were quieter than most of these and perhaps a little shorter."
When the Collegiate Players submitted their plays to the
judgment of girls at Smith College, they received a verdict
that the "little venture would set the American theater back
fifty or sixty years" a judgment that might lack in his-
toricity more than it did in emphasis. Despite the adverse
conclusion of the Smith girls, the Players gave 427 perform-
ances on tour, conceding at the end that while their show was
"nothing to make an audience stand up and cheer, it was one
that they would listen to, laugh at a little, and even applaud
now and then." Pleased with this achievement, the group
planned to adjust its sketches to the average motion-picture
patron and ignore any high-hatted minority likely to be
present.
To celebrate the forty-ninth anniversary of dramatics at
Princeton, the Triangle Club chose to "put on" a musical
comedy in 1937, called Fol-de-rol, fashioned on the frivolity
of the English Restoration period at the end of the seven-
teenth century. With this play the Club, carrying twenty-
five dancers, toured the East, Middle West, and South
during the holiday season. Everywhere it was greeted by
Princeton alumni, their families, and friends, with a cordiality
which implied that no intellectual interruption had come in
the Princeton tradition through the flight of years. While
the Princeton boys were going back to the English Restora-
tion for inspiration, girls at Barnard clung to the Greek
drama, as they understood it, impersonated horses in chariot
races, and tried to be Pan or Dionysus. In such fashions were
illustrated the advantages of collegiate training in the classic
sources of dramatic inspiration and in the art of histrionic
expression.
In the strange times of the midpassage, entertainment by
radio expanded with the pressures of mass production, as in-
644 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
ventions and improvements in devices flowed out of labora-
tories and workshops ; and it responded to 'those forces, finan-
cial, intellectual, and moral, which affected other forms of
diversion and communication. As in the case of the moving-
picture industry, broadcasting on a national scale tended to
come within the control of relatively few corporations pos-
sessing large capital and equipment; and these corporations
in turn became entangled with banking on the one side and
with supply interests, especially the electrical industries, on
the other. They borrowed money ; their stocks were sold on
the exchange or over the counter ; capitalists with funds to
invest could buy into them and exercise the rights of stock-
holders in determining the policies of management and the
selection of broadcast themes. Like the moving-picture
industry, the radio industry was engaged in mass production.
Dependent almost entirely upon advertisers for their revenues
and profits, national broadcasting concerns had to reach out
for the millions, for the lowest common denominators, ignor-
ing in the main "the select few, the elite, the precious/*
Under such pecuniary drives, entertainment over the air
went wider and deeper throughout American society than
any other type of amusement, diversion, or suggestion.
Through the installation of the radio in private homes and
hotels, in offices and shops, in schools and other institutions,
in motor cars and trains, on tractors and plows, the market
for receivers became almost universal in America. Special
devices furnishing " free- wind" power enabled rural homes in
regions not yet electrified to have the radio ; farmers' wives in
their kitchens could listen to an all-day program indoors
while their husbands in the fields could get the same out of
doors. As they toured for fares in the cities, taxicab drivers
could divert themselves with their dials. For the leisure class,
radios were designed to fit lounging chairs and coffee tables.
While tonal quality of reception was being improved, the
keyboards for tuning in were being made as "easy to read as
a ruler." In a split-second, the owner of the "refined" radio
could get the station he desired merely by pressing the button
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 645
marked with the call letters. And on the basis of sales after
January, 1937, business leaders looked forward in August to
9,000,000 buyers of these perfected instruments for that
single year. August forecasts ran the figure for radio sets of
all kinds in the homes up to 26,000,000 and added 5,000,000
for autos. On that basis radio manufacturing proceeded.
Through radio enterprise, including the radio-phonograph
combination, the broadcasting business reached comparable
proportions. The number of broadcasting stations mounted
to 674 as of October, 1937. Cincinnati acquired a million-
dollar station, built according to modern architectural taste
and containing an auditorium seating 600 persons, twelve
studios, a music library, and twenty-eight offices for the
administrators. The Rockefellers provided New York with
Radio City, in which the National Broadcasting Company
settled permanently, occupying palatial quarters high in the
sky.
Seeing that the radio was becoming a powerful competitor
for advertising and in the distribution of news, proprietors
of newspapers reached out for control and by the end of 1936
at least 168, or about twenty-six per cent of the commercial
radio stations, were under the dominance of newspapers or
their affiliates. In 1938 promoters were so enthusiastic that a
project for a broadcast newspaper Nation was actually
on their docket. Inventors were trying to perfect a method
for producing from the radio news a kind of continuous news-
paper automatically printed on receiving machines installed
in homes, by the bedside if desired.
As the demand rose for "features" to be broadcast, supply
concerns were created to furnish stations with any kind of
verbal or tonal commodity on a minute's notice and in whole-
sale lots. One of the high stakes in this branch of the industry
was held by amusement specialists known as Tin Pan Alley,
domiciled in New York City. In 1937 it was equipped to
turn out daily wares for hundreds of stations about as fast as
manufacturers could roll out cars or lipsticks. It also fur-
nished highly-paid song writers to the moving-picture pro-
646 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
ducers of the land. "Constant bustle" kept the offices at
white heat. According to a reporter who surveyed an estab-
lishment, "a movie outfit wants a specified number of ballads
on specified themes before a specified date. A radio band
leader needs a new swing tune for a definitely scheduled
program. A soprano orders a theme song. The publisher
himself must have a dreamy waltz to balance a new catalog.
As deadlines approach for melody orders, song teams work
straight through lunch and dinner and, if necessary, far into
the night." Tin Pan Alley, in short, was as hysterical as the
mad market which it served.
Knowing that they had a competitor in the radio, and yet
unable to prevent its expansion, adventurous moving-picture
producers decided to benefit from the supply business at least.
Well acquainted with the fact that "what is given away in
millions of homes cannot be sold for an admission price/'
they formed alliances with commercial sponsors of radio
broadcasts in 1937 and sold the talent of their studios in the
market of the air. In Your Hollywood Parade a manufac-
turer of cigarettes brought the stars of the Warner Brothers
to the national assembly of radio listeners. But this experi-
ment provoked more questions of a pecuniary nature : Would
the people now prefer to "listen in" at home beside their sets
instead of going to the movie houses to look ? Or would they
be incited by what they heard at home to pass through the
box offices on their way to see as well as hear ?
Perhaps such questions were to be answered by television,
bringing more pecuniary dilemmas to the radio and movie
industries alike. With intense concentration, inventors
worked to make this device technically effective and com-
mercially marketable. Although the date of that achieve-
ment could not be fixed, the thought of American entertain-
ment and instruction was energized by faith in the impend-
ing event. It was contended by critics of the microphone
that its "cold, mute" aloofness could never make a Henry
Irving or an Ellen Terry out of any actor or actress, nor
a Patrick Henry or a Daniel Webster out of any politician,
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 647
however magnetic voices might be in themselves. But
if television was to be perfected the dynamic personalities
of actors, politicians, and other public . figures could be
made visible to their audiences, and in some measure more
alive. While the subtlest forces uniting speaker and auditor
in warm relations could not be induced even by television,
sight blended with sound promised to raise the temperature
of American amusement, diversion, and discussion in the
home.
Program by program the interests and passions of the
throbbing universe were enlisted in the service of the radio.
Lonely women in isolated cottages could be entranced every
day, if they wished, by the crooning of the "women's sweet-
heart" not as of old a troubadour hymning heroics but a
paid hack chanting of You, You, You or they could pick
up items touching the conduct of their households and the
management of their children if they so desired. Farmers at
their chores in barns or fields could get weather reports, prices
of crops, baseball scores, or the joking of Amos y n Andy. In
country or town, persons to whom good music was an esthetic
delight could tune in on symphony concerts put on the air
by the leading orchestras of the nation, varied by grand opera
distributed from its great center in New York City.
Even into the music programs, however, were injected the
rush and roar of a factory-like enterprise. "The idea seems
to be," complained one customer, "to give at least eight or
nine items, with the result that the performers are breath-
less, while the condition of the listener is one of complete
exhaustion. Instead of cutting programs in half so that every-
thing can move along in an orderly manner, the pace is so
feverish that the final chords of one number have hardly faded
when the announcer is back again detailing the next item/'
Time was costly and not a moment was to be lost.
The factory taint attached to symphony concerts and
operas was made especially obtrusive by the introduction of
advertising. Such music was expensive to broadcast. Only
the biggest advertisers, the "financial angels," could afford to
648 AMERICA IN MWPASSAGE
sponsor it, and for sponsorship the pound of flesh was taken.
Before concerts opened, auditors were put in a frame of mind
for musical appreciation by the announcement of the soap,
perfume, or gadget that was paying the bill. During pauses,
announcers kept audiences aware of the commodity that was
serving as patron saint. And at the end, when enchanting
strains were sinking into memory, came the renewed tender
of the sponsoring soap, perfume, or gadget. So music was
charged with the blares of the marketplace. This had defi-
nite drawbacks, but radio listeners in America accepted them,
though not without complaint. Perhaps they were more
willing to take advertising with their music than to pay for
it themselves through an annual tax on radio sets.
Carrying music, story telling for young and old, sporting
events, comic skits, news reporting, prize fight announce-
ments, and similar diversions, broadcasting programs were
pitched to the general level of the vast audience. It seemed
that almost everybody who had anything to say and nearly
every idea bidding for popular allegiance had a hearing.
Minorities protested that they were not accorded their due
proportion of space and the necessity of paying for it was
a handicap to them. Yet among the items, amounting to
more than seven thousand daily in 1937, few interests that
attracted any considerable proportion of the population
eluded review in one form or another.
And here and there in the democracy of the profusion seri-
ous efforts were made to introduce and apply intelligence and
artistry. After he had discovered that delicacies of tone as
well as stridency could be transmitted, the great conductor,
Leopold Stokowski, consented to broadcast symphony
concerts. For months he had worked directly with radio
engineers on the problem of refining transmission, and after
making his first successful demonstration he continued to
labor at the task of perfecting the mechanical device. Such
efforts in behalf of culture were rewarded by popular appreci-
ation; and quick to make use of anything that "paid its
way," owners of broadcasting stations saved "time" for the
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 649
best that musicians could produce. Toscanini and Paderew-
ski became as popular in the air as they had been on the
platform.
Yielding to the demand for manifestations of intelligence
amid the great noise,, broadcasting companies allotted some
room, often grudgingly, to poetry, drama, book reviewing,
education, information tests, and the discussions of public
questions, apart from the arguments of politicians. Thus
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night eventually competed for
popularity with Mae West's sex appeal. In 1937 Archibald
McLeish's dramatic poem, The Fall of the City, a tragedy of
dictator worship, went over the air in reply to the orations of
contemporary dictators who shouted to democrats in America
through the microphone. Under the auspices of the Town
Hall of the Air in New York City, the chief issues of the days
were debated by speakers of competence, subject to the
criticisms of hecklers.
As to the effect of all this uproar upon the multitude of
listeners, estimates were more difficult to formulate than in
the case of the moving pictures, and the best of calculations
remained little more than guesses. Amid all the din, how-
ever, one thing could not be refuted : contemplation, medita-
tion, and quiet reading were made increasingly difficult for
men and women throughout the country. If a father or
mother wished to do a little thinking or to read a book, the
children might insist on having noise. Children had, it is
true, always indulged in clatter of their own making, limited
somewhat by their physical strength, but now canned rumbles,
thumps, and rattles poured out of radio sets, unremittingly
and ceaselessly. Even adults, formerly accustomed to read
in silent rooms, acquired the habit of sitting with books open
on their knees, if open at all, while the radio blared or crooned
its rival attractions. At home or abroad, in hotels and streets,
at bars and on railway trains, and in taxicabs, the everlasting
cacophony went on day and night. It was not surprising,
then, that James Rowland Angell, former president of
Yale University, after serving as an adviser to a national
650 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
broadcasting concern, confessed somewhat disconsolately
that education, even in the most diluted form, was a kind
of waif in the radio storm.
Everything considered, attempts to measure, appraise, and
evaluate the influence and promise of the radio, especially in
relation to democracy, brought few positive results. Unmis-
takably, in totalitarian countries, where the radio was a
censored government monopoly, it was an instrument of
sheer authority for enslaving the minds of auditors, crushing
opposition, and producing a rigid uniformity of thought and
feeling. In the United States on the contrary, where the busi-
ness was in private hands and to a large extent competitive,
broadcasters relied almost entirely upon advertisers for
leadership. Only great corporations, with immense resources,
could afford to pay for expensive programs. Would business
concerns, therefore, enmesh all actors, musicians, orators,
producers, announcers, crooners, educators, and commenta-
tors in their scheme of values and proprieties ? Would such
concentration reenforce economic conservatism, strengthen
vulgarity, and drive the American mind to an undemocratic
Right I If so, and business enterprise could not of its own
motion find a way out of the dilemma of unemployment and
mass poverty, would the radio merely make more explosive
the snap of the tension when it came? Such questions
inevitably made the issue of free speech over the radio a prime
consideration, and in so doing brought the Federal Govern-
ment, representing all classes and interests, into the dis-
cussion of the radio's future.
Indeed there was no way for owners of broadcasting stations
to keep the Government out of the scene. By its very me-
chanical nature, radio broadcasting could not be left solely
to "free enterprise." The number of wave lengths for trans-
mission was limited and too many stations in a given area
would lead to mutual interference and destruction. Only a
small number could operate successfully in the United States
SOURCES OF ENTERTAINMENT 651
and the radio industry composed of competing interests could
not, or did not, police itself. So control by the Federal
Government was invoked, the number and location of stations
compatible with efficient service was determined, and no
station was allowed to proceed without a federal license.
Otherwise there would have been utter chaos. To administer
the "order" thus established in the air, the Federal Com-
munications Commission was created and given power to
license private concerns on the basis of "public convenience
and necessity." For a time the Commission left some of the
radio spectrum, or series of wave lengths, in individual
hands free from licensing and control, but in 1937 it assumed
supervision over practically the entire range.
With the adoption and extension of federal supervision, all
the old conflicts of economics and politics reached this field of
interest. When Frank R. McNinch was appointed chairman
of the Communications Commission by President Roosevelt
in 1937, he laid the cards frankly on the table. Was the radio
industry a public utility, a kind of monopoly subject to
specific types of regulation ? Or was it a competitive industry,
holding down prices while, in the higgling of the market,
advertisers paid the bills ? Did not the high charges made by
some companies and the concentration of control over chains
in the hands of relatively few concerns indicate that the
radio was following the trend of corporate centralization in
general ?
Since neither the Government nor the American people
could arrive at a conclusion on the merits of trust-busting and
regulation in other industries, how was any major decision
possible in respect of the radio ? If private monopoly was
intolerable, what would happen if the radio became a govern-
ment monopoly? Broadcasting companies, it was alleged,
liad censored their programs and speakers, or at all events
had exerted selective pressures on them. But how could the
existing freedom of speech, such as it was, be preserved if the
Federal Government assumed direct charge or operated the
industry, as in Great Britain, through a government corpo-
652 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
ration ? Around these questions revolved a prolix debate.
If the industry was to continue, permanent evasion of such
issues was impossible.
A neat question, touching this problem, involved the form
and support of radio programs to be transmitted to neighbor-
ing Latin America a matter which seemed to many citizens
and officials to become exigent after European dictators,
hostile to democracy, began supplying their propaganda,
even in the guise of music, to the nations south of the United
States. What, then, could be offered by the United States as
a democratic offset and as a means of awakening sympathy
among peoples who had not experienced democracy ? What,
precisely, was this democracy to be explained over the air ?
Were Amos V Andy, bedtime stories, symphony concerts,
and kitchen recipes adequate to the occasion, or was some-
thing else needed to convince the people beyond the Rio
Grande that the democratic way was the best of all ways ? In
just what terms was American civilization to be described as
the grand contrast to the culture of fascism ? Since exagger-
ation comparable to the extravagances of European utter-
ances was demanded as an offset to such propaganda,
exactly what kind of exaggeration would most effectively
serve that purpose ?
CHAPTER XIII
Mainsprings and Ranges of Letters
No less than the makers of entertainment, the makers
of letters worked in the substances and styles of
the age. The business of America is business. . . .
High plateau of permanent prosperity. . . . Another down-
ward slide in agricultural prices. . . . The spectre of poverty
vanishing. . . . Foreclosure of farm mortgages. . . . Re-
publican policies. . . . Hawiey-Smoot tariff bill. . . .Crash
in Wall Street. . . . Reassurances from Washington. . . .
Millions of tons of top soil washing out to sea. . . . Stocks.
. . . Bonds. . . . Brilliant opening of the opera season.
. . . Hollywood Hit. . . . ColossaL . . . Stupendous. . . .
Crime. . . . Stocks. . . . Bonds. . . . Unemployment
mounts. . . Hilariously funny. . . . Stocks. . . . Bonds.
. . . Bread lines. . . . Sweepstakes. . . . Millions idle.
. . . Bankruptcies. . . . Army Maneuvers. . . . Election.
.... Save rugged individualism. . . . Roosevelt promises
an adequate navy. . . . Crop control plan endorsed. . . .
More millions idle. . . . Suicide. . . . Save liberty. . . .
Bank crashes. . . . Dancing lessons at reduced prices. . . .
653
654 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Schools close doors. . . . Bank holidays. . . . New Deal
inaugurated. . . . N.R.A. . . . A.A.A. . . . C.C.C. . . .
P.W.A. . . . C.W.A. . . . Abundant life. . . . Signs of
recovery. . . . Supreme Court blocks New Deal. . . . Foul
breath of Moscow. . . . Twelve million idle. . . . Roose-
velt carries forty-six states. . . . New hit from Hollywood.
. . . Ill-fed, ill-nourished, ill-housed. . . . Roosevelt's plan
for revamping judiciary. . . - The Constitution in danger.
. . . Communism. . . . The Constitution in danger. . . .
Learn swing. . . . War . rages in Spain. . . . Kidnapers
busy- . . . Big Apple. . . . Sit-down strikes. . . . War in
China. . , . Recession. . . . Idleness rises, . . . Syphilis
must be stamped out. . . . Birth control goes forward. . . .
Debts. . . . Deficits. . . . Vigilantes. . . . Business strikes.
. . . More railway bankruptcies. . . , Super-navy. . .
Civil liberties. . . . National defense. . . . Depression. . . .
Trade agreements. . . . Catholic protests against films
deemed favorable to Loyalist Spain. . . . Quarantines. , . .
House votes billion for navy. . . . Whither ? Why ?
Whither? Why?
Ears could not muffle the detonations nor could eyes mis-
read the headlines that daily recorded shocks and agonies,
diversions and pleasures. The coldest of hearts were not chill
enough to congeal the distempers and resentments surging
up in the course of personal and social transactions. Where
life was, there was the clamorous insistence of personalities
and events. To live was to know at least something of
contemporary fears, hopes, appeals, sufferings, frenzies,
escapes^ evaluations, decisions, and aspirations. To think
as well as to know was to employ some wisdom related to the
elements of the situation. To feel and to wonder were to join
the quest for an interpretation of the ways pursued by
fortune.
Mingled in the minds of writers with impressions received
from immediate events were memory and knowledge of the
literary traditions in America built up in times past by
masters and apprentices and kept alive by the elders of the
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 655
craft still living. For the precious and the genteel, making
the best of both worlds, matrices had been left, for example,
by such exponents of the reputable as Hamilton Wright
Mabie, Richard Watson Gilder, and Josiah Gilbert Holland.
For the larger public, Mark Twain had written prose and
Walt Whitman and Vachel Lindsay had written poetry, in a
distinctly democratic way, sometimes in joyful acceptance of
American life, sometimes reiterating plaints against the
lawyers and money-lenders as old as the laments of Daniel
Shays.
A third tradition, set by unquestioned masters dead and
living, was that of positive dissidence, the inability to ac-
cept the American scene. Throughout the course of imagi-
native literature in America, and particularly since the
Second Revolution of 1861-1865, the accent of criticism had
been acute. One of the chief mainsprings had been dislike
of the plutocracy which burst upon the stage in full panoply
during the gilded age, a displeasure burnt into the novels of
Edith Wharton, Winston Churchill, and to a considerable
extent of Henry James^ all of whom were ranked by then-
con temporaries as literary artists of high order. The values
upon which their criticisms rested had been fundamentally
middle 'class in imputation and the source of their revolt had
been essentially nostalgia for the past, real or romantic.
Sharing in a degree the same distaste for the plutocracy,
another dissident school of novelists, represented by William
Dean Howells, Edward Bellamy, Jack London, and Upton
Sinclair, had as its standard of criticism an idealized future
rather than a past a future neither plutocratic nor middle
class but socialistic in its theory and practice.
Unable to submit unreservedly to any one of the four
fairly definite types of social valuation, another group of
writers had given the country a tradition of literary insur-
gency without permanently fixing the locus of their exaspera-
tion or indicating the end of their desires. In 1928 Eugene
O'Neill, whose work had awakened great expectancy, still
seemed unable to break the bonds that confined his genius
656 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
within the terms of personal struggles and frustration-
Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg in poetry, and Sherwood
Anderson in prose, voiced emotions that had turned and
veered but had no precise terminus. After leaving the Ameri-
can Mercury, Henry L. Mencken remained in a fine fury
against the Philistines, fairly bursting his afflatus in a crusade
that finally brought him up short in the political camp of
Alfred M. Landon. Memories of Frank Norris, David
Graham Phillips, and Robert W. Chambers the mighty
Galahads of the joust against corruptionists and plutocrats
lingered as fuel for more vexations of spirit. Neither The
Octopus nor The Deluge nor Cardigan was entirely forgotten
by the writers who pondered on theme and appeal. With
Sinclair Lewis' Main Street and Babbitt continuing in wide
circulation, the petty bourgeois was getting a drubbing as
severe as that administered to the plutocrat when the
thunder of 1929 announced the opening of frantic days. No-
where in this heritage of dissident form, style, and interest
was there a sign that sheer optimism might soon gloss over
the antipathies of times passed and passing.
According to Lewis Mumford, "everyone who grew up"
in the period immediately preceding the crash of 1929 "had a
conscious or unconscious debt to Van Wyck Brooks/* And
what was this debt ? It was a bill owed to Brooks for his
peculiar brand of biting criticism respecting American so-
ciety, coupled with his keen appreciation of its potentialities
for improvement- "Long before the modern movement had
begun in American literature, in 1908," said Mumford,
"when David Graham Phillips was a promising writer and
Mr. Theodore Dreiser was a neglected 'genius' and Mr.
Mencken was exercising his European scholarship and his
knowledge of Nietzsche, before Mr. Frost had published
C A Boy's Will' or Vachel Lindsay had preached his Gospels
of beauty, in a day when the Woodberrys and Barrett Wen-
dells loftily shuddered at Whitman, and the American past
was the sort of thing that nice people didn't mention in
public, except in relation to George Washington or the Puri-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 657
tan fathers in these days Mr. Brooks was the first to an-
nounce that we had still to discover the body of our country
and had still to use its earth and its sky and the experience
that lay between them in the creation of American art and
thought. Mr. Brooks, throughout this whole period, was
perhaps the only critic who both saw the importance of using
our American sources, and the equal necessity . . . of holding
our own expression in literature up to the highest standard.
The school that was interested in standards and values forgot
America and, within their narrow university walls, had no
commerce with its life; the school that was interested in
American life, and dilated on the esthetics of the comic
supplement or the exquisite style of the Advertisement, had
no values ; but Mr. Brooks was the first of our critics, since
Emerson's time, to have both, and to keep both equally in
view/'
In short, a critical strain had characterized strong currents
of literature previous to the economic crisis of 1929 dissatis-
faction with the pecuniary culture produced by the enormous
growth and power of the plutocracy and its Philistine imi-
tations. The vulgarisms of conspicuous waste, satirized by
Veblen at the turn of the century in The Theory of the
Leisure Class, had continued to try the spirit of those who
worked in imaginative letters. If, as always, censure had
been accompanied by belief in some ideal, clear or vague,
attained but lost or not yet attained, attainable or perhaps
half inevitable, still the censure was unmistakable, some-
times humorous, often bitten
Unwilling to endure the stresses and ugliness in the
American scene, more than one novelist had fled from the
New World to more congenial cultures in the Old World.
In his Portrait of the American as Artist, published in 1930,
Matthew Josephson dealt sympathetically with American
writers who went beyond the sea to their Holy Grail in
England, France, or Italy. For a brief moment at that time
an iridescent apparition seemed to be suspended over Mos-
cow.
658 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
If such had been the state of the literary arts in the years
before the great depression, if criticism of American economy
and culture had long been the insistent motif, what was to be
expected after the deluge that followed the general break-
down of 1929 ? In the late nineteenth century the plutocrat,
his ladies, and his politicians had been a theme of literature.
Now investigation after investigation and bankruptcy after
bankruptcy were unfolding more evidences of their mutuality
in interest and operation revealing some Lords of Creation
as betrayers of fiduciary trust and in a few cases even as plain
criminals. Finally a President of the United States, popularly
applauded, was threatening to drive the money changers
from the temple. Were writers to take account of the ty-
phonic events, the fear of social dissolution, the dreams of a
reorganized society? Were novelists and poets to rewarm
their tradition, their heritage of realism, censure, humor,
irony, hope for a better world ? Or was America to close its
literature ? Writing certainly did not cease. What writers,
then, what books, what imagery or symbolism, captured
esteem and commanded loyalty ?
A survey of the Best Books of the Decade from 1926 to
1935, made by A. D. Dickinson, covering the years of the
golden glow and the black depression, disclosed the intel-
lectual and moral evaluations of the reading public. The
survey was based upon 102 sources of information, including
library book lists, review digests, group and " expert" classifi-
cations, booksellers' selections for the White House, antholo-
gies, and other compilations. Out of such data, more or less
statistical, the surveyor arrived at certain conclusions re-
specting the "best" books of the period, using the term to
mean "selected by a consensus of expert opinion as most
worthy the attention of intelligent American readers." On
this basis Dickinson compiled lists of "favorite authors" and
"best books" of the ten years in the several divisions of in-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 659
tellectual interest, general and special. It could be said, of
course, that the expert opinion so registered was principally
middle class in source ; even so, the appraisals expressed the
concerns and dominant ideas of the largest reading and writ-
ing class amid the upswing and crash of American economy,
revolutions and wars abroad, and overturns in domestic poli-
tics. Whoever sought to meditate upon American culture
thus possessed a group of impressive materials in books widely
distributed and elaborately praised in the current years.
At the top of the list of Dickinson's twenty-five "favorite
authors" for the years 1926-1935 stood, in order, James
Truslow Adams, Willa Gather, Pearl Buck, and Ellen Glas-
gow one historical and political writer and three novelists.
Mr. Adams' New England in the Republic, 1776-1850, pub-
lished in 1926, had been acclaimed both for scholarship and
for grace of style. His subsequent writings on current ques-
tions were marked by devotion to the historic ideal of indi-
vidualism, the advocacy of mild reforms, criticism of the
New Deal, and defense of the general principles espoused by
the Republican party. He had by no means accepted all the
policies pursued by the Lords of Creation, but in the political
division his fundamental allegiance lay on their side. Of the
novelists, Willa Gather had avoided the stresses and strains
represented by unemployment, bankruptcy, defaults, and
growing labor unrest and found refuge in preciosities of
language, devotion to beauty in itself, and solace in the
mystic reaches of the soul ; Pearl Buck up to this point had
directed her sympathies toward the primordials of life and
culture in far-off China ; Ellen Glasgow, while personally
sensitive to the pending and impending conflicts in America
and keenly receptive to the idea of change as necessity, had
skirted around the volcanic center of contemporary events
in her fiction. Nor was it without social implications that
the zestful poet, Carl Sandburg, who had known toil and
sweat as a casual laborer and had written of the world he
knew, stood at the bottom of Dickinson's list of the twenty-
five "favorites."
660 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
In the schedule of "fifty best books/' evaluated by the
survey, the five standing first were Mark Sullivan's Our
Times., Douglas Southall Freeman's Robert E. Lee, Pearl
Buck's Good Earth, Willa Gather's Death Comes for the
Archbishop, and Thornton Wilder's Bridge of San Luis Rey.
There was the cream of the years in the judgment of the
market. Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought
ranked thirty-seventh and Stuart Chase's Men and Machines,
forty-fourth. Heading the eight "best books on philosophy,
psychology, ethics, and religion " was Will Durant's chatty
Story of Philosophy ; ranking fourth in this category was
Walter Lippmann's genial Preface to Morals ; and a place
at the bottom was assigned to Bertrand Russell's erudite
Philosophy, with less than half the "points" of evaluation
given to the work at the head of the roll. In the field of the
"social sciences," the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences
rated first, Chase's Men and Machines second, and Lewis
Corey's Decline of American Capitalism next to the last of
twenty-five books. Helen Gardner's Art through the Ages
crowned the pyramid of "the ten best books on art and
music."
In the three years which followed the decade covered by
Dickinson's survey nothing occurred in the literary market to
alter the general verdict of his statistical returns. No new
"favorite" author burst upon the scene with an interpreta-
tion of life and values essentially different from that pre-
sented by the established favorites. No new "best" book
offered either a revulsion or revolution in feelings. At the top,
among the best-sellers, favorites, and bests, were Van Wyck
Brooks and Margaret Mitchell. They too wrote of past
times and dealt with memories. Departing from the caustic
analysis and the social framework that had marked his earlier
work, Brooks now described The Flowering of New England
as he saw it 3 looking backward in 1936 spoke of Haw-
thorne, Emerson, and their friends, of apple blossoms, of
splashing rivulets, of the fragrant honeysuckle. With such
exultation was this sweetness and light hailed by reviewers
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 661
and readers that stray objections were buried in the oblivion
which could so easily be accorded to doubters in America.
The Brooks triumph was almost Roman in its magnificence :
eager buyers grasped at edition after edition and the author
was crowned with the laurels of the Academy.
Although likewise historical in time-setting, Margaret
Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was more rugged in its rhetoric
and more resonant with the clatter of the contemporary
palace and plaza. While it dealt with the moldering tragedy
of the civil war, it vibrated with mighty passions blind,
confident, greedy, heroic, futile. Through its pages pressed
ardent youth seeking adventure under arms, slaves, soldiers
at war and afterwards, the women of their circles, politicians,
and speculators. Rhett Butler, a star performer, might
have been a contemporary Lord of Creation battening on war
trade, with the trader's contempt for the country gentleman's
heroics. Bright colors were offset by black soot. In the trail
of the perfume came stench. Nevertheless the characters and
events were of times long passed and, if the thought was of
necessity contemporary, it was softened and blurred by the
illusion of shadowy perspective. So clothed in the appear-
ances of distance, if intelligible to a society still in conflict,
Gone with the Wind made a national sensation and sold
more than a million copies in the years of the great economic
plague.
But such surveys of "the favorites" and "the best" by no
means encompassed the vast range of American letters ; nor
did they cover the incomparable richness and diversity of
themes and modulations. As a matter of fact, during the
radiance of the golden glow and the tempests of the depres-
sion, with rushing vitality imaginative writers reached out
further and went deeper for materials than in any previous
epoch in American literary development. When the market
for material goods narrowed and publishers complained of
declining sales, dynamic writing seemed to be stimulated,
662 AMERICA IN MID PASSAGE
not quenched. If there ever had been an Augustan age in
American letters it certainly had not come to a close in falling
energies and decaying intellectual powers. Although stocks
were in the doldrums and trade remained dull, publishers'
desks were heaped high with manuscripts and, discard as they
did by the thousands, the volume of their publication con-
tinued to be enormous.
For the several forms of media to which writers resorted
all human interests and manifestations of life in all kinds of
places and circumstances were utilized as content. Authors
turned their microscopes on every nook and cranny of
geography regions, cities, towns, villages, lonely farms,
plains, mountains, deserts, bayous, lakes, and seas North,
South, East, and West. This they did with such thorough-
ness that if all other records were destroyed and novels alone
survived, students in some distant age could reconstruct from
the pages of fiction alone the human geography of the United
States in the age of Coolidge, Hoover, and Roosevelt. Every
phase of the family, for instance, and in its varied connections
was explored and described love, the eternal triangle,
relations legal and economic, parent and child, conflict of
generations, and lines of heredity, in all social settings from
the idle rich to the idle poor. Classes and races, their charac-
teristics, their cultures, and their clashes were also themes as
immediate materials or as illustrations of broader facets of
the everlastingly human. All types of persons were pressed
into the service of literary artistry : politicians, economic
dynasts, labor leaders, industrial workers, farm laborers,
brahmins, puritans, cavaliers, feminine careerists, and all
the rest. The focus of inquiry was brought to bear on multi-
tudes of "the plain people"; on the ferments among their
several orders, Descending to the ultimate unit, the indi-
vidual, resourceful writers meticulously dissected and de-
scribed single persons variously circumstanced, making their
way in American society, struggling for a living, seeking
compensations for suffering, hunting for some gyroscopic
principle that would give steadiness and assurance amid the
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 663
welter, the hopeless discontent, and despairing hope of the
times. And although convenience for thinking about the
sum of imaginative literature required classification as to
theme and emphasis, any classification was bound to be more
or less false, so interwoven were the strands of life which ran
through the classes of literature.
While many writers still insisted that their function was to
sing into the sky if they wanted to or "describe things as they
actually were," some of their fellow travelers were conscious
of the philosophic implications raised by their very language
and saw something to be gained by considering them, if
dimly and without gaining any absolute certainty. Among
writers, literary critics, editors, and publishers proceeded a
vigorous discussion of controlling philosophies for selection
and emphasis in imaginative letters and of the writer's role
in society. This interrogation and sifting of opinions brought
into letters all the currents of thought that had run through
philosophy, theology, politics, economics, and historiography
for centuries. On every side the Socratic elenchus was freely
applied to cherished convictions and enthusiastic ambitions.
As imaginative literature was swept nearer to the vortex of
great politics and economics, so it was more interpenetrated
by the thought, majestic and mean, that had been generated
in other manifestations of culture.
Apart from idea, substance, and philosophy, imaginative
letters were characterized by great energies, penetrating and
searching interest, indefatigable studies first and second hand,
indubitable force and literary skill, and a sensitivity to the
action and spirit of the time. No longer regnant were the
simple hopes of Horatio Alger or the polished refinements of
Hamilton Wright Mabie ; none was able to " translate the
stubbornness of fortune into so quiet and so sweet a style."
What was equally significant for the nature and future of
American culture was the wide distribution of skills and
powers throughout the country. No metropolis or region
monopolized them. The intellectual and moral forces for
sustained writing seemed to burst out spontaneously in city^
664 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
town, village, farmstead, desert, and valley, as if some pro-
tean urge had shaken the whole nation.
"Contact with life" with the vernacular, perduring or
ever renewed was the clue to the new writing. In no corner
of the literary world did writers wholly withdraw from this
vitalizing relationship to copy old masters, refine, whittle,
and polish inherited models, to play with convention and
tradition in a spirit of literary affectation. Even when they
resorted to what was recklessly and often falsely called
"escapist" fiction, they did not shine entirely by reflected
light.
After all, human nature underlay and survived the fortunes
of States, politics, industries, institutions, and academies
pomp and circumstance of every kind and continued to
exhibit its facets and propensities, however colored and de-
flected by current events. It never wearied of romantic love,
the characteristic that so sharply distinguished the family
impulse in Western civilization from the categorical regimen
of the Orient. Nor did it ever cease to thirst for adventure,
for mystery, for the primitive from which it sprang, for the
wit and humor that enlivened the commonplaces of life
from the cradle through the bridal chamber to the grave.
Despite its narrowness and meanness, human nature never
failed to display, upon occasions great and small, qualities
of character that gave an elevation and dignity to life, even
to its trivialities.
In the face of many warnings from philosophers, anno-
tators 3 and dust sifters, mankind, with or without benefit of
clergy,, insisted on conceiving history as tragedy, as divine
comedy, as progress toward a golden day, or as melodrama,
with heroes, heroines, and villains. And respecting the truth
of things as they actually had been or were, such conceptions
of life, for all any one knew, might be nearer reality than the
most solemn treatise composed for personal satisfaction or
the classroom or the parlor table. Graphs could reveal
variations in American culture, but the breath of life could
not be blown into digits, curves, and cubes. To be sure, no
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 665
writer of fiction brought the whole of that culture into an
artistically composite unity. Nor did anybody else. On the
American continent there was no tight frame of aristocracy,
middle class, and toiling mass, such as had engaged the genius
of Byron, Thackeray, George Eliot, and Dickens in England.
"The Great American Novel" was not achieved in this epoch
of the midpassage doubtless lay beyond the powers of any
genius but many important and powerful novels were
written as the solemn ways of Mr. Coolidge's age merged
into the kinematics of the New Deal.
Responding to the multiformity of human experience,
imaginative literature ranged from top to bottom, from
bottom to top, from the center to the circumference of things.
Carrying little or no baggage of pedantry, it could penetrate
more swiftly to the heart of human situations and baldly
tell truths too shocking for incorporation in the grave pages
of sociology or psychology. Whether considered as enter-
tainment or inspiration, it rose above and far outstripped the
motion picture, eternally striving to become the agency of the
lowest common denominator. It was more plastic, freer in
the choice of emphases, less standardized. For many reasons,
its influences also ran far beyond those of the stage, notwith-
standing the creative liberty and subtle nuances peculiar to
the living play ; indeed play after play was dramatized from
a successful novel. Nor did the formal history, with few
women in its pages and fewer romances, compete with imagi-
native literature in delineating the many-sided manifesta-
tions of human nature in action. Over the greatest of State
papers and the most accurate statistical tables hung an air
of abstractness. In imaginative literature the meaning of such
papers and tables could be made as full-blooded as life.
This is not to say that when the plummet reached the
depths in all waters that no dregs were stirred and that no
writers took advantage of the occasion to exhibit or commer-
cialize wanton prurience. As in every age when preceding
order and precious forms had been rudely dislocated by
historical events, the pendulum of anarchy had swung far
666 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
away. That had been true, for instance, in the literature of
the English restoration which followed the stern system of
Puritanism. Yet when everything was in flux and history
was being made at great cost to what had seemed to be
eternal institutions, it was difficult, in fact impossible, to
determine in every case just where a novel that attempted to
depict life as actually lived by men, women, and children
of all classes, at all levels of human nature, fell in any scheme
of classification separating the prurient in motive from the
truth-telling passion of science and art.
No criteria of judgment conceived in terms of mere literary
art enabled critics to obtain an unquestionable consensus of
informed opinion on the fifty or five hundred books, poems,
stories, or essays to be deemed most worthy of admission to
the temple of fame. Despite some evident gradations of
force in style and substance, any selections from the profuse
literary offering, whether for library lists or for historical
records, had to be more or less arbitrary and could only serve
the purpose of illustrating the variety of ideas and interests
represented by imaginative letters. A pretension to a cate-
gorical judgment of pure literary merits was bound to be
hollow and to be greeted by a torrent of warrantable protests.
To the short story the Americans continued to resort like
ducks to water. Wedged in between bizarre announcements
of manufacturers' commodities for sale, in the magazines, it
often seemed a mere appendage to advertisements. Yet a
few magazines managed to supply stories without such acces-
sories. Even loaded with advertising appeals to the upper
income groups, the New Yorker encouraged a peculiar
approach to this form of literature, characterized by whimsy;
it was illustrated in Leane Zugsmith's series of stories, Home
Is Where You Hang Your Childhood, eventually issued as a
separate collection. Without numerous advertising pages,
the magazine, Story, transplanted from Majorca to the
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 667
United States during this period, manifested a primary
interest in snapshot tales as works of art. In 1934 it dis-
covered one of the most original of short-story writers,
William Saroyan, who entered its pages with The Daring
Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and was soon well
launched on his creative career with the cooperation of
Mencken's American Mercury.
Saroyan's first little tale dealt with a poverty-stricken
writer sleeping fitfully, rising to seek work for sustenance,
suffering the pangs of defeat and hunger, dropping back upon
his bed for the long sleep but, in the interval of waking,
humming the song about a daring young man on a flying
trapeze: "a trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze
to some sort of eternity ; and He prayed objectively for
strength to make the flight with grace." That the young
man succeeded in doing. Grasped in his hand was a one-cent
piece which he had found and as he lapsed into his final
slumber, he regretted that he had not given it to a child, for
a child could buy so many things with a penny.
For a few cents Americans by the thousands were buying
the sheets of music about the daring young man and as this
music came over the air through the microphone and out of
the phonographs, Americans literally by the millions began to
sing and whistle in the wind, on their individual trapezes, to
God or to nothing, with the daring young man. Thoroughly
established on his own course, Saroyan developed the short
story as a deft combination of running commentary on life
and parable, sinking toward the depths for his subject matter
and attaining heights. When Modern Books issued a col-
lection of his stories in 1937, it maintained that Saroyan
possessed "a vision as lucid and honest as Whitman's or
Rousseau's and clarity akin to the spirit of the early writer-
thinkers of the East."
Among the new manipulators of the miniature tale, none
was more adventuresome than Erskine Caldwell of Georgia,
a Prometheus unbound, using his fire to scorch mankind with
accounts of its cruelty, helplessness, ignorance, poverty, and
668 AMERICA IN MWPASSAGE
the general inhumanity of man to man. His stories were
about people on the soil principally. With the accuracy of
his vignettes in detail, the doughtiest Southern defender of
regional virtues did not quarrel a toute outrance ; but when
Caldwell, after using such titles as Kneel to the Rising Sun
and The People's Choice, called a collection of his lurid tales,
Southways, he was taken to task for implying that such traits
and situations as he described were peculiar to the South.
Jonathan Daniels, a leading critic of the section himself,
also objected to CaldwelPs growing inclination to pity his
subjects and declared, in effect, that he was exceeding his
function as a literary artist in putting his heart into the
plight of the wretches whose stories he told. But Daniels was
not running away from truth for he said that growing
hunger was the great problem of the South.
All Southern localities were made to talk about themselves
through the short story. William Faulkner, of Mississippi,
undertook to construct a city in that region, Jefferson, with
six novels and three volumes of little tales. Among his short
stories was a collection entitled The Unvanquished and
readers who expected to find only heroes so honored in fiction
were surprised to meet Old Granny, a heroine, indomitable
though a slave.
In the center of the agrarian middle west, many short-
story writers called attention to their region through this
medium. Formerly, as Wallace Stegner said in The Saturday
Review in connection with Josephine Herbst's novels, west-
erners had enjoyed "lampooning the culture clubs which
sought sordid realism with bated breath and buzzed with
indignation when they found it." Now verities were piling up
in western fiction and even the cultured were consenting to
know the worst as well as the best about their communities.
One of the most granitic among the new writers of the short
tale was Wallace Stegner himself whom some exuberant
critics ranked with Edith Wharton for his ability to tell a
story as unvarnished as Ethan Frome.
Taking politics for a gay ride, Katharine Dayton treated
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 669
the subject in comic skits which ran in issue after issue of The
Saturday Evening Post. In one of these tales, Mrs. Republi-
can, a comfortable person who loved her quiet old house,
twitted Mrs. Democrat about the "dirt" which had become
so vexing. She had to keep putting up new tariffs, she said,
because the old ones simply would get covered with smoot.
When the Tiger Cat brushed its tail against her knees, Mrs.
Republican exclaimed genially: "Goodness!" In her quiet
old house she could easily forget the Vare machine in Phila-
delphia.
Foreign politics was a theme chosen by Thomas Wolfe,
determined for once to subdue his volubility and make his
point emphatic. Ancient wisdom had declared that " nothing
is too small to mirror the Buddha" and putting much into
little was surely a fine art. To accomplish that feat, Thomas
Wolfe had more to compress than any of his writing col-
leagues. But in 1937 the author of the monumental Look
Homeward Angel, a novel of North Carolinians, confined his
turbulent emotions and brought a terrific surge of political
and social ideas to a focus in a brief story called I Have a
Thing to Tell You his opinion of the totalitarian State in
Germany.
In respect of domestic problems, the short story was a
vehicle for trenchant statements of positions. For instance
the difficulties which second and third generations of immi-
grants faced in trying to adapt themselves to a new and a
democratic civilization were discussed in the form of narra-
tives dealing with their situation and their ways of handling
it. Irish adolescents in Chicago stood out in bold relief in the
writings of James T. Farrell ; to seventeen stories about them
he gave the title, Can All This Grandeur Perish ? The painful
efforts of Jewish students in the great cities to master the
intricacies of the English language formed the core of
Leonard Q. Ross* merry tales of Hyman Kaplan. Old and
new Americans disporting at Coney Island, the people's
great playground, were the substance of Robert M. Coates*
short story, The Fury, which won an O. Henry award in 1937.
670 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
That many of the short stories were more than fugitive
leaflets was evidenced in the numerous collections published
by the writers themselves and in collections assembled by
watchful editors. For example, among the authors' own
collections, sometimes grouped under the caption of a leading
story, were Stephen Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster ;
Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Fables for Parents ; Charles C.
Dobie's San Francisco Tales ; Vincent Sheean's Pieces of a
Fan ; and Wallace Stegner's Remembering Laughter. With
the assistance of Elinor Clark, Horace Gregory collected and
published in 1937 a series of leftist brevities entitled New
Letters in America. Annually Edward J. O'Brien issued a
volume of The Best Short Stories, selected on his principles
of excellence, theoretically formal, practically rightist in
upshot. And yet, if nothing was too small to mirror the
Buddha, neither the short story nor the museum of vignettes
satisfied writers and readers who grasped at the fullness of
life.
Without diminishing the favor accorded to the short story,
the "full-bodied" novel continued in vogue and on its larger
canvas appeared the shapes and colors of widely assorted
social arrangements among the men, women, and children
composing American society. At a time when sociologists
and hygienists on college campuses were trying to impress
upon youth the meaning of the family as a prime social insti-
tution, novelists were basing works on the family as they
saw it or understood it during the years when millions of
families were going to pieces in the high winds of the panic.
Gladys Hasty Carroll kept the dignity of life and the worthi-
ness of labor on the land surviving despite business condi-
tions, As the Earth Turns. Ruth Suckow contributed more
pictures of The Folks in Iowa ; LeRoy MacLeod invited com-
parisons with farming families in Indiana, in The Crowded
Hill. Trilogies and even longer spans of family chronicles
were written as interest in what was happening to lines of
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 671
heredity, as time unfolded, supplied stimulus for such in-
quiries. New England clans were the substance of Inez
Haynes Irwin's pleasant Family Circle and Samuel Rogers'
Dusk at the Grove the latter a tale of degeneration.
A Southern family was followed from The Forge and the
Store to Unfinished Cathedral by T. S. Stribling, to its cul-
mination in an atmosphere of commercialized religion, with
Muscle Shoals, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Scottsboro boys
figuring prominently in its setting. Passing beyond ordinary
secular affairs, in These Bars of Flesh, Stribling ridiculed
higher education so remorselessly that John Erskine, reviewing
the book amid memories of his own professorial days, refused
to take it seriously and preferred merely to enjoy it. It was
in Stribling's neighborhood, not far away, that Edward
Turpin of Mississippi traced four generations of Negroes
rising out of their slave past. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings put
families from the Florida scrub lands on the literary map with
South Moon Under and The Yearling. In 1938 Laura Krey
described the renewal of a planting family in Texas after its
trials in the civil war, under the title, . . . And Tell of Time.
The struggle of a family to become merely rich in a capitalist
society and the proneness of women to waste their affections
on futilities, in vain at that, was the content of a trilogy pro-
posed by Josephine Herbst and executed in part with Pity
Is Not Enough and The Executioner Waits.
One of the most horrendous family novels was Maria
Sandoz's story of her own group in the sandhills of Nebraska.
Her father^ Old Jules, had been born in Switzerland and
studied medicine there in his youth. But he came to the new
world and went west to farm. With the ferocity of a lion, he
persisted in subduing a cattle region to crop bearing and in
the course of his career he struck down everything that stood
in his way. His very wives quailed and died in his company
but he found new women ready to try living with him. Here
was man wrestling with the soil in a terrifying fury, in a
strange spot of the earth where nature had incalculable ways
herself, the contest between human will and nature's course
672 AMERICA IN MIDPA&SAGE
forming a phase of this cyclopean drama of family life in the
High Plains.
Second and third generations of immigrants figured in
several of the long chronicles : in Meyer Levin's narrative of
The Old Bunch, which pursued the fate of nineteen Jewish
boys and girls of Chicago freed from sweatshop servitude to
adventure in the professions and in politics, to racketeer,
gamble, or succumb to parasitism and inertia ; in William
Carlos Williams' study of middle-class immigrants in Man-
hattan, White Mule; and in Daniel Fuchs' Jewish group
portraiture, Summer in Williamsburg. Using materials on
family life to develop the theme of character in slow matur-
ing, Vardis Fisher produced a tetralogy ; after declaring that
Passions Spin the Plot, he argued that No Villain Need Be.
In Roots in the Sky, Sidney Meller placed in juxtaposition
the Jewish elders of a community trying to uphold the Tal-
mudic code and their offspring endeavoring to adjust them-
selves to the contemporary age and place.
The flow of the love story never faltered. But through the
changing experiences of these years, it ran into strange chan-
nels as it coursed through the trivial and the tragic, from
frustration to the triumph of fulfillment, from the intimately
personal to the social implication. After eight years of silence,
the boy terror of the post-war years who had once emitted
tales of flaming youth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, broke out with a
story of disintegrating marriage, Tender Is the Night, a
recital that displayed more consciousness of milieux. In this
so-called "era of business and professional women," Elizabeth
Corbett related the life of one, After Five O'Clock. What
they experienced in careering Allis McKay discussed in
Woman about Town. Women Live Too Long thought Vina
Delmar. But Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in The Deepening
Stream, permitted a woman born in the gay nineties to live
even through the awful experience of the world war and yet
arrive at a sense of personal fulfillment. Rose Feld chose a
Young Man of Fifty as a study in emotion. Djuna Barnes,
unwilling to think of the love life short of a compound of
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 673
French, English, and American impacts, framed a novel on
that model, Nightwood, for which T. S. Eliot prepared an
introduction.
Whether Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not
belonged in the category of love stories or social interpreta-
tion was a matter of hot debate among literary critics. At all
events, when he interrupted his long silence, Hemingway re-
counted a story of animal vitality resisting enervation, of a
man's passionate devotion to his family driving him into a
desperate struggle for their existence and his own, to defeat
and death. Although many commentators airily dismissed
this novel as "leftist" and others charged it with being
"hard-boiled" and "indecent," Elliot Paul gave it eloquent
and discriminating praise in The Saturday Review. Wher-
ever it belonged in any scheme of classification, it was no
simple exploration of subjective propensities. Disturbed as a
novelist and a citizen by the amount and nature of fiction
representing human beings sinking beneath a sea of trouble,
Ellen Glasgow wrote Vein of Iron, a story of dignity main-
tained under the stress of genuine hardships. Though it
was an offset, it was no apology.
As the Freudian fever ebbed, the novel of introspection
became less conspicuous, and "extrovert," socially alert
fiction achieved more prominence. After publishing in 1933
his mammoth Anthony Adverse, a treatise in psychoanalysis
combined with lush adventure and romance, Hervey Allen
took a rest. In 1938 he was less subjective and less ambitious ;
in his comparatively short novel, Action at Aquila, he simply
revived the warrior, the least introspective of mortals, as a
hero displaying his prowess in civil war.
Back in 1929, while authors of the problem novel in the
newer spirit were merely cleaning their typewriters and pre-
paring to write, Sinclair Lewis brought into bas relief a rich
man from the automobile world, Dodsworth, engaged in a
quest for culture at the heels of a hectic and imperious wife*
The applause that greeted the performance was loud but not
prolonged. Within a few months mild lampoons were being
674 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
submerged in tougher fiction and by 1930 a more clearly
directed realism than Lewis had yet commanded was pressing
into the novel. In that year Charles Norris in The Seed
brought this method to bear on birth control ; Cornelia James
Cannon, in Heirs, on the assimilation of aliens ; Julia Ellsworth
Ford, in Consequence, on the opium trade ; Mary Heaton
Vorse, in Strike, on the labor struggle ; Gertrude Shelby and
Samuel Stoney in Po' Buckra, and Gilmore Millen, in Sweet
Man, on the race conflict ; Upton Sinclair, in Mountain City,
on the role of money and in Little Steel on the conflict of
capital and labor; Edwin Seaver, in The Company, on busi-
ness organization ; John Tunis, in American Girl, on the
exploitation of the tennis champion. Choosing a broader
plot, Irving Fineman undertook, in This Pure Young Man,
a critique on the whole of contemporary civilization. In a
highly charged Mothers' Cry, Helen Carlisle fairly shrieked
for recognition of basic maternal needs.
Racial affiliations, trials and tribulations, peculiar charac-
teristics and modes of meeting life the minority issue
within a political democracy furnished substance for long
stories as for short. From the perspective of the white race,
Oliver LaFarge in Laughing Boy and Florence E. McClinch-
ery in Joe Pete, like several other writers, gave their versions
of the American Indian. But steadily the Indians were
learning to be articulate about themselves. The same was
true of the Negro race ; it had other interpreters and its own.
Based on her personal experiences in modern plantation
management^ Julia Peterkin wrote sympathetic character
studies of South Carolina Negroes. Katharine Hamill, in
Swamp Shadow, a novel of the Mississippi low lands, and
Zora Neale Thurston, in Their Eyes Were Watching God, a
tale of Floridans, also dealt with the Negro character strug-
gling to make terms with life in America.
The insecurity of the Jews on the world stage had reper-
cussions in American literature, although in practice their
persecutors were kept within some bounds of decency by
democratic politics in the United States. Before Hitler
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 675
commenced his " Aryan " purge 3 as early as 1929 when the
skies seemed almost azure for most races in America., Robert
Nathan made the Jew in a Gentile world the theme of his
novel, There Is Another Heaven. In the year of Hitler's rise
to mastery over the Germans, Irving Fineman in Hear Ye,
Sons warned his readers of a spreading racial conflict in-
volving the Jews the conflict so serio-comically treated in
Lewis Browne's How Odd of God.
Like families and races, individuals as types had their days
in the literary court. Men of untamed temper were the
subjects of W. R. Burnet's Iron Man and The Giant Swing.
Man tamed to labor interested William Wister Haines, author
of Slim, an electric lineman, and Archie Binns, whose Light-
ship described men willing to guard sea lanes for navigators.
Men tamed by inner checks called puritanic served as theme
for the philosophic scholar, George Santayana, whose The
Last Puritan presented a victim of new times caught in a
devouring pool of spiritual ruin. Another type of Puritan,
the Boston Brahmin, was genially satirized by John P.
Marquand in The Late George Apley. It seemed, therefore,
that the Gentile in a nation of Jews, Negroes, Indians, and
peoples of many other races and nationalities was also get-
ting his due, more or less.
Occupational characteristics, so superficially listed in cen-
sus returns, stared out of the pages of fiction. In her own
way Willa Gather had brought the musician into fiction.
Now James Cain did the same thing but in an entirely
different fashion. His Serenade, like The Postman Always
Rings Twice, belonged to the "hard-boiled" class. Its singer
was swept through American-Mexican relations, politics, and
brothels, through commercial battles over music in Holly-
wood, through controversies over the merits of mechanical
reproductions of music, through grand opera in New York
and back to Mexico where a tragic fate awaited his beloved
Mexican woman and deep sorrow came to her lover. Cer T
tainly this was no book to be read and enjoyed by patrons
of chamber music. That could also be said of Paul Horgan's
676 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
The Fault of Angels, a satire on the musical set in a small
western town, which received a Harper prize.
As the search light of imaginative letters swung on its axis,
its glare was cast upon the politicians. W. R. Burnett in 1936
personified one as King Cole. The political battles between
Yankees and Irish, Republicans and Democrats, corruption-
ists and purists, all in Boston, were the theme of Joseph
Dineen's Ward Eight. Under a title peculiarly apt, What
People Said, W. L. White ventilated small-town and small-
time politics and crooked finance in the middle west, utilizing
first-hand facts and intimate experience in a manner that
cut beneath the camouflage of conventions. Persons familiar
with American politics could visualize through his word pic-
tures smoke-filled rooms with brass cuspidors shining and
"the boys" fixing things up. To the surprise of her wide
public accustomed to her simple tales of adventure, Mary
Roberts Rinehart mingled politics with the story of a woman
in The State vs. Elinor Norton.
In a study of The Liberals, which Granville Hicks, close
student of the literary tradition in America, called "one of the
most exciting novels of our time,'* the hopes and difficulties
of that tribe were set forth by John Hyde Preston out of
knowledge and with penetrating consideration. Going back-
ward in time Janet Ayer Fairbank caught up in Rich Man
Poor Man the saga of the Progressive revolt under Theodore
Roosevelt and traced its evolution through the fortunes of
Hendricks Smith, son of a great capitalist, a Harvard gradu-
ate, who snapped off from his family pretensions, cast in his
lot with the rebels of his day, and worried his way with a suf-
fragette wife through the world war into the golden glow.
Careening both vertically and horizontally through human
society, historical novels brought remote times and places
into competition with the here and the now for the diversion
of readers. Novels of wars, revolutionary and civil, came
from the presses with an insistent regularity which implied
that neither Hemingway's Farewell to Arms nor Mary Lee's
farewell to martial futility in It's a Great War, had exhausted
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 677
the interest in death and destruction. If, as often alleged,
American democracy was basically pacific, its writers pro-
duced no great novel of peace as such to offset blood-curdling
stories of war passions.
The historical novel was of course an expression of con-
temporary ideas and interests read into the past. In two
novels of the South the vigor of two points of view was
illustrated : the nostalgic, in Stark Young's yearning for a
past deemed exquisite. River House, written in 1929, followed
by So Red the Rose ; and, in 1934, the critical, in William
Faulkner's story of the decaying old order, called The Sound
and the Fury. Honore Willsie Morrow ended her Lincoln
trilogy with The Last Full Measure. Blair Niles plotted a
series of historical novels dealing with Latin America and
executed a part of the plan in narratives of Guatemalans and
Peruvians with fidelity to source materials and a sympathy
nourished by experiences among descendants of the peoples
whom she described. Combining meticulous research with
flights of fancy, Kenneth Roberts, in Northwest Passage,
carried a host of readers through frontier intrigues and wars
during years before the American revolution, with Major
Robert Rogers, the Indian fighter, as the central figure.
Reaching back into the seventeenth century, Esther Forbes
related tales of colonial Massachusetts, including in her reper-
tory Indian wars and witches and summing it all up under the
name Paradise. Gertrude Atherton enlarged upon her novels
of statecraft, which had taken early American republicanism
and the age of Pericles as their substance, to cover the time
of Caesar Augustus and rendered her own verdict Peacock*
In an age when everybody and everything furnished grist
to the literary mill, it was inevitable no doubt that the makers
of polite and imaginative letters themselves should be made
to stand forth in their settings. Applying her biting analysis
to the writers, Dawn Powell, in Turn, Magic Wheel, held up to
ridicule the literary circle in New York, its hub of the uni-
verse. But with a gentleness as light as a perfume-laden
breeze in springtime, Robert Nathan wafted his humor into
678 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Winter in April in 1938, at that point in the midpassage.
His central figure, Henry Pennifer, had reached the top rung
of the ladder as a critic, a member of the Academy, a Pulitzer
prize winner, emeritus editor of the University Quarterly.
What more could a man of letters ask in this world ? The
days of Pennifer's years were now pleasantly passed writing
on small matters, attending meetings of the Academy where
new candidates were discussed, idling hours away over
domestic details. The man of letters as artist was well-housed,
well-fed, and well-clothed. He lived in an appropriate section
of the city- Any disciple of Richard Watson Gilder would
have been charmed with the delicacy of these features com-
mon to the correct literary way.
But Robert Nathan did not forget spring clouds. Into the
thin, mellow light of the literary set, of which Pennifer was
an ornament, fell dark shadows from the outside. Old Stuart
Orrin, who had been a literary editor and a discoverer of
talents in former days, encountered Pennifer at a cocktail
party and complained that "the old boys" were writing the
same kind of books year after year. Aware that something
was actually happening in letters, Pennifer replied, "Not the
new ones," and remarked that the new books seemed different
to him. Enlivened by the rejoinder, Orrin thanked God for
the new books and, warming up, rejoiced that "pretty writ-
ing" had gone out of style, that the new books smelled of life.
Also into the pale light another shadow fell Nadia Bala-
kov, whose father and mother had been murdered in the
Bolshevik revolution, whose prayers went up for old Russia,
the Russia before the revolution. And yet another shadow :
a German youth driven from home by the cruelties and dis- ,
honors of the Nazi revolution, an accomplished linguist and
musician ; aflame with the zeal of a great hope, he cast aside
literary pleasantries to fight for the Loyalist government on
the sodden fields of Spain in the year of grace, 1938. It
did seem indeed that something was happening to polite
letters and the literary set.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 679
Poets likewise ranged the wide realm of fact, ideas, and
judgments in a world manifesting signs of degeneration and
reconstruction. Never was so much poetry published in
America in so short a span as during the midpassage. The
year 1933 alone produced sixty impressive titles as testimony
to the activity of poets. Willa Gather was still reveling in
April Twilight. Ruth St. Denis was still dreaming of her
mystic dances in Lotus Light. In Innocent Summer, Frances
Frost, a loyal native of Vermont, was claiming peace for
the soul far away from troubled cities in singing of nature
and tradition. But Cale Young Rice sniffed High Perils and
Ezra Pound in The Fifth Decade of Cantos lashed harder
at his obsession, economic materialism. If Allen Tate re-
mained in the realm of "super-reality" while composing
The Mediterranean, Mark Van Doren confessed deep con-
cern for earthly character and made the affirmations of a
town and country gentleman, with respect to values, in The
Last Look. Louise Bogan sought to unite the concrete
substance of things with concern for the metaphysical in
The Sleeping Fury. With his distinctive modernist idiom,
Horace Gregory sounded the call for No Retreat. The sharp-
ening conflict put a keener edge on Stephen Vincent Benet's
poetry; in the Burning City, a collection of his poems,
he expressed his passionate revulsion against tyranny
against war, fascism, madness of all varieties, stupidity, and
degeneracy.
Only Robinson Jeffers seemed to be content with complete
frustration, seeing no escape from humanity's incapacities
and violence even in death ; Such Counsels As You Gave Me
followed Give Your Heart to the Hawks both statements
of the tortured poetic soul in a world infinitely hideous. If
the world would become communist, Muriel Rukeyser, like
Isidor Schneider and the older comrades generally, thought
she would like it very well; her USI, for instance, using
items in the daily press as reportage of abuses to be removed,
offered a social revolution as the way to clean the Augean
stables. That it might be possible to return to' the old
.680 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
American dream in memory at least, to the great westward
movement, Helene Magaret implied in The Great Horse.
The disillusioning present was the burden of Josephine W.
Johnson's Year's End. But if quotability was the test of
poetry, Ogden Nash led all the rest in skill. His verse was
freer than Whitman's had been as free as conversational
chaos. His satire was contemporary and catholic in its
appreciations; his wide-ranging observations on the little
and the big first families, bankers, consciences clean and
foul, ditherers, divorcees, politicians, night club revelers,
bounders, simplicities with complexities all under the head-
ing, I'm a Stranger Here Myself exactly fitted the moods
of countless fellow creatures.
. The great democracy scattered out over the continent,
which travelers prefigured in snapshots general and particu-
lar, Carl Sandburg commemorated in a long poem bearing
the cryptic heading, The People Yes. High and low, far and
wide, over plains, amid factories, farms, dust bowls, across
mountain ranges, rivers, and lakes, among all unemploy-
ments and occupations, professions, jobs, skills, and no
skills, this poet wandered, listening to words spoken in
trains, in lobbies,, filling stations, streets, barns, offices, and
shops. Then he reported the voices, aphorisms, sayings,
hopes, and cynicisms of the multitudes. In line after line
of his poem fluttered inanities, without evident meaning,
or at least with no more meaning than was put into the
rattle, clatter, and clack of kitchen, barn, and parlor chat-
tering, whether at noon or at midnight. But through the
texture of the poems gleamed flashes of great and homely
wisdom axioms enduring, wrought of strong life, casual
comment revealing unbeatable men and women, penetrating
observations far beyond the notice of "big shots" at mahog-
any desks or lecterns or microphones. Corrosive sublimate
dripped, page after page, upon formalities, conventionalities,
"stuffed shirt fronts/* the high proprieties of the high.
Below figures set down in the ledgers and the words in his
book, no balance was struck by Sandburg; perhaps, none
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 681
could be struck just then, by any poet, had he wished to do
so. Yet some things were writ very large :
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Machines, land, buildings are property, yes.
A job is property,
no, nix, nah, nah.
At the moment one clear command rang out :
First class passengers, keep your seats.
Second class passengers, get out and walk.
Third class passengers, get out and shove.
Even so, the people were reaching out " for lights beyond the
prison of the five senses, for keepsakes lasting beyond any
hunger or death."
The people know the salt of the sea
and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth*
The people take the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
Who else speaks for the Family of Man ?
In darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for
keeps, the people march :
Where to ? What next ?
By any test this was more philosophic than the report of the
learned men who fabricated a history of Everyman in three
words :
Born,
troubled,
died.
Travelers with imaginations, not in Altruria an imagi-
nary land but in America as it was, encircled the country,
penetrated the crowded streets of cities and the byways of
rural regions, and made elaborate reports on what they saw
and heard in the language of ordinary discourse. John Spivak
682 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
looked for people ready to mount the barricades and dis-
covered people merely eager for jobs or bread. Out of im-
pressions gathered on prolonged journeys, out of interviews
with "folks'* of all sorts and conditions, and out of corre-
spondence, serious, gay, and distempered, Louis Adamic
assembled in 1938 a mountainous mass of materials in a
rambling fashion, though with some method in madness,
and crowned it with the title, My America a document
of prime importance for watchers of underlying surges and
tendencies, especially in the North. In an Odyssey all his
own, Jonathan Daniels took in the South as far west as the
Mississippi, with little excursions beyond, talked with the
very best people and the very worst people, discussed matters
economical, political, and sociological with writers, philos-
ophers, planters, tenant union leaders, lawyers, and seem-
ingly everybody else. At the end of his wanderings, he
summed up his discoveries, snapshots, and verdicts in a
single volume, A Southerner Discovers the South, causing
his readers to wonder in just what realm lay the "solid
South" so celebrated in the legends of politics. Compared
with a Don Quixote on an odyssey was Bradford Smith's
American Quest published in 1938 an attempt in a trans-
continental journey to find the American soul.
Framed in the democratic tradition and flavored with dis-
sidence were numerous biographies recounting the personal
experiences of individuals. Distinguished by great labor and
supported by scholarly paraphernalia, they differed from the
stout volumes produced by family gardeners and from the
works of professional historians deemed "scientific" by mem-
bers of that gild. Although Henry Pringle's life of Theodore
Roosevelt passed the standard tests of the historical profes-
sion, it presented no wooden image of righteousness, entire
and intact. Harvey O'Connor's tale of Andrew D. Mellon
and his millions, based on documentation and laden with cita-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 683
tions > worked much havoc with the memorials of that titan in
finance and politics from Pittsburgh, called by a friend "the
greatest Secretary of the Treasury since Hamilton." Criti-
cized as "unfair/' nevertheless O'Connor's biography told
truth so irrefragable that even Lords of Creation had to give
heed much as they might despise it.
In a similar manner O'Connor dealt with The Guggen-
heims : the Making of an American Dynasty, monarchs of
copper who climbed from peddling to great riches, to the
patronage of learning and art, sheathing as with a cloth of
gold the smudges of the conflicts that had raged around
mine and smelter. It was also upon prodigious research in
newspapers, letters, and other documents that Ferdinand
Lundberg built his volume on the Imperial Hearst, master
of a vast journalistic and industrial corpus, crumbling at the
borders and rotting at the center ; and his broader treatise on
the dynasts, Sixty Families with their riches, their philan-
thropies, their newspapers and magazines, their universities*
and their politics. Giant figures from the muck-raking age
ascended from the grave in The Autobiography of Lincoln
Steffens.
Turning upon actors in the American scene a mind trained
in the subtleties of French letters and hitherto devoted to
such great European characters as Rousseau and Zola>
Matthew Josephson drew full length portraits in The Robber
Barons of the gilded age. Here were knights of the bags,
not of the crags, the great American capitalists of 18611901,
revived in 1934. Josephson later enlarged his gallery by a
volume on their political retainers, The Politicos, who served
as negotiators between business and government during the
years when the lyrical "Give us what we want and let us
alone" rang to the sky in the morning of youth. Although
heavily documented and written in historical form, these
books brightened the pages of current congressional investi-
gations by resurrecting rugged personalities whose works
had spanned the continent and erected an economic tradi-
tion. This division of literature Oscar Lewis entered in 1938
684 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
with the story of The Big Four Collis P. Huntington,
Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins,, and Charles Crocker, all
lusty figures among the barons of old America.
Although the makers of polite letters were not likely to
admit it and critics were often inclined to overlook it, there
was meaning for the matters they discussed in the literature
of humor. That too was germane to the interpenetration of
opposites pointed out by Bernard DeVoto in his appraisal of
proletarian fiction. Moreover in both form and flavor it was
distinctly American. In Europe, humor was often mordant
and, like politics, bore the stamp of antagonisms almost
irreducible. This had long been so in the scarifying wrath
of Dean Swift, the sardonic blasts of Maximilian Harden,
and the appalling lines of Daumier. In America, however,
humor had generally been homely, earthly, gushing, rela-
tively tolerant "childish and silly," falling short of wit,
said critics given to comparisons.
Humor had rippled into every domain of culture, economy,
and politics, as a softening and moderating influence. Many
a time in the worst days of the civil war, for example, when
men before him, all nominally on his side, were quaking
with anger and on the edge of using their fists, Abraham
Lincoln had relieved their tension merely by "telling a
story." His "yarns" were often artless enough, as simple
as fables from Aesop, and possibly irritating to men who
were "hell-bent" on having things just their way, but the
interlude provided an armistice, eased off passions, and made
listeners forget their petty differences, like children diverted
by a wise and patient mother. "Why so hot, little man?"
The question was frequently an antidote useful to both sides
of innumerable conflicts an antidote conducive to rational
adjustment.
The question, for instance, controlled the humor of Clar-
ence Day. From his original Crow's Nest, a watch-tower
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 685
of his own creation, Day surveyed a wide landscape, occupied
by human beings given to curious antics resembling those
of the animal kingdom. In After All he described a world
"peopled with egocentric men, gracious women, and his
favorite barnyard and jungle animals which he used in fables
outlining the small absurdities of the human species/' With
a whimsical air of detachment, he viewed little mortals,
strutting about cocksure, imagining themselves most sophis-
ticated when they were most naive. His laughter even
played around the solemnity of that major psychological
and sociological obsession family relations in sketches
of his father and mother, showing the trivial bickerings as
well as the permanent formalities of life in a circle distinctly
middle class in manners and values.
While Clarence Day joked at simian ways among humans,
Don Marquis made a very good philosopher out of a cock-
roach. The conduct of Milt Gross's Feitelbaum family,
unlike the Marxian conception of "bourgeois family rela-
tions," was as funny as any of the antics in Clarence Day's
domestic circle. Seeing the absurd, amazing, and ludicrous
at every point, acres of diamonds glistening, Ring Lardner,
Robert Benchley, and James Thurber embroidered letters
with sparkles of their own witticisms, during the sternness of
Calvin Coolidge's administration, the gloom of the Hoover
depression, and the fitful variations of the New Deal.
It was with poetic justice, when Ogden Nash, Milt Gross,
Robert Benchley, and Wolcott Gibbs were making merry
with the human race, that Negroes began to laugh at them-
selves and the " superior" whites. They were winning head-
way against heavy odds in politics and economics and
through powerful figures, such as Langston Hughes and
Walter White, were demonstrating their capacity for sur-
vival in the welter of defeat and hope called civilization.
Able to see the ridiculous and grotesque within the tragic,
Jessie Fauset, in her Comedy American Style, described
the wreck and ruin of lives produced by a colored woman,
nearly white, who devoted herself with a tigress's energy to
686 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
the mission of carrying her family over the line into the
white camp. Incidentally Miss Fauset drew jewelled pic-
tures of life among middle-class Negroes and, with humor
aforethought, foibles and follies among the whites, including
the most futile among them, with whom "aspiring" Negroes
so passionately desired to associate themselves. Perhaps in
a strict sense Miss Fauset's book belonged neither to comedy
nor tragedy but to that mysterious realm where amusement
and sorrow melt into a supreme unity. In any case its
readers who wept over the absurdities of Negroes must have
laughed over the antics of Nordics deemed so worthy of
imitation.
However excellent the "best" and "favorite" books,
however meritorious the volumes written in the democratic
tradition or in the spirit of regional or personal exploration,
they did not entrance all workers in the field of imaginative
letters, nor indeed the entire appraising and reading public.
In the midpassage came something like a definite break in
the flow of the literary tradition. This new dissidence was
not directly concerned with vulgarians of the plutocracy,
with monopolists and corruptionists who figured in the
muck-raking school of Lincoln Steffens' age. No disciple of
Edith Wharton dealt so remorselessly with the clashing
habits and customs of the "seasoned" and the "new-rich"
classes, both suffering from resentments. That old type
of writing by masters no longer commanded the spirit of
genius. The new rejection was not that of prudent and
cultured merchants crushed by the weight and behavior
of upstart plutocrats. Nor was the protest exactly that
formulated by William Dean Ho wells and Edward Bellamy.
On the contrary, it was largely an outcry in the name of the
disinherited, sometimes called by the outlandish name of
"the proletariat." It looked in the direction of the working
class, sought to voice its tragedies, and in animus, if not
positive upshot, to impress upon readers the message that
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 687
something drastic should or will be done to redeem the dis-
inherited, by the will of the disinherited if in no other way.
Grinding poverty,, it is true, had never been absent from
the American land despite its fabulous resources and growing
democracy. From early times slaves, indentured servants,
casual laborers, and farm hands had lived near or at the
minimum of subsistence. Apart, however, from the slaves
who were mere chattels bought and sold as such, the propor-
tion of the propertyless had once been small in America as
compared with that in Europe and Asia. Moreover the
dream of endless opportunity to acquire comfort and security
had served in America as a check on the drift of spirit toward
the beggary or turbulence of urban "mobs," so familiar to
the eighteenth century that they filled the mind of Ameri-
cans, such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin,
with horror. Yet the dream of comfort and security in the
historic style was now growing paler. No optimism could
be so innocent as to obscure the fact of a contracting econ-
omy, unemployed millions, and expanding degradation.
Even if there had been no connection with European life
and its events, even if Americans had been isolated like the
denizens of the lost Atlantis, some sense of this reality would
no doubt have been awakened in America and it would have
expressed itself in some literary fashion, unless all vitality
had departed from the people.
Of course America was not completely isolated and,
whether so intended or not, many of the volumes that came
from the presses had in fact a "foreign flavor*" Often the
authors of such works were more concerned with the thought
and tactics of Marx and Lenin than with the thought and
tactics of Tom Paine and Walt Whitman. Yet, despite the
fragments or the whole frame of Marxism which gleamed
through much of the new literature, the sources of artistic
creation in American letters of the distinctly labor tendency
lay by no means wholly within that rigid and alien scheme
of ideology. Most, if not all, the writers of this direction
were American born and reared, more or less familiar with
688 AMERICA IN MWPASSAGE
the great literary tradition of the United States, It was not
known, perhaps the writers themselves did not know or
care, whether their themes, their plots, the involutions of
their sentences, or the denouements were true to the poli-
tical line drawn by Moscow. The mere fact that a literary
design was hailed or abused as proletarian or Marxian meant
little and settled nothing, save for appraisers who were in-
sensitive to signs of universality within national particu-
larities. All that could safely be said, then, about the under-
lying animus of "proletarian literature" was that it pictured
the life of the underprivileged of America, caught the irony
of the discrepancy between noble theory and poor practice,
and let the rays of hope play through the mists, openly or by
implication. So conceived, this literature, whether imbued
with a foreign flavor or not, was at home in the United
States, and as much as Cooper's tales, influenced by Scott's,
it could be called indigenous.
However widely they differed over form, style, and upshot,
radical writers agreed on certain things. First of all, they
believed that life in America, as elsewhere, was pinioned to
the nature and fate of the politico-economic system and its
conflicts in other words, to great history as distinguished
from family squabbles and village commonplaces. They
were conscious of the plight of labor in town and country,
of its miseries, struggles, and oppressive fortunes. For
ethical or esthetic reasons, or both, they could not or did
not close their minds and hearts to this situation. Whether
they saw redemption for the disinherited in Marxism or
American agrarianisrn or no salvation at all, they undertook
to describe, photograph, and give voice to industrial workers,
miners, tenants, share croppers, field hands, and the drifting
nomads of the dustbowl and seasonal agriculture. An Ameri-
can literary tradition was thus revitalized with social insight
and criticism.
The plutocracy might still treasure its town houses, coun-
try places, and yachts, the middle class might still cherish
its peculiar securities of property and income, precarious as
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 689
everything seemed in the economic panic, but dissident
writers insisted on thrusting into general thought the specific
thought of other values. As Huey Long raged about poverty
and under-privilege in the Senate until he was shot down,
as the La Follette committee calmly investigating violations
of civil liberties received publicity on the first pages of the
newspapers for its findings about labor spies., poison gas,
factory gunmen, and police beating or killing strikers all
in the service of "the best people/' as a presidential com-
mittee on farm tenancy traced the steady degradation of
labor on the land, innumerable men and women writers
resolved that some readers of literature must hear about
people who never figured in society columns or adventure-
some romance, people who merely toiled and plodded, suf-
fered in silence, protested, questioned, struck back, or
aroused the interest of politicians in Washington. Many
economists knew that in the long run the permanence of the
banquet table itself depended upon transactions outside,
and creative artists in letters also had an inkling of this
truism.
The result was that not a year passed without the appear-
ance in the book marts of one or more novels which concen-
trated on life and labor in field or factory, in shack or tene-
ment, in regular employment or out of luck. Jews without
money, on the East Side of New York City, almost in a ghetto,
rose to public view in the pages of Michael Gold. Up from
the deep South came the wretched figures of Erskine Cald-
welFs Tobacco Road. Out of the Far West Robert Cantwell
brought the desperate war between laborers and middle-class
vigilantes at Centralia in The Land of Plenty. Southern
workers were seen migrating from the mountains into the
mill towns, in Fielding Burke's (Olive Dargan's) Call Home
the Heart and A Stone Came Rolling and in Grace Lump-
kin's To Make My Bread, only to be caught in the trammels
of exploitation and the necessity of taking up the weapon
690 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
of the strike in efforts to secure a livelihood. Straight com-
munism was prescribed for white and black share croppers
in Grace Lumpkin's A Sign for Cain. From the moving
belts and human clashes of the automobile industry in
Detroit, James Steele, in a story of The Conveyor, carried
an American citizen, surprised to discover that he was just a
laborer, to the minds of readers who bought fiction. One
must go back to Dickens, a reader declared, to get such vivid
reports on labor conditions as Albert Halper delivered in
The Foundry; but Halper's Union Square gave vent to
laborers' emotions, in a fashion unknown in the Dickens'
era, as agitators shouted their solutions to a motley crowd
of workers, peddlers, artists, and mere strollers of the streets.
The irony of Normalcy and the New Deal alike, Catharine
Brody portrayed under the heading, Nobody Starves.
Who, among the many writers of the dissident school
the school of a great continuing and reworking literary
tradition most artistically blended distinction of style
with precision of material and propriety of philosophy ? This
was a subject of argument among the partisans and critics
who regarded themselves as " disinterested " reviewers.
Proletarian writers, so-called, might praise one another or
abuse one another, according to their notions of artistry
and the correct political line; in that case, they erected
standards for their own dissent. But when the great metro-
politan reviews, such as The Saturday Review of Literature,
Books of the Herald-Tribune, and The Book Review of The
New York Times, granted large spreads of space and con-
siderable cordiality of treatment to members of the newest
school of revolt, this was proof of a stronger kind that some
of the protestants represented a force of theme and a manner
of manipulation meaningful in and for America. Granting
that the judgments of the journals of opinion were not infalli-
ble, nevertheless they were evidences that Americans were
facing the bright glare of social documents without wearing
heavily smoked glasses.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 691
Symptomatic of the newest upheaval was John Chamber-
lain's Farewell to Reform, published in 1932, while President
Hoover was twisting and fretting in the White House. The
title was oracular and the subtitle was definitive : " Being a
history of the rise, life, and decay of the progressive mind in
America." With an inclusory glance, Chamberlain surveyed
the teeming years that followed "the nineties" of the pre-
ceding century their vast economic changes, the protests
of the old dissenters, trustbusters, and muckrakers, the
fiction of this protest, the lower-middle-class character of
"progressive" nonconformity, and the failure of the "lib-
eral" technique. Then, with an air of finality, he buried
all that. It had not been without insight and merit, the
young critic confessed, but its plaints and its efforts to dis-
solve the battlements of plutocracy had been in vain : the
census returns of modern corporations showed the inanity
of its hopes and the ineptitude of its methods.
After the funeral speech, what of the future ? Chamber-
lain faced that question and made replies. Russia "with no
six per cents to pay investors" will put a clamp on capitalist
expansion. The uncovering of new markets in distant places
or in new gadgets offers no promise. Fascism ? Yes, it may
intervene, but not forever, "for Fascism implies the develop-
ment of the labor-syndicate idea; and it would be only a
question of opportunity before the syndicates attempted
their own march to power/* What of labor on the land, a
continent washing out to sea, the physical base of civiliza-
tion disintegrating beneath the "labor-syndicates"? Into
that final question even the daring Chamberlain did not go.
Perhaps, in drawing the curtain of oblivion over progressiv-
ism and its works he had done enough for one young man.
At all events, he had correctly described the intellectual
cleavage that separated "the great tradition" of letters
from the thought of the current years.
In illustrating the rupture between the old and the new,
John Chamberlain contrasted John Dos Passos with Frank
Norris and the juxtaposition was effective, Dos Passos was
692 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
born in 1896, the exciting year of populism, Bryan, and the
crown-of-thorns speech; moreover, he was born in Chicago
where the "revolutionary" Democrats assembled to chal-
lenge Mark Hanna and gold. Graduated from Harvard
while the world war was raging, he served in an ambulance
corps under the Red Cross in 1917-1919, spent seasons of
searching and appraising in Washington, London, Paris, and
Madrid, and was apparently fascinated by the mighty up-
heaval in Russia. In the buzzing years of normalcy he began
publishing and kept on writing in the rosy prospects of the
golden glow. His play, The Garbage Man, issued while
President Coolidge occupied the throne of contentment,
was symptomatic of unrest beneath the seats of the mighty.
Beginning in 1930, while the Lords of Creation were caught
in their own melee, Dos Passos published three studies of the
American scene, the like of which had never before appeared
in American print : The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen,
and The Big Money, all combined, revamped, and pub-
lished in 1937 under the title U. S. A, Like a Kansas cyclone
that gathers up men, women, children, houses, barns, shops,
factories, machines, dry goods, and chickens in a swirl of
dust and wind, Dos Passos tore through the years from the
close of the nineteenth century and across the continent,
scooping into his omnibus events, personalities, scenes,
conversations, maladies, stews, aspirations, and follies.
Whatever verdict sciolists or philologists might render on
this feat, it proclaimed an underlying, persistent, and irre-
sistible rejection of complacency a dynamic, typhonic,
devastating rejection. Such satire might perish from the
earth. It might not. Juvenal survived even the Empire.
To whatever category of ideology Dos Passos' U. S. A.
belonged, it was certainly not fiction to be enfolded by the
adjective "genteel." Here was no soft story opening with a
stately mansion in a setting of graceful elms or fragrant
magnolia blossoms and finishing at the bridal chamber. Its
fibre was hard and its range was as wide as the total economy
of American society. Starting with the Spanish-American
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 693
War, it raced on through the fruition of imperialist expan-
sion. The reader was introduced at the outset to the symbol
of foreign adventure General Miles, dressed in a gaudy
uniform, mounted on a spirited charger to head the great
military parade in the national capital, at the verge of the
closing nineteenth century, during the administration of
President McKinley. General Miles was not long erect,
however, for the spirited horse threw the rider in the dust
of the capital, suggesting an anagoge. Leaving the President
and his successors to rustle papers in their office, the narra-
tive then crashed through time to the point where the utility
magnate, Samuel Insull, incarnation of great capitalism,
at his trial in Chicago for defrauding investors, confessed
that he had made a petty error of ten millions in his account-
ing, was pronounced "not guilty" by a jury of his peers,
and went into retirement on a pension, smiling through his
tears.
In the involutions and evolutions of U. S. A., the tale of
the promised land of youth led on, under the caption of
"Mary French," to a group of workers wrestling with they
scarcely knew what; on to stranded young people hitch-
hiking across the continent, uprooted, while Pullman air-
planes roared through the skies above them. In bas relief
stood out a typical lad who had been indoctrinated at school
with the patriotic ideas of U. S. A. as a fairy realm of oppor-
tunity, home-owning, survival of the fittest, and the speed
indicative of prowess and courage. He had listened to radio
crooners, in the excellent age of the machine, whispering
of girls, girls, girls, and he had seen platinum blonds coaxing
boys from the screens in motion-picture houses. He had
read about millions of dollars chalked up on boards at the
Exchange and of big executives with three telephones on their
desks, always ringing amid the roar of business enterprise.
Misfortune had overtaken the lad, however, not fortune,
and, in the closing scene of U. S. A., he is the Vagabond wait-
ing beside the speeding traffic, hungry and footsore, hoping
only to thumb his way "a hundred miles down the road."
694 AMERICA IN M1DPASSAGE
In the interstices of U. S. A. were newsreels, camera shots,
fragments from headlines, blinding word pictures of daily
scenes, and stories of life, common and uncommon. The
eternal man-woman problem gleamed and sputtered through
the pages in all the different settings for its never-to-be-
attained solution, though not alone always with its place
in the economic scale. In impetuous yet not altogether
disorderly array, were crowded politicians, editors, finan-
ciers, gamblers, stocks, bonds, "furreners," detective agen-
cies, livery stables, Manila Bay, automobiles, "the Roosevelt
boys," cold wind blowing, Andrew Carnegie extolling the
advantages of the higher learning, locomotive firemen, large
men fond of whiskey, Eugene Debs in Woodrow Wilson's
jail, an infidel believing in Darwin and natural selection,
the world war with all its blah, blah, boom, boom, muni-
tioneers cutting melons, Dr. Wilson a man of standing who
talked correct English, morgues, reek of lime and death,
Y. M. C. A., Mr. Harding praying to God, United States
Steel, martial law, strikes, mine explosion, Lindbergh the
aviator, Russia, Trotsky, Stalin, Hearst in a black frock
coat and a ten-gallon hat, big smash in stocks, down, down,
down, prosperity near, "real values unharmed," Roosevelt
administration, companies, corporations, J. Pierpont Mor-
gan, and Owen D. Young. On and on passed the pageant
to its end youth thumbing its way down the road
somewhere, nowhere.
If to possessors of the orthodox frame of social reference
profits, progress, and prosperity the brain storm seemed
sheer madness or awful effrontery, it had justification in the
historical record, with a multitude of things unmentioned.
This version of the U. S. A. might not be wholly true and
permanent. But what was wholly true and permanent?
Who in high places, with the most efficient research secre-
taries at hand, could answer that question ?
Whether to be praised or condemned, Dos Passos' appar-
ently impressionistic, yet closely-knit portrayal of years and
scenes had lofty sanction. Long before it was published,
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 695
Herbert Hoover had given some warrant to every passage.
Speaking before the Federated Engineering Societies in 1920,
Mr. Hoover had said :
"Our economic system [despite its accomplishments] . . .
presents a series of human and social difficulties to the solu-
tion of which we are groping."
(Dos Passos illustrated them.)
"The congestion of population is producing subnormal
conditions of life."
(Dos Passos documented them.)
"The vast repetitive operations are dulling the human
mind."
(Dos Passos described results.)
"The intermittency of employment due to the bad co-
ordination of industry, the great waves of unemployment
in the ebb and flow of economic tides, the ever present indus-
trial conflicts by strike and lockout, produce infinite wastes
and great suffering."
(Dos Passos lifted the lid of the seething cauldron covered
by this politico-economic generalization.)
"Our business enterprises have become so large and com-
plex that the old pleasant relationship between employer
and worker has, to a great extent, disappeared."
(Dos Passos made pointed references to the new, unpleas-
ant relationships.)
"The aggregation of great wealth with its power to eco-
nomic domination presents social and economic ills which
we are constantly struggling to remedy."
(Dos Passos incorporated these ills in battered and torn
personalities.)
Also in the forms of poetry the scheme of things entire was
drawn into the reckonings of the midpassage. Swinging
around a wide circle of urbanism and ruralism, Archibald
MacLeish sought to wrest from the totality its guarded
meaning. Son of Yale University, graduate of the Harvard
696 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Law School, destined by birth and education for the circle
of genteel comfort, MacLeish had been plunged into the
world war and thrown back from that chaos shocked and
pensive. Presumably he might have joined Richard Whitney
at the Stock Exchange, but he turned to letters instead.
Tentatively, it seems, he groped his way through unfolding
experience, recording his adventures in verse and play,
growing steadily in strength and precision. New Found
Land was published in 1930; Conquistador, which won the
Pulitzer poetry prize, in 1932 ; and Frescoes for Mr. Rocke-
feller's City, depicting crassness and beauty, in 1933.
Then in 1937, MacLeish's saga, The Fall of the City a
tale of the dictator's coming and of masses prostrating them-
selves in the presence of the false, if fair, god was recited
to the public over the radio. This theme was " the pitiful,
blind, foredefeated, subhuman, yet all-too-human, bowing
of a people before an invading Conqueror, whose actual
hollowness is disguised by heavy clanking armor." As the
Conqueror lifted his visor a Voice cried :
The Helmet is hollow !
The metal is empty ! The armor is empty ! I tell you
There's no one at all there ; there's only the metal ;
The barrel of metal : the bundle of armor. It's empty !
The push of a stiff pole at the nipple would topple it.
They don't see ! They lie on the paving. They lie in the
Burnt spears : the ashes of arrows. They lie there. . , .
They don't see or they won't see. They are silent. . . .
That was a startling literary event : the actor at the micro-
phone, speaking unprinted lines, emphasizing, giving color
and compulsion to words and sentences, an unseen audience
at night listening, following, awaiting the climax, trans-
ported by the author's moving narrative and the spell of the
intonations. And perhaps strangest of all was the fact that
MacLeish was an associate editor of Fortune, the new maga-
zine sold at a price which only the rich could pay.
The following year, 1938, MacLeish chose still another
medium : a combination of photographic pictures and verse,
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 697
entitled Land of the Free. From the pictures stared, in livid
shapes, personalities and situations recorded in the statistics
of labor and tenancy : a coal miner's daughter on an old iron
cot, wandering fruit pickers, share croppers, the Republic
Steel riot, police wielding clubs against unarmed workers,
men and women falling in heaps, trade union organizers
beaten over the head by agents of law and order, farmers
evicted from homes by dust storms, hovels called homes
collapsing into tatters, hard-favored heirs and heiresses of
ignorance, misfortune, and neglect, children bending their
backs over gruelling toil, thin-lipped, squint-eyed, or pop-
eyed men and women stranded in the march of progress to
success.
Margaret Bourke- White, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Roth-
stein, Russell Lee, and others supplied the photographs of
life in the land of the free. MacLeish furnished the words
simple, questioning words ; inadequate only because human
inventiveness had never found a language capable of express-
ing such human feeling, human sorrow, human wonder.
Although literary experts inquired whether the poet had
really captured the mood of dying hopes, bloody tragedy,
confusion, and pulsing fear, there could be no doubt that he
had conveyed the contrasts between the ''ill-housed, ill-clad,
ill-nourished "of President Roosevelt's second inaugural and
the American dream of freedom, abundance, and victory.
Wondering fathers, mothers, and children found voice in
the poet's voice :
Maybe the proposition is self-evident.
Maybe we were endowed by our creator
With certain inalienable rights, including
The right to assemble in peace and petition.
Maybe.
But try it in South Chicago Memorial Day
With the mick police on the prairie in front of the factory
Gunning you down from behind and for what ?
For liberty ?
698 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
Between photographs of strikers and police at the Republic
Steel Company's plant in South Chicago and of a prostrate
laborer vainly trying to protect his skull from a rain of blows,
MacLeish questioned the promise of nature and nature's
God incorporated in the Declaration of Independence :
Maybe God Almighty wrote it out ;
We could shoot off our mouths where we pleased
and with what and no Thank-yous.
But try it at River Rouge with the Ford militia.
Try it if Mister Ford's opinions are otherwise.
Try it and see where you land with your back broken.
What answer had the poet for the question that came
hurtling through the pictures of people, land, and factories ?
No smooth and certain spring into freedom. Perhaps the
disinherited had some resolution for the dilemma ? Probably
not. Neither did the poet, who may have double-distilled
the quintessence of the hour and occasion better than statis-
ticians and dialectitians :
We wonder if the liberty is done :
The dreaming is finished
We can't say
We aren't sure. . . .
Or if there's something different men can dream . . .
Or if there's something different men can mean by Liberty,
We wonder . . .
We don't know
We're asking. . . .
While MacLeish left his characters wondering and asking,
Paul Engle supplied a definite answer to the big question.
In one of his earlier poems, The Troubadour of Eze, Engle
had avowed implicit faith in the American way :
Here to my town has the world's
great power come over
The torn, dream-furrowed ocean,
and now waits
A stronger form that the New
World alone
Can give to its old and proud
nobility.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 699
But in 19363 in Break the Heart's Anger, Paul Engle cast
off the spell and avowed himself a disciple of Lenin. Having
scrutinized America, England, Germany, and Russia, he
could find no praise for democracy; nor for fascism. The
riddle of the universe, in his opinion, had been solved by
Lenin, if not by Russia.
Often the titles of poems themselves betrayed the under-
lying points of reference: as for instance Maxwell Boden-
heim's To a Revolutionary Girl; Kenneth Fearing's No
Credit ; Robert Gessner's Cross of Flame ; Langston Hughes'
Ballad of Lenin and Sharecroppers ; Joseph Kalar's Worker
Uprooted; Alfred Kreymborg's American Jeremiad; Nor-
man MacLeod's Coal Strike; Harry Alan Potamkin's
Haymarket; and Muriel Rukeyser's City of Monuments.
Coming from a Utah Canyon to the great city of New York,
its ways throbbing, its thought shaken by disturbing events,
its people in tumult, Phyllis M'Ginley burst into a Carol
with Variations :
Sing hosanna, sing Noel.
Sing the gunner and the shell.
Sing the candle, sing the lamp,
Sing the Concentration Camp.
Sing the season born anew,
Sing of exile for the Jew,
Wreathe the world with evergreen.
Praise the cunning submarine.
Sing the barbed and bitter wire,
Poison gas and liquid fire,
Bullet, bomb and hand grenade,
And the heart of man, afraid.
Christ is come, the Light hath risen,
All our foes are safe in prison,
And the Christmastide begets
Seven million bayonets.
Positive as to the frame of social reference were the novels
of James T. Farrell : Studs Lonigan, Gas-House McGinty,
700 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
and A World I Never Made. Any controversy about that
he himself dismissed in A Note on Literary Criticism, charac-
terized by Edmund Wilson as "One of the few intelligent
discussions of literature from the Marxist point of view which
have yet been written by Americans/' In A World I Never
Made, published in 1936, Farrell centered his story in
Chicago during the year 1911, and gave another picture of a
working class family of Irish origins, struggling in the jungle
of economic scarcity and uncertainty.
The hero of the occasion, if a defeated driver of an express
wagon could be called such, was Jim O'Neill, who knew a
little Shakespeare, married a gay lass, and in her company
slid down hill into endless toil, poverty, and wrangling,
relieved by rare bits of good luck. Their home ? Peeling wall
paper, drab red bricks, noise of trains, smell, smoke, and dust.
The bedroom ? "The worst in the whole place. Jim glanced
around, junk all over, the dresser in the corner piled with
it, rags, clothes, junk, and the table on the left with a slab
of grocery box in place of one leg; it, too, was piled and
littered with every damn thing in the house." Here lay Lizz,
his wife, "smiling weakly at him, her face round, full, un-
washed, her mouth weak, her eyes dark, a soiled rag under her
chin, her hair uncombed'* bringing another child into the
world that already had too many. In the weary round and
round of toiling and moiling came one stroke of dubious
fortune a thousand dollars in cash as damages for an
injury to their little boy, run over by a wagon !
Woven into the life of a single family were the lives of
relatives some begirt by the bands of wage-earning, others
mounting to the rim of the middle class salesmen, hack
lawyers, politicians of large hopes and small accomplish-
ments. Threading his way through the scene was a little
lumber man with the psychology of a Napoleon in business,
"Well, Peg,'* boasted Lorry Robinson, " things will pick up.
The possibilities in this country are endless. America is going
to be the richest nation in all history. Why, we've got every-
thing here. Peg, you should see some of my lumber lands.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 701
Resources ? They are beyond calculation. We are coming
into an age that is bound to be the wealthiest the human race
has ever known. Times are a little tight now. I know most
of my money is tied up, and I've had to put up every cent I
could raise as collateral for loans I needed to swing some of
my deals out west. But that's only temporary. . . . The
business system is catching its wind again now. Don't
you worry." In time, said this little king of big business in
dreams, he would divorce his wife and marry Peg a wastrel
and bounder, on her way in the great rich America, now
burdened with casualties but certain to be the wealthiest
country the human race had ever known. In its fashion,
that too was an American dream, not true at the moment all
around, but prized and nourished.
Seeping into the minds of little men dreaming of great
riches through salesmanship was the animus which Farrell
treated as "spiritual success." Is there sales resistance on the
ground that times are hard and business is poor? "The
power of wishing and concentration is a mighty force that no
man can beat. Jesus said that faith can move mountains*
And it can ! Al, if you wish for something and concentrate
on it wholly and completely with strong faith in your wish,
there is nothing on God's earth that can stop you ! Abso-
lutely nothing ! The power of the wish is the mightiest of
powers. It is the true kernel of wisdom in the teaching of
Jesus. That's what he meant by faith."
It was all well and good to believe in God, the Holy Trinity,
and the hereafter, but the business man's paradise was to
come on earth. The concentrated wish would bring it. No
doubt about it. Only the week before, the wishing shoe sales-
man had sold a big order " to old Guggins of the High Class
Shoe Emporium" in Kokomo. "Before I called on him I
sent out a thought-wish that would go through the cosmos
and connect up with his psyche." When the salesman entered
Guggins* store on his errand of wish-fulfillment, he greeted
the crusty codger : "And, say, you're looking fine, young and
peppy, just like a college boy." Result ? "Well, Al, to make
702 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
a long story short, he bought three cases of shoes off me.
And you know, he still doesn't know how he was sold."
Faith, confidence, wish-concentration, they would move
mountains, break down sales resistance, master the panic,
and make everybody rich, except possibly salesmen who
did not have the right line of talk and ought to be digging
ditches.
In and out through Farrell's narrative, too, ran threads
of politics, the real politics of corralling voters with favors,
electing the right boys, playing the game with men of money,
holding the jobs, democratic and Democratic politics. "Any
workingman who votes for the Republicans," exclaimed the
express-wagon driver, "is a damn fool!" It was the right
thing to hold a trade union card, strike, wreck wagons, "and
punch the living Jesus out of every damn scab who tries to
drive one." A mild Socialist of the Debs school protested
that "sabotage and violence will never get you anywhere.
The bosses like that. They can put the cops on you then, and
the newspapers say you're anarchists." That may be "but
you Socialists will never get anywhere. . . . You Socialists
are lunatics."
Times were hard for Jim O'Neill, but "I'll make my kids
something better." Jim was not going to crack his brains
about socialism. He would depend upon his own fists and do
his own fighting against scabs who tried to cut wages and
take his job. There was, however, a small hope in politics :
"Maybe if we get the Democrats in Washington next year
they'll give the people some things." Well, Farrell might
have added, Woodrow Wilson was elected and he gave labor
Samuel Gompers' "magna charta" and the eight hour day
for trainmen and a little later war and the sedition act.
Debs got somewhere that is, in the Atlanta penitentiary,
where he stayed until President Harding and Attorney Gen-
eral Daugherty let him out. But Farrell was writing of 1911
and at that time Al thought that by 1931 "everybody in
America who's worth his salt ought to be rich." In massing
his materials Farrell relied on force, not grace but, as Ralph
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 703
Thompson said in reviewing for The New York Times his No
Star Is Lost, "merely graceful writers come by the dozen."
While Dos Passos and Farrell centered their thought
mainly upon the realm of urban industry, Erskine Caldweil
crashed into the world of letters with descriptions of labor
on the land. Before President Roosevelt's committee on
farm tenancy had made its statistical report, Caldweil had
made reports in human terms : Tobacco Road and God's
Little Acre. Life might be hard for industrial workers near
the bottom of the industrial jungle in Chicago, but it was
degrading even to idiocy at the bottom of the tenant and
share-cropping region. Beside the hunger and futility of
Caldwell's Jeeter family, the junk and wastage of FarrelPs
O'Neill family took on the colors of paradise. In driving
sentences, telegraphic in brevity, Caldweil described men,
women, children, houses, fields, misery, deformity, imbecility,
dirt, and turnips in that never, never land where even animal
life could scarcely struggle for existence against adversity,
starved soil, incapacity, and misfortune. Delicate sensi-
bilities were not spared. No red roses were added for decora-
tion. The strongest of stomachs could hardly bear the sight.
The meanest of realists could not believe their eyes. It was
a nauseous dose that Caldweil served his readers. But he
would be heard and he was heard. Where readers failed,
theatergoers saw, for Tobacco Road, in its dramatized form,
was enacted steadily in New York City for years, while the
New Deal of beneficent planning rose, flourished, and de-
clined. How was that to be explained in a land that placed
Willa Gather's Death Comes to the Archbishop near the top
of the best books ?
Widening his arc beyond Tobacco Road, Caldweil united
barren farm land with a mill in God's Little Acre a novel
which Jonathan Daniels pronounced "one of the finest
studies of the Southern poor white that has ever come into
704 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
our literature " and certain to "lift the noses of the sensitive."
On Tobacco Road, where hope and aspiration had been
quenched, just hungers remained; but in God's little acre,
joining mill and farm, human life, while still sordid, mani-
fested vigor, a restless searching for better ways, a few aims,
humor, touches of heroism, the sanguine expectancy of labor
reaching out for something. An old man digging for gold and
a direct-action radical simply would not be crushed, though
they got nowhere in the going.
While noble males of the species tossed around in futility,
the females, in the stress and strain, sought a way to security
and happiness in the labor of their hands. "The men who
worked in the mill looked tired and worn, but the girls were
in love with the looms and the spindles and the flying lint.
The wild-eyed girls on the inside of the ivy-walled mill looked
like potted plants in bloom. Up and down the Valley lay the
company towns and the ivy-walled cotton mills and the firm-
bodied girls with eyes like morning glories, and the men stood
on the hot streets looking at each other while they spat their
lungs into the deep yellow dust of Carolina." For the older
women life was hard enough, cruel enough, but the girls ever
anew brought to it the surge of young blood and desire. The
treadmill was swiftly turning, broken intermittently by in-
dustrial conflict, and then ever turning again ; the determin-
ism of .biology and of work with things was clear in the pic-
ture; if there was any wrath, it was God's wrath; if injustice,
it lay in the very nature of the drama. At all events Caldwell
kept his frame of reference hidden under the procession and
struggle of human creatures.
Cutting deeper into the pungency of experience in the
world of labor than did Dos Passos and making a wider sweep
around economy than James T. Farrell, Jack Conroy in 1933
incorporated his impressions in a saga of toil, The Disin-
herited. The central figure of this saga was the son of a
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 705
miner; his associates were the husbands, wives, sons, and
daughters of laboring families in mines, mills, and shops and
on the land in town and country. The scene opened in a
mining camp dominated by a dump, "like an Old World
cathedral towering over peasants' huts." Father did his long
daily stint in the mines, when there was work or strikes did
not intervene. Brother Dan went into the mines when he was
only twelve, despite the child labor law.
While Mother was frying salt pork one day, Jimmy Kerns
came with shadows on his face to say but Mother snatched
the words from his mouth : "Tell me, Jimmy ! Is it Tom ?
. . . Then it's Dan." They brought the boy home, all
broken and crushed, a sickening sight, to writhe in agony and
die. Then Tim took his place. Not long afterward Father
was carried home, maimed and bruised by a cave-in, also to
die; and "The Methodist choir sang 'Jesus, Lover of My
Soul ' " at his funeral. Mother took on the double burden and
slaved at the wash tub and over the ironing board to keep the
family together, day by day losing in the struggle as she grew
older and feebler.
As soon as Larry, the Ulysses of the saga, was strong
enough to work, he became a laborer in a car repair shop and
soon was caught in a vortex of events in that fourth dimen-
sion called time. Strike America enters the war an
"agitator" shouts that it is a capitalist war and is beaten into
pulp by an angry mob bent on "the war for democracy"
"Five men for a steel mill. Must be husky" work in a
rubber factory steaming with gas and stench wage cuts,
strikes scabs, fights, defeat a gassed soldier coughing
on a park bench trek to the great automobile town
hard, driven labor on the assembly line Hoover prosperity
dawns rush, rush crash in Wall Street the conveyor
belt slows down and stops men out of work men and
women in old cars driving, hunting, growing weaker and
poorer, children bawling "No men wanted" Hoover-
towns of tin and old boards rise on the edges of cities a job
here for a day or two a job there, for a day or two a
706 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
"chance" to lay pavements "Hey, there, you're drinking
out of the 'Niggers' cup'" what of it for Nordics in the
same plight ? down and out home to Mother in a leaky
miner's shack, a pot of greens on the stove, seasoned by a bit
of lard "That'll be fine. . . . Been a long time since we've
had any good old wild greens" odd jobs, odd jobs " the
steam shovel does the work of 500 miners" "Father
always wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor" hungry men
and women in St. Louis march on city hall demanding relief,
police throw tear bombs, a gigantic Negro catches the bombs
and hurls them back, authorities grant demands (moral
suasion or force?) odd jobs, odd jobs, no place fit to live
in children blue with cold and on and on Bosses
"lookin' for beef today."
Around, everywhere, women mothers, aunts, cousins,
sisters yes, and Bonny Fern, a farmer's daughter who
looks down on miners' "brats." Gleams of life and beauty
for a brief season of youth marriage, children, shacks for
homes more children strikes rags, bones, and hanks
of hair bent backs, leathery skins, watery eyes, rheu-
matism hungry kids wide-eyed one room, two rooms,
three rooms, with rickety furniture bawdy houses on the
edges of town American family life, well, there it is
why have romances, marry, and make the grand start, down
hill ? Bonny Fern, yes, she's still beautiful and losing her
pride while father is sliding lower, to a sheriff's sale labor
agitations workers arise ! - ideologies and agrarian crises,
why not talk American ? Sale day comes to the bankrupt
father farmers and workers gather in old man Fern's door
yard a rope with a noose is hung over a limb auctioneer,
sheriff, and state police (all swank, with guns unloosed)
what am I bid ? one low bid a few cents, for the fur-
niture none dares to raise it one low bid a few cents
for the farm none dares to raise that old man Fern,
by due process of law and order, repossesses his home
Bonny still appealing But, no, Larry has seen family life
it's not for him into the old car with two labor philos-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 707
ophers and organizers, Ulysses rides away to the west. Why
West ? No answer. There you are, said Jack Conroy 3 in
effect ; it's real ; take it or leave it.
Taking it, Sinclair Lewis, in It Can't Happen Here, gave a
fascist upshot of the class climax, in which a raucous dema-
gogue, Buzz Windrip, assailing the rich and using their
money, hacked his way through democratic restraints and
suppressed in violence the voices of wonder and protest ex-
pressed in the literature of dissidence. And Lewis drew both
plot and figures from the actualities of American life. Pos-
sessors of good things in the United States, as well as revolu-
tionary workers, had spoken of the need for " a man on horse-
back." Neither wanted, of course, exactly what was likely
to come, but force was the essence of desire. Senator Huey
Long was an embodiment of fury; until overcome by an
assassin, he spread genuine terror in politics. He could dine
with the rich, heap up treasures for himself on earth, and
flatter and feed the poor; yet he could be ruthless enough
whenever it pleased him to cut either way in the social
scale. Steeped in American experience tingling with the
force of vigilantes and lynchers It Can't Happen Here, if
not, as critics claimed, a supreme work of art, had the sub-
stance and air of verisimilitude. Too hot for the moving-
picture industry catering to the German and Italian trade,
Lewis' story was kept off the screen. It eventually reached
theater-goers, as we have said, but only through the enter-
prise of an actors' project under the Works Progress Adminis-
tration in Washington, That too was minatory.
Defying easy classification, yet certainly outside the
domain of the "best," the democratically general, and the
sharp-cut "proletarian," were writers of grave disposition
who concerned themselves with the ironies, wastes, and
frauds in American society, without visibly attempting to
bring them into any fixed mold of social ideology, unless per-
708 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
chance a conception of chaos could be deemed a mold.
Indeed an overpowering sense of futility, enveloping the
small as well as the great, had in times past smitten strong
minds, versed in old wisdom and deeply experienced. "He
that increaseth knowledge," said the preacher in the Bible,
"increaseth sorrow." While carrying the burdens of the
Roman empire, Marcus Aurelius had fretted over the vanity
of vanities. Centuries later in Germany, on the eve of Hitler's
rise to sovereignty, Theodor Lessing, gifted with many
tongues, western and oriental, and learned in the philoso-
phies and the arts, reached the conclusion that history-writ-
ing was merely an exercise of the art of putting sense into the
senseless. The idea that man is simply a faux pas had long
burdened Old World thought.
In America, land of "liberty and opportunity," however,
the conception of life as chaos, as meaningless, had not
flowered into the cogency of literature before the collapse
of Mr. Coolidge's prosperity. Afterward, as the economic
depression dragged its ugly length through the years, writers
began to strike bass notes of futility for labor, for Lords of
Creation, and for their emulators lower in the scale of in-
comes.
Henry James, no doubt, had once believed nearly every-
thing in the United States to be poor, thin, and too "bour-
geois" for the delicacy of his nature. Edith Wharton had
expressed this view of the plutocracy while finding some
solace in the seasoned families of America. The new futility,
however, did not stem from their tastes and notions of the
good life, It offered no escape, either to the once "mellow
culture" of Italy, France, and England or to a classless
Utopia by the proletarian route of revolution.
Absorbed in the idea of a "lost generation" hiding away
in Europe, Elliot Paul, in Concert Pitch, engraved a story
about a group of such frustrated persons in musical Paris,
representatives of the post-war cults, insecure and over-
wrought, fluttering about and indecisive "like a tangle of
uprooted plants floating pointlessly on a sullen sea." It was
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 709
not because these feckless persons were expatriates that
futility had swamped them ; they were doomed by their own
resentments, incompetence, malice, and constitutional ina-
bility to face life, their discords attaining "concert pitch."
And with what hope of redemption? None, visible, ap-
parently, on Paul's horizon.
Shortly after Lords of Creation had tried to explain to the
Senate committee on banking and finance just how the for-
mation of holding companies and the issue of watered stocks
and bonds had enriched American economy, Kay Boyle,
likewise an American living in Europe, "le doute incarne,"
as George Sand said of Byron, depicted in My Next Bride
the stature and psychology of Antony Lister, son of a New
York financier, searching for the art of life in France.
This wandering youth, who had no stomach for his father's
office, dabbled, played, wondered, and thought, a little hither
and yon, scattering his money, toying with women, stum-
bling through a narrowing alley to his doom. One day he was
seen carrying Henry Adams' The Degradation of the Demo-
cratic Dogma under his arm. Another day he put a strange
question to Victoria John, an American girl scratching for a
livelihood among the wastrels of Paris: "Have you ever
read a man named MacLeish ? I've never read anyone like
him. I've a book of his for you if you'll have it tomorrow
afternoon." Here and there little plaintive notes were
piped: "Le Poete, doit-il reconnaitre 1'Empire de PAge
Mecanique?" Should he indeed? If so or not, why and
what upshot ? No answer. Antony was no good for business,
inept in everything else, blundering around, uttering hollow
sounds with dim meaning, only a wraith of reality.
And how had Antony Lister got that way ? Kay Boyle
gave her explanation in Antony's own words. "Where I went
to school/' he said, "the conversation was the most elegant
you could find for the price. The boys used to talk about how
many cocktails their mothers served at home in the evening
and to how many people, and how many bridge tables they
had. There weren't any black people being hung in the
710 AMERICA IN MID PASS AGE
South, the Supreme Court was the highest, the supremest,
Buddha had never sat quiet, year after year, reflecting.
Nothing was sacred enough to kneel to, not even a mountain,
nor an element like the wind, or the rain, nor an astral
body."
In that emptiness Antony had spent his boyhood. In his
young manhood he could lay hold of nothing that satisfied his
spirit. He vaguely thought " that the rich and the poor were
not the issue ; it had to be something better than that or else
he might as well be dead. If you had no money at all you
were finished, but also if you had money it was possible you
were finished too. Rich or poor, everyone was stabbing
everyone else with hate, stabbing in envy and in terror."
No light in any direction. "The whole universe on a honey-
moon of horror, wedded to their daggers, stabbing their way
from one betrayal to the next. Even your own family and
friends eager to do it to you."
In this torment, the addled youth confessed : "I am weak,
too weak to take up a weapon and go into the orgy, unless I
turned it upon myself. . . ." To this outburst, Victoria,
deeply longing for America, the land of her birth, replied with
equal futility : "You don't have to. You can always get on a
boat and leave the country. You can always keep on going."
So it might seem to a dreaming girl, as it had seemed to the
knights of endless industrial progress in the United States
keep on going and going and going. While the going was
good, no question need be asked ; when it slowed down or
stopped, no answers for any questions. At least Antony
could find none: "I can't go far enough. Nobody can.
Wherever I am, just looking out of the holes in my skull is
enough to scare me. I'm scared of what's happening to every-
one and I can't do anything to change it."
Nor, indeed, could Victoria herself, despite the apparent
optimism of keeping the faith in her own words : "It's no use,
Antony, I know how little use it is. There are two kinds of
people in the world, there are the rich and the poor, and if
you're the poor you're finished from the first, even though
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 711
you don't see it right away. You can make a little struggle,
very brief, and after a while you begin to see. You see they Ve
got you down and they certainly aren't going to let you up
again. It wouldn't be clever at all. Once you go tup and were
still young enough you might tell what you had seen down
there." This came from Victoria's heart, for she was poor
and just hanging on to the rim of existence. Antony could
not see the situation in the simple terms of rich and poor,
although he knew riches and beheld poverty, but he agreed
with Victoria about the slight possibility of avoiding the envy
and terror of things.
In the middle of futility, Antony had to go back to New
York where he had a father called Horace. From this center
of the business empire in the machine age, he cabled his wife,
Fontana, a kind of sensuous shadow into whose toils he had
fallen in Paris : " Wall Street narrow as the bier. . . . Horace
believes in the future of gold, silver, copper, steel, and other
metals. . , . They've put bars on all the windows because
so many people committed it this year now it seems more like
a prison than last. . . Nijinsky should have stayed sane
long enough to create the dance I see myself doing in wreaths,
garlands, festoons of stock quotations on white ticker rib-
bons. ... I walk all night after parties or when there'renot
any. ... I am not gold, silver, or copper, I am something
waiting to be set to music. . . . Mozart forgot me in his
eighth year . . . hummed me over between Don Juan and
the Magic Flute and forgot me going up stairs to bed in
Salzburg. . . . Anaconda Copper, Cerro de Pasco, Seaboard
Oil are passwords for departure. . . . New York explodes
inside me every time I step out the door. ... I can't do it.
... I can't do it. ... I can't do it. ... Have you seen a
girl called Victoria John she's trapped in ancient Greece."
A fe^sv days later, Fontana and Victoria, while riding through
the streets of Paris, opened up the Paris-American newspaper
and read: "Prominent Young Club Man Cuts Veins in
Father's Office," and a subtitle : "Antony Lister Takes Own
Life. Wall Street Losses Rumored." Fontana turned to her
712 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
companion and said: "Don't cry. Antony said you never
cried." Tears themselves were futile.
If the son of a rich man who had been educated in the most
elegant conversation that money could buy could find in the
end no impulse or reason for going on, the promise of things
was different for Emma Troy, a woman who had made money
in the manufacture of "triple-whipped mayonnaise" and set
out in a rush to break into "the American aristocracy" at
home. Her story Hamilton Basso told under the title, In
Their Own Image, published right in the middle of the New
Deal, during the feverish quest for "recovery " of things past.
Emma was no daughter of the rich. She had worked her way
into the business of making mayonnaise and on the crest of
success had sold out her establishment to a kind of holding
company for a huge pile of income-bearing paper. Spangled
with gold, she took her son and daughter, Freddie and Vir-
ginia, to Aiken, South Carolina, where many possessors of
great wealth spent their winter months in the pursuits of the
leisured.
Like the courtiers who danced at the balls of Louis XVI,
the "winter set" had created a ritual of inutilities, if with no
Most Christian Majesty to serve as the center. Around and
around this "round of pleasures," Basso carried Emma,
Freddie, and Virginia Troy in their effort to "break into the
ranks." Unlike Edith Wharton he did not set the newcomers
off as mere vulgarians against the culture of seasoned wealth
which through long years had sloughed off the barbarism of
manual labor and " the odor of trade." No such purpose or
illusion shone through his pages. For Basso, these holders of
liquid claims to America's wealth were not merely "new
people" annoying to the ordered and aromatic world of
established families. Nor were they mere grinders of the
faces of the poor. They rose to no such zenith of force. In
sum and substance, in relation to going concerns, they were
simply useless and, incidentally, wasters. While Basso did
not say this so baldly, the cold irony of his story sayings
and doings in Aiken could leave no other impression.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 713
He made no point of tragedy, comedy, farce., or fraud. His
characters spoke and acted for themselves, where they were
in Aiken, for a winter round of pleasures.
There were no happy endings for the mayonnaise family or
at least no realization of ambitions. Though the son Freddie
was married off, the achievement turned out to be a mess.
Virginia, the daughter, having inherited, perhaps, some
healthy memories from Emma's days in the mayonnaise
kitchen, managed to elude the snare her mother set to cap-
ture an impecunious Italian count. And Emma found no
prince for herself. As fortune went badly with her climbing,
she attached herself to the lower rungs of the social ladder by
marrying an advertising man who laughed at publicity and
public relations as heartily as he did at the ritual of the Aiken
set.
While describing its ineptitudes, Basso allowed the set to
hear the rumble of an industrial conflict ; but that was, to all
appearances, an accident of geography and time. It hap-
pened that there was a mill town not far away from the scene
of the ritual and that a strike occurred during the season.
The rich heard of it and were a bit discomfited. Indeed a boy
of artistic proclivities was seen prowling around the homes
of the rich, carrying an easel and brush, and was shot as a
suspicious character. Neither the strike nor the shooting
affair, however, had any evident connection with the mayon-
naise family or the doings and sayings in the Aiken crowd.
Never before in American fiction had families of great
riches been treated in just such a fashion. In Basso's pages
they appeared not as mere vulgarians, or exploiters, or ogres
of any kind. They were simply purposeless, useless, futile, in
respect of the economy that sustained them. Though in-
wardly hearty and vivacious, they seemed to be turning
yellow, like autumn leaves about to fall. They might drop
to earth. They might flutter in the breeze a long time.
Basso left them hanging there.
With a similar surgery John O'Hara carved at the system
in Hollywood, cutting off the celluloid mask and exposing its
714 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
inner life, tormented and retching. In Hope of Heaven he
framed the dream, the romance, and the ravages of reality.
An examination of the precious "studio atmosphere" seemed
to discover "no more hope in it than there was in Appoint-
ment in Samarra, no more heaven there than there was in
Butterfield 8." That meant exactly none at all. In the
glittering land of fancy, despite Shirley Temple and all the
rest, boundless deceit, passion, and intrigue boiled over in one
compact spot. Undeniably that was a harsh judgment and
it must have been disagreeable for Deacon Will Hays, Czar
of the Movies, and his committees of ladies. Yet it had an
outside homology in revelations of the methods employed by
some financial magnates in the motion-picture industry
financing being an euphonious term that could cover betrayal
of trust, inside deals, and the duping of "investors." Besides,
Deacon Hays himself, the very chief of the motion-picture
captains, had displayed an amazing virtuosity, in matters
fiduciary, as he explained to a Senate committee in describing
his relations to Harry Sinclair and the oil scandals while he
had been arch financier of the Republican campaign fund.
O'Hara's literary conception of the Hollywood scene was,
therefore, not wholly out of line with the once orthodox con-
ception of the politico-economic scene over which the Czar of
the "industry" presided with such aplomb.
In another place not Paris or Aiken or Hollywood
just Tenth Street in New York Edna St. Vincent Millay
in the medium of verse presented a few mortals from the busy
city holding a Conversation at Midnight, that is, setting
forth their interests, ideas, hopes, fears, and ambitions, in
I 937> while business, recently at the crest, was slithering
downward in its course. Among these mortals gathered after
dinner around good whiskey and wine were a man of affairs
listed as a stockbroker, a communist poet, a painter, a story
writer, an advertising expert, a Roman Catholic priest, and
a kind of Olympian host who combined amiability with gen-
eral agnosticism. For hours the conversation splashed,
flashed, and bubbled along like a brook, meandering and
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 715
getting nowhere. Yet in the splashing and flashing, lights
illuminated all facets of American culture ranging from
sports, business, sex, music, and the arts, to religion and
politics. The kaleidoscope of American civilization was
turned over and over, producing fragments of figures, but no
figures. Neither art nor letters nor religion could stop and
possess the stream, of talk. Giving it up as hopeless, the priest
went away early; in such a group he could not command.
The advertising man spoke of love as the great need of
troubled times, without evoking ardent responses. The
artist seemed merely wistful.
At one point, however, the conversation at midnight
simmered down to a broad and irreducible antithesis. The
stockbroker as capitalist and the poet as communist faced
each other and spat fire. From his home in Palo Alto, Her-
bert Hoover had shouted to the man in the White House
whole paragraphs and speeches which could be summarized
in a few words: "Regimentation, regimentation. Give us
freedom." Perhaps the stockbroker had heard them. Per-
haps he just felt like Hoover for similar reasons. At all events
he cried out :
Oh, God, why live, to breathe a prescribed and rational air !
All free
Opinion, all interchange of vigorous thought, suffocated
By the poisonous motor-exhaust of motor minds !
Passion regimented; curiosity regimented; endeavour regi-
mented ;
Culture, and grace, and all the things I cared for
Equally divided among the mob, and sauced to their taste !
This is the time for the proud to take his pride by the hilt
And slit his bowels with it ; this is the time for the individual,
for me,
To lock himself in his room . . * and get it over with.
This was the cue for the communist who answered in a
fierce tu quoque:
You, an individual ? you, you regimented mouse ?
You Harvard Club, Union Club, white tie for the opera,
black tie for the theatre,
716 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
Trouser legs a little wider this year, sir,
I would suggest dark blue instead of black, sir,
Pumps are no longer worn, sir,
Mah-Johngg, cross-word, anagram, backgammon, whist,
bridge, auction, contract, regimented mouse !
Why, you're so accustomed to being flanked to right and left
by people just like yourself
That if they ever should step aside you wouldn't stand up !
You, an individual ?
You salad for luncheon, soup for dinner,
Maine for summer, Florida for winter,
Wife-pampering dog- worshipper !
Where was the synthesis, the resolution of the contradic-
tion ? The conversation at midnight did not bring it forth.
The priest had not produced it. The advertising man's love
offered no single wonder-working providence. The host
could tender only the uncertainty of liberalism : both fascism
and communism were intolerable to the human spirit ; liber-
alism might play the eclectic role, pick, elide, combine. But
liberalism seemed to get nowhere. Even so, where were
fascism and communism getting, in terms of precious human
values ? Uncertainty prevailed :
Let us abdicate now; let us disintegrate quietly here, con-
vivially imbibing
The pleasanter poisons.
Although Sinclair Lewis probably did not intend to place
his novel of Prodigal Parents in the class of futilitarian litera-
ture, he certainly cast the children of a prosperous business
man, Frederick William Cornplow, and his wife, into the pit
of wastrels, while mixing sex vaporings and communist
fumes in a curious concoction. To be sure, Cornplow was
mighty enough, in Lewis' pages, but his offspring were silly
and hopeless and then as ever the future belonged to youth.
In final analysis, Lewis' panegyric on Cornplow in itself
raised a question : Did the boast spring from fear or assur-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 717
ance? "Cornplow," he said, "is the eternal bourgeois, the
Middle Class, whom the Bolsheviks hate and imitate, whom
the English love and deprecate, and who is most of the popu-
lation worth considering in France and Germany and these
United States; when he changes his mind that crisis is
weightier than Waterloo or Thermopylae/' Possibly, but
the sweeping assertion boomed with the oratory of the ad-
vertising agent and was far beyond the reach of demonstra-
tion. In the Congress of these United States, where eternal
bourgeois were at the time ostensibly busy making laws, they
were also digging their own graves apparently in preparation
for burial under a mountain of debts, deficits, inflation, and
armaments. Perhaps they would change their minds, if they
could, and prove that it could happen here, but if that crisis
was to be weightier than Waterloo or Thermopylae it might
settle just as much as those historic battles settled for the
long movement of civilization. It was possible that warriors
and priests would outlive the Cornplows.
Continuous insistence that the genteel tradition had be-
come a hollow farce, that democracy of the political tradition
was not enough, that fundamental changes in economic and
social usage must come, were now coming, coupled with the
repeated allegations of futility, introduced a heat almost
revolutionary into literary reviewing, appraising, and dis-
cussing. The sit-down strike, metaphorically speaking, broke
into editorial sanctums, publishers' teas, and assemblies for
considering the state of beautiful letters.
The bearers of dissident reports devoid of glad tidings had
often known at first hand the experiences of which they wrote
long hours at rattling machines, tedious hours digging in
mines, strikes, battles with police, the search for work, riding
the rods, clashes with "scabs" and "finks." Their novels
rang with an authenticity and an assurance that could not be
called artificial on any score and this may have been a factor
718 AMERICA IN MID PASSAGE
in winning the reception which was accorded to so many of
them in the reviews. At all events, though, in the main, lit-
erary criticism, as of old, revolved around the pivot of per-
sistent concern with form and symmetry, style and rhythm,
finish and grace, with emphasis on pure, rather than practi-
cal, artistry, the dissidents were accorded full hearings be-
side the "favorites" and the "best/ 7 No editors in fact
clung so tenaciously to the genteel tradition as to reject com-
pletely the men and the women who wrote vivid reports and
sizzling tales of life and struggle at the lowest levels of eco-
nomic subsistence. Literary militancy "made" the front
pages of reviews and drew serious consideration from the
leading critics of the country.
During his tenure of office as editor of the Saturday Review
of Literature, Henry Seidel Canby, though by no means cap-
tivated by the proletarian appeal as such, greeted the novels
of that school with fair appreciation when they demon-
strated literary power and skill. Perhaps more comprehen-
sively, his immediate successor, Bernard DeVoto, continued
this appreciation with criticism. Indeed the hospitality of
literary critics to the new writers of fiction and poetry was
itself symptomatic of a catholicity in spirit extending beyond
that manifest in the marketplace and the counting house.
Despite some intemperate appraisals and violent encounters,
the character of the great literary debate was on the whole a
tribute to the quality of American culture and meaningful for
its future. Americans were not to Laugh and Lie Down, as
Robert Cantwell had phrased it, passively.
In volumes, essays, and little magazines, the Marxists kept
harping on a problem more easily stated than solved : "Since
the writer is perforce a product of time, place, and social
milieu and cannot stand entirely outside his own experience,
cannot acquire by any means an Olympian detachment from
earthly affairs, how can he avoid giving expression to ac-
quired values and, if he can not escape that necessity, what
values shall he choose ? " That was a tough nut for Marxists
to crack as well as for all writers and critics ; and nobody
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 719
cracked it to universal satisfaction. One thing was patent
at least : the time had passed when young persons could set
out upon literary careers equipped merely with Samuel
Smiles, Matthew Arnold, and a few of the classics as models
of substance and style.
In fact no writers even in the era of high American pros-
perity had done just that. Before Mr. Coolidge left his
office as President of the United States, V. F. Calverton had
brought to literary criticism the wide pattern of sociological
interest, in a treatise called The Newer Spirit. This was fol-
lowed by a sociological interpretation of American literature
since the civil war set forth by Granville Hicks, a close stu-
dent of the subject, under the caption of The Great Tradi-
tion. With full historical warrant, Hicks declared that ours
has been a critical literature, critical of greed, cowardice, and
meanness. Then he put this question to his countrymen :
How can authors refuse to strike at the sources of the evils
they have so constantly attacked ? When they choose to go
to the roots of things, he insisted they must take the com-
munist line : they must give their support to the class that is
able to overthrow capitalism. Pondering longer on the Amer-
ican tradition, Hicks declared in 1938 I Like America; he
hoped it would improve its ways, however.
If to youth unmindful of long history the application of
the sociological method to literature looked like an original
achievement, historians of literary criticism found in it con-
firmation of a common-sense view long held by masters of
literature. Voltaire certainly had written on life, manners,
thought, and cruelties under the old regime of the eighteenth
century, no matter how many hours he had spent on polishing
his sentences. At the opening of the nineteenth century,
Madame de Stael had lucidly applied the sociological critique
in a treatise On Literature Considered in Relation to Social
Institutions. In the Victorian age, John Morley had said in
his inimitable way : "Poetry, and not only poetry, but every
other channel of emotional expression and aesthetic culture,
confessedly moves with the general march of the human
720 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
mind, and art is only the transformation into ideal and imag-
inative shapes of a predominant system and philosophy of
life." Minor writers could be consigned without disrespect to
the region of the literature of taste, graces, stray variations
of shade and color. But "the loftier masters, though their
technical power and originality, their beauty of form,
strength of flight, music and variousness of rhythm, are full
of interest and instruction, yet, besides these precious gifts,
come to us with the size and quality of great historic forces,
for they represent the hope and energies, the dreams and the
consummation, of the human intelligence in its most enor-
mous movements." This view Edith Wharton sustained out
of her own experience and power as a writer as one of the
masters. The patient study of style was no vain literary pur-
suit ; the born-poet could scarcely evolve Alexandrine verse
out of his inner consciousness in New York or Kansas ; but it
was certain, as the New Deal moved toward its finish, that
American literature was becoming concerned with "human
intelligence in its most enormous movements." Perchance
the hour of great politics was drawing nearer.
The discussion of the literary movement took various
forms. In part it was an affair of the writers in prose and
poetry themselves bent on examining their own intentions
and obligations. In 1937 a throng assembled in New York
in their second Writers' Congress to talk about the direction
of the literary movement and its relation to society, as mem-
bers of P. E. N. had been doing in national and international
assemblies for some time. The discussion revealed a wide
diversity of opinion and judgment about the function of the
writer, and participants soon found that the direction of the
dissident movement was not to be perfectly straight, narrow,
and well-lighted for everybody who took part in it. Marxists
made speeches characterized by the fixed idea that literature
in America as in Russia must exhibit correctness of doctrine
and soundness of verbalism but they differed acutely over the
nature of that correctness and soundness. Inasmuch as all
Marxists had rejected the Pope, inasmuch as the Russian
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 721
lictator, Stalin, was too distraught with many other matters
:o settle the quarrels of Grub Street in New York, who among
;he Marxists was in fact anointed, consecrated, and author-
zed to approve or excommunicate ? While Marxists wran-
jled over the correct line, other authors at the Writers'
Congress asserted the right to describe what they saw and
oiew of labor, poverty, and disenchantment without refer-
ence to prescriptions authoritative in the temple of the ortho-
iox. It was a lively meeting of dissident minds, observed by
:rowded galleries.
During the sessions Malcolm Cowley, literary editor of the
NTew Republic, author and poet, retaining memories of a
youthful expatriation in Paris, laid stress on the power of
revolutionary conceptions in kindling and feeding the fire of
:reative energy. On the other hand, Edwin Seaver, critic
ind novelist, warned his colleagues against subservience to
shibboleths and dogmas. John Crowe Ransom, agrarian,
poet, critic, professor at Vanderbilt University, later trans-
ferred to Kenyon College, took the floor to scourge the " ama-
teurs" who appeared to dominate the literary field, and con-
tended that critics must be trained presumably in the
seats of learning by professor-philosophers ; this left in a
haze the familiar 'problem: Who is to train the trainers?
Other speakers kept bringing back into the argument the
force of varied experiences, inner fire, and grand conceptions
of life whatever they might be. In the end, the Writers'
Congress adjourned without agreements defined in thirty-
nine articles of faith, or more or less, and without a mani-
festo, despite the number of members who came with neat
prescriptions in their heads or in their pockets. Naturally,
therefore, after the congress was over, a spirited controversy
took place in the press over the meaning and the upshot of
the literary assembly. One aspect seemed positive, namely,
emphasis on the substance of letters.
To this sociological analysis of literature, Kenneth Burke
of the dissident school and a participant in the Writers'
Congress added a critique entitled Attitudes toward History,
722 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
By history, Burke meant the substance of economy, life,
and labor, actuality, and culture, rather than the fragments
of totality carved out by professors of history obsessed merely
by warriors and politicians. It was his contention that the
writer interprets life, that is, history, according to his experi-
ence with it, and assumes an attitude either of acceptance or
rejection of the forms which life displays. The essence of life
being permanence amid change,, the writer will be, with
respect to that essence, passive or disturbed, content or mal-
content, sentimentally satisfied or maladjusted and over-
wrought. Applying this dictum to American literature,
Burke inquired whether American writers had at last ac-
cepted American life or were still fleeing from its issues and
conflicts even by making them despicable. Thus the prob-
lem of the determinism or indeterminism in "objective rela-
tions" was thrust by Burke into the obscure realm of sub-
jective moods. In his discussion of American literature as
history and in his analysis of contemporary writing, Burke
seemed to call for the recognition of life in America as theme
worthy of the highest intelligence, to demand hard work in
penetrating to its substance, and to make imperative the
literary master's affection for the competent forms and
shades of expression.
Over the tempest raised by disputes about pure pro-
letarian literature, as distinguished from dissident literature
in general, broke a torrent of discussion among readers
of fiction, poetry, and criticism. The escaping steam was
sometimes called the vaporing of little minds learned neither
in Marxism nor in letters, and indeed there was some
justice in the allegation, for much nonsense was written
on the subject by little persons who could scarcely write
at all.
After carrying on a searching inquiry, Louis Adamic de-
clared that the proletarian authors were either non-prole-
tarian in origin or ceased to be proletarians when they en-
tered the white-collar career of letters. In the second place,
he contended, on the authority of Trotsky, that a real pro-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 723
letarian literature was impossible under capitalism, for the
actual workers were too busy "making a living, fretting,
agonizing, scheming, and struggling to seize power" and,
however energetic, could not find the leisure required for
writing. Under a well-functioning communist state to follow
capitalism, the proletariat would cease to exist and, in that
happy order of things, art would simply be human art.
Humanity would be emancipated from bondage to things
and class. Whether the literature of revolt was written by
the proletariat or not, another question remained : Did the
workers in town or country read it ?
The answer to this query Adamic sought by traveling far
and wide over the country and interviewing the kinds of men
and women described in the so-called proletarian literature.
On the basis of his journeying and inquisition, he reported
that the influence of such literature on the working class was
negligible ; in fact, nil. Workers in factory and field did not
care to read about themselves about the men, women,
and children of the disinherited. They read few novels and
fewer books of a general character. Now and then industrial
workers bought the Liberty magazine, True Stories, Wild
West Tales, or Screen Romance, if they ventured beyond the
sensational newspapers, tabloids, comic strips, and picture
magazines. "Ninety-nine and one-half per cent" of the
American workers, Adamic concluded, in 1934, "seem to me
to be practically beyond the reach of radical printed propa-
ganda or serious, honest writing of any sort. This, to my
deep regret, is the brutal truth of the situation, and anyone
who does not realize it ... is, I think, ipso facto, open to the
suspicion that he is not qualified to write about the American
proletariat." Exceptions to the rule, remarkable exceptions,
Adamic did find here and there, but they merely served to
bring out forcefully the main conclusion of his survey. The
following year, in America Faces the Barricades, John L.
Spivak made a confirming report: "I am convinced that the
American worker does not want to overthrow the govern-
ment. All he wants is food." The plight of the people was
724 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
grievous. What are you going to do about it ? Spivak set
down as his answer: "I don't know."
To the further confusion of the Marxians, Robert Herrick,
an elder statesman of American letters, contributed a trench-
ant inquiry. If, as the Marxists believe, all social movements
and class actions are determined in the very nature of things,
why the laudation of proletarian virtues and why the moral
indignation over capitalist "vices" ? If Marxism is the sci-
ence of prediction, as precise as the science of physics, why
all the righteous heat over the way to the predicted end?
One does not quarrel with water running down hill on its in-
exorable course. If the movement of history is determined,
it is determined for all classes. And yet, Herrick said, he
could not remember "a single instance" in which this logic
was applied by intransigent writers to show that the em-
ployer was under the same bondage to the capitalist system
as the workers were. According to the strict logic of Marx-
ism, both should be represented as caught in a mechanical
trap, but Herrick could not detect in proletarian literature a
single case "where the top dog is presented not with sym-
pathy but with a definite awareness that he too is moved by a
terrifying necessity along predetermined lines of least resist-
ance the bosses, the executives, the impersonal boards of
directors, all without exception bound to the same coil of
necessity through fear, shame, desire, habit." In short,
Herrick held, the proletarian school was lacking in perception
and failing to apply its own dogma of determinism. If some
of its expositors were right, if Marxism was merely a por-
trayal of mechanical economy and iron prediction, then Her-
rick could be deemed more Marxist than the writers who suf-
fused description and revolt with sentiment and evaluation.
But could literature be reduced to physics and still be liter-
ature ?
Going persistently on his own way, Edmund Wilson di-
rected his thought with increasing effectiveness to the issue
that had engaged the hot concern of the writers' congress,
and indeed of all workers in the domain of letters, namely.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 725
the substance of literature amid its forms and accidents.
Having graduated from regular services on the New York
Evening Sun, Vanity Fair, and The New Republic, Wilson
tried to pierce further beneath the surface of volumes, chap-
ters, paragraphs, and sentences in search of the controlling
conceptions that accounted for authors' selections, omissions,
and emphases. Whether he dealt with single authors, as
with Edith Wharton in an appraisal written for The New
Republic after her death was announced, or with a group, as
in his volume on Triple Thinkers, Wilson never lost sight of
the heart of the business : Under what overarching concep-
tion of things has this configuration in letters taken shape ?
It was no accident then when he turned to an examination
of the historical development of socialism from the French
revolution through the partnership of Marx and Engels, in
his unresting exploration of the forces conditioning or deter-
mining the substance of "polite" letters.
In this literary tournament, Bernard DeVoto, critic, essay-
ist, and novelist, likewise jousted. What was the meaning for
American civilization for the trajectory of the future
to be found in all the literature called proletarian ? DeVoto
made an answer : "Class literature, the literature of any class
whatever, quite apart from its esthetic function which may
in part at least affect all classes, must serve at least one of
two functions. First and most important, there is the func-
tion of heightening and unifying the sentiments of the class
which it represents. It may confirm or increase their group-
consciousness, step up their solidarity, make stronger their
sense of power and injury and communion, and create, prop-
agate, and enliven those vital myths, beliefs, ideals, aims,
dogmas, slogans, personifications, purposes, and sanctions
which are at once the bonds that hold the class together and
the energy that makes action possible. Second, there is the
interclass function, Literature may be an agency of attack
on other classes or of conversion among them. It may assist
disintegration, weakening the other classes by making them
pity or fear the class it represents, giving them a sense of
726 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
shame or guilt or futility, hammering at their doubts with
ridicule or horror or terror. Or it may proselytize among
them, converting the essentially religious symbols of its own
myths into symbols acceptable among the religions it in-
vades, and carrying the position by outflanking it with vi-
sions of the greater glory to come or the equivalent in the
eschatology of the period. These functions are usually quite
distinct. Only rarely and only in great literature will they
coalesce. A work of genius may well fuse them together,
achieving symbols that are both incandescent for its own
class and immediately authoritative for other classes."
This terse summary by DeVoto, covering the class sub-
stance of literature and artistic appraisal, certainly had direct
application to Marxian forms, efforts, and propensities.
Whether it applied also 'to the whole body of letters dis-
playing economic and political awareness was another, and
broader, issue. Nor did DeVoto's judgment on this point
take into account the measurement of literary influences on
secular history on the makers of that history. If in time
to come American history as actuality should be simplified
down to an acute conflict between the owners of property
on the one side and the non-owners on the other side as
James Madison and Daniel Webster had feared it might be
then the proletarian literature could be described by distant
historians as at least foreshadowing, if not in any manner
shaping, the course of things to come.
But there was no way, in any " science," Marxian or other-
wise, despite much bold asserting, of knowing in the days of
the golden glow and the New Deal whether this conflict, in
bald and simple forms, would come to pass. Nor, if it was
to come to pass, was there any science for predicting the hour,
the circumstances, or the immediate outcome. Judging by
European experience and by hints and signs in the United
States, Sinclair Lewis could have been right in the verdict
rendered by It Can't Happen Here. Although the unquench-
able hope of Marxists looked far beyond fascism, wars, re-
volts, and suppressions to the final day of the spring into
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 727
freedom, an air of remoteness and uncertainty hung over that
assurance. If for the long time, or all time, the course of his-
tory was to run against the disinherited, the makers of pro-
letarian letters might well have wished that they had stayed
within the confused and blurring lines of "the united front/'
Neither friend nor foe, however, could lift in 1928 or in 1938
the curtain on that realm of possibilities.
The whole philosophic problem thus posed in Europe as in
America was analyzed and clarified in Karl Mannheim's
Ideology and Utopia, translated into English in 1937. Class
interests and ideas, he affirmed, do appear in society, but
they do not lie insulated, side by side, like eggs in a basket.
In times of peace and relative well-being, transfusions, modi-
fications, disintegrations occur and, even when tension
sharpens the insular character of ideas and interests, no ab-
solute cleavages take place. It was so in respect of any liter-
ature that touched life at all, especially the literature of
economic and political consciousness. Like realistic writings
in sociology and politics, realistic literature dealt with actual-
ities of life and labor, gave voice to peoples and interests,
thrust upon the first class passengers, who rode, some knowl-
edge of the second class, that walked, and of the third class,
that pushed the wagon to repeat Carl Sandburg's im-
agery.
However rough and untraveled the road ahead, the liter-
ature of dissidence certainly gave suggestions respecting the
way. It expressed and echoed the swelling sentiments that
swept every state in the Union in 1936 and shook both the
powers and the convictions of those Bourbons who spoke of
"restoration." The prose and verse of economic and political
sensitiveness were not read by the millions, but they were
read and discussed by some men and women, boys and girls,
who would help to make history in 1950, 1960, 1970.
Like the literature of imagination and literary criticism,
with which it was inevitably associated, the newspaper press
728 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
reflected the tendencies of the time its mechanics, its
centralization, its economies, its moralities, and its ironies.
While Berle and Means reported the intensifying concentra-
tion of corporate control over national wealth, statisticians of
newspaper ownership and circulation traced the rise of dailies
correctly called "chain" and recorded the death and consoli-
dation of papers. In 1928 the "chains" dominated 280 daily
newspapers. In 1933 they held 361 dailies in thrall, with a
circulation of " 13,244,574 or 37.4 per cent of the total daily
issuance and 11,044,646 or 45.9 per cent of the Sunday," to
use the figures of Alfred M. Lee, in his volume on The Daily
Newspaper in America.
Mergers and suspensions marked the course of this devel-
opment. In the decade between 1924 and 1934, "a net de-
cline of 136 units" occurred in the daily and Sunday field.
Under the expert editorship of Walter Lippmann, the New
York Morning World weakened and died. Hearst was com-
pelled to bury his New York American for want of suste-
nance. Competitors consolidated until cities of the smaller
rank were sometimes "served with news" under the auspices
of single concerns. Perhaps the climax was reached when
Republican and Democratic sheets in one city rolled from
presses under common ownership, with malice toward none,
charity for all, and counting house receipts augmented. Al-
though country weeklies and small town dailies continued to
flourish, the circulation of urban and suburban papers in
rural regions expanded rapidly, with improved roads, the
perfection of high-speed trucks, and the advancement of
rural free delivery by automobile.
In some measure this centralization was the outcome of
ambition and avarice. In some measure it responded to
mechanics and economics. Efforts to achieve more rapid
printing ordinary, color, and rotogravure led to the
construction of machines more complicated and expensive.
A single plant opened by the New York Daily News in 1930
cost ten million dollars. When other equipment, services, and
devices were added to mere plant, capital and current out-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 729
lays mounted. According to reports, the Philadelphia In-
quirer was sold in 1930 for eighteen million dollars.
Without world news services, the most expensive plant was
worthless and the cost of these services rose with the area and
intensity of coverage. The outlay of the Associated Press
alone nearly tripled between 1917 and 1931. When wire-
photo reporting was added to telegraph, radio, and telephone
reporting, a new element of expense was introduced. Com-
petition for circulation, on which advertising revenues rested,
led to the increasing employment of special writers for sports,
the arts, the sciences, radio, education, the theater, cosmetics,
lingerie, and accessories, the motion-picture kingdom, wars,
foreign affairs, and every other phase of public interest ; and
all this raised the cost of newspaper production. To meet
these and similar charges, ever larger receipts were required,
merely to keep alive, apart from making profits.
In such circumstances metropolitan journalism became a
business that could be carried on effectively only by great
capitalists or great corporations. The day when a brilliant
journalist, such as Horace Greeley, could borrow a little
money or buy a cheap machine on credit and set out on a
career of intellectual leadership had passed. Convinced by
tradition that the press was still a power, families that had
made fortunes in industry and commerce put some of their
millions into journalism. They bought up newspapers or
bought into them and, as more or less silent owners or part-
ners, added the weight of industrial capital to that of the
publishing capital invested in presses, plants, and services*
The extent to which newspapers were actually owned by
capitalists outside the "profession" could not be determined
by any available figures, but there seemed to be few great
dailies built up entirely out of their own earnings, without the
aid of stock and bond issues or bank loans. In other words,
journalism became a branch of business enterprise, controlled
by its necessities, penetrated by its spirit, interlocked with
its fortunes. Editors and readers sank into the background.
Subsidized newspapers could be run at a loss. The capitalist
730 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
with his immense resources, supported by advertisers, could
alone cope with the costs of publication and supply the
multitude with the diversified news, special articles, photo-
gravures, comic strips, and cartoons necessary to meet mass
demands.
Coupled with the high capitalization of the publishing in-
dustry was a tendency toward uniformity of cultural, politi-
cal, and economic opinion. In the course of this development
the open "crusading" journalism of the type launched in the
late nineteenth century by Hearst and Pulitzer declined
toward the vanishing point. In their early days they had
berated the American plutocracy without mercy, campaigned
against trusts and monopolies, and demanded heavy taxation
on incomes and inheritances. Pulitzer, however, was now
dead and his morning New York World had gone with him to
its tomb. His St. Louis Post Dispatch went over to Alfred
Landon, the Republican candidate in 1936, and to big pot-
tage. As Hearst grew richer and his interests extended, he
shed his old radicalism, actually surpassed Tories in his de-
fense of primitive capitalism, and as he aged he turned his
lingering energy to Hollywood, art treasures, and efforts to
conserve his decaying estate.
In big journalism, crusading now came to an end. Ap-
parently it did not "pay," especially as the picture news-
papers carried off readers, or rather "lookers," who could
not stand the strain of construing sentences. Even the
Scripps-Howard chain of papers, which had flirted with labor
and trust-busting, went over to the Right on all major issues,
leaving behind merely the faint incense of diluted sentimen-
tality. Nowhere in the land was a great editor left to battle
heroically "for the plain people," in the style of the youthful
Hearst or Pulitzer. Only cartoonists ingenious at their craft
could now say things by insinuation that once could have
been put into double-column leaders. And their number and
skill were striking features of the age.
Cooperating with artists of the ordinary comic strip in
creating totalitarian imagery on a national scale were the
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 731
columnists whose effusions flowed across the continent in
rising volume. Highest among them, with reference to the
number of newspapers served or to circulation claimed, were
O. CX Mclntyre, " Dorothy Dix," and Dale Carnegie. The
first, until his death in 1938, supplied the middle class in the
small towns and cities of the hinterland with gossip about life
in New York City the land of dreams for fresh-water
automobile salesmen, little executives, realtors, morticians,
aspiring wives, and restless girls. The second, "Dorothy
Dix," touched a universal chord, by giving advice to the love-
sick and the love-lorn of both sexes. The third, Dale Car-
negie, provided instruction on such matters of business enter-
prise as how to turn garage mechanics into sales orators or
lift harassed insurance agents into company presidents. By
these three columnists, the popular hunger for the trivia of
metropolitan gossip, for the experiences of sex, and for the
acquisition of riches was cleverly served, while the news-
papers gathered in pecuniary rewards.
To that other great lust of Americans politics a small
army of columnists avidly catered. For a long time Arthur
Brisbane, the employee of Hearst, led them all in the number
of estimated readers and emoluments, but Brisbane died in
1936 and his name dropped quickly into devouring oblivion.
Pitching his thought to the level occupied by such persons
as the officers of the National Manufacturers Association,
executives of Morgan and other banks, aspiring enterprisers
of the middle west and beyond to the Golden Gate, and
women of the well-to-do clubs in search of moral and eco-
nomic security, Walter Lippmann, who had previously at-
tained fame as a liberal, reached a lofty peak as the intellec-
tual purist among the columnists. While his star was glit-
tering in the heavens, Dorothy Thompson, specializing in
fascism and communism after years spent as a newspaper
reporter in Germany where the two systems clashed so
savagely, played upon the emotion of fear and the flair for
horror and violence as she ostensibly engaged in discussing
American public questions and politics. Among their rivals
732 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
and associates. Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, in a joint
syndicate, and Boake Carter, acting alone, were alleged to
reach more readers and command more minds, though there
was no way of proving the claim ; nor did this trio seem to
enlist as much affection as the others among the intelligent-
sia of the upper income brackets, for they were not always
tenderly faithful to the honorifics of such circles.
Clearly, there was a diversity of talents and audiences in
the syndicate field. Yet the most popular columnists, in-
cluding the sportive Westbrook Pegler, agreed as a rule on
one thing : they preached an economic orthodoxy which the
highest pontifex in the United States Chamber of Commerce
could usually scan with pleasure and approval. Such devia-
tions as they occasionally allowed themselves could readily
be taken as that homage which regularity pays to liberty.
It was, therefore, strictly fitting that Dorothy Thompson
should receive an honorary degree from Columbia University
at the June commencement of 1938. Among the columnists
of large following only Heywood Broun kept up* a running
fire on the left and certainly no university made him a Doctor
of Humane Letters. Only incidentally could the First Lady,
Eleanor Roosevelt, as a columnist, be called a strict defender
of the New Deal,
During the turmoil of the panic and persisting business de-
pression, when new social doctrines were advanced in the
country, the popular columnists contributed to the main-
tenance of uniformity in opinion. Nearly all of them came
out openly for the Republican candidate in 1936, laying bare
the secret wishes of their accredited Olympian impartiality;
and their services were even employed by Democratic pub-
lishers not too much enamored of the New Deal. Lukewarm
editors, unable or unwilling to attack the Democratic ma-
chine or to flout the fixed ideas of their readers, were wont
to balance such Democratic editorials as they chose to write
by one or more "columns" on the opposite side of the politi-
cal battle. This operation satisfied their covert desires while
giving the semblances of catholicity in free journalism.
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 733
Whatever the motives, the syndication of columns
throughout the country helped to stifle diversities of opinion,,
at least in the press, and tended to spread the uniformity of
conservatism even among potential dissenters, at least as far
as the influence of newspapers extended. In other words,
syndicated columns made for a greater degree of standardiza-
tion or totalitarianism in the materials editors chose to pub-
lish and in journalism as an industry ; and the uniformity
on the whole reflected a belief in the illusion of permanence.
The actual influence of the columnists, students of journal-
ism sought to estimate but all the relevant facts were not
available, and the undertaking was impossible. No instru-
ments of precise measurement were at hand. Promoters of
columnism claimed enormous circulations for their clients,
but how many newspaper buyers and subscribers read the
columnists? Only guesses could be made. Sample surveys
showed that the readers of one distinguished columnist
voted against his creed in the election of 1936. Similar sur-
veys of another gave opposite results. There was some sig-
nificance, perhaps, to the fact that with a few exceptions the
columnists were fiercely opposed to the reelection of Presi-
dent Roosevelt, and were thus in accord with the bulk of the
metropolitan press. Yet what significance ? Though specu-
lative fancy might presume to say, science could not. If there
had been no political columnists in 1936, President Roosevelt
might have polled more votes or, for aught any one really
knew, fewer votes. So slight was exact knowledge of the
influence exerted by ideas, tempers, and thought upon the
minds of the millions. About all that could be said on the
basis of precise information was that there were many
columnists, that most of them were against the New Deal,
that they made money out of their industry.
The suggestion was even broached that the conservatism
of the columnists, added to that of editors in general, helped
to intensify the criticism of newspapers that came from the
Center and the Left. Certainly this criticism heated the dis-
pute over the vague idea phrased as the "freedom of the
734 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
press." The debate became especially hot when President
Roosevelt made a drive against child labor in formulating
the newspaper code under the National Industrial Recovery
Act of 1933 and in pressing other measures directed to the
same end. Since newspapers were among the largest em-
ployers of children, especially newsboys, their earnings were
immediately affected by efforts to raise the age limits of
employment, and their reaction was generally hostile. In
resisting the elimination of child labor, several newspaper
proprietors and distributors raised the cry that the freedom
of the press was endangered. Some of their colleagues in the
industry, it is true, disagreed. "Alone among the industries,"
the New York Daily News remarked, ". . . the newspapers
insist on the retention of child labor, in the form of newsboys
and carriers working before dawn or after dark." But the
chief force of the press was thrown against President Roose-
velt's proposal. Newspaper representatives were able to put
limits on the code provisions touching child labor and even
then complained loudly against what they were pleased to
regard as attacks on their independence and freedom.
The opposition of the press to restrictions on the use of
newsboys before dawn and after dark was not appreciably
diminished by criticisms and arguments advanced by the
opponents of child labor. Editors commented on the sad
plight of boys in search of employment, and were fond of
saying that "some of our finest citizens have made their
start in life through selling newspapers." Against this op-
timism was placed the evidence of Warden Lewis E. Lawes,
of Sing Sing Prison : "Recently I had a census taken here in
Sing Sing to determine the number of inmates who had sold
newspapers in their youth. The examination showed that
of the 2,300 men, over 69% had done so. Most of our popu-
lation is drawn from the metropolitan district, and Sing Sing
receives over 70% of all felons sentenced in this state/*
Newspaper proprietors and distributors continued to insist,
however, on the right to make use of child labor and to rest
their case on " freedom of the press." A. M. Lee was speaking
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 735
by the record when he said : "Not a little of the unpopularity
of the Roosevelt regime with the daily newspaper industry
arose from its stand on child labor."
In some measure the acrimony connected with this argu-
ment sprang from popular confusion respecting the meaning
of the phrase "freedom of the press." Judging by criticisms
directed against newspapers, it seemed to be generally taken
for granted that freedom of the press meant impartiality of
the press ; and newspaper proprietors were charged with sup-
pressing and distorting news and deliberately maligning per-
sonalities and causes. That such complaints were often well
founded could not be gainsaid. George Seldes, in his Freedom
of the Press, gave chapter and verse for a damning indict-
ment. Nevertheless, in the tumult of discussion, misappre-
hension was evident, for it was not true, as critics often
intimated, that the Constitution of the United States guaran-
teed the impartiality or fairness of the press. The Constitu-
tion merely forbade Congress to make any law respecting the
freedom of the press and state constitutions left proprietors
free to print what they pleased subject to the law of libel
and slander. In short, owners of papers could handle their
industry in their own way. They had a constitutional right
to suppress and distort news and even to malign and they
exercised it to a degree that undoubtedly augmented popular
disgust with the press a disgust exhibited in the election of
1936 when the advice and appeals of the majority of the
great metropolitan newspapers were spurned by millions of
their readers.
For the popular impression that freedom of the press neces-
sarily implied impartiality of the press, newspaper publishers
were partly responsible. While asserting the generally con-
ceded right to pursue a partisan editorial policy, several pro-
prietors of distinction made pretensions to neutrality in their
news reporting. They used such phrases as "objective news
columns" or "all the news that's fit to print," to assure
readers that they did not suppress or distort the news itself,
whatever they did in their editorial columns. In other words,
736 AMERICA IN MIDPJSSAGE
they themselves seemed to assume that freedom of the press
implied impartiality of the press or at least of the news
and in so doing they called forth from readers and critics
innumerable demonstrations of their partiality.
In truth the ideal of a completely "objective" report on
any complicated series of events was an impossible ideal.
Necessarily, if not at all by intention, the slogan "all the
news that's fit to print" was repeatedly violated. At best
the maxim was merely a vague aspiration beyond the reach
of the finest resolves. Although such ideals and aspirations
were noble in conception and efforts to realize them gave dis-
tinction to a few newspapers throughout the country, no
publisher managed to scale Olympus.
The very circumstances of newsgathering the imma-
turity of many reporters, the rush, the confusion, the limita-
tion of space conspired against the attainment of "objec-
tivity" and all-around "fairness." A comparison of reports
on any single series of events, such as a strike or a mass
meeting, published by two or more papers dedicated to re-
porting in the fulness of the truth was sure to disclose the
inadequacy and the falsity of the claim to objectivity. The
amount of space assigned to the series varied. The different
positions given to the report first page or sixteenth page
represented estimates of nejvs, that is of "importance"
in other words, subjective determinations of values. The
attached headlines signified interpretation, if not an obvious
animus. Besides, it was a matter of common knowledge
among reporters that each paper had its "general policies"
and that, in selecting, condensing, and emphasizing news for
telegraphic or telephonic dispatch, these general policies
acted as a broad psychological control. It was likewise a
matter of common knowledge that in the everlasting search
for the sensational, headline writers were prone to seize upon
pungent phrases or items, tear them from their context, and
give to news reports a "turn" or "slant" which was dis-
torting or suppressive in nature, whatever the intention.
An illustration makes concrete the fallacy of the claim to
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 737
objectivity or to reporting all the news that's fit to print. On
March 6, 1938, an anti-war rally was held in New York City,
It was organized by a small group of citizens opposed to the
super-navy bill then pending a group including liberals
and a few Socialists. The meeting was addressed by several
speakers, among them General William C. Rivers and Nor-
man Thomas. The following day the meeting was reported
by The New York Times to the extent of about three-fourths
of a column. The report stated that the meeting had been
held under the auspices of a new organization of " Socialists
and other liberals." It gave extracts from the 1 address by
Senator Robert M. La Follette and then added that "among
those who spoke were Homer Martin, president of the United
Auto Workers of America; Norman Thomas, Socialist
leader; Major General W. C. Rivers., retired, and Bertram
Wolfe, writer." And the report was published on page ten,
while the rumor that President Roosevelt would soon give
the country a "lecture" on phosphates was assigned to the
front page with appropriate headlines. By what criterion of
"objectivity" was all the space given to Senator La Follette
and none to General Rivers ? Or the tenth page given to an
anti-war mass meeting and the first page to a rumored dis-
course on phosphates so useful for war purposes ?
Evidently not all the news "fit" to print was printed in this
case ; nor, indeed, did the exigencies of space permit that feat.
Given the limited space and an effort to report all the
speeches, by what process of selecting a few words from each
could a perfectly "balanced" and "objective" report of the
whole have been achieved? Only by publishing all the
speeches in full, exactly as delivered, could any paper give
an objective account of the discourses, and that was practi-
cally out of the question.
The fallacy of the "objective" theory of news reporting was
also illustrated by comparisons of the "stories" printed on
the super-navy issue by two papers of high quality. For
example, on March 7, 1938, a dissenting minority, led by
Congressman Ralph O. Brewster of the naval affairs com-
738 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
mittee in the House of Representatives, issued a report
against the huge navy bill approved by the majority of that
committee. The New York Times and The New York
Herald Tribune made first page news of the report, the
former with small headlines, the latter with big headlines,
Both published extracts from the report, but different ex-
tracts. Committed by general policy to the principle of col-
laboration with Great Britain and collective security, The
Times placed its emphasis almost entirely on the foreign
policy statements of the Brewster report and said little about
the technical objections to the navy bill advanced by the
minority- The Herald Tribune, on the other hand, a "big
navy advocate" and an opponent of President Roosevelt,
used as its extracts from the report sections almost entirely
technical, that is, designed to show that the authorizations
of battleships and other craft already on the statute books
made the new bill unnecessary for efficient defence. How
could two "objective accounts" of the same "event" be so
different, if the two great newspapers concerned were actu-
ally controlled by the iron law of objectivity and not by
publishing policies ?
The conclusions indicated by such illustrations were sus-
tained by Leo C. Rosten's survey of the Washington corre-
spondents made under the auspices of the Social Science Re-
search Council. Eighty-six per cent of those correspondents
believed that comparatively few papers gave significant
accounts of our "basic economic conflicts." Forty-eight per
cent did not believe that newspapers were equally fair to
"big business" and "labor," while forty-three per cent held
the opposite view and the remainder were undecided. Fifty-
five per cent agreed that their reports had sometimes been
played down, cut, or killed for reasons of policy followed by
their publishers. Sixty per cent of the correspondents said
that their orders were "to be objective," but that they knew
how their respective papers wanted their stories "to be
played."
While such evidence destroyed the "objective" myth, it
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 739
also indicated a wide-spread desire for "fair" reporting, and
the greatest of the newspapers did give to labor and minor-
ities more space than had been customary in the history
of the American press. Unfortunately, however, from the
standpoint of a "fair" hearing, the omission of single items
could offset all the passages that were printed, as every at-
torney acquainted with the rules and effects of evidence knew
very well.
Discussions of newspaper policies in the matter of objec-
tivity served many purposes. They made American news-
papers look like the white hope of humanity in comparison
with the enslaved and "reptile press" of totalitarian states.
At the same time critical analyses put American readers on
their guard against the extravagant pretensions of the press
to complete fairness and neutrality. Criticism induced skep-
ticism, sometimes great contempt, and acted as a check on
the excesses of the press. Even boys and girls in high schools
developed keen eyes for "propaganda" in the form of al-
leged news. Reporters who presided over the auguries of
newsgathering and reporting often laughed up their sleeves,
sometimes sardonically. The success of the Newspaper
Guild in acquiring members and the action of the Guild in
joining the Committee for Industrial Organization were
straws in the wind. Whatever proprietors, managers, and
editors might say or claim, working newspaper men and
women evidently knew that the political science of Calvin
Coolidge's age, at least, had passed. Warned against making
false pretensions and subjected to close scrutiny, proprietors
with a sense of public responsibility and private honor
seemed to redouble their efforts, year by year, to attain a
higher and higher degree of fair and balanced news reporting.
In the situation there were elements of encouragement to
citizens of a patient and tolerant spirit.
Among the magazines only a few decided tendencies could
be observed. Chief among these, perhaps, was the widening
reception given to The Readers Digest, in pocket or purse
size, by means of which men and women amid the hurry of
740 AMERICA IN MIDPASSAGE
things could get synoptic glimpses of the outstanding articles
in the whole array of magazines. More original was the
Coronet. By the range and diversity of its materials and the
size of its reading public, it demonstrated that the cultural
desert was not as large as critics of philistinism had appar-
ently imagined. Another tendency was the unabashed shift
of older magazines to the Right. The Atlantic Monthly
went over resolutely to the creed of the National Manu-
facturers Association and shortly afterward seemed to be
engaged in distributing the propaganda of oil interests
adversely affected by the policies of the Mexican govern-
ment. Its former editor crowned a long life of literary en-
deavor by making a trip to Spain and publishing a laudatory
account of General Franco's beneficent rule, for the edifica-
tion of the American public.
Most striking of all was the quest of magazine editors for
sightseers as distinguished from readers. On the principle
that what the eyes see must be interesting and thought
provoking, a new magazine brazenly called Look, filled with
gripping pictures, often ingeniously selected, was launched
and soon boasted of more than a million lookers as buyers.
The old magazine Life was taken over by the owners of
Time, filled almost entirely with pictures, and floated to
success on a tide of prosperity. Competing with Look and
Life in profusion of pictures and yet slightly, not dangerously,
radical, another newcomer, Ken, set out to jostle minor
conventions and showed some skill in the undertaking. No
longer was it necessary for buyers of magazines to be wholly
literate. Painted tabloids reached parlor tables.
Meanwhile the vogue set by the dazzle of Time, founded
in the age of normalcy, affected nearly all weeklies of large
circulation. To be brisk, curt, concise, telegraphic, and
bright became the verbal mode of the hour. To print noth-
ing that would take more than ten or fifteen minutes to read
became almost a ruling fashion* Even so complicated a
matter as the collapse of American railways could be sum-
marized and disposed of presumably in a few "crystal-
MAINSPRINGS AND RANGES OF LETTERS 741
clear" paragraphs for readers who had but ten minutes to
spare from their looking.
Yet one event in the great magazine world, apart from
the editorial achievements of the Yale Review, the Vir-
ginia Quarterly, and the Southern Review, ran clearly
counter to the degradation of the democratic dogma. That
was the establishment and success of Fortune under the
auspices of the men who published Time and Life. Issued as
a monthly, with an expensive format, to sell at ten dollars a
year, Fortune was designed directly for the rich, and
