Aside from the Civil War, the Great Depression was the gravest crisis in American history. Just as in the Civil War, the United States appeared—at least at the start of the 1930s—to be falling apart. But for all the turbulence and the panic, the ultimate effects of the Great Depression were less revolutionary than reassuring.

This was undeniably an era of extraordinary political innovation, much of it expressed in the reforms enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and his administration’s attempts to cope with the problems of poverty, unemployment, and the disintegration of the American economy. It was also a time when a significant number of Americans flirted with Marxist movements and ideas, as well as with the notion that the model for a more humane society could be found in the Soviet Union. Above all, it was a decade of cultural ferment, in which American writers, artists, and intellectuals experimented with new, more socially oriented forms of literature, painting, theater, music, and mass entertainment.

Yet, paradoxically, the turmoil of the 1930s turned out to be predominantly conservative in its impact on American society. The Great Depression taught people of all social classes the value of economic security and the need to endure and survive hard times rather than to take risks with one’s life or money. Moreover, faced with the specter of totalitarian ideologies in Europe and Japan, Americans rediscovered the virtues of democracy and the essential decency of the ordinary citizen—the near-mythical “common man” who was celebrated in Roosevelt’s speeches, Frank Capra’s movies, and Norman Rockwell’s paintings. Thus, a decade marked by fundamental—even radical—social change ended for most with a reaffirmation of America’s cultural past and its traditional political ideals.

By contrast, many American intellectuals in the 1920s, disillusioned by what they considered the pointless carnage of World War I, had shown little interest in politics or social movements. Nor did they display much affection for life in the United States. Indeed, most American novelists, poets, artists, composers, and scientists continued to believe, as they had since the 19th century, that the United States was culturally inferior to Europe. So, to learn the latest modernist techniques in literature, painting, or music, or to study the most advanced theories in physics or psychoanalysis, they assumed they had to go to London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, or Copenhagen.

But the stock market crash in 1929, the factory closures and spiraling unemployment of the early 1930s, and Hitler’s takeover of the German government in 1933 forced many “expatriates” not only to return to the United States but to become politically engaged in their home country. During the worst years of the Great Depression, between 1930 and 1935, this engagement often took the form of an attraction to Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the American Communist Party.

Marxism seemed to explain persuasively the causes of capitalism’s collapse, while also providing a vision of an alternative social order. The Soviet Union, the site of the first successful Marxist-inspired revolution, appeared by the 1930s to be a concrete embodiment of what many writers called (in characteristically pragmatic American terms) the socialist “experiment.” In addition, from 1934 to 1939, the Soviet Union was the most uncompromising opponent of Nazi Germany, seeking alliances with Britain, France, and the United States and promoting a “popular front” partnership of liberals and socialists within the Western democracies to halt the spread of fascism in Europe and throughout the world. Nowhere did Moscow’s desire for a broad antifascist coalition appear more genuine than in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), when the Soviet Union was the only country besides Mexico to aid in any serious way the Spanish Republicans against the armies of Francisco Franco (supported by Hitler and Benito Mussolini).

Meanwhile, the communist parties in the United States and in western Europe gave intellectuals—as well as teachers, lawyers, architects, and other middle-class professionals—a feeling that they were no longer solitary individuals suffering from the failures of capitalism but belonged instead to a vibrant community of like-minded souls, in that they were participants in an international movement larger than themselves and that they were literally making history. For all these reasons Marxism, the Soviet Union, and the various national communist parties enjoyed a prestige and a popularity through much of the 1930s that they had never possessed in the 1920s and would never again enjoy after the Great Depression.

In 1932 the appeal of Marxism led 53 prominent American writers—including the novelists Sherwood Anderson and John Dos Passos, poet Langston Hughes, literary critics Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, philosopher Sidney Hook, and journalist Lincoln Steffens—to announce their support for William Z. Foster, the Communist Party’s candidate for president. Although Dos Passos, Wilson, and Hook later became bitter critics of the Soviet Union’s Stalinist regime, their initial enthusiasm for a socialist revolution indicated how compelling for intellectuals were the values and ideas of the left.

Perhaps no writer better reflected this new sense of social commitment than Ernest Hemingway. In 1929 Hemingway published A Farewell to Arms. The novel’s Lieutenant Henry, like Hemingway himself a volunteer American ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, decides to flee the madness of the war and make a “separate peace.” Here, desertion is seen as an act of sanity, even of heroism. Eleven years later, in 1940, Hemingway published another novel about war—in this case, the Spanish Civil War—called For Whom the Bell Tolls (the title was taken from John Donne’s poem, which is itself a hymn to human fellowship). In this novel, Robert Jordan, another Hemingwayesque volunteer, serving with a band of anti-Franco guerrillas, is badly wounded but stays behind to defend a bridge, thereby protecting his comrades as they retreat. Jordan—unlike Lieutenant Henry—has found a cause worth fighting and dying for. And Hemingway’s own strong identification with the Spanish Republicans, for whom he raised money and helped make a documentary film called The Spanish Earth (1937), was symptomatic of a political involvement that neither he nor his fictional characters would have undertaken a decade earlier.

Of course, not every Depression-era American writer was entranced by communism or the Soviet Union. The majority of intellectuals and artists, like their fellow citizens, were much more comfortable voting for Roosevelt than idolizing Joseph Stalin. Indeed, by the middle and late 1930s, a growing number of American intellectuals—many of them clustered around the literary and political journal Partisan Review—had become militantly anti-Stalinist even as they retained their sympathy for socialism, their new stance having formed as Stalin launched a series of show trials that sent his former Bolshevik colleagues to Siberian labor camps (or more frequently to their death in the cellars of prisons), as terror spread throughout the Soviet Union, and as stories began to circulate about the communists murdering Trotskyists and anarchists behind the Republican lines in Spain. Still, it was not until August 1939, when Stalin shocked the world by signing a nonaggression pact with his archenemy Hitler, that the Soviet Union and the Communist Party in the United States lost what was left of their moral authority with all but a few American intellectuals.

New forms of cultural expression

The documentary impulse

Novelists, poets, painters, and playwrights of the 1930s did not need to be Marxists to create works that dealt with the problems of the Great Depression or the dangers of fascism. Indeed, even many who were sympathetic to Marxism acted as “fellow travelers” without joining the Communist Party. Most writers and artists in the prosperous 1920s thought of themselves as members of a transatlantic avant-garde and as stylistic disciples of Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, or Igor Stravinsky. In the impoverished and desperate 1930s, they repudiated—as did Malcolm Cowley in his literary memoir of the 1920s, Exile’s Return (1934)—what they now regarded as the escapism and self-indulgence of their modernist mentors. Given the political and economic calamities at home and abroad, they sought to focus on the plight of workers, sharecroppers, African Americans, the poor, and the dispossessed. Further, they wanted to communicate their insights in a language—whether literary, visual, or musical—that their audiences could easily comprehend.

This impulse led, in a variety of genres, to an aesthetic of documentary-style realism and of social protest. For writers such as Edmund Wilson, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, and James Agee, fiction seemed inadequate in describing the disastrous effects of the Great Depression on political institutions, the natural environment, and human lives. So they joined with photographers and turned to journalism, as if their eyewitness portraits of desolate factories and American shantytowns, interviews with migrant workers and tenant farmers, and ubiquitous cameras could capture the “feel” and the essential truth of the Great Depression. Their yearning to record the pure, unadorned facts of daily existence, to listen to what Americans said about their plight, and to refrain from abstract theories or artistic embellishment was reflected in the titles of some of the books they wrote about their travels throughout the country: Wilson’s The American Jitters (1932), Anderson’s Puzzled America (1935), Nathan Asch’s The Road—In Search of America (1937), Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), and Wright’s Twelve Million Black Voices (1941).

The most lyrical, and certainly the most eccentric, of these documentaries was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), with a text by Agee and pictures by Walker Evans. In order to illuminate the suffering but also the dignity of three sharecropper families in Alabama, Evans tried to photograph his subjects as objectively and as unobtrusively as possible. Meanwhile, Agee employed a variety of journalistic and artistic techniques: naturalistic description and dialogue, an almost anthropological itemization of clothing and household furniture, erudite discussions of agricultural problems in the deep South, autobiographical ruminations, religious symbolism, and intimate expressions of love for the families and rage at their misery. Though the book’s prose was perhaps too convoluted for readers in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was the precursor of what would later be called the “New Journalism,” a highly personal style of reporting that influenced writers as diverse as George Orwell, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer.

Increasingly, Americans expected to be transported—through photographs, newsreels, or radio—to the scene of the latest calamity. The urge to convey the sights and sounds of the 1930s was also reflected in the emergence of public-opinion polling as a major (if still primitive) industry; in the “living newspaper” productions of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre Project, which dramatized the headlines of the day; in government-sponsored documentary films such as Pare Lorentz’s The River (1938) and The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936); in newsreels such as 20th Century-Fox’s Movietone News and Henry Luce’s March of Time; in the photography of Dorothea Lange and Margaret Bourke-White; and in Life magazine’s reliance on photographs even more than on traditional print journalism to tell the authentic story of what Americans were enduring at the time.

This sensation of being present, at least vicariously, at a crisis may explain why Orson Welles’s radio adaptation on October 30, 1938, of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) terrified so many listeners into believing that Martians had actually landed in New Jersey. The broadcast was done not as a play but in the style of a news story, with “announcers” breaking in for special bulletins, “reporters” delivering on-the-spot descriptions of the invasion, and “government spokesmen” (including one who sounded like FDR) issuing orders to troops and police. It was an event shared by millions of Americans, which is why it remains one of the most remembered events of the 1930s.

By the end of the decade, as Europe erupted into war, dramatic radio broadcasts took their cue from Welles’s drama, and audiences grew to depend on a new type of foreign correspondent, such as Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast from Berlin, Paris, and the rooftops of London and brought the sounds of falling bombs and air-raid sirens directly into people’s living rooms, documenting a global struggle more cataclysmic than even Welles could have imagined.