Dancing in the dark: a cultural history of the Great Depression

Abstract

Only yesterday Great Depression seemed like a bad memory, receding into hazy distance with little relevance to our own flush times. Economists assured us that calamities that befell our grandparents could not happen again, yet recent economic meltdown has once again riveted world's attention on 1930s. Now, in this timely and long-awaited cultural history, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called of our best and most distinguished critics of American explores anxiety and hope, despair and surprising optimism of a traumatized nation. Dickstein's fascination springs from his own childhood, from a father who feared a pink slip every Friday and from his own love of more exuberant side of era: zany screwball comedies, witty musicals, and lubricious choreography of Busby Berkeley. Whether analyzing influence of film, design, literature, theater, or music, Dickstein lyrically demonstrates how arts were then so integral to fabric of American society. While any lover of American literature knows Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Dickstein also reclaims lives of other novelists whose work offers enduring insights. Nathanael West saw Los Angeles as a vast dream dump, a Sargasso Sea of tawdry longing that exposed pinched and disappointed lives of ordinary people, while Erskine Caldwell, his books Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre festooned with lurid covers, provided most graphic portrayal of rural destitution in 1930s. Dickstein also immerses us in visions of Zora Neale Hurston and Henry Roth, only later recognized for their literary masterpieces. Just as Dickstein radically transforms our understanding of Depression literature, he explodes prevailing myths that 1930s musicals and movies were merely escapist. Whether describing undertone of sadness that lurks just below surface of Cole Porter's bubbly world or stressing darker side of Capra's wildly popular films, he shows how they delivered a catharsis of pain and an evangel of hope. Dickstein suggests that tragic and comic worlds of Broadway and Hollywood preserved a radiance and energy that became a bastion against social suffering. Dancing in Dark describes how FDR's administration recognized critical role that arts could play in enabling the helpless to become hopeful, victims to become agents. Along with WPA, photography unit of FSA represented a historic partnership between government and art, and photographers, among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, created defining look of period. The symbolic end to this cultural flowering came finally with New York World's Fair of 1939-40, a collective event that presented a vision of future as a utopia of streamlined modernity and, at long last, consumer abundance. Retrieving stories of an entire generation of performers and writers, Dancing in Dark shows how a rich, panoramic culture both exposed and helped alleviate national trauma. This luminous work is a monumental study of one of America's most remarkable artistic periods.