Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression. By David Welky. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. x, 266 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-252-03299-8. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 978-0-252-07504-9.)

Abstract

David Welky's Everything Was Better in America is an overview of “mainstream” newspapers, magazines, and books of the 1930s. Welky's goal is to describe the ruling ideas and assumptions and the definitions of “Americanness” that emerge from these sources. He argues that mainstream print culture was quite conservative, embracing traditional ideas about the distinctive nature and the superiority of American life; the efficacy of individual initiative and hard work; and the sanctity of the home and traditional gender roles. These texts constructed a vision of America free of class distinctions, radical revolutionaries, and disruptive ethnic and racial “others” present in American life. Welky's primary interlocutor is Michael Denning, whose magisterial The Cultural Front (1996) argues that popular culture was remade in the 1930s by immigrant and working-class men and women with labor and social justice sympathies. “Radical authors and radical movements have dominated the historiography of the 1930s,” Welky argues, and his goal is to correct that perceived overemphasis (p. 3).