Radical America: The 1930s and the Politics of Storytelling

Abstract

This paper examines the invocation of similarities between today’s rising authoritarianism and economic crises and those of the 1930s to argue that a return to that period in American history is indeed politically instructive for movements that would challenge both. In the 1930s, an antifascist, antiracist, working-class identity came to the fore in the cultural productions of the Popular Front. The American stories told by Popular Front figures like Woody Guthrie, Jack Conroy, and John Dos Passos, and the group around the publication The New Masses, invoked the classic American hobo character. This character, the author argues, is an icon of the militant labor movement politics and the accompanying cultural politics that have been seminal in shaping American working-class struggle as well as the counterculture. A return to this story is ripe with political possibility if we read it against some of the intentions of the 1930s storytellers themselves.