The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s by Matthew M. Lambert

Abstract

Rachel Carson’s 1962 nonfiction bestseller Silent Spring, an extended discussion of the harmful effects of synthetic chemical insecticides on human and nonhuman animals, has traditionally been credited with launching the environmentalist movement. In Green Depression, Matthew Lambert complicates that conventional wisdom. Drawing on the work of historians who identify the roots of the environmentalist movement in Americans’ response to the Dust Bowl, Lambert argues that writers of the 1930s and 1940s anticipated twentieth- and twenty-first-century environmentalism and contributed to its early development. He elaborates on the cultural work that these interwar American writers performed:First, they recognized, as never before, the apocalyptic effect that humans could have on the environment, particularly in response to the Dust Bowl and the period’s other human-made environmental disasters. Next, they depicted the ecological and cultural value of nonhuman animal “predators” and “pests.” . . . And third, many authors laid the groundwork for what we now refer to as “environmental justice” by directly connecting environmental exploitation with racial, economic, and gender inequality. (4–5)Lambert’s deceptively slim volume belies its impressively wide range, which encompasses not only literary novels and short fiction but also Hollywood films, documentaries, and midcentury science fiction. Although in his opening chapter he analyzes works by canonical white, male modernists such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, he devotes more assiduous attention to works by authors from traditionally underrepresented populations, including Native Americans, the working class, and African Americans. Lambert defines the scope of his monograph more broadly than its title might suggest: “Because of the Depression’s tremendous inf luence on responses to environmental issues during and after the 1930s, I use ‘depression-era’ as a frame for considering literature from roughly 1930 to 1950” (6). Lambert contends that the writers of the 1930s and 1940s, all too acquainted with the devastation and human suffering caused by the Dust Bowl, widespread flooding, and nuclear fallout, readily acknowledged the ways in which humans could damage the environment. They questioned the then common dismissal (even by many conservationists) of certain animals as unwanted predators or vicious vermin, arguing instead for their value to the overall ecosystem and to human communities. These writers also acknowledged what Rob Nixon (2011) has called the “slow violence” that capitalism wreaks on the environment, especially in areas inhabited by the underrepresented populations already mentioned.In his first chapter, “The Last Frontier,” Lambert opens with a discussion of wilderness in Walt Disney’s animated 1942 feature film Bambi, arguing that the movie introduced its young audience to the concept that nonhuman animals are inherently valuable in their own right and not just through their usefulness to humans. Its strong antihunting bias angered sportsmen’s organizations, which argued that it misrepresented good hunting ethics. Lambert acknowledges that “its pungent if often exaggerated critique of human hunters certainly played a part in creating forms of identification and empathy with forest animals” (24). The structure of Bambi’s family echoed that of the typical middle-class family, naturalizing those social structures:The film combines realistic anatomical detail with familial, middle-class values to illustrate the innate value of forest animals. But in projecting normative values onto select animals, Bambi contributes as much to segregating nonhuman animal species as protecting them. (25)According to Lambert, Bambi’s focus on “cute” animals omitted and thus “othered” predators and other animals that could not as easily be depicted as cute, relegating them to an unacceptable caste status. By neglecting to include predators, Disney emphasized the dangers caused by human hunters and the fire (presumably caused by humans, either accidentally or deliberately) that drives the animals out of the forest.Lambert launches his argument with a discussion of hunting in the writings of Aldo Leopold, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, each of whom presents predators in novel ways:Instead of viewing wilderness as something people should develop for economic interests or leave unspoiled by human presence, these authors saw it as a space through which humans could come to identify with other animals, particularly species that are feared or hated due to their perceived transgressions against human physical safety and economic interests. (41)For example, in “Thinking Like a Mountain” (1949), after Leopold encounters a dying wolf he had shot and experiences a moment of unexpected empathy, he begins to question federal programs that targeted animals that preyed on livestock. Along similar lines, Faulkner implies that the death of Old Ben, the bear in Go Down, Moses (1942), marks the destruction of the last American wilderness. The protagonist, Ike McCaslin, foresees the harmful effects of such destruction on the human and nonhuman environment but, Lambert notes, McCaslin is unable to persuade those around him to recognize their own hubris. In Green Hills of Africa (1935), Hemingway presents a similar conceptual shift, from hunting for animals as trophies to acknowledging the damage that economic exploitation of Africa has caused to both the nonhuman environment and to human communities in that environment. Lambert describes this conceptual shift as laying the groundwork for environmentalism.He closes this chapter with an extended discussion of D’Arcy McNickle’s semiautobiographical 1936 novel The Surrounded. Well regarded by critics, the little-known novel sold modestly and went out of print quickly; it was reprinted by the University of New Mexico Press in 1978. Lambert persuasively argues that The Surrounded dramatizes the failure of conservationists to recognize the rights of Indigenous peoples. McNickle dissects the American mythos of the frontier from a Native American perspective in an effort to recover Native American power and agency. The novel’s protagonist, Archilde, is (like its author) half white and half Salish, from the Flathead Reservation in western Montana. A tense confrontation with a racist white game warden escalates quickly and results in the game warden’s murder at the hands of Archilde’s mother. As Salish Indians, the family should have had an exemption from game laws, so the warden’s rash actions are completely unjustified. In the novel’s conclusion, Archilde is accused of the murder, captured, and thrown into prison. McNickle traces the harmful effects that frontier policies and practices had on the Native communities and the environment. As Lambert notes,McNickle appropriates Frederick Jackson Turner’s “palimpsest,” a metaphor the historian uses to describe the layers of changes to frontier lands in the wake of western expansion. For McNickle, using the palimpsest helps uncover the social, cultural, and environmental scars that frontier practices and policies have left on indigenous groups and lands in the West. (14–15)All of the literary works discussed in this chapter depict wilderness as a space in which humans could transcend seeing the landscape only in terms of its economic value or its usefulness as a recreational space and instead develop and strengthen relationships between themselves and the nonhuman life forms in their environment.Shifting his attention from American wilderness to rural environments, Lambert analyzes the “plantation pastoralism” (62) of southern writers and Hollywood filmmakers, arguing that their work mythologizes the connection between southerners and their land. Although agrarian pastoralism might have initially seemed attractive to unemployed workers turning away from shuttered urban factories during the Depression, this idealization of rural southern communities—a form of American pastoralism traditionally associated with Thomas Jefferson—elided first the slavery and later the exploitative sharecropping on which it depended economically and masked the environmental damage—including disastrous soil erosion, widespread f looding, and wildlife depletion—wrought by unsustainable Depression-era farming and hunting practices. Acknowledging that his analysis parallels Christopher Rieger’s in Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern Literature (2012), Lambert analyzes the false nostalgia of Southern apologists in works such as John Crowe Ransom’s essay “Reconstructed but Unregenerate” (1930) and William Alexander Percy’s 1941 autobiography Lanterns on the Levee. Percy’s work draws on the trope of the South as a contentious landscape that must be subdued by brute force—an attitude that bleeds over into Percy’s view of African American workers. For example, Lambert points out, the failure of the levees after the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 created a crisis that reinforced the trope—common among southern apologists, according to Lambert—that violence or the threat of violence was necessary to maintain racial hierarchies and stave off chaos: “This violence is justified through social and cultural practices that dehumanize African Americans by depicting them as childlike beasts of burden and/or violent predators” (68). Percy writes of southern African Americans in blatantly racist terms that Lambert quotes: “Apparently there is something peculiarly Negroid in the Negro’s attitude toward, and aptitude for, crimes of violence. He seems to have resisted, except on the surface, ethics and to have rejected our standards” (quoted in Lambert 69). Filmmakers like William Wyler and Victor Fleming present similarly racist views in films set in the Civil War era, such as Wyler’s Jezebel (1938) and Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939).By contrast, Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel Tobacco Road and Richard Wright’s 1938 book Uncle Tom’s Children dismantle the garden myth of plantation pastoralism and offer a more realistic depiction of the brutal hardships and hazards of Southern sharecropping. In Caldwell’s novel, Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester cannot make a living because his farmland has been exhausted by his reliance on a monoculture—cotton—and unsustainable agricultural practices passed down in the family. Wright’s collection of short stories depicts the racial violence inherent in the sharecropping system and calls attention to the environmental inequities of the American South during the Jim Crow era. White terrorism denies African Americans access to resources and compels them to “[bear] the brunt of environmental disasters” while keeping them economically trapped in an exploitative economic system little better than slavery (87). Finally, Lambert observes that in her 1935 collection of folklore Mules and Men Zora Neale Hurston explores the ways African Americans understand nonhuman animals. The folktales she examines portray feared animals like alligators and snakes sympathetically and defend the importance of pests like boll weevils and mosquitoes (and by extension, devalued humans such as African Americans) in the Southern environment. Lambert asserts that “Hurston’s depictions of black folklore model more inclusive and sustainable social and environmental forms of rural life” (61).In his third chapter, “The Postpastoral City,” Lambert turns his attention from wilderness and rural settings to urban environments: the South Side of Chicago in James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan (1932), Northwest Chicago in Nelson Algren’s Never Come Morning (1932), and the Lower East Side of New York in Mike Gold’s Jews without Money (1930). Lambert contends that these authors use the urban pastoral mode in these novels to anticipate the importance of urban environments to environmentalist thought, help readers understand the interconnections between pollution and human inequality, and dramatize the interactions of city dwellers (and sometimes their cross-species identification) with animals widely regarded as vermin. Lambert draws on Terry Gifford’s (1999) concept of the “postpastoral” to discuss “ways in which discourses celebrating human mastery over nature have often been used to support the subjugation of different genders or races thought naturally inferior” (100). Farrell, Algren, and Gold all examine the very restricted access that children of the working class have to green space. In Farrell’s novel, Studs Lonigan’s experiences in urban parks contrast with the “tough, masculine street ethos” of his everyday life, offering him the momentary possibility of a more peaceful, connected existence (Lambert 2020: 103). Algren’s characters dismiss parks as spaces suitable only for women and children but demonstrate their lack of interconnectedness through crime and violence. Gold depicts urban children’s love for vacant lots and suggests that their protectiveness of these modest green spaces indicates their potential to envision alternate possibilities for themselves. In Tillie Olsen’s unfinished novel, urban children in the meat-packing district of Omaha play at the city dump despite its noxious odor and potential contamination. Lambert writes that, for Olsen, the dump demonstrates that capitalism necessarily produces waste products that are collected and abandoned in low-income neighborhoods, where their toxicity causes harm to working-class families. Finally, Lambert analyzes the rats in Richard Wright’s 1940 novel Native Son: “In Wright’s novel, rats not only offer new ways of identifying with nonhuman animals often considered dangerous pests, they also represent symbols of resistance and mobility and are used to critique attitudes toward human groups considered inhuman” (117). In all of these works of fiction, according to Lambert, the authors represent social and environmental crises of the city in order to gesture toward alternative possibilities for a more egalitarian society and for more ecologically sound forms of human interaction with nonhuman nature.In the fourth and final chapter, “Futuramas and Atom Bombs,” which focuses on interwar concepts of the future, Lambert contends that writers between World War I and the Korean War examine the threat of harm to the human body and to the surrounding natural world posed by new forms of technology. He identifies the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York—sited at the Corona Ash Dump, memorialized by F. Scott Fitzgerald as the Valley of Ashes in The Great Gatsby (1925)—as an example of the “technological sublime” (131), which he defines as the unqualified veneration of the wonders of science and technology. At the Fair, General Motors’ exhibit Futurama, which simulated air travel for its visitors, celebrated the technological city of the future. By contrast, documentary filmmakers and science fiction writers of roughly the same period articulated concerns about the harmful effects of technology that anticipated those popularized in 1962 in Carson’s Silent Spring. For example, the 1939 film The City, produced by the American Institute of Planners and shown at the Fair, highlights the industrial city’s ugliness, alienation, and misery and contrasts it with the Greenbelt city, a cooperative community constructed in Maryland in the 1930s. Surrounded by a “belt” of green space, the city offers a new vision of the urban environment—albeit one that relegates women to housework and excludes people of color altogether. Thus the documentary perpetuates inequity even while it questions the technological sublime celebrated in the World’s Fair.Also in the same chapter, Lambert discusses the uses of the grotesque in science fiction of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s: “These texts often critique the technological sublime by identifying the grotesque consequences of uncritical forms of scientific and technological progress” (145). For example, in the interconnected short stories in his 1950 collection The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury connects the ideology of the American frontier to the disastrous effects of nuclear warfare on human lives and the nonhuman environment. The epidemic of chicken pox that wipes out the Martians in “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” evokes the European diseases, such as smallpox, that killed so many Native Americans. Like the Europeans in what later became the United States, the imperialistic human explorers blatantly disrespect Indigenous culture and focus greedily on what they can extract from the planet. Lambert also draws on Dianne Newell and Victoria Lamont’s Judith Merril: A Critical Study (2012) to analyze the science fiction of a less well-known writer: “If Bradbury used the genre to critique imperialist understandings of technology and progress, Judith Merril used the genre to challenge gender norms underlying dominant attitudes concerning technology, social hierarchy, and the environment” (152). In particular, Lambert cites the father’s irrational fear of his own mutant child in Merril’s disturbing 1948 short story “That Only a Mother.” The child, Henrietta, is born without arms or legs as a result of her father’s exposure to nuclear radiation at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her deformity renders him hysterical while the mother remains calm, an inversion of stereotypical gender norms, and Henrietta’s very existence threatens the status quo. Lambert suggests that the father might kill his daughter in an effort to contain the threat her misshapen body poses to his sense of himself and his ideas about the rightful order of things—a horrific act that would perpetuate a culture that has created her deformity in the first place. Merril’s 1950 novel Shadow on the Hearth depicts a conventional wife and mother trying to protect her family in the aftermath of a nuclear war; like the short story already discussed, it suggests that men’s need to dominate and control has led to a disaster that destroys human lives and the nonhuman environment. Finally, Lambert shows how George S. Schuyler’s novel Black Empire, first serialized from 1936 to 1938, interrogates the use of technology to subjugate people of color while also suggesting that technology could be deployed in ways that protect the planet and foster human equality. As Lambert notes, “Schuyler pointed to the role of science and technology in conquering people of African descent, while at the same time envisioning alternative forms of technology that we would today consider to be renewable” (166).In a brief conclusion, Lambert poses questions for other researchers about representations of the environment in the ecoliterature of Latinx and Asian American authors and in other art forms of the interwar period, including painting, photography, and music. He also cites compelling evidence from twenty-first-century filmmakers who have established connections between the 1930s and 1940s and present-day environmental concerns, in such diverse works as the 2008 animated film Wall-E, Ken Burns’s 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl, and the 2014 science fiction feature film Interstellar: “Each of these works draws on the Dust Bowl’s legacy in understanding climate change and other contemporary environmental issues” (171). Lambert cites as examples the interviews from Ken Burns’s documentary used in Interstellar and the dust storms that repeatedly force the title character of Wall-E to find shelter.Impressively well researched, Green Depression is admirably inclusive. True, women authors are perhaps underrepresented in Lambert’s book, but they are also underrepresented among writers of the interwar period more broadly, particularly in several of the subgenres Lambert examines (hunting fiction, Hollywood films, urban Bildungsromane, and science fiction). The range of cultural artifacts considered in his book offers entry points for scholars interested in a wide range of works of Depression-era literature and film. He usefully pushes his readers to examine these various subgenres from an ecocritical perspective even when they depict urban or futuristic environments not commonly viewed through an ecocritical lens. He compels his readers to recognize the proto-environmentalist thinking inherent in works created well before the date usually associated with the origin of the American environmentalist movement. Green Depression’s strong emphasis on environmental justice makes this book a particularly welcome addition to the still relatively modest (but rapidly growing) body of work on twentieth-century American literature and the environment.