Published Winter/Spring 2009
 
Revising the Great Depression
(on Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression [New York: HarperCollins, 2007]; Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 [New York: Picador, 2006]; and Mildred Armstrong Kalish's Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression [New York: Bantam, 2007])
by Jason Arthur | ns 71-72
As the last of the survivors of the Great Depression pass, there's a question of how to remember the era, and whether policies or people ought to organize our memory. On the one hand, considering the recent global financial meltdown, it's obvious that the "bold, persistent experimentation" of New Deal policies and agencies ought to be at the front of any discussion of the Great Depression. On the other hand, considering the "people's history" ethos so beloved in the work of Studs Terkel and Robert McElvaine, it's clear that the human element will factor into any popular historical narrative.
This choice between people or policies is at play in a recent wave of publications anticipating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the New Deal. From the hastily produced and mildly exploitive The New Deal: A 75th Anniversary Celebration (2008), to the quirkily academic America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA—the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food (2008), and the encyclopedic chronology American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work (2008); recent books about the New Deal tend to celebrate the monumentalism and nationalism of New Deal works projects. Other notable titles in this vein include: Neil M. Maher's Nature's New Deal (2008); Sarah T. Phillips' This Land, This Nation (2008); Susan Quinn's Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times (2008); Jean Edwards Smith's FDR (2008); Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey's anthology of essays modeled after WPA State Guidebooks, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America (2008); and H. W. Brands' mammoth new biography of FDR, Traitor to His Class (2008).
Amid this publication wave, three titles dramatize the tension between focusing on policies or people. Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939, and Mildred Armstrong Kalish's Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression resurrect an old, unresolved debate about the "forgotten man," the populist metaphor that Roosevelt famously resurrected in campaign speeches. It's well known that Roosevelt lifted the term from William Graham Sumner, a late nineteenth-century Yale political science professor who meant the term to signify the employed, middle-class tax payer disproportionately expected to fund social policies, someone quite different from Roosevelt's "man at the bottom of the economic pyramid." An economic category turned political constituency, the forgotten man has reemerged as the undifferentiated face of a populace whose features may well determine how Americans respond to the current economic crisis.
Shlaes' "new history" is a pro-free-market revision. It claims to be a new history of New Deal policy, but in the process it redefines Sumner's forgotten man as an entrepreneur too dignified to accept federal relief. Schivelbusch's comparative history likewise focuses on systemic matters and also indirectly asserts the forgotten man as a global phenomenon in the 1930s, a collective mass of huddled laborers pushed to endorse moratoriums on democracy. Kalish's book, a memoir, obviously prefers people to policies; it claims to be the voice of a forgotten woman. (Dwight Hoover issued a similar memoir in 2007: A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression). Ironically, it is Kalish who is most likely to impact reader attitude toward post-crisis economic policy. As she describes a replenishing well of resources and know-how available to the organized family farm, Kalish convinces readers that to be forgotten is to ensure survival. As Kalish's portrait of the period wins sway, future generations will be more likely to understand the Depression as "Great" precisely because it allowed native self-reliance to thrive. In the process of presenting nativity, and not policy, as the generator of sustainability, Kalish's conception of the forgotten man happily drives another nail into the coffin of social welfare in America.
The earliest critical works about the Depression forego discussion of the forgotten man. For instance, Arthur Schlesinger's Depression trilogy—The Crisis of the Old Order (1957), The Coming of the New Deal (1958), and The Politics of Upheaval (1960)—presents New Deal programs as anti-communist tactics whose "fundamental enterprise" is identical to that of the Cold War intellectual: "re-examination and self-criticism" (vii). According to Schlesinger, whose view dominated much of pre-Reagan historiography, New Deal policies and agencies were nonradical measures of liberal economic reform. The goal of the New Deal was to check the excesses of capitalism and make it work better, not to replace it with a social welfare system. By contrast, in the 1960s, such titles as Howard Zinn's New Deal Thought (1966) and Irving Bernstein's Turbulent Years (1967) brought the forgotten man to light as a radicalizable labor force. By the 1980s, this version of the forgotten man morphed into the caricature of the docile layabout, a sullen and despairing personification of the reason why the remainder of New Deal social programs ought to be repealed.
In his introduction to Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man" (1983), McElvaine acknowledges this neoconservative move to corrupt the "sources of traditional history," and responds by presenting a collection of unsolicited testimonies of the men and women who suffered the worst of the Depression (3). Through fidelity to their rough-edged verities, McElvaine counteracts the caricature of relief recipients as miserable characters who "sat at home, rocked dispiritedly in their chairs, and blamed 'conditions'" (Schlesinger qtd in McElvaine 3). The wave of recent New Deal celebration includes a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of McElvaine's Down and Out in the Great Depression.
In this celebratory context, Shlaes' anti-New Deal history seems anomalous. However, The Forgotten Man has proven itself to be more of a readable narrative than a rightwing screed, garnering a John Updike New Yorker review. Rather than the standard chronology, Shlaes tells her story in various detailed episodes that range from Hoover's clumsy post-crash tax levies and the Soviet junket attended by future New Dealers to the Supreme Court case that brought down the National Recovery Administration and the great gift that Andrew Mellon offered to an administration that ignored him for a decade. The centerpiece of the book is the fight between Wendell Willkie (President of Commonwealth & Southern and 1938 Republican candidate for president) and David Lilienthal (Director of the Tennessee Valley Authority). Willkie emerges as what Steve Forbes refers to as the "true hero" of The Forgotten Man, a forgotten man whose free-market optimism is a "precursor to that of Ronald Reagan" (24).
Shlaes roughly follows Jim Powell's FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression (2003), arguing that Roosevelt's aggressive and unpredictable experimentation paralyzed business leaders and thus stalled private-sector growth. Shlaes enacts the neoconservative logic of citing absences as evidence. Just as the absence of post-9/11 terror attacks proves the effectiveness of the "war on terror," the absence of growth initiatives in the 1930s proves the claim that fear of Roosevelt, not fear itself, "froze the economy" (9). Shlaes actually makes a case for "fear itself," endorsing the idea that business leaders ought to fear federal policies and programs that intervene into financial markets. Most importantly, she instructs, fear the production of "groups where only individual citizens or isolated cranks had stood before" (11). Roosevelt's ability to collectivize "isolated cranks" into a populist metaphor is his most sinister legacy, a legacy that needs to be discredited before trickledown Reaganomics vanish and regulatory policies once again suspend the freedom of banks to operate shadow markets.
Though his title classifies him alongside 1930s dictators, Schivelbusch is far less critical of Roosevelt than Shlaes. For Schivelbusch, who investigates global suspensions of liberal capitalism during the 1930s, the excessive experimentation of Roosevelt's policymaking and remaking, his refusal to prescribe single answers to shifting problems, is what separates him from Hitler and Mussolini. What all these leaders have in common is not, as Shlaes would have it, a dictatorial strategy in financial matters, but a tactical preference for state capitalism over liberal capitalism. Schivelbusch even tacitly warns against Shlaes' brand of revisionism: "revisionist efforts to place the New Deal, Fascism, and National Socialism in a more differentiated historical context" will only renew the "simplistic dichotomy of liberal democracy on the one hand and repressive dictatorship on the other" (10).
In what may well be the last memoir about growing up in the Depression, Kalish helps resolve the intra-academic quibble between revisionism and comparativism. She offers a narrative inventory of the daily life of a farm family particularly well equipped to survive the Depression. The book's folksy moral—that family self-sufficiency is the only antidote to unfathomable global economic crashes—is innocuous enough. A member of the type of landed farm family set up to survive the Depression and thrive through Eisenhower's 1950s, Kalish fits both Sumner's and Roosevelt's conceptions of the forgotten man. Her family, an ultra-self-reliant bunch of Iowans, conceives of Depression-era scarcity as an opportunity to build "character." This opportunity is what makes the Depression "great," at least for the duration of Kalish's memoir. She happily admits ignorance of "vast economic forces operating on a global level" and foregoes any serious discussion of the historical era that she has no trouble adopting as part of her memoir's subtitle (15). It's this ignorance that authorizes the transformation of the Depression from a complex political-economic situation into a mentally-ownable memory of a time and place. It's this ignorance that overlays concerns about policy reform with the warm, handmade quilt of self-reliance.
The only memoir to make the New York Times "10 Best Books of 2007," the popularity of Little Heathens seemed curious a year ago. Now that such phrases as "the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression" are formulaic, it's completely natural, if not a little eerie, to think that an almanac of Depression survival would top a list of important titles. Just as Frank Capra's Poverty Row production, It Happened One Night, unexpectedly swept the 1934 Oscars, Kalish's memoir seems a perfect answer to the "fear itself" that's revisiting the global financial system. The simplicity of its inventories, including many actual recipes, exemplifies the worst of Depression-era documentary work, specifically what Alfred Kazin called the "evidence of a need to retreat into the solid comfort of descriptive facts" (381). Fetishizing facts, readers' curiosity about local reactions to global economic crises get satiated by tasty local knowledge. In other words, Kalish exploits a need to represent national trauma as a thing of the past. Her comforting inventories stand in as solutions to the economic problems that perpetuate the need to take incessant inventory. Her unexpectedly popular narrative index of farm-girl remembrances and homeopathic wisdom espouses a barefoot DIY aesthetic that quakes with nostalgia and, like many nostalgias, forgets the actual hardships that engender the need for social welfare. Little Heathens will likely outlive similar Depression-based oral histories, namely those of McElvaine and Terkel, which have none of the flourish of Kalish's moral-laden memoir. In fact, Kalish's harkening back to a self-reliant world off the grid offers an antithesis to Terkel and McElvaine's unvarnished realism, Shlaes' thick episodic history, and Schivelbusch's unaffiliated comparativism.
Schivelbusch bookishly, and somewhat predictably, universalizes the waxing and waning of self-reliance. In the case of the 1930s, the "materialistic hedonism of the Roaring Twenties" caused the "rediscovery of the nation and its embodiment, the state ... as the only real reliable source of value and the last refuge in times of desperation" (105). The "desire to recover some ground beneath one's feet" was thus a "powerful collective psychological impulse" of the 1930s, not an impulse exclusive to Iowa farm families (105). Like any "back to the land" movement, it staves off the "chill" of modernity with the "warmth" of sustainability (112). Kalish conceives of the "land" not as a terrain of contact between policy and people, but as a zone of isolation where families turn inward to cultivate their own gardens.
But one needs only to look at the New Deal's great success—the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—to see the sustained attention of New Deal policy to the local, and to see that that attention authorizes not pioneer self-reliance but a redefinition of the national body itself. The TVA introduced modern infrastructure, managed river erosion, and ended the segregation model of electrification along the drainage basin on the Tennessee River. "[T]he concrete-and-steel realization of the regulatory authority [was] at the heart of the New Deal," Schivelbusch claims (160).
But, despite all its successes, the TVA carried the very seeds of the anti-state self-reliance that Kalish's memoir cultivates. The TVA's first critic, the pro-New Deal James Agee of all people, saw this problem coming. In his 1933 profile, Agee predicts that the TVA's conception of its region's inhabitants value self-reliance way out of proportion. According to Agee, as the TVA modernized the Tennessee Valley it also iconized its locals. "Tennessee mountaineers" come to signify the type of American who is "of that incomparably pure American stock which produced such men as Lincoln and Chief Justice Marshall" (635). In optimizing the valley's natural resources, the region's human resources thus become icons of self-reliance. This iconization was, in 1933, mutually beneficial. New Dealers got their experiment and the inhabitants of the Tennessee Valley got their dignity.
Despite its high reputation, however, the conceit of self-reliance as an organizing principle for remembering the Depression is bad for everybody. It eclipses the "culture of outrage" that Kim Phillips-Fein thinks "matters most" about the 1930s. It strikes a death blow to Michael Denning's notion that Popular Front sentiments extend into the present moment. What replaces these political sentiments is a reverence, both from the Right and the Left, for what is historically distant. In our current celebratory mood, programs like the TVA seem like an economic incentive package designed to set the conditions for self-reliant Americans to thrive.
Rather than marking the beginning of a new chapter of US labor history, now the New Deal seems like a government-sponsored play of memories about native self-reliance. In the process of remembering the experience of being forgotten, the memoirist joins the revisionist in an effort to reconceive of the "forgotten man" not as a target for relief, but as the type of American that New Deal policies killed with kindness.
Works Cited
Agee, James. "Tennessee Valley Authority." Film Writing and Selected Journalism. New York: Library of America, 2005. 631-46.
Brands, H. W. A Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. New York: Doubleday, 2008.
Flynn, Kathryn, and Richard Polese. The New Deal: A 75th Anniversary Celebration. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2008.
Forbes, Steve. "Unforgettable." Forbes 180.2 (23 July 2007): 24-24.
Hoover, Dwight. A Good Day's Work: An Iowa Farm in the Great Depression. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007.
Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956.
McElvaine, Robert S. Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man." Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2008.
Maher, Neil M. Nature's New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement. New York: Oxford UP, 2007.
Phillips, Sarah T. This Land, This Nation: Conservation, Rural America, and the New Deal. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.
Phillips-Fein, Kim. "Hard Times." The Nation 20 March 2008. Accessed 30 Aug. 2008.
Quinn, Susan. Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a Cast of Thousands Made High Art Out of Desperate Times. New York: Walker, 2008.
Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. 1949. New Brunswick: Transaction P, 1998.
Smith, Jean Edwards. FDR. New York: Random House, 2007.
Taylor, Nick. American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work. New York: Bantam, 2008.
Weiland, Matt, and Sean Wilsey. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. New York: Ecco, 2008.
Willard, Pat. America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA—the Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008.
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