The Roaring 20’s and the

     Road  To Depression

To set up the 1920’s, one only has to look as far as the debate over the Treaty of Versailles and the election campaign of 1920.  With WW1 being a war that significantly affected the fabric of American life, the way in which we left the war would have significant ramifications both at home and abroad.  We would indeed be making decisions that would affect us for years to come.

Leave us alone!!!

When the U.S. entered WW1, President Woodrow Wilson presented Congress with

his basis for American involvement and the peace we hoped for afterwards.  The 14 Points was essentially a document that furthered the American crusade for “open doors” around the world, asking for things such as freedom of the seas and the end of secret treaties. The points became the basis for the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that was signed to end the war.  The most important part of both the 14 Points and the Treaty of Versailles, according to Wilson, was the League of Nations.  Conservative Republicans balked at membership in the League, concerned with the possibility of being drawn into world disputes (isolationist) and the treaty failed.

Return to normalcy…

In 1920, Warren G. Harding won the presidency and promised a “return to normalcy” for the American people.   One should have assumed this meant a return to life before the war, however, it foreshadowed a movement back to the “laissez-faire” politics of

the industrial era, where government kept out of the business of big business.  All three Republican presidents in the 20’s would follow this policy (Harding- 1920,Coolidge– 1924, Hoover – 1928) and the U.S. would enter the 2^nd Industrial Revolution.  The reason why this is significant is that there was a reason for the Progressive Era.  The U.S. economy needed reform, and the 20’s took us away from those necessary reforms.  This would spell disaster for the future.  

Another revolution?

The 2^nd Industrial Revolution was jump-started by Henry Ford when he opened his Model T plant in 1919 at River Rouge, Michigan.  By using the assembly line, he was able to produce cars much more efficiently and at lower costs.  The negative side of the assembly line was the loss of craftsmanship and the robot-like effect it had on workers.  Electricity became the main power source in all factories, and 2/3 of American families had it by 1930.  This led to homes being equipped with washing machines, refrigerators and ranges. Installment buying allowed people to spend above their means and led to a consumer goods revolution. With consumers hungry for products, marketing and advertising brought chain stores like Sears, Marshall Fields and Montgomery Ward to the forefront of the American economy.  Finance capitalism and the stock market allowed corporations to grow larger and larger.  Mergers continued throughout the era.  By 1930, the 200 largest corporations in the country owned half of the U.S. corporate wealth.

In class journal:  How does this painting, called American Landscape, set the tone of the time?

Buy more stuff!

The consumer goods explosion disguised weak industries such as railroads, coal, textiles mills (replaced by rayon) and farmers (cut in exports due to end of war and isolation). 

Workers were not growing as job growth was in low paying service industries, and organized labor was weakened by

·        internal struggles (skilled vs. non-skilled),

·        association with radical causes (anarchism ; Red Scare),

·        the use of injunctions and the abundance black workers in north due to migration during war. 

Saturation of the market for consumer goods led to speculation in risky ventures like the stock market, a prescription for trouble.

Cut that hair short and get dancing!

A new urban culture developed with the growth of cities and skyscrapers.  A negative was the loss of old town community ties of church, home and school and the loneliness of the cities became a common theme. 

In class journal:  How does this painting by Charles Burchfield show the transition/fight between the new city life and old town values?

The situation for women changed with the passage of the 19^th amendment in 1920 (suffrage).  However, the number of women in workforce showed only a slow gain and it was mostly in low paying jobs (secretaries, etc).  Alice Paul (National Women’s Party) introduced in the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923, but it failed.  Instead of social progress, women concentrated on individual self-expression.  The “flapper” cut her hair short, raised her skirt above the knee and set out to shock her elders,  dancing the Charleston, smoking cigarettes and drinking in public.  A sense of a prolonged adolescence developed, with young people freed from making a living right away and drinking, engaging in casual sex, and a search for excitement  (hallmarks of upper-class youth) and rebellion from parental values.

Are you going to the game!

Spectators activities became very popular with sports heroes

such as

·        Babe Ruth and Red Grange,

·        and the feats of Charles Lindbergh (Spirit of St. Louis-flight across the Atlantic).

Radio became very popular with KDKA in Pittsburgh and NBC (1929 – Amos n Andy show). 

Movies were popular, both the silent films of Charlie Chaplin and the 1^st talkie (Jazz Singer –1929).

I just can’t find myself!!  (The Lost Generation)

Literature was greatest cultural advance of the 20’s.  Known as the “disillusioned” they commented on industrial society and flawed promise of America. All cried out against conformity, materialism and mass production, however few engaged in social reform (such as the muckrakers), but retreated into individualism, escaping into their art.   Some even fled to Europe.  Novelists included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby – 1925 – the emptiness and lack of human concern in American youth) and Sinclair Lewis  (Babbitt – 1922 – made fun at the over commercialism of the New era). 

selection from Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis

Chapter I

THE TOWERS of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. They were neither citadels nor churches, but frankly and beautifully office-buildings.

The mist took pity on the fretted structures of earlier generations: the Post Office with its shingle-tortured mansard, the red brick minarets of hulking old houses, factories with stingy and sooted windows, wooden tenements colored like mud. The city was full of such grotesqueries, but the clean towers were thrusting them from the business center, and on the farther hills were shining new houses, homes—they seemed—for laughter and tranquillity.

In one of the skyscrapers the wires of the Associated Press were closing down. The telegraph operators wearily raised their celluloid eye-shades after a night of talking with Paris and Peking. Through the building crawled the scrubwomen, yawning, their old shoes slapping. The dawn mist spun away. Cues of men with lunch-boxes clumped toward the immensity of new factories, sheets of glass and hollow tile, glittering shops where five thousand men worked beneath one roof, pouring out the honest wares that would be sold up the Euphrates and across the veldt. The whistles rolled out in greeting a chorus cheerful as the April dawn; the song of labor in a city built—it seemed—for giants.

There was nothing of the giant in the aspect of the man who was beginning to awaken on the sleeping-porch of a Dutch Colonial house in that residential district of Zenith known as Floral Heights.  His name was George F. Babbitt. He was forty-six years old now, in April, 1920, and he made nothing in particular, neither butter nor shoes nor poetry, but he was nimble in the calling of selling houses for more than people could afford to pay

Babbitt moaned; turned over; struggled back toward his dream. He could see only her face now, beyond misty waters. The furnace-man slammed the basement door. A dog barked in the next yard. As Babbitt sank blissfully into a dim warm tide, the paper-carrier went by whistling, and the rolled-up Advocate thumped the front door. Babbitt roused, his stomach constricted with alarm. As he relaxed, he was pierced by the familiar and irritating rattle of some one cranking a Ford: snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah, snap-ah-ah. Himself a pious motorist, Babbitt cranked with the unseen driver, with him waited through taut hours for the roar of the starting engine, with him agonized as the roar ceased and again began the infernal patient snap-ah-ah—a round, flat sound, a shivering cold-morning sound, a sound infuriating and inescapable. Not till the rising voice of the motor told him that the Ford was moving was he released from the panting tension. He glanced once at his favorite tree, elm twigs against the gold patina of sky, and fumbled for sleep as for a drug. He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.

It was the best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks, with all modern attachments, including cathedral chime, intermittent alarm, and a phosphorescent dial. Babbitt was proud of being awakened by such a rich device. Socially it was almost as creditable as buying expensive cord tires

Though the house was not large it had, like all houses on Floral Heights, an altogether royal bathroom of porcelain and glazed tile and metal sleek as silver. The towel-rack was a rod of clear glass set in nickel. The tub was long enough for a Prussian Guard, and above the set bowl was a sensational exhibit of tooth-brush holder, shaving-brush holder, soap-dish, sponge-dish, and medicine-cabinet, so glittering and so ingenious that they resembled an electrical instrument-board. But the Babbitt whose god was Modern Appliances was not pleased. The air of the bathroom was thick with the smell of a heathen toothpaste. “Verona been at it again! ’Stead of sticking to Lilidol, like I’ve re-peat-ed-ly asked her, she’s gone and gotten some confounded stinkum stuff that makes you sick!”

He hunted through the medicine-cabinet for a packet of new razor-blades (reflecting, as invariably, “Be cheaper to buy one of these dinguses and strop your own blades,”) and when he discovered the packet, behind the round box of bicarbonate of soda, he thought ill of his wife for putting it there and very well of himself for not saying “Damn.” But he did say it, immediately afterward, when with wet and soap-slippery fingers he tried to remove the horrible little envelope and crisp clinging oiled paper from the new blade.

Then there was the problem, oft-pondered, never solved, of what to do with the old blade, which might imperil the fingers of his young. As usual, he tossed it on top of the medicine-cabinet, with a mental note that some day he must remove the fifty or sixty other blades that were also temporarily, piled up there. He finished his shaving in a growing testiness increased by his spinning headache and by the emptiness in his stomach. When he was done, his round face smooth and streamy and his eyes stinging from soapy water, he reached for a towel. The family towels were wet, wet and clammy and vile, all of them wet, he found, as he blindly snatched them—his own face-towel, his wife’s, Verona’s, Ted’s, Tinka’s, and the lone bath-towel with the huge welt of initial. Then George F. Babbitt did a dismaying thing. He wiped his face on the guest-towel! It was a pansy-embroidered trifle which always hung there to indicate that the Babbitts were in the best Floral Heights society. No one had ever used it. No guest had ever dared to. Guests secretively took a corner of the nearest regular towel.

Now here is a home!

When W.E.B duBois brought the Crisis newspaper and NAACP offices to New

York, the Harlem Renaissaince was born.  New York became the mecca for black poets and authors such as James Weldon Johnson , Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes.

Not so fast!

          A rural counterattack against the evils in the cities occurred, spurred on by a WASP tradition and a nationalistic spirit. 

·        The Red Scare was brought on by fear of the 1917 Russian revolution, 1919 strikes in Seattle, Boston Police, iron and steel industries and a  series of bombings around country.   The Palmer Raids  (attorney general ) saw the rounding up of radicals and suspected communists to be deported.  

·        The horrible result of this scare was the trial of  Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920 on robbery and murder charges.  This became the great liberal cause of the day. Called by the judge “those anarchist bastards” they were electrified in 1927, even though the evidence against them was very sparse. 

·        Prohibition began with the passage of the 18^th Amendment.   It was ignored by the wealthy (fashionable to drink at speakeasies),  resented by immigrants (Germans and Irish), ignored by police and led to bootlegging and organized

                              crime (Al Capone). 

·        The  founding of modern day KKK occurred in 1915  at Stone Mountain Georgia as both an anti – black and anti-immigrant group.  With 5 million members by 1925, it disappeared by end of era as it offended the nations conscience.

·        Restrictions were placed on immigration, with the passage of the 1921 Emergency Immigration Act (3% of nationals quota) and the 1924  National Origins Quota Act (set quotas that favored north and western Europeans, limited southeastern Europeans greatly, and banned Asians)  Unlike Red Scare and KKK, this lasted through to 1965 as it was okayed  by big business because cheap immigrant labor was replaced by machines. Religious leaders such as Madison Grant stated that the Anglo-Saxon stock was about to be overrun by lesser breeds with inferior genes.

·        The 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Ohio brought Fundamentalism into the national limelight as William Jennings Bryan (Creationism) and Clarence Darrow (Evolution) led the fight between religion and science. 

In class journal:  How does this Grant Wood painting, American Gothic, show us the attitude of the rural counterattack?

In what ways was the Charlie Chaplin movie, Modern Times, part of the rural counterattack?

Homework Assignment #32                                                       The Roaring 20’s

1.  Discuss the main part of the Treaty of Versailles that was in dispute in 1919.

2.  Discuss the impact of the “return to normalcy” in 1920.

3.  Discuss the main aspects of the 2^nd Industrial Revolution.

              a.

              b.

              c.

              d.

4.   Discuss the weaknesses in the economy that were disguised by the consumer goods explosion.

              a.

              b.

              c.

              d.

5.  Discuss the many aspects of the new urban culture.

              a.

              b.

              c.

              d.

6.  Discuss the rise of spectator activities.

7.  Discuss the work of the “disillusioned”.

8.  Discuss the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance.

9. Discuss the aspects of the Rural counterattack.

              a.

              b.

              c.

              d.

              e.

So you want to know what caused the Great Depression?

How It Feels to Be Colored Me – Zore Neale Hurston

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat to me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually the automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county-- everybody's Zora.

But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that i had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown-- warranted not to rub nor run.

But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!"; and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

Jacob Lawrence – Migrations Series

In class journal:  Differ between the tone of these three Jacob Lawrence paintings.

How It Feels to Be Colored Me – Zore Neale Hurston  (continued)

For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It's beyond me.

But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knifeblade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two, still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?

Zora Neale Hurston (from The World Tomorrow, 1928.]

In class journal – Underline references from the above passages that are consistent with the music you are listening to.  How is it consistent with this painting, Swing Landscape, by Stuart Davis?

“Happy Days Are Here Again”

In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President, promising the American people a  "New Deal."   Declaring that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, he immediately embarked on an aggressive legislative campaign over the first 100 Days.  He declared a "Bank Holiday," closing all of the countries banks. Only the ones that were declared solvent would be reopened.  FDR gave weekly "Fireside  Chats", radio explanations of policy, calming jittery nerves.

“Pump Priming”

The key concept in government involvement was to put money in to the economy to bolster the purchasing power of the American consumer.   If more people were buying, businesses would have to make more products and need to employ more workers, etc.   To get this cycle started, the government would have to deficit spend.

Three R’s – Relief, Recovery, Reform

The New Deal put the government in a position to become an active participant in

the American economy.  Wherever the government participates it will be the largest

participant and therefore exert a tremendous amount of control over the economy.

In it's new role it would:

a.  Provide direct relief to those who were temporarily or permanently unable to care for

     themselves.

·        Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA-1933) -provide aid for the unemployed

·        Social Security Act (1935)- provided pensions for retired workers, aid for those with disabilities, children without parents and unemployment.

b.  Provide regulation for the sectors of the economy that had been

     affected by bad decision-making.

·        National Recovery Administration (NRA-1933)- set codes of fair competition, including minimum wage and prices.  Declared unconstitutional.

·        Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC-1933)- protected bank deposits

·        Security and Exchange Commission (SEC-1934)- supervised the stock market

·        National Labor Relations Act (NLRB-1935)- called the Wagner Act, defined

unfair labor practices and set up a board to settle labor disputes.

·        Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA-1938) – established a minimum wage, maximum hours in workweek, protected children in the workplace.

c.   Become an employer, the largest employer in the country.

·        Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC-1933) – provided jobs, shelter and food for young men on conservations projects such as national parks.

·        Works Progress Administration (WPA-1935)- criticized for creating jobs for the sake of a job (“made work” and “We Poke Along” – boondoggling)

d.  Become a consumer, particularly through large-scale public

     works projects.

·        Public Works Administration (PWA-1933)- large government projects such as dams and bridges, libraries, etc. which hired skilled and unskilled workers.

·        War?

e.  Help subsidize (assist) industries that were doing poorly.

·        Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA-1933)- helped regulate crop production, particularly by discouraging overproduction. Declared unconstitutional.

·        Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA-1933)- provided electricity for the poor in the Tennessee Valley through the building of dams.  Still owned by the federal government today.

Don’t forget the workers!

American labor was one of the key benefactors of the New Deal, due to collective bargaining provision in the Wagner Act.   John L. Lewis, the head of the United Mine Workers, formed the Committee on Industrial Organization (CIO) to organize the unskilled workers who had previously been excluded by the AF of L.  Between 1936 and 1941, he had achieved a series of victories, unionizing many of the nations steel and auto industries. 

The sit down strike was used for the first time to obtain recognition from General Motors in 1936.  Ford was the last car company to recognize the United Auto Workers (UAW) in 1941, after years of violent resistance with strikebreakers and thugs. 

Smaller steel companies, like Republic Steel in Chicago, resisted much longer than the larger ones like U.S. Steel.

       Philip Evergood – An American Tragedy

They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear
I was always there right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?

Once I built a railroad, I made it run
Made it race against time
Once I built a railroad, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once I built a tower up to the sun
Brick and rivet and lime
Once I built a tower, now it's done
Brother, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, gee we looked swell
Full of that Yankee-Doodly-dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through Hell
And I was the kid with the drum

Say, don't you remember, they called me "Al"
It was "Al" all the time
Why don't you remember, I'm your pal
Say buddy, can you spare a dime?

Once in khaki suits, ah gee we looked swell
Full of that Yankee-Doodly-dum
Half a million boots went sloggin' through Hell
And I was the kid with the drum

Oh, say, don't you remember, they called me "Al"
It was "Al" all the time

Say, don't you remember, I'm your pal
Buddy, can you spare a dime?

Dorothea Lange – Migrant Mother

Homework Assignment #33                                                               

1.  Discuss the causes of the Great Depression.

          a.

          b.

          c.

          d.

          e.

          f.

2.  What was the 100 Days?

3.  Discuss the role the Fireside Chats played.

4.  Discuss the CIO and John L. Lewis.

5.  Discuss the following agencies and programs.

          a.  AAA

          b.  NRA

          c. CCC

          d. FDIC

          e. PWA       

          f.  TVA

          g. SEC

          h. WPA

          i.  Fair Labor Standards Act.

7.   Discuss the four provisions of the Social Security Act.

          a.

          b.

          c.

          d.

The Historical Significance of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men provides considerable insight into the historic events of 1930s America through its examination of Southern sharecroppers. In addition to illuminating concrete historical phenomena, the work illuminates fundamental attitude changes. Notably, James Agee and Walker Evans' method of handling their subject matter shows both a rejection of Victorian and Progressive values, and the adoption of a fundamentally different approach to addressing social issues. Unlike many who wrote before them, Agee and Evans did not criticize and berate the tenants' lifestyles. Rather, they respected the dignity of the families they profiled while sensitively presenting the hardships each family faced. Likewise, the author and photographer did not present the subject matter in the context of a perfectly ordered world that could be easily understood. Instead, Agee and Evans present a confusing world where judgments about dignity and the way humans should live are not easily made.

The manner in which Let Us Now Praise Famous Men reflects attitude changes is made lucid by comparing it with earlier assessments of social issues. One work that can be compared to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives. Though the latter work was published fifty years before the former, the pieces share some important qualities. For example, both were written by journalists about the poor. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and How the Other Half Lives address issues such as housing, work, and education while chronicling the lives of poor people. Thus, the works are similar in their basic objectives and formats.

Despite these structural similarities the two works are strikingly different in their manner of presentation. These differences in style serve as a reflection of the historical changes that occurred between 1890 and 1940. Essentially, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men issue a firm rejection of the Victorian notion of the ordered world. The 1940 work embraces a notion of the world as complex and confusing. To understand how Let Us Now Praise Famous Men asserts a modern world view, it is necessary to understand the ways in which How the Other Half Lives asserts Victorian values. First, the contemporary reader will notice the condescending attitude of Riis. Throughout the work, Riis passes judgment on the impoverished immigrants he examines. Riis labels virtually every immigrant group he encounters. For example, he describes Chinese as "neat" but untrustworthy and sneaky, and the Jewish as thrifty.[1] Furthermore, Riis uss strong language throughout his work to illustrate his disgust for the way these people lived. This is reflected even in Riis' choice of chapter headings such as "a Raid on the Stale Beer Dives" and "the Cheap Lodging Houses." Riis often talks of the stench and filth of the places where these immigrants live.

These clear-cut presentations of the lifestyles of the poor reflect broader Victorian values. Riis clearly viewed these people in an ordered and understandable Victorian context. The flaws of these people were completely clear. It was indisputable to Riis and his middle-class Victorian readers that slum-dwellers were inferior--at least in the way they lived their lives. Woven into Riis' work was the contention that Victorians had discovered the right way to live. Riis' Victorian readers saw themselves at the top of an evolutionary ladder while the poor remained on lower rungs with their inferior lifestyles. In the Victorian tradition, Riis was not concerned about presenting the poor as possessors of inherent human dignity. Rather, the most crucial problem was that immigrants were not living according to the Victorian image. This reflects the Victorians' confidence that they understood the right way to live and that it was appropriate to label and patronize those who did not live according to their vision.

Unlike Riis, Agee and Evans made a concerted effort to avoid labeling and patronizing. Though the Alabama tenants were as poor and down-trodden as the immigrants examined by Riis, Agee and Evans present their subjects quite differently. A chapter which Riis might have labeled "the Filthy Shack of the Alabama Tenant," Agee titles with the neutral term "Shelter." Furthermore, Agee's vivid and extensive descriptions of tenant dwellings are amazingly free of patronizing descriptions. For example, Agee describes the Gudger house as "rudimentary as a child's drawing, and of a bareness, cleanness, and sobriety which only Doric architecture . . . can hope to approach."[2] Agee could have described the Gudger house as crude, uninhabitable, and disgusting. However, the author opted to give the dwelling its own sort of dignity and beauty.

Similar attempts to show the human dignity of the tenants appear throughout the work. For example, when Agee describes the educational levels of the tenants, he avoids blanket characterizations of Alabama tenants as uneducated and ignorant. Instead, he assumes a more objective posture, mentioning the amount of formal education each character has received and the mental capabilities of each character. Agee explains that Pearl Woods "[uses] her mind and her senses much more subtly than is ever indicated or taught in school."[3] This same effort to respect the human dignity of these tenants is reflected in the photographs of Walker Evans. Though Evans makes no attempt to make the tenants look like a middle-class family, they still exude an inherent human dignity. The efforts of Agee and Evans to present their subjects with dignity is indicative of a new way of looking at the world. Unlike Riis, Agee and Evans reject the notion that standards of dignity could be clearly delineated. By 1940, the factors which constituted dignity or anything else could not be so easily defined. Riis' ordered vision of the world had given way to a modern notion of a more complex, less easily understood world.

This image of a complex world is furthered by Agee's examination of the Alabama education system. Agee is careful not to criticize the Alabama schools and laws that allow children to attend school sporadically. For example, Agee writes that "it would seem to me mistaken to decry the Alabama schools . . . or to be particularly wholehearted in the regret that these tenants are subjected only to a few years of education."[4] Agee continues by suggesting that tenants would be at a disadvantage if they had more education, at a disadvantage if they had less education, and at a disadvantage in the little education they have. Essentially, Agee does not understand the issue of educating the sharecropper as a clearly defined problem with clearly defined solutions. However, Victorians such as Riis would have confidently defined the flaws in the Alabama system of public education and then advocated reforms.

Essentially, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with its concern for respecting human dignity and its view of the world as complex and confusing, serves as a striking contrast to earlier notions. Agee and Evans reject any vision of the world as clearly understandable and ordered. While rejections of Victorian attitudes in literature surfaced years earlier, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men not only rejects Victorianism, but also grapples with a new way of understanding the world. That the book was written at all is evidence that the authors felt it worthwhile to attempt to understand a confusing world. Granted, not all people during this period would employ the approach of Agee and Evans. Nonetheless, Agee and Evans are not particularly unusual in their approach; others share their intellectual persuasions. Furthermore, fundamental attitudes apparent in the book were manifest in various social programs. For example, the Works Progress Administration's employment of individuals with a broad range of skills reflects the notion that dignity can be found through innumerable pursuits. These considerations suggest that Agee and Evans' manner of presentation was not merely an arbitrary, stylistic choice. Rather, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men illustrates changes in the fundamental notions which determine human thought and behavior.