Laura Browder
Rousing the Nation: Radical Culture in Depression America
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998. Pp. 217. $29.95
Reviewed by Axel Knoenagel
The 1930s were characterized by a deep economic crisis that affected all capitalist countries. Numerous authors attempted to suggest solutions by advocating far-reaching social and political changes. The American novel of that decade-referred to repeatedly as the “Red Decade”-took part in the political debate. While novels of the 1920s such as The Great Gatsby, Manhattan Transfer, and Babbitt pronounced criticism primarily on the personal level, the 1930s saw the publication of literature that radically questioned the usefulness of the whole political system.
Laura Browder’s study analyzes “how American writers in a period of crisis attempted the near impossible: to present a new vision of America to an audience largely uninterested in its vehicle-the book, the play-and to persuade those audiences to become politically engaged themselves as a result” (2). The basis for Browder’s study is provided by the trilogies of novels published by John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and Josephine Herbst, and also by the “living newspapers,” a form of theatrical play quite popular in the second half of the 1930s.
A common trait of many “radical” writers in the 1930s was “the feeling that their old intellectual habits had become irrelevant, that a literature that did not address the crisis at hand was a literature not worth writing” (16). John Dos Passos became the most respected American novelist of the decade, largely because of the U.S.A. trilogy he published between 1930 and 1936. Browder stresses the significance of Dos Passos’s trilogy by suggesting that the author was “proposing, and providing the model for, an entirely new kind of fiction, one which would offer a discourse about America that would be both truthful and rhetorically effective” (41). Browder analyzes the novels of the trilogy with specific regard to the use Dos Passos makes of the traditions of radical discourse and to the products the ideal audience of radical writing-the poor masses-mostly come in touch with, namely mass culture.
James T. Farrell’s trilogy, Studs Lonigan, becomes Browder’s example of an alternative to the “standard” for radical fiction that was advocated by the Communist Party and exemplified by Michael Gold’s Jews Without Money. Browder sees Farrell offering “no less than a critique of the masculinized, idealized proletariat so lauded by Gold and other writers” (71), regarding the character of Lonigan as that of an average working-class figure interested primarily in the products of mass culture. Taking that portrait seriously, Browder suggests, shows that the traditional modernist novel as Dos Passos and other writers of the decade practiced it could not reach that audience which it should spur to action.
Another group of the population ignored in Gold’s version of the radical novel is the center of attention in Josephine Herbst’s trilogy on the Trexler family-the women. “The masculine ideology that Dos Passos embraces and Farrell deconstructs in their respective trilogies had the effect of shutting women writers out of the Marxist literary conversation of the 1930s” (92). Browder’s discussion of Herbst’s accomplishments in the novels Pity is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939) suggests that Herbst, “by bridging Dos Passos’s concern with the radical writer and Farrell’s focus on the reader,” offered “a blueprint for transforming readers into writers” (89). Browder analyzes Herbst’s use of personal documents in her trilogy to include all members of the family in the action and concludes that only Herbst manages a critique of radical culture that is “as much class-based as gender-based” (109).
Browder’s main interest is in the so-called “living newspapers,” written under the umbrella of the Federal Theater Project. These plays focused on dramatizing politically controversial issues, sometimes with very modern dramatic inventions, and reached large audiences in spite of their formal experimentalism. Browder concludes that with this politically controversial artistic invention a means had been found to achieve “what so many radical writers of the thirties had only dreamed of accomplishing: address the burning issues of the day with politically and aesthetically sophisticated works that reached millions” (155).
Rousing the Nation discusses an issue that transcends the historical period that Browder has chosen as her field of study. The question of how to reach an audience used to the products of mass culture with aesthetically sophisticated works is as pertinent today as it was in the 1930s. Browder’s study provides relevant insights into the mechanisms of creating and disseminating controversial content in a culture more interested in the mass consumption of culture itself than in the quality of its artistic productions.