AMERICAN MODERNISM
AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
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AMERICAN
MODERNISM AND
DEPRESSION
DOCUMENTARY
JEFF ALLRED
2010
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allred, Jeff, 1972–
American modernism and depression documentary / Jeff Allred.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-533568-2
1. American literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2.
Documentary photography—United States—History—20th century. 3.
Modernism (Literature) —United States. 4. Literature and
photography—United States—History—20th century. 5.
Photography—Political aspects—United States. 6. Caldwell, Erskine,
1903–1987. You have seen their faces. 7. Agee, James, 1909–1955. Let us
now praise famous men. 8. Wright, Richard, 1908-1960. 12 million black
voices. I. Title.
PS228.P48A45 2009
810.9′356—dc22
2009002666
987654321
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
for Jasper
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank some of the people and institutions whose material and
moral support made this book possible. Of the many fine mentors I have
been blessed with, three deserve special mention: David L. Smith, for giving
me the “spyglass” that gives a fresh perspective on the closest and most familiar things; Eric Cheyfitz, for teaching me about kinship with his unique
blend of astringency and loyalty; and Rita Barnard, for her pithiness and
critical wisdom, which started shaping this project even before it began.
Two seminars at the University of Pennsylvania—the American Literature
Seminar and the Modernism Reading Group—provided spaces for collaboration and feedback that enhanced this project: special thanks go to Nancy Bentley and Jim English for their support of my work. I am also grateful for my
smart and humane peers at Penn whose collegiality and good humor kept me
going, especially Rob Baedekar, Dillon Brown, Laura Heffernan, Matt Hart,
Damien Keane, Jessica Lowenthal, Matthew Merlino, Cyrus Mulready, Jessica
Rosenfeld, Martha Schoolman, Josh Schuster, and Denise Tanyol. I would also
like to thank the members of writing groups in Philadelphia (Matt Gold, Justine Murison, and Emily Rosenfeld) and New York (Sophie Bell, Sarah Chinn,
Anna Mae Duane, Joseph Entin, Jonathan Hartmann, Hildegard Hoeller, Lori
Jirousek-Falls, and Jennifer Travis) whose good critical judgment benefited the
book in important ways. My colleagues in the English department at Hunter
College have been unfailingly welcoming and supportive, especially Cristina
Alfar. I am also grateful to colleagues at other institutions for their valuable
input, including Elizabeth Dillon and Alan Wald, as well as anonymous reviewers at American Literature, which published an earlier version of chapter
4, and Oxford University Press. Sara Blair and Bill Maxwell deserve special
thanks for their timely comments at a crucial juncture. Finally, thanks to Shannon McLachlan at Oxford University Press for her hard work and generosity.
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A number of grants provided time away from teaching and funds for
travel, including: a Duncan Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center in
Austin, Texas in 2007; Award Grants from the Professional Staff Congress at
the City University of New York in 2006–07 and 2007–08; a Mellon fellowship at CUNY’s Center for the Humanities in 2006–07; and a fellowship
through CUNY’s Faculty Fellowship Publication Program in 2008. I am also
grateful to the librarians at Hunter College who kept me in reading material,
especially Norman Clarius.
Finally, I would like to thank a few of the friends and family members
whose love and support got me through. Jordan Stanger-Ross and Ilana
Stanger-Ross were always good for a meal and nourishing talk, and Jeffrey
Sharlet and Julia Rabig have helped make Brooklyn feel like home. Thanks
also to my siblings, the Aguiar clan, Chris Wells, and The Band. My father
provided an example of relentless curiosity that still guides me, and my
mother the virtue of steadfastness. Finally, to Gretchen, for all the usual reasons and especially the ones only she knows.
CONTENTS
Introduction: Plausible Fictions of the Real, 3
1. From “Culture” to “Cultural Work”: Literature and Labor
between the Wars, 27
2. The Road to Somewhere: Locating Knowledge in Erskine
Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen
Their Faces (1937), 59
3. Moving Violations: Stasis and Mobility in James Agee and Walker
Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), 93
4. From Eye to We: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941),
Documentary, and Pedagogy, 133
5. “We Americans”: Henry Luce, Life, and the Mind-Guided
Camera, 167
Epilogue: Depression Documentary and the Knot
of History, 199
Notes, 207
Works Cited, 245
Index, 259
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AMERICAN MODERNISM
AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
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Introduction
Plausible Fictions of the Real
Perhaps real reality is also an interruption.
—Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Age (1936)
(T)he true face of . . . photographic creativity is advertising or association; therefore its correct opposite is unmasking or construction.
For the situation, Brecht says, is complicated by the fact that less than
ever does a simple reproduction of reality express something about
reality.
—Walter Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography” (1931)
The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be
achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than
with fact. Truth told uncompromisingly will always have its ragged
edges.
—Herman Melville, Billy Budd (1891)
In his second inaugural address of January 20, 1937, Franklin Roosevelt
asked Americans to reflect on the unfinished business of the New Deal,
using a chain of parallelisms linked by the metaphor of sight:
I see a great nation, upon a great continent, blessed with a great wealth of
natural resources. . . .
I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of
family disaster hangs over them day by day.
I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under
conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago. . . .
I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.1
3
4
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
The varying focal lengths of Roosevelt’s lenses, so to speak, allow him to
combine a masterful, continental vista in this passage with much more intimate looks: in a manner typical of the politics of the New Deal, the president
figures both as a Prometheus capable of electrifying the Tennessee Valley
and a trusted relative who soothes anxieties at fireside with commonsensical
advice. He is also able to synthesize these disparate phenomena into a single
matrix, such that his audience’s sentiments can cleave to the pathos of individual suffering as it is integrated into a broader social landscape of “millions” or, better, into a “nation” whose full integration awaits further state
intervention. Finally, the magisterial survey of the realm implies a clear segmentation of the nation, such that two-thirds do the looking and one-third
passively awaits this gaze. It is a small step from this implication to the next:
the provision of the ill-housed, -fed, and -clad with the needs they never
even have to voice, so powerful is the nation’s vision.
Photography is the glue that binds this ideology: photographic seeing is
the inheritor, par excellence, of the long-standing Western linkage of vision
with knowledge and mastery. When Roosevelt performatively “sees millions”
with/for his audience, he mimics the photograph’s capacity to fashion itself as
a peephole into subaltern subjects’ lives through which millions of spectators
can peer by the seeming magic of mechanical reproduction, thus rendering
the intimate act of voyeurism as something shared on a massive scale. This
mastery then fixes the division between, in Roosevelt’s discourse, the middleclass two-thirds and the subaltern remainder, thus effacing the particularity
of the work that went into the production and circulation of the images that
claim passively to represent this division.2 Nor is Roosevelt’s reference to
photography purely metaphorical: by 1937, members of his audience would
have already encountered Roosevelt’s “one-third of a nation” through the
photographs taken by employees of the government’s Resettlement Authority (and later the Farm Security Administration [FSA] and Office of War
Information [OWI]) beginning in 1935. This massive project was charged
with making what director Roy Stryker called “a pictorial encyclopedia of
American agriculture,” one that focused relentlessly on the gap between victims of rural poverty and the comfortable condition of the presumed middle-class viewers of the images and found a wide distribution in the popular
press, museums, and traveling exhibitions.3 Roosevelt’s theatrics of vision
thus summoned up a freshly shared experience in which the various representatives of government, dignitaries, and the like had looked upon the abject
“one-third”; his address, then, hailed his auditors as agents of modernization
who could bring these victims back into full national membership.
It is tempting to push this argument further, making claims in behalf of
the disciplinary power of the documentary image, its unvarying alignment
with the cultural dominant, and its reification of social antagonisms. Many
INTRODUCTION
5
critics argue that this is at least tendentially true of Depression-era “official
images,” which celebrated America’s agrarian past as they emphasized its
supercession at the hands of a benevolent project of industrial modernization managed by a technocratic elite. Cara Finnegan, for example, claims that
“the New Deal instituted a range of material practice in which visual remedies were often positioned as the cure for—or at least the mode of diagnosis
of—what ailed the nation.” Marion Stange writes that the “official images” of
the nation generated by the various New Deal photography projects evince a
“technocratic” ethos that promoted a “reorientation and ‘modernization’ of
working class values” to reinforce the growing hegemony of the professionalmanagerial class. John Tagg argues that the FSA photographs betray the
nostalgia of Stryker, “whose ideological framework belonged to that ‘lost
American’ of small rural towns” that modernization was rapidly changing.
Finally, Terry Smith claims that these photographs perform an ideological
“double shuffle,” whereby the celebration of the nobility of the nation’s rural
poor is coupled with its disappearance amid a national project of industrialization and modernization figured as a both inevitable and unambiguous
good.4 The ideological reading of Depression-era documentary photography
as predominantly progressive-technocratic, albeit with elements of nostalgia
and populist resistance, has a lot of merit, particularly in light of the bureaucratic structure that governed the production of most such images of the
crisis and attempted recovery. In getting at the question of the politics
of Depression documentary, however, I want to slip outside of this mode of
ideological unmasking, with its suspicious interrogation of the cultural text.
Instead, I would like to consider the possibility that the very quality of the
photograph that allows it to speak with such seeming immediacy to a mass
audience also allows its rearticulation to quite different ends.
Consider, for example, the opening words of Richard Wright’s documentary book 12 Million Black Voices (1941), which was copiously illustrated
with selections from the FSA archive:
Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or upon
the hard pavement of the city streets, you usually take us for granted and think
you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not
what we seem.
Our outward guise still carries the old familiar aspect which three hundred
years of oppression in America have given us, but beneath [this] garb . . . lies an
uneasily tied knot of pain and hope whose snarled strands converge from many
points of time and space.5
Whereas Roosevelt depends upon the coupling of the transparent image
with a referent that is passively waiting to be clothed, fed, and housed by a
6
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
masterful elite, Wright’s discourse disrupts the relay linking image and referent, confronting his audience with the knottiness that characterizes both
images and the reality they index. In other words, Wright’s text binds politics
and aesthetics, problems of power and autonomy with problems of mimesis
and representation, into a knot that the reader must untie. The work of picking this knot apart requires a dialectical apperception of subaltern subjects—
here, the anonymous millions of “black folk”—in which the mastery of seeing/knowing is deferred, pending the tracing out of whatever itineraries the
reader may explore through the traumatic history of African Americans in
the United States.
Wright and Roosevelt pull from the same archive, but with different
methods and to different ends. However compelling the critical consensus
regarding the ideological underpinnings of the FSA project, it fails to account
for Wright’s framing of its images in ways that can hardly be described as
simply nostalgic, technocratic, nationalist, and the like. Nor does Wright
envision a pluralistic resolution to this “knot,” whereby a stable, if marginal,
blackness might be assimilated to a nation unified in its diversity. Instead,
Wright’s rendering of society’s forgotten members as “knots” transforms the
politics of their representation at a fundamental level. No longer is the
central question how to ameliorate the poverty that we all see, thereby readmitting the “forgotten” to our national family. The figure of the “knot”
discomfits this confident position by emphasizing the obscurity of the other
as figured in the documentary image and questioning the very identities of
self and other as figured in the documentary text. In Wright’s hands, the
knot is a figure of nonidentity, of loops around a void, but it is a curious form
of nonidentity that links self and other in a highly contingent manner
through its “snarled strands.” The political problem for Wright is thus not
that of meeting the manifest needs of a visible other; rather, it is the problem
of the articulation of that other or, better, of its constitution in a process that
reveals subterranean connections linking self and other.
In combining photographic images that index the ongoing socioeconomic
crisis of the Depression with a “captioning” text that engages in a complex
metareflection on photographic representation itself, Wright positions himself
at the crossroads of the two most conspicuous aesthetic modes of the period,
documentary and modernism. The three “documentary books” that I focus on
in this book—Wright’s Black Voices, Erskine Caldwell and Margaret BourkeWhite’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), and James Agee and Walker Evans’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)—all sit at this dynamic intersection.
The documentary book emerged as a genre in the 1890s as a hybrid textual
form combining nonfictional narratives with photographs to, in William Stott’s
oft-cited definition, “make the reader feel he is first-hand witness to a social
condition.”6 This genre achieved its highest profile, then or since, in the latter
INTRODUCTION
7
years of the Depression: twelve major documentary books were published
between 1937 and 1942, and they stand as one of the central manifestations of
the era’s “documentary expression.”7 The texts featured in this study, however,
revise the genre in crucial ways. Documentary had traditionally functioned
to call attention to social problems in ways that hypostatized the positions of
middle-class observers invested with social agency over and against the
abject “other half,” as in Jacob Riis’s pioneering documentary work at the turn
of the nineteenth century.8 The modernist documentary book represents
social others in ways that arrest or interrupt, rather than confirm, dominant
ideologies: as the brief example from Wright’s text suggests, they disrupt the
identities of reading selves and represented others and refigure the orderly
teleology of historical progress as a contingent and unpredictable process.
My analysis of the convergence of the aesthetic modes of documentary
and modernism in the Depression-era documentary book will advance
three major arguments. First, that these books do not naturalize the social
status quo they index in word and image. Rather, they engage in a speculative practice of aesthetic construction in a subjunctive mood, one that recruits readers in a shared project of thinking through plausible pasts,
presents, and futures, rather than in the indicative mood commonly associated with documentary realism. A second argument explores the relationship of these books to the distinctive aesthetics that emerge from the
Depression era: I claim that this period’s documentary expression is intimately implicated with modernism, and in particular with what Astradur
Eysteinsson calls a modernist aesthetics of “interruption.”9 Thus we need a
better understanding of the discursive interactions of “documentary” and
“modernism” over time, particularly given the long-standing critical habit of
segregating them, and better readings of documentary works of art that recognize their deployment of modernist aesthetic strategies, and vice versa.
These arguments dovetail with a third regarding politics: that the interruptive aesthetic of documentary modernism addresses a widespread crisis
of representation that arises in the Depression era regarding “the people,”
the primary, if often obscure, object of political desire in the era. As they
issue from and thematize migrations that criss-cross the uneven terrain of
a modernizing U.S., the documentary texts at the center of this study do not
present “the people” as an unproblematic matrix for the nation, as the aforementioned critical consensus on the ideology of FSA photography contends.
My book attends instead to the strangeness of Depression-era documentary
texts: their source in uneasy encounters between metropolitan artists and
denizens of underdeveloped hinterlands; the ethical, aesthetic, and political
problems of representation that emerge from these charged encounters; and
the fraught attempts to use the documentary text as a means to the political
ends of fostering new collective subjects.
8
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
In this way, Depression documentary resonates deeply with recent theorizations of populism in political theory.10 Ernesto Laclau’s recent work on
“populist reason” has helped contextualize and clarify Depression-era discourse regarding “the people.” For Laclau, populism is not one of several
types of politics but is “a mode of constructing the political” that takes as its
chief project the construction of “the people” from a position of radical exteriority to a given hegemonic order.11 A “people” in this sense comes into
being when a hegemonic power fails to meet what Laclau calls the “democratic demands” that are articulated from within that order. Unmet demands
thus become available for articulation from outside this hegemony as “popular demands.”12 The formation of a “people” unfolds out of the contingent
construction of a chain of differential “popular demands” united by a common antagonism to the dominant order. The salient feature of this “populism” is that it is nonidentitarian: it names no a priori subject but rather
refers to the constitution of a collective subject out of antagonism to the established order.13 The genesis of a “people” in demands that find no place
within the administered space of a hegemony also means that the formation
of a “people” tends to encompass those most “othered” by that order: the
“lumpen” masses of Marxist theory, the “stateless” or “illegal aliens” of our
own era, or, in the language of the Depression era, the “forgotten,” the
“bottom dogs,” or the “Negro farthest down.”14 The abstractness of Laclau’s
formulation finds particularly clear and concrete expression in the two examples with which we started. Roosevelt speaks from a hegemonic position
in which all problems are problems of administration rather than political
antagonism: all demands, be they for clothing, food, shelter, or whatever else
the “forgotten” may need, can be met by the masterful and impersonal
machinery of the New Deal. Wright disrupts this discourse by voicing an
obscure and exterior subjectivity, one that seeks out the reader’s self-implication
in its “knot” in ways that seek out “equivalences” across a fractured social
landscape. As we shall see, this emphasis on nonidentity, exteriority to the
“normal,” “proper,” “modern” spaces of the American polity, and the linkages that might bind self and other across this uneven terrain, is shared by
the documentary modernist texts at the center of this book.
THE DIFFICULTIES OF DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
On Native Grounds (1942), Alfred Kazin’s influential survey of postbellum
American literature, ends with an ambivalent evaluation of documentary
writing, perhaps the most prominent literary mode of the Depression era.
Given Kazin’s investment in literary realism and his attempt to recover the
INTRODUCTION
9
legacy of William Dean Howells for his own generation, one might expect
this “Literature of Fact” to please Kazin.15 On the contrary, as he surveys the
wide range of work circumscribed by “documentary,” including ethnography, reportage, travel writing, and the photo-textual documentary book, he
finds it fundamentally wanting. Work in this mode, he argues, shares a
fascination with particulars and a disinclination, or inability, to subsume
isolated bits of experience within a broader realist synthesis. Writers of documentary, according to Kazin, accumulated a “vast granary of facts on life in
America” that constitutes “only a sub-literature . . . a preparation for literature.” The “chief effort” of such writers, he argues, “seemed bent only on reporting, reporting [and] running not too far behind the phenomena of the
times.”16
This implicit contrast between the human (or humane) and mechanical is
crystallized a bit later, with Kazin’s observation that the camera became a
numinous object in this period: Writers were “curiously abject before it,”
Kazin notes, and it stood before them as a “prime symbol of a certain enforced simplicity and passivity of mind.”17 This observation gives a more
material basis to the above reading of documentary work as undigested: the
camera serves as a prosthesis that obviates the need to create, synthesize, or
even think; moreover, writers aspire to become cameras in what Kazin views
as a reduction of the aesthetic mediation of experience to the mere transcription of arbitrary sense-impressions. Documentary thus appears less as
a form of aesthetic craft than of industrial work: like assembly-line workers
subject to a speed-up, Kazin’s documentarians struggle to keep pace with the
endless procession of images and sense-impressions that fly by beneath their
noses. In emphasizing the inadequacy of Depression-era culture, its tendency to oscillate from befuddlement to polemic to naïve mimeticism, Kazin
is part of the first wave of a familiar mode of mid-century criticism that
severely limited the presence of the era’s explicitly political art in critical
discourse, academic syllabi, and even publication until the late 1960s.18
Although Kazin’s leitmotif summons up the half-baked aspect of 1930s
documentary work, he nevertheless includes a contrapuntal motif, however
faintly voiced, in his consideration of the social context that gave rise to
Depression-era documentary expression, and this bit of counterpoint hints
at a critical road not taken. At the end of his discussion of the camera as tool
and symbol, he observes that its distinctively fragmentary mode of vision
was neatly fitted to the Zeitgeist, for “that discontinuity, that havoc of pictorial sensations,” was the “truth” of the Depression era.19 Having described
documentary so unflatteringly, it is strange to hear him simultaneously concede that its fragments tell the truth of the times. Although Kazin drops this
issue nearly as soon as he raises it, his words demand a question in response:
if it is Depression-era life itself that lacks coherence and spills out of the
10
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
received aesthetic containers into which one would pour it, then what should
its most vital and “truthful” art look like? My answer to this question unfolds
over the course of this book, but it can be most simply summarized thus: a
broad agreement with Kazin that the documentary aesthetic that so pervades 1930s American culture is composed of fragments of disarticulated
experience, but a sharp dissent from Kazin’s interpretation of what these
fragments might or might not signify. To put things differently, I grant that
the documentarians of the Depression era heaped up a “granary of facts” but
read this as a figure, not of failure or omission, but of germination. Walter
Benjamin’s comments on the scattered and desultory prose style of Herodotus are instructive in this light:
Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest. That is why this
story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing
astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which
have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up air-tight
and have retained their germinative power to this day.20
For Benjamin, the very lack of closure and gloss that leads Kazin to read a
given text as an inert “granary of facts” can render it productive and powerful, not to mention enduring. In my view, the documentary texts that have
often been read, by Kazin and many others in his wake, as arbitrary collations of facts or as polemics with short aesthetic half-lives, constitute an
important legacy of American modernism and one of the most vital aspects
of Depression-era culture.
Where Kazin sees a stupefying heap of fragments, I see a realized documentary aesthetic that can be described, in ways I will explain more fully in
a moment, in terms of plausible fictions of the real. A commitment to sociological observation, with its technological handmaiden, the camera, is central to this aesthetic, but this capturing of bits of experience must be seen as
only one moment within a larger process of framing, captioning, layout,
and narrativization. I am interested in documentary art that deploys the
“document” as a trace of the real, a “resident alien” in the house of culture
whose presence in the text destabilizes relationships between reality and
representation, self and other, reader and text.21 In this process, collecting
“documents”—snapping photographs is the paradigmatic practice in the
Depression era, but also transcribing oral narratives, gathering statistics,
clipping out mass cultural “found objects,” and the like—is coupled with
their collation into carefully assembled texts and their reception by a mass
readership. Reading documentary texts in light of this process, artists appear
as anything but “abject” before the technologies of mechanical reproduction. On the contrary, the documentary practice that emerges from the
INTRODUCTION
11
Depression era exemplifies what Benjamin calls the imperative for the author
to become a “producer,” working with new technologies of representation to
communicate with mass readerships in a fresh, participatory, democratic
idiom.22
In the above discussion of Kazin’s response to Depression documentary,
I pointed out that documentary figures in his text as inchoate realism; its
fragments have a certain verisimilitude, but they fail to cohere as a narrative.
Kazin’s emphasis on fragments raises a crucial question: Why isn’t this modernism? Kazin had his own reasons to resist this line of inquiry, first among
them that “modernism” was then an emergent term used to describe a small
subset of experimental interwar writers.23 From our own standpoint, the
dominance of “modernism” in critical discourse lends the question more
urgency. Looking at things in strictly empirical and quantitative terms,
something striking emerges: “documentary modernism” is something of an
endangered species in the criticism of the last few decades, even if signs of
life are evident in recent and ongoing work. A search under the subject
heading “modernism” in the MLA International Bibliography database
garners 5,752 hits and “documentary” 2,478. A combination of the two
terms, however, yields only five: all five have been published since 1999, and
two of the four only discuss documentary film.24 One must avoid broad generalizations here—as I will point out in a moment, the segregation of
scholarship about “documentary” from that on “modernism” is far from
total—but this finding is suggestive. Why have critics so tended to vote with
their keyboards, in effect, to consider “modernism” and “documentary” as
separate discursive and aesthetic realms? The simplest explanation, and in
many ways the best, looks to questions of address and accessibility. Broadly
speaking, modernism is defined by “difficulty,” in Richard Poirer’s classic
formulation.25 It expands or explodes realist modes of representation by mediating between things themselves and the inner processes by which they
are perceived. To define things in more sociological terms, modernism revolts against the realist “contract” that guarantees the continuity between
texts and readers’ generic expectations on the one hand, and the continuity
between the world and the text on the other.26 The cost of this revolt is the
shrinking of the aesthetic field, such that, increasingly, the only competent
readers are literary “experts” or members of coteries.27
Documentary occupies a position nearly opposite that of modernism, although it is a subordinate and peripheral form of opposition, since the latter
is unparalleled at present as a literary-critical center of discursive gravity,
whereas the former orbits in the outer reaches of aesthetics and literary history. Documentary is defined by its simplicity and utility: as an early critic
put it, “Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The potmaker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries [sic].”28 Critics
12
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
working in documentary studies often emphasize the etymological slippage
whereby documentary refers both to the “documents,” the archival or artifactual objects that root documentary representations in the real, and to the
pedagogical or propaganda function of the resultant text (> Latin, docere, “to
teach”). Thus the distinctions that divide modernism and documentary
come into sharper focus: the genius vs. the craftsman; the transcendent and
autotelic status of l’art pour art vs. the practical, persuasive orientation of the
documentary text; the intensively tutored and self-selected audience for the
modernist artwork vs. the broad public that is delighted, instructed, agitated, and propagandized by the documentary text.
As I move against the grain of this tendency toward segregation of these
terms throughout this book, I thereby emphasize what has been recently
called the “convergence” and “complementarity” that characterize modernism and documentary, especially in the Depression era.29 The commonalities are especially striking in light of the roughly simultaneous
development of “modernism” and “documentary” as self-conscious critical
categories and the art that has been gathered under these rubrics. It is difficult to narrate the cultural history of the period in which modernist and
documentary art both emerged without uncovering connections that
obscure, if not completely efface, the difference between them. Wherever
one looks for an important emergence or development in the history of
modernist art, it seems, one finds parallel developments in documentary
nearby: Daumier’s journalistic sketches of everyday life in France, an origin
of sorts for the documentary image, emerged simultaneously with
Baudelaire’s verse, often cited as an origin of literary modernism; Riis’s How
the Other Half Lives (1890), often considered the first “documentary book,”
arose alongside Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), with its protomodernist use of ellipsis to capture the jaggedness of slum life; the cubism
of Picasso and Braque was, in part, a response to the Lumiere brothers’
actualities, cinematic slices of everyday life in France that began appearing
in 1895;30 the documentary films of Vertov were screened for millions of
Russian peasants in the late 1910s, as the futurist verse of Mayakovsky began
to appear. Still more strikingly, the terms “documentary” and “modernism”
enter critical discourse at almost exactly the same time. The former term is
generally attributed to John Grierson in a review of Moana, a 1926 ethnographic film by Robert Flaherty, and became, by the mid-1930s, a cultural
keyword applied to a wide range of genres and forms, particularly in the
U.S.31 The latter term, in its contemporary sense, can be traced to Allen Tate
and the Fugitive circle of poets and critics at Vanderbilt University in the
mid-1920s, whence it gradually became the dominant term in Britain and
the U.S. for the work of experimental artists like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and
Woolf.32
INTRODUCTION
13
These simultaneities and coincidences, however suggestive, fall short of
my task, which is to describe the aesthetic zone wherein documentary and
modernism meet. Although modernism is sometimes conceived of as a reaction against mimesis, as an antirealist aesthetic, like many recent critics,
I read modernism as a radicalization of literary realism, in which the relationship between the real and representation becomes a primary object of
contemplation.33 One can see something of the convergence of “documentary” mimesis and “modernist” formal abstraction even in the company of
the “highest” modernists, for modernism’s deep concern with real persons,
places, and things is evident in some of its most classic formulations. The
most obvious of these is William Carlos Williams’s dictum, “no ideas but in
things,” which can be read as a mission statement of sorts for documentary
modernism.34 One might agree with Ezra Pound that poetry is “news that
STAYS news,” and thereby emphasize the roots of the most difficult and fragmentary modernist work in the archive of “documents” that make up
history’s first draft.35 Taking a slightly different tack, one might say with
Wallace Stevens that “things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar”:
this maintains modernist art as a dialectic of the real and its representation,
while amplifying the latter in a typical high modernist strategy of emphasizing the medium or means of representation rather than its object.36
Most fitting for my purposes, however, is Marianne Moore’s famous recipe for poetry: “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.”37 Unlike Pound
and Stevens, Moore emphasizes the strangeness of the real and the problem
it presents for the poet. If Moore’s imaginary garden is analogous to Stevens’s
blues as a space apart in which signs float, relatively unmoored from direct
reference, in Moore’s case, this zone is penetrated by the real as a foreign
body. That the agent is amphibious, camouflaged, and a bit slippery, perhaps
a prince in disguise but evocative of disgust, solidifies the sense that art of a
certain stripe enacts a movement between incommensurable levels that are
nonetheless linked. This emphasis on incommensurability and foreignness
allows the outlines of a modernism to emerge in which form can no longer
master content, dispelling, on the one hand, realism’s claims to represent a
knowable social totality and, on the other, the aura of transcendence and
self-sufficiency that often attaches to high modernist artworks.
If modernists whose work has a documentary bent can be considered,
once again via Moore, as “literalists of the imagination,” we might consider
in complementary fashion the work of documentarians who foreground
problems of representation in their work and thus figure as imaginers of
the literal in some sense.38 Even as un-modernist an artist as documentary
critic and filmmaker John Grierson conjures up something of this imaginative supplement to documentary mimesis in his oft-cited description of
documentary as “the creative treatment of actuality.”39 I want to focus on
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
experimental uses of documentary techniques and technologies—most
prominently the portable camera that so dominated the cultural landscape
of the Depression era—in order to probe the effects of this dialectic of imagination and mimesis, creativity and actuality, the photographic image and
its recomposition through captioning and montage. If Stevens puts too much
stock in the autonomy of imagination in transforming the real, however,
here we find the opposite problem: a surplus of faith in the stability of “things
as they are” independent of their representation, as if “actuality” could simply be documented as it is, or supplemented by an a posteriori creativity.40
Battles over the authenticity of particular documentary images—the controversy over Arthur Rothstein’s moving of a cow skull several feet to capture
the Dust Bowl drought more evocatively is the most famous and emblematic—
point both to a broad expectation of transparency in documentary representation and the fact that this expectation is most often honored in the breach.41
The modernist strand of documentary is characterized by frequent and
extravagant violations of authenticity: to draw examples from this book’s
archive, consider Wright’s voicing of an African American “we” that directly
experiences the Middle Passage; Agee’s ventriloquzing of his subjects’ erotic
fantasies; and Caldwell and Bourke-White’s depiction of grotesques that
explode norms of documentary typicality. The most striking aspect of the
aesthetic that emerges from the crossroads where modernism and documentary meet is its reversal of the mythicizing impetus behind some of the
signal works of “high modernism.” Whereas this latter tendency gathers
the refuse of modernity in order to redeem it as part of an “ideal order,” in
Eliot’s famous phrase, the works I focus on in this book confront their readers with vulgar materials that that disrupt overarching metanarratives, most
prominently, those secular “myths” of identity, nation, and a transcendent
humanity.42
PLAUSIBLE FICTIONS OF THE REAL
The central project of documentary modernism is the construction of plausible fictions of the real. By “fictions of the real,” I mean something very different from the aesthetic attributed to William Dean Howells and others in
the latter half of the nineteenth century.43 I use it instead to describe texts in
which the real-as-trace is embedded in narrative and thereby exerts a disruptive force. I do not, of course, mean that documentary somehow incorporates “the real thing” in an unmediated fashion or has recourse to an
Adamic language in which words are “signs of natural facts.”44 What I do
mean is audible in James Agee’s lament to readers of Let Us Now Praise
INTRODUCTION
15
Famous Men that words fail to capture the intensity of his experience in
rural Alabama and that he would like to substitute “photographs . . . fragments
of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood
and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement.”45 Since traditional narrative realism domesticates and falsifies, and the Ding an sich
is always already mediated by its representation, Agee falls back on the central aesthetic strategy of documentary modernism, which is to draw sparks
out of the friction between narrative fictions and mechanically produced
traces that index particular moments, like the photographs and phonographs he mentions. It is this tense and unstable relationship between reality
and fictionality that characterizes the modernist strand of documentary
practice as such. In other words, I want to make a seemingly paradoxical
argument that the particular way some documentaries reference reality as
trace subverts their realism by foregrounding contingencies of perception
and representation.46
By modifying “fictions of the real” with “plausible,” I mean to pull fiction
away from its mimetic role in reflecting or translating the real and towards
its rhetorical dimension, and thereby to raise the crucial question of the
audience of the documentary text. It is tempting to think of documentary as
a popularization of social science: the photographer Ansel Adams told Roy
Stryker that his FSA employees were not artistic “photographers” but “sociologists with cameras.”47 My emphasis on plausibility replaces the scientific
conceit of the disinterested observer producing objective truths with a
performative-rhetorical conceit in which the text conjures up an audience
and an artist who share a subjunctive mood. Documentary discourse thus
construed is always already conditioned by reception; it builds its audience
in, so to speak, such that the text’s performance involves its auditors in a set
of movements between is and ought, reality and desire, actuality and
possibility.
The seeming paradox of my reading of Depression documentary—that
its inclusion of maximally referential materials like photographs exerts an
interruptive, counterrealist force—has affinities with a number of recent
arguments regarding Depression-era literature and culture. Joseph Entin,
for example, calls the 1930s a “golden age of distortion in the arts.” He links
that distortion to artists’ attempts to express in as authentic a manner as possible the era’s “social and economic chaos”: thus, “many artists who aspired
to offer a ‘realist’ accounting of the contemporary scene found themselves
using exaggeration and hyperbole, the bizarre and the uncanny, to convey
feelings of despair, disorientation, and dislocation.”48 Tyrus Miller has
recently revised twentieth-century literary history, with its progression from
modernism to postmodernism, to accommodate a “late modernism” characterized by, in part, the inclusion of extrinsic, “real” materials that disrupt
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
the unity and mastery of the text. This openness to the text’s “social and
political environs,” Miller argues, is a stance that “increasingly threatened
the efficacy of high modernist form” and “exposes to critical view the stigmata where mass politics and urban life left their forceful signatures.”49
My emphasis on the fissures and gaps in Depression documentary owes
the largest debt to Astradur Eysteinsson, who locates the “concept of modernism” in what he calls an “aesthetics of interruption.”50 In emphasizing the
way modernist texts engage audiences’ readerly expectations, Eysteinsson
illuminates what I have described above as the nexus in documentary modernist texts between plausibility and “fictions of the real.” Eysteinsson
illustrates the workings of modernist interruption through Paul Valery’s
statement, “Consult your own experience, and you will find that we understand each other, and ourselves, only thanks to our rapid passage over
words.”51 Interruption of this “rapid passage” thus constitutes modernism:
the modernist text appears to its reader as a kinked chain of signifiers whose
sense must be teased out through a painstaking interpretive process. Modernism, in this light, is an insubordinate mode of expression that frustrates
the expectations readers develop through everyday engagement with the
language of bureaucracies and the mass media, thereby rendering the usually unconscious protocol by which language makes sense to us as a problem, as an object of analysis.52
This emphasis on readers and reception leads to a second crucial aspect
of Eysteinsson’s argument: although Eysteinsson emphasizes the negative
and critical character of modernist art vis-à-vis mass culture, he also attributes a constructive, pedagogical function to this negativity that helps
readers “to resist ‘innocent’ reception and possible subjugation as [they]
confront the rhetorical powers of various channels of communication.”53 In
a reading that pulls from Roland Barthes on the “writerly” text and Benjamin
on Baroque allegory, Eysteinsson reads the interruptive text of modernism
as coauthored in some sense by reader and writer, both of whom generate a
contingent set of meanings from a fragmentary world/text. Modernist
textuality thus confronts readers with an “otherness . . . the reader has to
negotiate . . . in his or her own terms”; it thereby throws a wrench in the
works of the smoothly functioning interface of “communicative rationality,”
not to create a separate, transcendent space for the art object, but to teach
readers the principles of a new form of intellectual construction.54
American Modernism and Depression Documentary examines a particular deployment of the modernist aesthetics of interruption that results from
the friction between the photographic image and the surrounding text. This
does not mean that the documentary books I examine present as radical an
instance of an aesthetics of interruption as cubist collage or Samuel Beckett’s
plays; on the contrary, the texts in question are committed to addressing a
INTRODUCTION
17
broad public and indexing social and political issues with wide currency in
the public sphere of their moment. But they do so in ways that foreground
the image’s capacity to arrest the smooth transmission of sociological fact,
sympathetic identification, and the like, and it is this emphasis, which critics
have so often neglected to discuss, that makes the linkage of documentary
with modernist aesthetics productive in ways that will unfold in detail
throughout this book.55
EVIDENCE, WITNESS, AND THE TRIAL
OF DOCUMENTARY
As we have seen, the kinds of experiments that one finds in the Depression
documentary book can be situated amid ongoing critical discussions in
modernist studies, especially regarding the aesthetic role played by the realas-trace. But what about the role this trace plays in critical discussion of
documentary? It is unsurprising that the “documents” that make up the
documentary text are rarely conceived of as particularly alien or problematic. For the mainstream of criticism on documentary, the documentarian is
less like Moore’s gardener-poet, startled by the intrusion of a slippery,
amphibious real, than a garden variety zoologist, whose job it is to go into
the “field” and collect specimens. The problem with this approach lies in its
naïveté regarding textuality: one simply can’t integrate real frogs into imaginative texts without a good bit of flattening and distension. Nonetheless,
critical conceptions of documentary, and the mainstream of documentary
texts themselves, have suffered from a naïveté or willful blindness toward
this representational ambiguity. I now want to turn to some of these inadequacies, culminating with a discussion of more compelling recent writing
on the subject. The most limited approach, which has been largely routed
from the field since the wide diffusion of poststructuralist theory in the
1980s in the American academy, can be summed up as the conception of
documentary as evidence.56 From this standpoint, documentarians succeed
insofar as they tread as lightly as possible on the “field” and its subjects,
catching life unawares. The technological advantage of the camera, thus, is
its capacity to efface the presence of the documentarian, conveying “things
as they are” to the spectator with a minimum of “signal loss.” The ethical,
political, and epistemological problems with this approach are by now widely
understood. Perhaps the most striking effect of viewing documentary as an
evidentiary practice is its hypostatization of the positions of documentarian,
documentary subject, and documentary audience. This freezing and naturalizing of subject positions is particularly problematic for its tendency
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
to produce the ideologically loaded divisions and distinctions it claims to
represent: white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, urban/“folk,” and the
like.57 William Stott vividly (if appallingly) testifies to this tradition and its
limitations in his influential Documentary Expression and Thirties America
(1973), claiming, “The poor, the primitive, and the young are the natural
heroes of photography; all others have learned too much disguise.”58
More recently, theorists and critics of documentary work have emphasized a related concept: rather than view documentary as a transcriptive
practice that neutrally conveys the thing itself as evidence, they subsume
evidence within the more complex mediation of witness.59 Witness is evidence mediated by performance: to talk about documentary as such brings
documentarians out of the black box and into plain view, underscoring the
embodied and narrative basis of their practice. As such, this critical orientation foregrounds the ethical dimension of documentary: the good documentary, in this view, grows out of exchange, mutual regard, rapport; its
protocols are clearly articulated to and understood by its subjects; it may
even incorporate into the text itself markers of the labor that went into its
production. Carol Shloss, for example, contrasts what she views as the unreflective documentary photography of Margaret Bourke-White in You Have
Seen Their Faces, which expresses the dominant ideology to the detriment of
her subaltern subjects, with the supposedly more ethical witness of James
Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which “attempted to avoid classrelated conceptions of poverty” and “wanted to ensure that no one could use
his text for tactical convenience.”60 Lili Corbus Bezner emphasizes the way
documentary photography differs from art photography in its transmission
of a recognizable moment, and its affective register, to viewers: “Documentary photography’s central concern has always been legible content (not
form, style, or presentation, although such issues were not neglected) and
the image’s capacity to arouse viewers’ sympathetic reactions.”61 This
approach obviously complicates matters in productive ways, calling attention to the contingent aspects of all representation as well as the ethical
and political problems inherent in speaking for an other who is, most often
in the history of documentary, a member of a subaltern group. The emphasis
on witness does, however, carry over problems discussed above with regard
to documentary as evidence. “Witness” carries with it a semantic slipperiness
that tends to conflate secular, juridical practices with religious fervor and
evangelism. One finds a hagiographic strain in criticism on documentary
that shrouds the “concerned” photographer with an aura of progressiveness
and charity that flows to the zealous reader/convert.62 I do not mean to
denigrate or discount the importance of affect and sympathy in binding
fieldworkers to their subjects, or readers to those they are moved to help,
but I also want to insist on a critical and negative stance regarding the
INTRODUCTION
19
way a given aesthetic strategy is endowed with the power to create such an
effect.
Gretchen Garner is the most sophisticated exponent of documentary
“witness,” and its strengths and limitations come into view quite clearly in
her work. She reads the twentieth-century history of photography in melancholic terms as the gradual disappearance of the aesthetic/ethic of “spontaneous witness,” of which the documentary work of the 1930s is the purest
instance. Garner specifies the practice of “spontaneous witness” in ways that
underscore the problematic slippage between its secular and spiritual senses.
On the one hand, spontaneous witness is “a practice focused on social reality
and on human life, informed by the strong feelings of the photographer.”63
On the other, it is “more than an aesthetic position,” Garner argues, “a way
of being in the world . . . that might even be termed a metaphysical path.”64 I
discuss the problematic relay by which the photographic capture of the lowliest subjects manifest as something beatific in my discussion of James Agee
and Walker Evans in chapter 3; for now, suffice it to say that Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men apotheosizes documentary as “witness” for many critics
in ways that my book critiques. As a final note, I want to point out the way
Garner’s valorization of spontaneous witness works within the larger historiographic arc of her book, because this movement throws into high relief
some of the unspoken assumptions that structure “documentary as witness.”
Garner defines the spontaneity of documentary, especially as practiced in
the 1930s, against the backdrop of the gradual “disappearance” of work that
witnesses to a broad public on social problems and the emergence of
approaches—most prominently, formalist modernism and work expressive
of individual subjectivity—whose unifying quality is their lack of spontaneity.
This self-reflexiveness and foregrounding of the medium carries a negative
moral charge in Garner’s overarching description in the twentieth century as
a shift from a “Zen-like philosophy of alert presence to a deistic theology of
godlike control on the part of the picture maker.”65
Theorizing documentary as an act of witness creates two major problems:
this perspective loses its critical purchase as it canonizes a select few documentarians for their passion, ethics, and “concern” without explaining how
these virtues translate into aesthetic terms or demonstrable impact on audiences. It also fails to recognize the nonspontaneous work of captioning, layout, and other textual manipulation that renders the decisive moment of the
photographer’s shot as part of complex process of production and circulation that involves many different kinds of labor and manipulation.66 The
most powerful theorizations of documentary preserve the richness of “witness” but subsume it within an expanded field, such that the spontaneity of
the encounter between documentarian and subject in the field is linked with
the other spaces within which the documentary text is produced, circulated,
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
and consumed. This expanded field emphasizes, first, the work of layout
by which the image of the other is cropped, captioned, printed, inscribed,
described, and montaged. Part of the job of the witness, in other words, is to
rehearse, so to speak, the portrayal of the singular event with an eye toward
its impact on a future audience. I therefore want to dispel the construction
of witness as an ecstatic medium who spontaneously transmits the real and
emphasize the synthetic, a posteriori, dramaturgical aspect of documentary
witness.67
The second space that comes into play is the more diffuse zone of mass
consumption. Documentary photographs are mechanical reproductions,
and they are most often delivered to consumers embedded in material texts
that are themselves churned out in quantity, be it by the millions (Life magazine in the late 1930s) or the several hundred copies of the first edition of Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men. The best work on documentary foregrounds
both the rhetorical charge carried by the documentary text and the material
context in which that rhetoric is bound.68 Accordingly, I focus throughout
this book not only on the way such texts anticipate their readers, but on the
way documentary texts include bits of mass culture within their structure
(e.g., a lynching photo from the popular press in Wright’s text, photographs
of tenant shacks plastered with advertisements and magazine pages in
Bourke-White and Caldwell’s) and thematize the relationships between
“straight” documentary style and the synthesized glamour of Madison Avenue and high-gloss magazines. Above all, this approach requires that one
read documentary texts not as static and “truthful” representations of “folk”
subjects, but as moving targets, such that one must trace the itineraries of
images as they move through darkrooms, editors’ studios, archives, books,
magazines, and museums, make comparisons across media and genres, and
consider the alternating currents of desire that are summoned up by the
production of all documentary texts.
Paula Rabinowitz’s They Must Be Represented (1994) provides the richest
example of this emphasis on the rhetorical charge of the documentary text.
She compellingly demystifies the process by which the “witness” of politically committed documentarians produces a given set of rhetorical,
and hence political, effects. For Rabinowitz, the most salient feature of
documentary—or of the aesthetically experimental and politically engaged
projects that interest her, at least—is its interpellation of a particular kind of
subject: she claims that “the rhetoric of political documentary” diverges
from the usual “claim to occupy the neutral position of the document” and
emphasizes instead “sexual, class, racial, and gender differences within its
address,” thereby “construct(ing) a spectator whose position is located within
history, essentially remaking the relationship of truth to ideology by insisting on advocacy rather than objectivity.”69 This spectator occupies neither
INTRODUCTION
21
the “neutral” position of scientific discourse nor the passive position of the
mass cultural consumer as construed by theorists of media studies: whereas
mainstream cinematic fictions employ a continuous “survey of objects” to
interpellate an isolated spectator who is a “subject of desire,” documentary
hails a collective and embodied audience as a “subject of (historical) agency,”
Rabinowitz argues, by means of a “disclosure of subjectivity.”70 Although she
does not describe things in precisely these terms, Rabinowitz’s theorization
of documentary weaves together many of the strands of modernist and documentary aesthetics I have pulled together above: her documentary text is a
switching station linking subaltern subjects with majority bourgeois audiences; it employs an aesthetics that interrupts that audience’s expectations
inherited from the realist tradition; and the interruption carries with it a
political charge that emphasizes radical difference, a difference whose resolution or reckoning devolves to the audience to work through.
Despite my broad sympathies with Rabinowitz’s arguments, my own
work diverges from hers in some ways and intensifies it in others. Most obviously, whereas Rabinowitz’s book cuts a wide swath through the twentieth
century and deals primarily with film, American Modernism and Depression
Documentary draws a tighter focus on the politics and culture of the Depression era. I also give the aesthetics of documentary a different emphasis:
whereas Rabinowitz’s describes the texts she privileges as “deconstructionist
documentaries,” I describe the documentary books of the Depression in
terms of modernism: as we have begun to see, I find in the documentary
texts of this era a significant constructivist dimension that links them
synchronically with transatlantic currents, including the creative work of
the Soviet artists in the interwar era and the critical analyses of German
contemporaries, like Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht.71 Finally, and this is an
instance of extension rather than divergence, my book examines the process
by which audiences might be endowed with agency quite extensively.
Rabinowitz imagines this process most often as the agitational confrontation of a “you” that receives a documentary address with a subaltern “they,”
accompanied by a propagandizing moment whereby this “you” is invested
with an ethical responsibility to act in the “real world.” I agree with this in
broad terms but link the play with grammatical person to a Popular Front
discourse in which the master trope is the first person plural, the choral “we”
that links the producers, consumers, and subjects of a given address as part
of a common, if internally fractured or inchoate, entity.
This book examines the different ways this “we” was conceived, and the
historical pressures upon this conception, by framing close formal engagements with the three aforementioned Depression-era documentary books
within explorations of the broader discursive and institutional context in
which these books were produced and consumed. Chapter 1 explores one
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
such context: new forms of agency that intellectuals and artists began to
imagine and implement for themselves in the interwar era. Writers in this
period countered the dominant conception of culture as an Eliotic “ideal
order” of transcendent masterworks with an investment in viewing culture
in terms of work. This investment, however, raised new questions and created new tensions. Perhaps the thorniest concerned the relationship between, to use a distinction from the era, “brain” and “muscle” work: on the
one hand, “proletarian” writers/critics like Mike Gold argued that writing
should be as close a translation as possible of “muscle work”; on the other,
writers like John Dos Passos and Kenneth Burke argued in behalf of a specialized cultural work oriented toward the interests of the working-class majority. The documentary expression of the Depression era borrows elements
from both of these intellectual strands, emphasizing, on the one hand, the
documentary text as a bearer of direct traces of working-class experience
and, on the other, the documentarian as a “technician” or “engineer” of culture, using the synthetic space of the documentary text to forge new collective subjects.
Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces
(1937) and James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
(1941), the subjects of the second and third chapters, respectively, have long
served as antagonists in a tired debate about literary value. In this debate,
Famous Men is generally read as authentically modernist and Their Faces as
propagandistic or kitschy. In chapter 2, I argue that Their Faces proves, upon
close examination, to be more “modernist” than critics have recognized,
particularly in its canny use of captions to raise questions of authenticity and
cultural location. I argue, moreover, that the authors’ familiarity with pop
cultural modes of address allows them to foreground the common desires
for mobility and material well-being that link mass audiences with subaltern
subjects. In chapter 3, I argue that the ethical and aesthetic rigorousness that
has made Famous Men the apotheosis of Depression documentary in most
critics’ minds depends upon a vilification of movement and a valorization of
stasis. The text’s emphasis on “folk” subjects who know their place, so to
speak, severely limits its capacity to come to terms with the texture of a
modernizing South; in focusing on the automobile as a source of anxiety for
Agee and of desire for rural dwellers in interwar America, I hope to reframe
discussions of this text around the era’s characteristic urge to move, an urge
Famous Men engages with great ambivalence.
Chapter 4 examines one of the richest documentary projects of the period,
Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941). Wright’s text invokes the
nationalist and populist first person plural found throughout Depressionera culture but dispels the aura of consensus and totality that traditionally
suffuses this “we, the people.” Wright’s “we” confronts readers from the far
INTRODUCTION
23
side of a race- and class-based divide, such that pluralist national unity
appears as a future horizon rather than an enduring fact. Blackness, in this
discourse, is a “dark mirror” put before a readership that the text hails as
white and middle class. In front of this mirror, personal, racial, and national
identities dissolve into an obscurity that can only be illuminated through a
complex historical and sociological mediation between self and other. On a
more subtle level, Black Voices explores fissures within the emergent plebeian African American “we” itself, working out in the process a theory of how
intellectuals and “folk” might collaborate in a project of modernization that
is radical rather than merely assimilative.
Chapter 5 widens the scope in a return to the first chapter’s concern with
intellectuals and institutions. It takes Henry Luce’s Time, Inc. as a model for
one of the era’s key emergences: that of the large-scale media empire. If chapter 1 emphasizes the utopian aspirations of committed intellectuals in the
Depression era, the conclusion argues that the interwar era also sees an
increasing share of “brain work” being directed by a corporate leadership
bent on directing popular energies into conservative channels. I read Luce’s
aspirations for Life to function as a “mind-guided camera” that domesticates
the public sphere alongside the roughly contemporary analysis of modern
media written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, as well as accounts
from disgruntled Time Inc. employees like Dwight Macdonald and Archibald
MacLeish, in order to capture the growing pessimism regarding the autonomy and efficacy of intellectuals’ “brain work” as the Depression era ends.
PRISMS: DOCUMENTARY MODERNISM
AND METHODOLOGY
Before moving on, I would like to comment briefly on my methodology
throughout this book. Photography is a notoriously difficult medium to interpret. It combines the agency of the photographer, the quiddity of the thing
photographed, and the abstract space of mass reproduction, dissemination,
and reception, such that one never knows which dimension to emphasize at
what interpretive moment with what kind of weight. It also straddles the
intellectual and disciplinary divide between social science and art history,
truth and beauty, vulgar history and aesthetic tradition. Finally, insofar as
photographs are embedded, as they most often are, within texts of one kind
or another, one must consider how to read them both as themselves and as
elements within a larger structure, with the attendant, often difficult, choices
of emphasis. Are word and image coextensive or in competition? Do the
images illustrate the text, or vice versa? Are the photographer and writer
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
collaborators, antagonists, or occupants of different rungs in a hierarchy of
artistic production? Of the many brilliant commentaries on these problems,
many of which are cited within these pages, I would like to single out one
that proved particularly helpful as I was making my way: Roland Barthes’s
enigmatic last book, Camera Lucida (1981).
Barthes’s starting point is a partition of photography into three “practices,” that of the “Operator,” “Spectator,” and “Spectrum”:
The Operator is the Photographer. The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who
glance through collections of photographs—in magazines and newspapers, in
books, albums, archives. . . . And the person or thing photographed is the target,
the referent, a kind of little simulacrum . . . which I should like to call the
Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a
relation to “spectacle” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is there in
every photograph: the return of the dead.72
He critiques most of photographic criticism up to the early 1980s as focusing on the Operator and calls for a shift in emphasis to the connections photography makes between Spectator and Spectrum. His wish has been borne
out, probably beyond his wildest dreams: a recent and influential argument,
for example, has us considering “what images want” as the central question
of visual culture criticism.73 I also want to pursue Barthes’s challenge in this
book. This entails a number of shifts and emphases. The first, as I have argued
above, is a broad shift from questions of mimesis and ethics—Does the document have verisimilitude? Did the subjects participate with full knowledge
and does the image appropriately “witness” their condition?—to an emphasis on what Barthes calls the “animation” that the image visits upon the
spectator: Could this be? Could it have been? How do these words/pictures
fit? How do these places/times relate? Where (or who) am I in comparison
to this time and that place?
The crystallizing metaphor for Barthes’s way of thinking about pictures,
and the one that most neatly elucidates my critical method, is his figure of
the camera lucida. Whereas approaches grounded in the position of the
“operator” view photography as the product of a camera obscura, a contained
space that frames reality from a neutral, distanced position, Barthes encourages us to think of it by analogy to a prior technology, that of the camera
lucida. The camera lucida is a prism used for painting or drawing that enables a split regard, one that combines, in effect, the object and its representation in the same visual space.74 A hallmark of “documentary modernism” is
its capacity to foment in readers this kind of split look, one that is not absorbed into the “spectrum” but rather dissects it and makes it available for
closer study. For Barthes, this prismatic way of looking at images endows
INTRODUCTION
25
viewers with agency to understand historical processes in new ways, a use of
photography to render inscrutable processes comprehensible in ways that
resemble the famous experiments with photographing motion by Marey
and Muybridge: “What Marey and Muybridge have done as operators I myself want to do as spectator: I decompose, I enlarge, and, so to speak, I retard,
in order to have time to know at last.”75
Accordingly, I have experimented throughout this book with a prismatic
perspective on Depression documentary. So, a photograph of an African
American family reading newspapers together in 12 Million Black Voices
leads to questions about rural literacy under segregation, the relationship
between print culture and nationalism, and the role played by Wright’s textual “voice” in the constitution of a different vision of “nation.” A picture of
a tenant shack plastered with magazine advertisements leads to a consideration of the intimate way “concerned” documentary work and “hack work”
for Madison Avenue are related in the work of Margaret Bourke-White.
James Agee’s ruminations on driving lead to detours through Agee’s journalism at Fortune in the 1930s and recent historiography on rural space and
automobiles. The oblique angles of inquiry that often issue from this prismatic methodology provide a model for how one might better integrate the
methods of literary criticism, art history, and cultural history within the
same frame. Or perhaps I should leave Barthes the last word, for I can provide no better description of my aims than this:
The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination:
false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal
hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand
“it is not there,” on the other “but it has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed
by reality.76
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1
From “Culture” to “Cultural Work”
Literature and Labor between the Wars
In this great undertaking the artists, the men of imagination will open
the march: they will take the Golden Age from the past and offer it
as a gift to future generations; they will make society pursue passionately the rise of its well-being, and they will do this by presenting the
picture of new prosperity, by making each member of society aware
that everyone will soon have a share in enjoyments which up to now
have been the privilege of an extremely small class; they will sing the
blessings of civilization, and for the attainment of their goal they will
use all the means of the arts, eloquence, poetry, painting, music; in a
word, they will develop the poetic aspect of the new system.
—Henri de Saint-Simon, De l’organisation sociale (1825)
I am eye. I have created a man more perfect than Adam. . . . I take
the most agile hands of one, the fastest and most graceful legs of
another . . . and, by editing, I create an entirely new, perfect man.
—Dziga Vertov, “Resolution of the Council of Three” (1923)
Why should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?
—Stuart Chase, A New Deal (1932)
In his memoir Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934), Malcolm Cowley
remembers eavesdropping one night on John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, and
Joseph Freeman at Squarcialupe’s, a Greenwich Village restaurant frequented
by literary bohemians in the mid-1920s. As the trio were planning their
launch of the New Masses, the most prominent little magazine of the 1930s
American Left, Cowley reports that Dos Passos, deep in his cups, shouted
out, “Intellectual workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but
27
28
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
your brains.”1 As is often the case, the joke loses its punch when parsed, but
doing so reveals a good bit about the intellectual mood of the moment, and
especially the aspirations and anxieties of intellectuals themselves as they
contemplated their social position and social role. The joke obviously invokes the utopian energies of 1848, with their dream of unity among intellectuals worldwide and solidarity between those engaged in “mental” and
“manual” labor.2 In a sense, the three men are writing themselves into
the history of the democratic “long revolution” as the “exiles” or “outsiders”
of cultural life who now attempt to seize its reins.3 This earnest invocation of
a revolutionary past is undercut, however, by an ironic displacement: The
alignment of intellectuals with manual laborers and the subordination of
intellectuals’ creative autonomy and isolated craft to collective political aims
promises, for Dos Passos, not the liberating breaking of chains but the
stultifying loss of brains. The joke thus poses questions that the editors of
the New Masses and many others in the period engaged, often in practical
and material ways, as they built new institutions and experimented with
new forms: What new literary forms and styles are needed to express the
lived experience of working-class life? What is the relationship of the
“intellectual”—conceived of since its emergence in the early nineteenth century as an autonomous and critical figure—to the affirmative culture of
the 1930s labor movement?4 What is the relationship between the utopian
vision of unified “brain” and “muscle” workers on the one hand, and the actually existing state and capitalist agents that produce culture on the other?
In response to such questions, artists and intellectuals of the interwar era
imagined, and in some cases or to some extent fashioned, new forms of
agency. The social, economic, and political crisis of the Depression era lent
a special urgency to these efforts and shored up a collective sense that radical changes in the way culture was produced and consumed were possible
and even necessary. The correlation of literature and labor was not new in
American culture: William Dean Howells had reconceived the “man of
letters” as a professional “man of business” some forty years prior to Dos
Passos’s quip, and Jack London and other naturalist writers from the turn of
the century had pointed the way to a literary practice that combined a nongenteel writer, a mass audience, a rough-hewn style, and working-class subject matter.5 The shift from “genteel” to “naturalistic” values in the literary
field unquestionably democratized the literary field and gestured toward a
rapprochement between literature and labor, but, as Christopher Wilson
argues, the democratizing aspects of the shift were hemmed in by writers’
lack of autonomy within the rapidly consolidating machinery that fed the
expanding cultural market.6 Howells captures this problem early on with his
observation that the “professional” author of the late nineteenth century is
“merely a working-man, and is under the rule that governs a working man’s
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
29
life,” an observation that is borne out by the short careers, professional frustrations, and uneven oeuvres of many members of the first generation of
“literary professionals” such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and London.7
Between the World Wars, and especially in the Depression era, writers radicalized this concept in two distinct directions. The first, that of “proletarian
art,” posited a further democratization of the writing function, such that
ordinary workers would write for other workers, using straightforward literary forms and collectivist literary institutions to foster an insurgent class
consciousness among workers. The second, that of the writer as technician
or engineer, preserved the division of mental and manual labor, envisioning
writing as a specialized form of work whose practitioners were charged with
building an intellectual infrastructure for the common benefit, one that
would improve upon the irrational and obfuscatory culture that organized
(or disorganized) life under capitalism.
This shift in the social role of intellectuals is clearly legible in the documentary books at the center of this project. The most obvious contribution
of documentary art to interwar American culture is its collation of traces of
working-class life—photographs most prominently, but also informant narratives, sound recordings, and moving images—in formats that gave mass
audiences a sense of direct encounter with “forgotten” subjects who are frequently excluded from cultural representation. Wright’s millions of eponymous “black voices,” Caldwell and Bourke-White’s “faces” that confront
readers with pathetic urgency, and Agee and Evans’s praise for unfamous
denizens of central Alabama all share with “proletarian art” an investment in
an aesthetics of direct presentation and in the often grotesque shock that
comes from the textual encounter with subjects who are quite alien to the
dominant literary discourse. These books depart, however, from the proletarian tendency in their foregrounding of the different times and spaces that
belong to the producers, consumers, and subjects of documentary texts. In
their foregrounding of the technologies of transportation and cultural transmission that make documentary work possible—the automobiles that convey documentarians to their subjects, the cameras that cut and copy slices of
space-time from the flow of everyday life, the books that circulate in the
amorphous space of literary reception—the authors of these text emphasize
their role as technicians of word and image. In what follows, I will trace out
some of the theory and practice of the distinctive articulation of “culture”
and “work” in the Depression era in order to provide a context both for the
agency with which the producers of documentary books were invested and
some of the problems and limitations that circumscribe this agency.
An emphasis on the work of intellectuals and artists in the interwar
era, and especially during the Depression, has been a focus of recent criticism, and two recent books are particularly relevant to my analysis of the
30
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
relationship between literature and labor. Joan Saab argues that the interwar
era is characterized by the “desacralization of culture,” in which art was increasingly seen as something useful that is integrated into everyday life
rather than segregated from it. The New Deal’s Federal Art Project (FAP),
administered by Harry Hopkins, exemplifies this process: the FAP fashioned
itself as a “laboratory” that pursued a “pedagogy of cultural production”
within which individual artists served as, in the words of artist George Biddle, “producers,” like “the farmer or bricklayer.”8 Michael Szalay also argues
that the government’s employment of artists changed ideas about “culture”
and “work,” but with somewhat different emphases. For Szalay, the economic
crisis of the Depression, which hit the publishing industry with particular
force, situated writers within a broader economic discourse regarding supply and demand. Just as New Deal liberalism engaged the problems of overproduction and underconsumption by using State interventions to remedy
laissez faire “risk” with social-democratic “security,” the New Deal’s cultural
wing revised cultural production, such that culture was no longer seen as “a
system of commodities . . . but an administratively coordinated process of
production.”9 This revision occasioned fundamental changes in both artists
and artworks: for Szalay, the Depression era sees the rise of a “New Deal
modernism” grounded in the salaried artist who is a performer of art rather
than its producer. This emphasis on process democratized art, rendering it
as “an entirely procedural activity, a form of recreation that all might perform. . . . Art would solve the problem of underconsumption by making consumption and production . . . a temporally defined activity detached as much
as possible from the determining equivocations of market demand.”10
My argument shares Saab’s and Szalay’s emphasis on the articulation of
“culture” with “work” in the interwar period, and on the democratic implications of this shift, as art became increasingly (though by no means completely) integrated into everyday life and accessible to ordinary people as
producers rather than solely as consumers. I diverge, however, from their
arguments in my focus on individuals and institutions that are much more a
part of what Michael Denning calls the “cultural front”—an insurgent movement bent on the “laboring of American culture” in concert with the most
progressive elements of American labor—than the government-sponsored
agencies Saab and Szalay emphasize.11 Accordingly, the theorizations of
“cultural work” that I examine imagine alternatives, and often radical ones,
to the state as promoter of “social security” and the artist as performer within
its bureaucracies. Here my divergence from Szalay is marked: he criticizes a
wide range of Marxist critics for overemphasizing figures and works on the
political margins and ignoring the liberal mainstream whose legacy, he
argues, equips us with a much more pragmatic means of resisting the
“small cartel of media conglomerates” that underwrite contemporary
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
31
cultural production.12 To this, I can only reply that my sense of the critic’s
task is to revisit and invest with value works, artists, and structures of feeling
that, however outmoded they may seem from our present vantage point,
might offer alternatives to our own ingrained ways of seeing.
CITIZENS’ BAND: WRITING, TECHNOLOGY,
AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION
Both the “proletarian art” and the “writer as technician” models for intellectual work share an antipathy toward the humanist vision of culture that
coalesced in the late nineteenth century in the United States: the view that
art is separate from entertainment and commerce, expresses universal
truths, and transcends everyday life, offering its audience a quasi-religious
experience that guides the good life.13 This vision was imagined variously,
as a “kingdom of culture,” by W. E. B. Du Bois, a “republic of the spirit” by
Edith Wharton (through the character Richard Selden), and, of course, as a
set of “touchstones” that serve as repositories of “sweetness and light” that
uplift and unify all who heed their call by Matthew Arnold: linking all of
these formulations is the paradoxical sense that, while the opportunity to
access this realm is open to all, only a self-selected minority of society’s most
cultivated souls pass through its gates.14 T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” is the classic exposition of this position for the modernist era,
shifting the question of artistic genius from the personality, skill, and life
experience of individual artists to their relationship to “Tradition,” an ideal
structure that “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous
order” within each authentic poet.15 Writing is thus the extinction, rather
than expression, of personal subjectivity and experience: in Eliot’s famous
metaphor, the artist is like a “filament of platinum” that catalyzes a reaction
in which Tradition is altered (if only infinitesimally) while the writer him/
herself vanishes.16
The interwar Left countered this transcendent vision of culture with a
range of responses that shared basic underpinnings: that culture is not a
transcendent “simultaneous order” or exclusive “kingdom” but a product of
labor that is “no more mystical in its origins,” according to Mike Gold, “than
a ham sandwich”17; that producers of culture should engage the democratic
majority rather than select out an elite minority; and that artists have an active role to play in engaging social issues that exceeds the passive relation of
Eliot’s catalyzing “filament of platinum.” The contours of this dissent against
Kultur, as well as the tensions within it, draw into focus in a short piece written seven years later by Dos Passos for the launch of the New Masses. Dos
32
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
Passos begins the essay with a bit of irony, claiming that Mike Gold had recently called him a “bourgeois intellectual”: he grants the epithet’s accuracy
but examines it more closely in order to critically reflect upon Gold’s reflexive and pejorative use of the term.18 Whereas Gold assumes an essential distinction between two kinds of writers, the proletarian and bourgeois, Dos
Passos insists that writing is a trade or profession that has no essence and
can be turned to any political purpose. Thus, when one “stops earning an
honest living and becomes a writer, agitator, poet, idealist, in his actions if
not in his ideas he becomes a member of the great semiparasitic class that
includes all the trades that deal with words from advertising and the Christian ministry to song writing.”19 Dos Passos laments that most writers are
currently embedded in capitalist institutions, such that they are subject to
the “enforced pigeonholing of specialized industry” and hence “farther away
from reality” than in the past.20
In a richly suggestive metaphor, Dos Passos then imagines an alternative
practice that might guide insurgent institutions like the New Masses, one in
which writers would fashion themselves as “highly flexible receiving [radio]
station(s) that will find out what’s in the air in the country.”21 He elaborates
the metaphor linking writing with telecommunications in a problematic but
provocative manner:
The receiver has to be tuned to a fairly limited range . . . vaguely laid down to be
the masses. . . . Within that range, wouldn’t a blank sheet for men and women
who have never written before to write on as no one has ever written before be
better than an instruction book, whether the instructions come from Moscow
or Bethlehem, PA?22
The emergent technology of radio is envisioned here as a solution to the
problem Dos Passos outlines above for the modern writer: by tuning in to
the American vernacular, writers escape the pigeonholing and isolation to
which their structural position as literary professionals otherwise condemns
them. The contrast with Eliot is clear: whereas Eliot has poets acquire their
licenses, as it were, by communing with the touchstones of Western literary
tradition, Dos Passos insists that poets be attuned instead to the vulgar
speech of the contemporary masses who are absent from both sides of Eliot’s
tradition/talent dialectic.
Dos Passos’s solution, however, creates its own problems. The first concerns the location of the writing-function: is the writer a trained professional,
who receives the vernacular lower frequencies and then transmits them in the
form of literature, or do ordinary people themselves become writers, as Dos
Passos’s figure of the “blank page” that the radio apparatus confers to subaltern subjects would suggest? Alongside the question of who writes or speaks
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
33
runs the related problem of the places of the consumer or “end user” and the
institutional framework. It is a basic irony of the emergence of the mass media in the first half of the twentieth century that the proliferation of media
texts that saturated modern everyday life was coupled with the increasing
consolidation of the media market by a few companies with national reach.
The radio, in other words, brought the world into the homes of Americans,
even those in the hinterlands: from the late 1920s onward, an increasing share
of Americans sat at Roosevelt’s fireside, had front-row seats for Count Basie,
and rode shotgun with Charles Lindbergh. This vicarious intimacy notwithstanding, radio is a notoriously centrifugal and expert-driven medium that
hails readers, for the most part, as part of an indistinct and homogeneous
mass. Dos Passos fails to reckon with this irony or even acknowledge it,
blithely mapping the breadth of different voices the consumer hears across
the radio dial onto the site of production, envisioning a situation in which
nearly anyone could broadcast to everyone else. As theory, this is premature
at best and silly at worst, especially in light of the postwar development of the
mass media. But read symptomatically, it brings into focus a hope, however
dimly or partially articulated, for a new intellectual practice: a linkage of intellectuals and the working class under the aegis of production that employs
the emerging tools of cultural transmission to benefit the masses.
Dos Passos’s location of the writer within a technological apparatus—as a
radio transmitter and/or receiver—reveals the indebtedness of his thinking
to transatlantic intellectual currents, most importantly the “constructivist”
movement that emerged in Russia in the decade following the 1917 Revolution. Constructivism reacted against the separateness of art from everyday
life and insisted that artists should give up easel painting and the production
of autotelic experiments with form and embrace a “constructive” orientation
toward social utility. This manifested itself in various ways, ranging from
Vladimir Mayakovsky’s modernist propaganda posters in support of the
revolution to Karl Ioganson’s self-embedding within a metalworking factory
in the hopes of injecting the artist’s radical spirit of inventiveness into the
often stultifying processes of industrial labor.23 Unlike his Russian counterparts, however, who enjoyed the imprimatur and financial support of the
fledgling Russian Republic, Dos Passos and his left-wing peers in the U.S.
had to create (or at least imagine) a constructivism that might function at
the margins of American society, or perhaps bore into its mainstream institutions from within. Accordingly, American articulations of “culture” with
“work” in the interwar period bear a family resemblance to contemporary
work by Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, work that considers models
for intellectual practice that take into account the alienation of cultural
workers within capitalism, couching its utopianism within an acute sense of
the limitations inscribed by the status quo.24
34
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
In the mid-1920s, Brecht outlined a critique of radio, and a prescription
for its improvement, during its infancy that resonates quite strongly with
Dos Passos’s. He argues that radio entered the scene as a “substitute” for inherited forms like theater and the newspaper but had gradually begun to
gain its own distinctive identity as a medium. Brecht criticizes what he sees
as the futile urge to use radio to “prettify” modern life and restore coziness to
the isolated modern home, and provides a more radical suggestion instead:
But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it
should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out.
So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to
communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication
apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it
knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well
as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this
principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its
listeners as suppliers.25
Brecht improves upon Dos Passos’s conflation of transmission and reception
with his distinction between apparatuses of distribution and communication.
His model of radio as a communicative medium, which strikingly anticipates
the “blogosphere” of our own era, thus envisions a fundamental change in the
medium’s relationship between producer and consumer: as Brecht states at
the end of the essay, radio thus achieves “the prime objective of turning the
audience not only into pupils but into teachers.”26 American writers of the
Depression era tried to build channels of cultural transmission that worked
“communicatively” in Brecht’s sense, allowing users to become producers and
creating a dynamically pedagogical mode of address. As we shall see, however,
their efforts were bedeviled by, on the one hand, a certain abstractness that
stems largely from the absence of the kinds of autonomous spaces for aesthetic
experiment that supported European constructivisms and, on the other hand,
the rapid expansion, which I will examine in detail in chapter 5, of culture
industries with rather different ideas regarding the utility of “cultural work.”
THE “IMPOSSIBLE LOCATION”
OF PROLETARIAN ART
The origins of proletarian literature are obscure, but one can see early stirrings in the turn-of-the-century writings of Jack London; the sketches and
songs written by industrial workers in the labor-oriented public sphere of
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
35
the 1910s; and debates about cultural politics in the Yiddish press of the
early 1920s. The ur text most commonly cited by critics, however, is an essay
published in the Masses by Mike Gold, “Towards Proletarian Art” (1921).27
In Gold’s rapturous narrative, proletarian literature is not part of a long genealogy of formal development or admixture of different cultural influences;
rather, it seems to spring, fully formed, from the working class: “Art is the
tenement, pouring out its soul through its most sensitive sons and daughters. Life for us has been the tenement that bore and molded us through
years of meaningful pain.”28 “When I think,” Gold writes, “it is the tenement
thinking. When I hope it is the tenement hoping, I am not an individual.”29
Gold’s chutzpah is striking here, as he invests two obscure, and even despised sites within American culture with enormous value: the tenement
that houses America’s “other half ” and the plebeian writers who had been
almost completely excluded from literary tradition up to this point.30 As if
this weren’t enough, Gold indulges in a mystical set of incantations in praise
of “the masses” (e.g., “Masses are never far from the earth. Masses are never
far from heaven. Masses go on—they are the eternal truth.”) and castigates
mainstream artists for their marginality to the source of all art worth doing:
“The elder artists have all been sick. They have had no roots in the people.
The art ideals of the capitalistic world isolated each artist as in a solitary cell,
there to brood, and suffer silently, and go mad.”31 The problems with this
aesthetic theory are both numerous and obvious: it conflates individual experience with that of a diverse community; it ignores the fact that all representation involves mediation, such that art is never just the tenement any
more than ceci is ever just une pipe; and it invokes the distinctive sensitivity
possessed by a minority of tenement dwellers only to dispel it in favor of a
mimetic spontaneity. More important, especially for a putatively Marxist
theory of art, Gold’s notion of the autopoeic tenement simply ignores the
materiality of literary production and consumption: the cultural institutions, material texts, processes of writing and reading, social networks, in
short, all of the coordinated labor that goes into converting experience into
shared meanings through the dissemination of mass-produced texts. Dubious though it may be as aesthetics, the essay is illuminating as an artifact of
cultural history, pointing as it does to the challenge faced by plebeian writers
like Gold in the interwar era as they tried to carve out a space for themselves,
the social milieus they inhabited, and the working-class audiences they
hoped to engage, within a literary field dominated by bourgeois and bohemian institutions and norms.
Lawrence Hanley has recently argued that proletarian literature should
not be approached as a set of formal features, a coterie of writers, or a canon
of texts, but as “an awkward cultural space . . . most fundamentally structured by conflicts about and around the relations between class position,
36
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
literary production, and cultural capital.32 For Hanley, the Depression era
saw a peculiar reversal of values whereby relatively untutored writers like
Gold and Jack Conroy accrued cultural authority by virtue of their workingclass origins and experiences, even as many bourgeois writers, like Dos
Passos and Kenneth Burke, invested their traditionally accumulated cultural capital in the service of Left politics through an emergent ideology of
cultural “commitment.” Proletarian writing thus occupies an “impossible
location,” internally split by class differences and externally dependent upon
the very prestige-conferring literary institutions whose values it seeks to
overthrow. The apparent theoretical poverty of Gold’s “art is the tenement”
equation seems more understandable in light of this problem of location. In
Eliot’s construction of the modernist literary field, both tradition and the
individual talent occupy stable positions within a coordinated educational
system and cultural marketplace, such that each shores up the prestige of
the other. Gold and other plebeian writers of the interwar era, many of
whom came from immigrant and/or minority backgrounds, had no place
within this structure. Under such circumstances, to fashion one’s self as an
autochthonous entity sprung from a working-class matrix provided a place,
however implausible, overdetermined, or abstract, from which to write.
In view of the broader social and cultural history of Marxism in the U.S.,
Gold’s 1921 essay seems ahead of its time: although many of the emphases
Gold outlines above reappear as a central part of the culture of the Left, they
do not do so until the late 1920s, culminating in a high-water mark of influence in the early 1930s amid the socioeconomic crisis of the Great Depression. Although Eliot’s construction of literary tradition clearly dominated
the post-war era and persists in our own, whereas the “great tradition” of
working-class writing conceived by Gold’s generation lay in ruins for decades before its recent and partial excavation, the cultural authority wielded
by Gold’s autochthonous worker-writer was considerable in the early 1930s.33
In this period, Gold and other radicals aligned with the Communist Party
helped to build and/or influence institutions that gave proletarian writing a
high profile. The most important of these was the New Masses, the leading
cultural journal of the American Left from its inception in 1926 to the mid1930s.34 After an initial period in which the publication was headed by a
fairly broad spectrum of Left intellectuals, ranging from liberals like Lewis
Mumford and Louis Untermeyer to radicals like Gold and Joseph Freeman,
the New Masses ran into financial trouble; at this point, Gold took the helm
and successfully reorganized the magazine with an increased emphasis on
working-class writers and readers.
In so doing, Gold was working within the logic of “Third Period” Marxism (1928–1934), a leftward shift within the Communist movement that
grew out of the Sixth Comintern Congress and occasioned a shift in cultural
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
37
emphasis toward the proletariat as the featured subject matter, audience, and
producers of Communist-aligned art. In cultural terms, this policy translated into a focus on the figure of the worker-writer and a de-emphasis on
(or purging of) fellow-traveling bourgeois intellectuals. The ethos of the moment is clearly legible in Gold’s hortatory New Masses essay, “Go Left, Young
Writers!” (1928). In this piece, leftward political movement appears as a kind
of pioneering, with working-class America figured as a “lost continent.” The
avatar whose outlines Gold had begun to sketch in the earlier essay emerges
here in a much clearer form:
A new writer has been appearing; a wild youth of about twenty-two, the son of
working-class parents, who himself works in the lumber camps, coal mines,
and steel mills, harvest fields and mountain camps of American. He is sensitive
and impatient. He writes in jets of exasperated feeling and has no time to polish
his work.35
What authenticates the work of this “new writer” is not so much the bare
fact of his origins in the working class, as in the above essay, but his Whitmanic mode of expression, which is rough-hewn, spontaneous, and natural.
He is also masculinized and whitened, the “sensitive sons and daughters”
and the domestic tenement where they dwell, no doubt, with urban immigrants having given way to the vigorous, all-American manhood Gold associates with the “wild” West.36
Gone, too, is any sense that the transformation of experience into art requires mediation. Even the hint that some particularly “sensitive” members
of the community are needed to produce proletarian art disappears, as Gold
makes a more radical investment in a proletarian primitivism: “His writing
is no conscious straining after proletarian art, but the natural flower of his
environment. . . . He knows it in the same way that one of Professor Baker’s
students knows the six ways of ending a first act.”37 Whereas bourgeois art
comes from close study of formal structures, of a particular historical tradition, and of genre, all conducted within a stable institutional structure
(Professor Baker’s seminar), proletarian art requires only the authentic experience of manual labor and the commonsensical aesthetic instinct that
arises from it.
Limited as this aesthetics may seem to present-day readers, it had a remarkable appeal for many writers in the 1930s. The Harvard-educated Dos
Passos expressed jealousy to Gold at the latter’s working-class background,
claiming that “Mike Gold . . . was . . . lucky to have worked on a real garbage
dump, instead of on the garbage dump of dead ideas the colleges are, to have
started life as a worker instead of as an unclassed bourgeois.”38 With even
less restraint, Sherwood Anderson argued in the pages of the New Masses in
38
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
1932 that he, like all intellectuals, ought to be purged from cultural production:
Always the workers speak better, more directly, than the intellectuals. There
is a kind of force, a strength that shakes the nerves. . . . Down with us. If it be
necessary, in order to bring about the end of a money civilization and set up
something new, healthy, and strong, and we of the so-called artist class have
to be submerged, let us be submerged.39
Anderson imagines an extinguishing of personality here, but on very different terms than Eliot’s. Although Anderson had experimented throughout
the interwar period with literary forms that ventriloquize working-class
subjects, here he insists upon the priority of workers as writers in a thoroughgoing primitivism: Like Gold, Anderson attributes to workers a natural
vitality and a capacity for self-presence through direct speech that trumps
the mannered expression of “intellectuals.”40
Not all intellectuals, of course, chanted “down with us” alongside Anderson,
even those who had sympathies with Gold’s project. In an early essay for
the Partisan Review, editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips map the terrain
of proletarian literature in ways that preserve a place for the intellectual
as such. Although the authors were later to mount a strident dissent from literary Communism and reserved special scorn for proletarian literature as “the
literature of a party disguised as the literature of a class,” here they critique the
movement from within.41 The authors greatly complicate Gold’s tendency to
conflate the experience of work, the worker-writer, and the working-class
audience. For Rahv and Phillips, the struggle of the proletarian writer is not
only on the “external” front, against the bourgeoisie whose intellectuals lay out
the hegemonic vision of reality, but along “internal” fronts as well. Whereas
some in the movement delude themselves into thinking that the literary Left is
a “happy family,” proletarian literature is actually characterized by a struggle
between a conservative and untutored working-class readership and artists
who constantly invent new forms and expressive modes. This struggle
manifests itself in the empirically observable split between “intellectual” and
“popular” proletarian literature: Rahv and Phillips urge writers to “raise the
level” of workers by presenting them with work that contributes to their class
consciousness and maps of reality, but they insist that workers’ resistance must
be heeded, lest writers lose their audience:
The proletarian writer should realize that he is functioning through his medium
within the vanguard of the movement as a whole. As such, his task is to work
out a sensibility and a set of symbols unifying the responses and experiences of
his total audience. Insofar as this cannot be done overnight, his innovations
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
39
must be constantly checked by the response of his main audience, the working
class, even while he strives to raise the cultural level of the masses.42
Rahv and Phillips thus insert wedges into the unity Gold ascribes to proletarian literature. Whereas Gold claims that the worker-writer translates his
experience to the page naturally in “jets of feeling,” Rahv and Phillips insist
on writing as a “conscious task”; likewise, whereas Gold assumes that writer
and audience alike possess the rude glow of health, which raises the question
of why an insurgent cultural intervention is needed, Rahv and Phillips introduce the notion of “cultural level” that separates the tutored writer from the
unlettered masses, entrusting the former with the vanguardist role of radicalizing the latter. Proletarian literature thus becomes a deeply pedagogical
process, by which writers invested with cultural capital engage an audience
that lacks it in a dynamic, two-way flow of influence.
In raising the issue of reception, which Gold virtually never addresses,
Rahv and Phillips point to the great embarrassment of proletarian literature
as a historical formation: to quote V. F. Calverton, an eccentric literary radical of the modernist era, “the proletariat is the last group to identify itself as
proletarian.”43 Readership, of course, is hard to fix, especially among subaltern groups, but the vigorous discussions among literary Communists about
their own lack of readership, along with a fair amount of empirical data, bear
out Calverton’s assessment to a great extent. While the tenement spoke
through proletarian literature, most conspicuously through Mike Gold’s
best-selling novel, Jews Without Money (1930), it did so primarily to the
educated middle-class readers who constituted the vast majority of consumers in the literary marketplace, especially given the tight finances of most
Americans during proletarian literature’s heyday.44 Meanwhile, the workingclass majority went to the movies and consumed forms of advertising-driven
popular culture addressed to millions rather than thousands. Although
Michael Denning is right to emphasize the ways in which these popular entertainments participated in a broad-based “laboring of American culture,”
one in which the structure of feeling associated with the labor movement
suffused many of the products consumed by working-class Americans, this
pales in comparison to the vision of a nexus of cultural exchange controlled
by collectives of workers. Paul Buhle captures the pathos of this proletarian
culture that is imagined and diligently pursued but never achieved, arguing
that “the would-be pedagogues” of proletarian literature found themselves
“in the impossible position of teachers without students.”45
However accurate it may be to imagine proletarian literature as an oblivious teacher declaiming on the revolution before rows of empty desks, this
portrayal is itself oblivious to the movement’s pronounced speculative aspects. As we have seen, Gold recognizes from the very beginning his ironic
40
AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
position as a prophet of a form of literary agency that does not yet exist: it is
toward proletarian art that he looks. In some of its moods at least, proletarian
literature is less like the cantankerous and unpopular lecturer than Whitman’s “noiseless, patient spider”: propertyless, improvisatory, and committed
to doing the only thing it can, which is spinning itself out into the void in
search of still invisible points of contact. In an early call to readers, the editors
emphasize this speculative and experimental face of proletarian literature:
WE WANT TO PRINT:
Confessions—diaries—documents—
The concrete—
Letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and
schoolteachers—
Revelations by rebel chambermaids and night club waiters—
The sobs of driven stenographers—
The poetry of steel workers—
The wrath of miners—the laughter of sailors—
Strike stories, prison stories, work stories—
Stories by Communist, I. W. W. and other revolutionary workers.46
The catalog may summon up the same wish for directness and immediacy
that is bound up in “the tenement thinking” or the “wild youth” who writes in
“jets of feeling,” but here the emphasis falls on the way proletarian expressivity is materialized, and the way its materials index a teeming, uncontainable
reality. The list runs along a spectrum from materialized but unauthorized
literary forms, such as letters, diaries, and confessions, to modes of expression
like “sobs” and “laughter” that defy textual representation and gesture toward
a surrealist aesthetics of shock. It also hails people from a wide range of class
positions, ranging from the orthodox revolutionary workers to lumpen
figures like hoboes and dislocated members of middle-class professions. One
finds here an emphasis on the role of the magazine as a central node in a network of literary transmission and translation. This call issues from a “we”
who is a collector of scraps from various people, places, and times; as such, it
positions itself as an expressive agent that uses a wide range of techniques
never considered in the above essays: ventriloquism, collage, translation, and
the like. It is this vision of a dynamic and reciprocal relationship between, on
the one hand, subalterns in the hinterlands and urban ghettos and, on the
other, intellectual workers ranging outward from cultural centers, that constitutes a crucial model for and harbinger of the documentary strain of modernism. It also reveals the synthetic aspect of all “proletarian” expressive culture:
when work speaks, it does so in a particular medium, through a particular set
of institutions, and to particular publics. Here, Gold and the editors of the
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
41
magazine position themselves as collectors, collators, and layout artists on the
lookout for new and experimental ways to capture the everyday experiences
of ordinary workers and arrange them on the page for audiences in the hopes
of creating new maps of social reality.
ENGINEERING CULTURE: VEBLEN AND
TECHNOCRACY BETWEEN THE WARS
As we have seen, in its purest theoretical articulation, proletarian literature
verges on the extinguishing of intellectuals as such, replacing the traditional
inhabitants of the kingdom of culture with an autochthonous figure of cultural production, a plebeian writer who translates working-class experience
into textual form for an audience of peers, thus forming the tightest imaginable circuit connecting world, artist, text, and audience. The period also gave
rise to a different articulation of “culture” with “work,” one that shares many
of the same sympathies, including the overarching desire to imagine culture
as a form of production aligned with the working classes. This second vision,
however, imagines this cultural circuitry in diametrically opposed ways: the
writing-function is occupied, not by workers who transcribe their labor, but
by technicians of culture uniquely qualified by temperament and training to
make and maintain an intellectual infrastructure. In Gold’s formulation, the
proletarian artist is defined against literary expertise, the “elder artists” who
are removed from the life-giving matrix of the masses. The techniciancentered vision of cultural production that develops alongside it depends
upon a different opposition: that between “productive” labor, both intellectual and manual, and the “parasitic” doings of the advertisers, speculators,
and executives who are oriented toward profit rather than production.
The vision of the writer as engineer of culture is part of a broader fascination with the promise of expertise and rational planning to distribute abundance on a national scale, a fascination that finds its first major theorization
in the work of Thorstein Veblen in the late 1910s and culminates in the
short-lived but intense national celebrity enjoyed by the “technocracy”
movement in the early 1930s. An examination of the development of their
discourse on social engineering demonstrates why the engineer was such an
attractive model for intellectual work, how intellectuals of the Depression
era viewed their technical skills as manipulators of cultural codes as part of
a revolutionary project, and how this revolutionary project relates to the
New Deal’s more mainstream, liberal appropriation of some elements of the
“technocracy” discourse. The fascination with “technocracy,” which is
broadly distributed in the period over “high” and “low” cultural fields, gets
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
translated into cultural terms by Left intellectuals in the 1930s, who begin to
view their own work as writers and artists as a kind of cultural technics, the
product of specialized training in the manipulation of language that is (or
ought to be) aligned with the interests of the laboring masses. The first wave
of these translations coincides with the height of technocracy’s influence
around 1932, at the nadir of the Depression, and shares its undialectical celebration of the abstract and heroic technician figure. Later appropriations of
this discourse pull from it more critically, recognizing the limits of the analogy between industrial and cultural production and evincing an awareness
of the antidemocratic implications of social engineering.
The increased prominence of the engineer, and the extension of the principle of engineering beyond narrowly technological concerns to the social
and cultural realms, is a central part of what historians call the “second great
transformation” of the United States.47 This period, which spanned the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, saw the emergence of corporations
and state apparatuses that employed a “new class” of professional knowledge
workers to rationalize economic production, staff social institutions like
schools, welfare agencies, and hospitals, and centralize and bureaucratize
all of these on an increasingly national scale. The growing prominence of
the engineer was central to this transformation: the number of engineers
increased sixteenfold from 1850 to 1880 and another fivefold from 1900 to
1930.48 Alongside this social emergence grew an abiding cultural fascination
with this figure. Popular interest in the engineer is part of the cultural
response to the postbellum “incorporation” of America: if the cowboy archetype (a roughly contemporary object of public fascination) speaks to anxieties about the rising influence of state and corporate entities by eluding
bureaucratic and technological discipline and living free “on the range,” the
engineer engages these anxieties in an opposite manner, inhabiting the machinery of “incorporation” and orienting its workings to humane ends.49
The engineer is thus a synthesis of two faces of the shift: the promise of controlling nature and increasing abundance on a massive scale and of a cool,
disinterested, and rational presence at the center of the processes that produce this abundance. In this myth, the engineer makes what we want, but he
himself only wants to make.50
The utopian aspect of engineering loomed large among elites as well, particularly in the wake of World War I, with Progressive-era intellectuals like
Walter Lippmann, John Dewey, and Herbert Croly advocating the extension
of wartime measures by the federal government to rationalize and coordinate production through “planning boards.”51 Thorstein Veblen was the
most prominent theorist of the changing role of the engineer in society in
this period. In a series of articles published in the Dial in 1919, work that
would culminate in The Engineers and the Price System (1921), Veblen pushes
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
43
his longstanding sociological critique of capitalism in a more revolutionary
direction; with an eye toward the unfolding revolution in Russia and emerging organization of engineers at home, he envisioned a transformation of the
U.S. economy and society led by a “Soviet of technicians.”52 For Veblen,
modern industry is plagued by two groups of “saboteurs”: on the one hand,
workers, whose organization into syndicates encourages a myopic focus on
wages and discourages technological innovation; and on the other, the “absentee owners,” who themselves curtail production in order to maintain the
high prices that boost profits.53
In Veblen’s analysis, the development of new industrial technologies and
organizational modes contains the seeds of its own destruction: on the one
hand, they deskill work processes and thus alienate workers; on the other,
they render production processes increasingly inscrutable to owners focused
on the financial bottom line rather than the technical apparatus. This structural position gives the class of experts and technicians who mediate these
two groups an increasing share of responsibility over the smooth functioning of the entire production process. Thus the engineer is the key figure in
Veblen’s critique of modern industry for two reasons, one strategic and one
essential. Their strategic value is obvious: if engineers could develop a collective sense of identity and mission, they could disrupt production on a
scale never achieved by traditional labor organizations; moreover, this group
shares a common intellectual orientation, educational background, language, and social position that potentially makes them easier to organize than
the more heterogeneous working classes. Veblen’s second reason for privileging engineers moves beyond mere strategy to their putative essence as a
class: “these men,” claims Veblen, are “soberly trained in a spirit of tangible
performance and endowed with something more than an even share of the
sense of workmanship.” Moreover, they have no allegiance to the system of
corporate ownership, since this “customary right of ownership by virtue of
which the vested interest continues to control the industrial system for the
benefit of the kept classes, belongs to an other order of things than the mechanical industry.”54
Veblen’s book closes with a climactic vision in which the nation’s engineers, radicalized by their emerging class-consciousness, “cadastrate” the
nation,55 carrying out a statistical survey of its industrial capacity and of
consumers’ real needs, and enact a bloodless revolution:
The situation is ready for a self-selected, but inclusive, Soviet of technicians to
take over the economic affairs of the country and to allow and disallow what
they may agree on; provided always that they live within the requirements of
that state of the industrial arts whose keepers they are, and provided that their
pretensions continue to have the support of the industrial rank and file; which
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
comes near to saying that their Soviet must consistently and effectually take
care of the material welfare of the underlying population.56
Veblen draws here on several emphases that were central to the pragmatic
and progressive strains of American thought at the end of World War I: an
animus toward the wastefulness and inefficiency of capitalism, a wish to
overcome the gross economic inequalities of the era, and an unshakeable
faith in expertise. He mixes a radical redistributionism with a decidedly undemocratic and hierarchical social structure, relying on the figure of the
technician to harmonize the dissonance. As in the case of the “proletarian
artist” Gold introduced to Americans in the same year Engineers was published, Veblen’s technician appears in a rather mystical light, as a “natural”
inheritor of social leadership in industrial modernity, whose “instinct” is
always already aligned with production.57 Both visions share a sense of singular emergence, in which a messianic figure appears spontaneously as the
agent of a revolutionary destiny. For Veblen, however, the endpoint is not
the radical horizontality that Gold imagines for “the masses” that subsume
the proletarian writer but a hierarchy whose humaneness and rationality is
guaranteed by a shared “instinct for production.”
Veblen’s work on engineering grew out of a cluster of broader research
and organizing efforts in New York City from the late 1910s to the early
1930s. The first major project took place at the New School for Social Research, where Veblen, along with engineer Howard Scott and professor of
machine design Guido Marx, organized a set of “Conferences on the Social
Function of Engineers” beginning in the winter of 1919, hoping to rally support among a broad mass of engineers and technicians and create a sense of
common purpose. Support on the part of engineers failed to materialize,
and the failure was dramatic enough for Veblen to reach the bitter conclusion that “by settled habit the technicians, the engineers, and industrial experts, are a harmless and docile sort.”58 This initial failure, coupled with the
rising economic tide of the early 1920s, hampered further efforts at organizing engineers on a radical, anticapitalist basis.
With the deepening economic crisis of the early 1930s, the more radical
aspects of Veblen’s critique—the specter of idle factories amid mass poverty,
the irrationality of markets, and the need for rational central planning—
found a much more receptive audience. The most prominent group to address these concerns was the “Committee on Technocracy,” convened in 1932
by Walter Rautenstrauch, an engineering professor at Columbia University.
The activities of the Committee were hardly revolutionary—its chief project
was a statistical survey of national productive power and waste, in other
words, Veblen’s survey without the Soviets—but its members gained a national bully pulpit that allowed them to publicize their vision of an expert-led
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
45
reorganization of American society as a response to the Depression. The
group’s emphasis on capitalism’s waste and maldistribution perfectly matched
the public mood, pointing out the gap between the awesome productive
forces of modernity and their irrational and inequitable distribution. With
almost comical precision, the group published data to support their vision of
a technocratic utopia, claiming that, if production worked at full capacity
and its products equally shared, each citizen could work only six hundred
hours a year with an upper middle class standard of living.59
As in the late 1910s, however, the movement foundered as it tried to move
from theory to political action, a move that exposed contradictions that seem
obvious in retrospect: the impracticality of replacing the monetary signifying
system with a “truer” measure of value; the problem already confronted by Veblen of radicalizing a class of experts who were quite comfortably ensconced
within the status quo; and, most problematically, the difficulties in organizing a
mass movement predicated on the subjection of the masses to the machinations of experts. This set of difficulties coincided with the dissolution of the
Council, the withdrawal of Columbia’s institutional support, and a splitting of
the movement into two political camps: the Continental Committee on Technocracy, led by Harold Loeb and Technocracy, Inc., led by Howard Scott. Loeb
had been editor of the modernist “little magazine” Broom, and his branch of the
movement carried on the more humanist aspect of technocracy, envisioning a
utopia in which machine-based productivity fosters universal leisure and cultural development.60 In the words of Walter Rautenstrauch, technocracy promised to build Americans “one of the greatest national cultures the world has ever
seen.”61 Scott’s Technocracy, Inc. embodies technocracy’s fascist aspect with
equal clarity: starting in the mid-1930s, his organization began to take on
paramilitary aspects—uniforms, insignias, a salute, and ties to the German
aerospace industry.62 In Scott’s ideology, the division between means and ends
begins to shift: for Technocracy, Inc., the technocrat’s challenge is not so much
to produce abundance for the public benefit as to subordinate the irrational
public to the orderliness that engineering demands. The multitude is thus a
“second nature” for technology to dominate; as Scott put it, “If they can be taken
young enough, human beings can be conditioned to do just about anything.”63
TECHNOCRACY TRANSLATED:
THE WRITER AS TECHNICIAN
In 1932, a group of fifty-two artists and intellectuals published a pamphlet in
support of the Communist presidential ticket.64 The text, entitled Culture
and the Crisis: An Open Letter to the Writers, Artists, Teachers, Physicians,
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
Engineers, Scientists, and other Professional Workers of America, registers
how appealing the notion of a revolution led by technical experts was for
Left intellectuals at this moment. Its authors deploy a discourse inherited
from Veblen and his peers—the pamphlet was published at the height of
public fascination with technocracy—but extend this logic to reckon with
the specific role played by cultural work in political action. As its title suggests, the text hails readers from a wide array of white-collar professions as
a class that is pitted against capitalist industry:
Practically everything that is orderly and sane and useful in America was
made by two classes of Americans: our class, the class of brain workers, and the
“lower classes,” the muscle workers. Very well, we strike hands with our true
comrades. We claim our own and we reject the disorder, the lunacy spawned
by grabbers, advertisers, traders, speculators, salesmen, the much-adulated,
immensely stupid and irresponsible “business men.” We claim the right
to live and to function. It is our business to think and we shall not permit
business men to teach us our business.65
Like Veblen, the authors align two groups who share an “instinct for workmanship” that is disinterested and selfless, “brain” and “muscle” workers. On
the other side of this alignment sits the parasitic business class that manipulates the production process and consumers’ desires in search of profit. This
antagonism is then contrasted to the Arcadian conditions that would pertain under a communist order, with each producing according to his or her
own talent and inclination:
The engineer need consider only the efficiency of his work, the economist and
statistician can purposively plan the organization, management and social
objectives of industry, the architect is released from profit and speculative
motives and may express his finest aspirations in buildings of social utility and
beauty, the physician becomes the unfettered organizer of social preventative
medicine, the teacher, writer, and artist fashion the creative ideology of a new
world and a new culture.66
This redrawing of social and political allegiances raises a number of questions about the relationships between culture and work, artists and workers,
producers and consumers. The first of these questions is fairly simple: is
culture work? From our present vantage point, it seems obvious that the
production of culture does not differ in any fundamental way from other
kinds of labor, since most culture is produced within the culture industries
and most critics recognize that cultural texts have demonstrable ideological
effects upon audiences that contribute to the reproduction of social and eco-
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
47
nomic structures. But in the early 1930s context, writers who claimed allegiance with manual laborers as workers were cutting against the grain of
both a base/superstructure economism held by many on the Left and a bourgeois tradition of thinking of culture as something outside of production
altogether. The Technocrats themselves gave voice to both of these beliefs.
On the one hand, the humanist strand of Loeb and Rautenstrauch viewed
production as a mere means to allow for the democratic spread of culture,
envisioned as outside of production. On the other hand, the fascist strand of
Scott vilified all cultural activity as decadent, claiming that intellectuals
exemplified “complete functional incompetence” and did “nothing . . . more
important than read books, talk, and write more books.”67
At this point a second question arises. Assuming that cultural texts can
be, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, “equipment for living,” something with usevalue for its audience rather than a mere flight from utility, how does this
equipment work?68 It is one thing to conduct a national survey of industrial
output and consumer demand; it would be an infinitely more complex task
to account for the machines composed of words whose inputs, efficiencies,
and waste products inhere in an inscrutable nexus of frustration, pleasure,
desire, and imperceptible ideological shifts on the part of a heterogeneous
mass audience. As we shall see, writers curious about the effects of their
work reflected this complexity and confusion as they grappled with the
question of how institutions, authors, and audiences condition textual meaning. The role of the audience was particularly problematic: the technocratic
ethos tended to figure consumers as inert and abstract repositories of need.
Cultural workers, however, could not avoid the role reception plays in the
transmission of art; as Dos Passos suggested in his metaphor of radio
transcription, aesthetic models that fail to build in feedback loops for the
reception of popular desires are destined to be limited to the very coterie
audiences that typify the “high” art that Left artists defined themselves
against.
Finally, what role do institutions play in the work of artists? In a 1921
critique of the culture industry, Mike Gold refers to writers for the Saturday
Evening Post, then the most popular magazine in the U.S., as “amazingly
expert technicians who perform a definite function in the industrial
dynasty.”69 To recognize, in other words, that writers were increasingly technicians in the interwar era, did not necessarily constitute progress. A persistent feature of technocratic discourse is the notion that, once production was
properly rationalized and subordinated to expertise, producers would be
free; the problem with this position is that the very forces of rationalization
and bureaucratization that maximize production tend to create institutions
that feel more like Weberian “iron cages” than the pastoral sites the authors
of Culture and the Crisis anticipated.
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
After the high point of interest in technocracy had passed, Left intellectuals continued to pull from technocratic logic in their theorizations of
cultural work, but they often introduced a more critical edge into their
formulations. Two addresses to the American Writers’ Congress in 1935,
John Dos Passos’s “The Writer as Technician” and Kenneth Burke’s “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” speak to this emergent critical emphasis. The AWC, held at the Mecca Theater in New York, was an auspicious
forum for discussions of the role of the literary expert in society: it was the
first national gathering of writers in U.S. history and attracted more than
four thousand participants, who encompassed a wide spectrum of the literary Left of the time, from liberals like Archibald MacLeish to communists
like Gold and Joseph Freeman. Dos Passos’s essay engages the relationship
of the writer within the institutions that increasingly govern the production of culture, emphasizing the need to protect artists’ creative autonomy
from bureaucratic managers and, in Veblenite fashion, the “natural” accord
between the working class and the technicians of culture. Burke’s essay
dispenses with the division between “productive” technics and “parasitic”
manipulation of value, exploring the ways in which all writing, from advertising to “literature,” performs the same kind of “cultural work” of forging
social “myths.” It thus anticipates a wide range of Left theorizing from
Gramsci onward about the centrality of cultural work in struggles over
hegemony. Taken together, these pieces act as bookends of a sort for evaluating the range of responses in the Depression era to the notion intellectuals and artists might have a technical role to play in society.
Dos Passos’s essay begins with an analysis of the ways in which writers
find themselves, by the mid-1930s, increasingly subject to bureaucratic authority. Thus, one sense in which modern writers are technicians stems from
the circumscription of their autonomy in such institutional settings as the
culture industries (e.g., as writers of Hollywood scripts), political parties,
and academia (e.g., as researchers subject to the directives of a bureaucratic
hierarchy). In Dos Passos’s argument, such settings not only frustrate writers’ creative ambitions, they also tend to work in the service of social control
in ways that are politically regressive. Out of this sociological observation
emerges a counterformation: the “isolated technician,” who seeks out “liberty” to create imaginative literature and whose “main problem . . . is to secure enough freedom from interference from the managers of the society in
which he lives to be able to do his work.”70 Like the authors of the Culture
and the Crisis pamphlet, which he signed but probably did not directly contribute to, Dos Passos emphasizes the need for professional autonomy on the
part of all knowledge workers. He also emphasizes the constructive aspect of
the literary technician’s labor: like the scientist, the “professional writer”
participates in a process of “discovery” of “some aspect of the world” and
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
49
articulates it through language, by which he, in effect, “molds and influences
ways of thinking to the point of changing and rebuilding the language, which
is the mind of the group.”71 The problem, for Dos Passos, is that the extending and intensifying reach of media that was so visible in the 1920s and
1930s comes as part of a devil’s bargain for writers, according to which one’s
reach and power increases as one moves up the ladder from “one man handicraft” to “the complete belt conveyor system.”72 Under capitalism, in other
words, the power of the writing is inversely proportional to the liberty of the
writer.
Rather than work out some kind of synthesis of or accommodation between “isolated” and “collective” intellectual labor, between autonomy and
power, Dos Passos provides a radical defense of autonomy-in-isolation,
arguing that “liberty” is the sine qua non of worthy writing: “The only
name you can give a situation in which a technician can do his best work,
and be free to give rein to those doubts and unclassified impulses of curiosity that are at the root of invention and discovery and original thinking,
is liberty.”73 The negative moment in this libertarian interpretation of the
writer-technician’s praxis—that writerly liberty is liberty from party orthodoxies and Hollywood producers—is clear enough. As Dos Passos shifts to
a more positive articulation of the question that would examine what the
technics proper to writers is for, deep contradictions emerge that are familiar to scholars of modernism. At some points, Dos Passos advances a
humanist and conservative position, distinguishing between “the surface
of opinions, orthodoxies, heresies, gossip, and the journalistic garbage of
the day” and the “sharp, whittled exactitudes” of authentic art.74 At others,
he envisions the writer in a more populist vein as a transmitter or translator of the everyday lives and desires of the masses:
No matter from how narrow a set of convictions you start, you will find yourself
in your effort to probe deeper and deeper into men and events as you find them,
less and less able to work with the minute prescriptions of doctrine; and you
will find more and more that you are on the side of the men, women and
children alive right now against all the contraptions and organizations, however
magnificent their aims may be, that bedevil them; and that you are on the side,
not with phrases or opinions, but really and truly of liberty, fraternity, and
humanity. The words are old and dusty and hung with the dirty bunting of a
thousand crooked orations, but underneath they are still sound.75
At the beginning of the essay, Dos Passos’s argument appears as a radical
defense of literary technicians’ liberty and their responsibility to use it to
renovate the “public mind.” By the end, this vanguardist impulse recedes,
leaving behind a curious passivity (reinforced by the repetition of “you
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
will find”) according to which absorption in the isolated creative process
inevitably leads earthward to communion with “the people,” imagined as
a substrate that lies beneath the oratorical crookedness of institutional
“contraptions” that pull the linkage between words and deeds out of joint.
This leaves our would-be technician in a tight fix: he can join forces with
Pound and Eliot in a rear-guard battle against a corrosive mass culture, sell
out and be an apparatchik or Hollywood script doctor, or chant “down with
us” with Sherwood Anderson and turn the controls over to Gold’s “wild
youth,” who must be more closely attuned than any technician to the sound
structures that lie beneath dusty words. Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, which
he was completing at the time of this address, is structured by a similar tension, between the “speech of the people” (e.g., the stammering eloquence of
the doomed Sacco and Vanzetti) and the “slimy and foul” words that issue
from the machinery that makes mass culture (e.g., the campaign for patent
medicines designed by advertising executive Dick Savage).76 Thomas Strychacz nicely exposes the thinness of Dos Passos’s romantic populism and
his unveiling of the ideological function of mass culture, even as he values
a third strain in Dos Passos’s trilogy: its thematization of the ambivalent
location of the modernist writer within mass cultural and political institutions, a position that Dos Passos inflects with bitterness most often, but
occasionally with a tragic heroism, as in the case of radical journalist Mary
French.77 Dos Passos closes “The Writer as Technician” with an exploration
of this location, thus examining the relationship of writers to the institutions that direct their work. Having begun the essay with a critique of bureaucracies’ tendency to strip writer-technicians of the “liberty” that allows
them to do good work, Dos Passos later flips the equation around, to consider the effects of the relatively autonomous technician on the bureaucracies themselves:
I don’t see how it is possible to organize effectively for liberty and the humane
values of life without protecting . . . the liberties of investigation, speech and
discussion that are the greatest part of the ends of the struggle. In any
organization a man gives up this liberty of action. . . . But if men give up their
freedom of thought what follows is boss rule thuggery and administrative
stagnation. . . . The dilemma that faces honest technicians all over the world
to-day is how to combat the imperial and bureaucratic tendencies of the groups
whose aims they believe in without giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
By the nature of his function as a technician, the writer finds himself in the
dangerous and uncomfortable front line of this struggle.78
Here Dos Passos makes the odd suggestion that the goal of the technician’s
technics is to hinder the overly efficient functioning of the machinery within
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
51
which he works. As embodiments of liberty, Dos Passos’s writer-technicians
wage a curious struggle-within-a-struggle: on the one hand, the major struggle, that of radical institutions against the “enemy”; on the other, what Dos
Passos takes to be the inherent tendency of bureaucracies to curtail creative
and intellectual freedom.
At this point one must ask whether this qualifies as “technics” at all, or
whether it is in fact an anti- or a countertechnics. This emphasis has a long
lineage across the political spectrum in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
cultural theory, from Matthew Arnold’s “aliens” working in behalf of “culture” against the brutalizing influence of bourgeois “barbarians” to Theodor
Adorno’s “negative dialectics” to deconstructive thought, with its highly developed formal repertoire oriented strictly against the totalizing impulses of
dominant ideologies.79 But such theories have traditionally had difficulty in
their application to actual institutional situations. In Dos Passos’s case, to the
obvious question—why bureaucracies would put up with his countertechnical monkey-wrenching—his response is vague, claiming that such a writer’s
“only safety lies in the fact that the work of an able technician cannot be replaced. It is of use and a pleasure to mankind.”80 This claim rests on the same
shaky ground as Veblen’s regarding industrial technicians, which is perhaps
unsurprising since Dos Passos had recently read The Engineers and the Price
System.81 Nothing, beyond the mystified “instinct for workmanship,” precludes a given technician’s exchanging freedom for prestige and money or
aligning literary liberty against the public interest; moreover, nothing prevents the cultural institutions whose rise to dominance Dos Passos cites
from purging intractable technicians in favor of more malleable counterparts. Henry Luce’s stable of publications begun in the 1920s and 1930s at
Time Inc. provides a vivid illustration of an institution’s giving a broad public both “use” and “pleasure” while severely curtailing writers’ autonomy:
though Luce conceded that “it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers,” it is equally clear that, thus
“turned,” they were interchangeable parts amalgamated into the synthetic
voice of “timestyle.”82
By the mid-1930s, it seemed increasingly clear that Dos Passos had abandoned the utopian Veblen who had hoped for a “Soviet of engineers” for the
cynical Veblen who emerged from the rubble of this dream. One of the most
moving sections of U.S.A. is a short biography of Veblen’s life entitled “The
Bitter Drink,” which likens Veblen to a latter-day Socrates whose hemlock is
not administered by the State in one draft but meted out “in little sips” that
come in the form of thousands of doomed struggles against institutional
power and bureaucratic routine. Veblen “suffered from a constitutional inability to say yes,” Dos Passos writes, and the phrase resonates with Dos Passos’s own model for the cultural worker as a gadfly who keeps organizations
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
from losing their critical dimension.83 Given that Dos Passos began a long
rightward drift in the mid-1930s, culminating in his delivery of an address
in 1962 at Madison Square Garden before 18,000 members of Young Americans for Freedom, Inc., part of the nascent New Conservatism, it seems as if
he learned to say “yes” all too well, ironically living out precisely the kind of
tragic/farcical biographical arc he used to such satirical effect in his own
masterpiece.
In light of his later defense of artist as isolated technician cum organizational gadfly, it is interesting to note that, five years prior to Dos Passos’s
AWC address, his friend Edmund Wilson reported that Dos Passos had “finally come to the conclusion that, since the Communist Party with its pedantic Marxism is impossible, the thing to do is to persuade some radical
millionaire to hire an Ed Bernays or Ivy Lee to use American publicity methods to convert the Americans to Communism. It is interesting to contemplate the kind of Communism this would produce.”84 As we have seen, Dos
Passos’s later construction of a heroic literary technics excludes “American
publicity methods,” using a Veblenite logic that vilifies such methods as
stemming from an unproductive “instinct for display.” Kenneth Burke’s
address to the 1935 AWC, however, does posit a revolutionary role for technicians of mass persuasion. In this essay, “Revolutionary Symbolism in
America,” Burke sweeps aside the distinction, employed by both Dos Passos
and the Culture and the Crisis pamphleteers, between “productive” and “parasitic” cultural work, insisting that all writing, from the “lowest” to the
“highest” positions on the scale of aesthetic value, exists on the same plane
and works through the same kinds of machinery. Burke also jettisons Dos
Passos’s notion that honest craftsmen will simply find themselves in increasing proximity to the pleasures and needs of “the people,” taking the construction of these channels of reciprocal influence as his most fundamental
theoretical problem.
Burke begins, not with an idealized notion of craftsmanship, but with
“myth” as the solder that connects the elements of individual perception
and, hence, of social action:
A hammer is a carpenter’s tool; a wrench is a mechanic’s tool; and a “myth”
is a social tool for welding the sense of interrelationship by which the carpenter
and the mechanic, though differently occupied, can work together for common
social ends. In this sense a myth that works well is as real as food, tools, and
shelter are.85
Burke shows his affinities here with the authors of Culture and the Crisis and
with Dos Passos here to the extent that he emphasizes the work of culture, its
power to shape the “public mind.” He diverges dramatically from them,
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
53
however, in his provocative portrayal of the radical writer as a “complete
propagandist”:
[The propagandist] speaks in behalf of his cause, not in the ways of a lawyer’s
brief, but by the sort of things he associates with it. In a rudimentary way, this is
what our advertisers do when they recommend a particular brand of cigarette
by picturing it as being smoked under desirable conditions; it is the way in
which the best artists of the religious era recommended or glorified their Faith;
and I imagine it would be the best way of proceeding to-day. Reduced to a
precept, the formula would run: Let one encompass as many desirable features
of our cultural heritage as possible—and let him make sure that his political
alignment figures prominently among them.86
Burke thus moves decisively away from the distinctions that structure cultural translations of Veblen’s “instinct for workmanship”—between false
consciousness and science, propaganda and truth, and parasitism and productive labor.
If writers are to contribute to a radical politics, it will not stem from their
recitation of a “lawyer’s brief ” that workers instinctively recognize as gospel
by virtue of a shared affinity for production, but from the canny narrative
arrangement of material in ways that resonate with a given historically conditioned structure of feeling. Burke likens this practice, in a suggestive but
problematic gesture, to pioneering:
Insofar as a writer really is a propagandist, not merely writing work that will
be applauded by his allies, convincing the already convinced, but actually
moving forward like a pioneer into outlying areas of the public and bringing
them the first favorable impressions of his doctrine, the nature of his trade
may give rise to special symbolic requirements.87
Interestingly, Burke draws on the same metaphor that Gold does in his call
for writers to “go left.” When Gold urges us to light out for the territories,
however, he promises an encounter with a “wild youth” who is a proletarian
noble savage, someone closer to the fount of properly proletarian consciousness than we, whereas Burke imagines a more ambiguous situation in
which we move across social and cultural borders, learning to attend to and
speak unfamiliar dialects. The analogies with advertising and with churchsponsored art would seem to align Burke’s propagandist with troubling
company—not only with the missionary and advertiser, but with Lenin’s
vanguardist intellectual bringing “science” to the benighted masses. Furthermore, Burke’s emphasis on the integral nature of American culture—he
refers to “our cultural heritage” as the reservoir of “myth” the propagandist
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
pulls from—raises the question of how the writer is to navigate the increasingly visible yet overlapping divisions between cultural groups in the era.
If Burke’s is a vanguardist model, however, it is one in which the Leninist impulse is leavened by a Whitmanic receptivity to the masses: Burke
envisions feedback loops of teaching and learning rather than a strictly
“scientific” one-way flow of “correct” representations. In fact, in comparison to the valorizations of the cultural worker found among many of his
peers, Burke’s propagandist is a somewhat melancholy figure whose teaching is circumscribed by the conditions of its reception:
The fact remains that his specific job as a propagandist requires him primarily
to wheedle or cajole, to practice the arts of ingratiation. As a propagandizer,
it is not his work to convince the convinced, but to plead with the unconvinced,
which requires him to use their vocabulary, their values, their symbols, insofar
as this is possible.88
It is this insistence that writers cast down their buckets where they are, rearranging elements of reigning mythologies into new configurations, that
seems so ahead of its time to present-day readers. It is also what got Burke
into trouble with his comrades: his suggestion that Party-aligned writers replace the figure of “the worker” that is so central to proletarian literature
with the more recognizably American figure of “the people” drew wide criticism from Congress participants.89
Dos Passos and Burke both lend a critical edge to the broadly held wish
among the Depression-era literary Left for an autonomous space for “brain
work,” but with different emphases. Dos Passos provides a primarily negative assessment of cultural technics, but his is an engaged negativity. By this
seeming paradox, I mean to emphasize his refusal to retreat into a reified
“culture” that floats above the realm of production as well as his melancholic
recognition that an increasing number of intellectuals will need to carve out
such “liberty” as they are able within bureaucratic institutions: the “culture
industries,” academia, museums, and State cultural apparatuses. His “technicians” may not win friends by exhibiting a “constitutional ability to say ‘no’ ”
any more than Veblen did, but they may nevertheless influence people within
the institutions they serve by preserving a critical spirit that moves against
the affirmative grain of corporate cultures. Burke’s approach is nearly opposite in its insistence that intellectuals use their linguistic “tools” to forge
inclusive and affirmative visions of “the good life” from a socialist perspective. He thus anticipates with uncanny specificity the Gramscian strain of
cultural theory that emerges in Birmingham Cultural Studies in the 1960s
and has left such a mark on American literary and cultural studies in the last
twenty years.90
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
55
THE BLUEPRINT AND THE TINKER: “CULTURAL WORK”
ON THE LOWER FREQUENCIES
If the myth of origins for cultural workers in the modernist era has them
flowering from a Lower East Side tenement as semiconscious embodiments
of proletarian vigor, we might think of this trajectory as ending at a secure
undisclosed location underground, on the fringes of Harlem. Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man (1952) is a Janus-faced look back at the interwar dream of
aligning intellectuals with labor that also looks forward to a radically different notion of intellectual practice. Early in the novel, soon after the unnamed
narrator’s arrival in New York, he encounters Peter Wheatstraw, a custodian
wheeling a cart full of cast-off blueprints to the trash. Wheatstraw tries to
jive with the Invisible Man, improvising on the theme of the blueprint: he’s
got “hundreds of blueprints” but “couldn’t build nothin’ ”; he’s got enough
blueprints to build a house “if I could live in a paper house the way they do
in Japan.”91 To Wheatstraw’s observation that the blueprints are evidence
that “somebody done changed their plans,” the Invisible Man betrays his
lack of hipness and takes the bait with his straight reply: “Yes, that’s right . . .
but that’s a mistake. You have to stick to the plan.”92 The rest of the novel
casts all of the Invisible Man’s own blueprints into the dumpster: the pieties
of the southern black bourgeoisie; the Horatio Alger myth of self-betterment
through pluck and luck; and especially the revolutionary theories of the
Brotherhood, a thinly-veiled figure for the CP-USA. At the end of the plot,
he speaks in his own argot, a mixture of blues improvisation and modernist
allusiveness, stripped of the last vestiges of his urge to plan.
Although the encounter with Wheatstraw resonates throughout the
novel, it speaks most directly to the work of Ellison’s friend and mentor
Richard Wright, whose “Blueprint for Negro Culture” (1938) applies the
“writer as technician” ideal to the specific cultural and historical situation of
African American writers. In this essay, Wright works in a familiar vein: he
insists that writers have “functional autonomy” that “should complement
other professions, but it should not supplant them or be swamped by them.”93
Wright argues further that such writers must be fluent in the language and
culture of the African American “nation” in order to link its felt experience
to broader, domestic and international registers using the theoretical
resources of Marxism.94 The closing passage of the essay makes the engineering emphasis explicit through its architectural metaphor: “this is the
moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder out of what
materials can a human world be built. . . . Every first rate novel, poem, or play
lifts the level of consciousness higher.”95 There is much to say about the way
Wright appropriates a model of the vanguardist intellectual both to shore
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
up a sense of African American national identity and advance the “front” of
international communism.96 For now, I simply want to observe the confidence with which Wright insists upon three things: the role of the intellectual as engineer or architect, the benefit of that construction project to the
democratic majority, and the linkage of this localized construction site to an
international, even universal project in which each infinitesimal bit of cultural work adds to a commonly shared intellectual infrastructure.
The narrative of Invisible Man emanates from a very different space than
the one Wright imagines, and from a different kind of narrator. The Invisible
Man lives undetected in the basement of a racially segregated nineteenthcentury building, stealing current off the grid owned by “Monopolated
Power and Light” to create his own private parody of Enlightenment in the
form of 1,369 bulbs rigged by a “junk man.”97 The blueprint that Wright had
laid out for African American intellectuals has been refracted in the hallucinatory light of the Invisible Man’s hermitage: intellectuals are not engineers
but “thinker-tinker(s)”98; they do not draw up blueprints but spin out bluestinged improvisations; they do not build up the general cultural level in plain
view but coyly suggest that they might speak for others on the “lower frequencies”; they are not engaged in an international project of maximizing
utility and distributing it the general welfare, but live in “hibernation” and
pull juice off the privately managed grid on the sly.99 It is difficult to avoid
reading these oppositions through the lens of Claude Levi-Strauss’s famous
comparison of the engineer and the bricoleur, privileging the latter over the
former as a site of resistance to totalizing theories and practices of modernization and “planning” in the postwar era.100 Indeed, the wide diffusion of
celebrations of intellectual bricolage in the 1980s and 1990s, most notably in
the postmodernist anthropology of James Clifford, Renaldo Rosaldo, and
others, coincided with an elevation of Ellison’s literary capital over Wright’s,
and even a tendency, as Bill Maxwell notes, to read Ellisonian anti-Communist individualism into Wright’s “committed” fiction.101
My point is not to anoint either Wright or Ellison as the authentic heir to
American or African American literary traditions or to reverse the affective
polarity of Levi-Strauss’s theoretical distinction in the engineer’s favor.
Instead, I want to read Wright’s and Ellison’s constructions of intellectual
practices as symptoms of a tectonic shift in the kinds of agency that are conceivable during the era in which the “cultural work” formation emerges and
after it passes into a postwar notion of intellectual practice organized around
a liberal Keynesian political economy and the notion of a cultural “vital
center” that contains and domesticates radical energies.102 Ellison does not
have the last word on this shift, and there is “committed” art in the 1950s just
as there is in any era. But his novel does register a historical shift in which
the technological forces that guarantee abundance increasingly become the
FROM “CULTURE” TO “CULTURAL WORK”
57
province of an abstract bureaucratic “technostructure,” in John Kenneth
Galbraith’s influential formulation; the agents of this “technostructure” can
no longer imagine themselves in solidarity with ordinary workers in the way
Wright and other Depression-era theorists of “cultural work” do.103 In this
new order, we all become the objects of the structures managed by a few
inscrutable agents, the Robert Moseses and Robert McNamaras whose
bird’s-eye visions of commanding social and technological power become
the nightmares of ordinary people on the streets of Dresden and the Bronx.
The Invisible Man is an intellectual no less than Burke’s propagandist or Dos
Passos’s technician or Gold’s proletarian writer. Unlike these, however, he is
largely defined by his oblique relationship to the machinery of modern production. Making culture is no longer imagined as a remaking of the social
that is situated in the middle of things; rather, it is increasingly “hibernation”
from the social realm that is the precondition for seeing things in their full
depth.
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2
The Road to Somewhere
Locating Knowledge in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret
Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937)
The real world appears in [the image] as if it were between parentheses
or quotation marks.
—Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and its Shadow” (1948)
The works of the new time that is aborning will not be based on the
idea of linear succession but on the idea of combination: the conjunction, the diffusion, the reunion of languages, spaces, and times.
Fiesta and contemplation. An art of conjugation.
—Octavio Paz, Alternating Current (1973)
Preston Sturges’s film, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), begins with the title character, a successful but callow Hollywood director, yearning to leave the dream
factory and discover the more authentic America that he hopes to find on
the back roads between the coasts. He has amassed a small fortune making
films such as Hey-Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Pants of 1939, frothy
comedies that, according to his studio colleagues, have succeeded because
they “don’t stink with [political] messages.”1 Politics, however, is precisely
what Sullivan now wants to impart in an attempt to match his aesthetic to
the social conditions of the Depression, to offer audiences “a commentary
on modern conditions . . . stark realism . . . the problems that confront the
average man.” This homily links Sullivan’s proposed film, O Brother, Where
Art Thou? to the documentary mode in an attempt to convince his peers of
its seriousness: “I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror
up to life. I want it to be . . . a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.”
Sullivan then has the studio’s wardrobe department outfit him with a hobo
costume, and he hits the road with ten cents in his pocket and the parting
words, “I’m not coming back until I know what trouble is.”
59
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
In the picaresque adventure that follows, “the real thing” Sullivan seeks
on the road proves maddeningly elusive. Studio executives turn Sullivan’s
journey into a media spectacle, following him out of town in a luxurious
“land-yacht” (borrowed from a Cecil B. DeMille set) packed with support
staff and newspaper reporters assigned to drum up interest in the coming
film. Sullivan quickly gives his entourage the slip, however, and hitches his
way into the heartland on his own. After several midadventures, Sullivan
gets a lift from a trucker, hoping to continue his adventure. When he awakes,
however, the trucker deposits him, disoriented and cold, back in the heart of
Hollywood. The joke, which resonates throughout the film, is that the metropolis where mass cultural representations are produced is already linked
to the heartland Sullivan wants to document in myriad ways: through the
diffusion of the print media, the increasingly dense network of U.S. highways, and the ministrations of the film industry itself. Sullivan’s Travels thus
compactly and cleverly underscores both the Depression-era investment
in the opposition between the authenticity of the heartland and the irreality
of the Hollywood dream factory and the increasing absurdity of this very
opposition, given the ever-denser economic, social, and cultural networks
linking hinterlands and metropolises in the era.
Sullivan’s obliviousness to this dynamic is only dispelled near the film’s
end, after a series of misunderstandings lands him in a Southern penitentiary. While he is serving his sentence, the prison arranges an outing to a
local church. There, the chain-ganged prisoners shuffle into the sanctuary
for a church service, followed by a screening of a Disney cartoon. As he
watches, Sullivan’s attention is diverted from the film to his fellow prisoners;
he gasps with horror and wonder as their faces, blank masks throughout
their imprisonment, contort themselves in spasms of pleasure as they laugh
at the antics of Mickey and friends. In the film’s denouement, Sullivan is
exonerated, gets the girl, and returns to Hollywood, vowing to return to
making comedies. He does so over the howling protest of the very executives
who had urged him to stick to comedy in the opening sequence; these latter
want to capitalize on all the media attention that Sullivan’s travels, travails,
and escape have generated, attention that seems to promise financial success
for O Brother, Where Art Thou? Sullivan declines, claiming that he hasn’t
“suffered enough” to make O Brother and citing the effect escapist comedies
have on the very “average man” he set out to document in his travels: “There’s
a lot to be said for making people laugh. . . . Did you know that’s all that some
people have? It isn’t much . . . but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed
caravan.”
Sullivan’s Travels has been called Sturges’s most conservative film and, indeed, its lampooning of the committed artist’s attempt to nudge the culture
industry in a progressive direction tends strongly toward quietism: industri-
THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE
61
alized culture, it seems, enfolds all oppositional ideological energies within
its throwaway forms, while the mass of worker-consumers just want to vent
a bit of frustration before they shuffle back to their places in the social order.2 Although the film does lampoon Sullivan’s desire for political commitment, this satire need not be read as conservative: in its depiction of a naïf ’s
attempts to find authenticity by subjecting himself to harrowing dangers, the
film questions the very terms in which these attempts are framed. The implicit critique dismantles the geography that structures commonsensical notions of the documentary mode, demonstrating that the rural “there” where
authentically “average” Americans dwell is increasingly connected to the
metropolitan “here” where the culture industries make the products they
consume. It also challenges the notion that documentation can occur in a
social field uncontaminated by the awareness on the part of the subjects of
documentary that one’s image is always potentially subject to manipulation,
reproduction, and distribution to a mass audience. If Sullivan is to hold a
mirror up to contemporary conditions as he wishes, it will be to a public already accustomed to the idea of striking poses for a mass audience: for example, the gamine Sullivan meets on the road (and eventually marries)
wants to be a movie star even before she has met him, styling herself after the
tough-talking molls she has seen on the silver screen.
Finally, the prisoners’ response to Disney cartoons, however overdrawn,
raises the important question of the ends of Sullivan’s “document.” In his
conversion to politically committed art, Sullivan elevates mimesis above all
else: he wants to represent real conditions in all their grittiness rather than
comedic antics simply because that approach is more faithful to social reality. Absent in this wish—although we presume that he himself is not aware
of this absence—is any theory of how this fidelity to truth will translate into
a politics. Sturges underscores this point by having Sullivan’s butler plead
with him that the desire to make O Brother is misguided, since “the poor
know all about poverty and only the morbid rich would find the topic glamorous.” Thus, the map of social reality that the documentarian produces
generates nothing of benefit to its subjects, only a frisson of pleasure and
excitement in a “slumming” mode on the part of its bourgeois consumers.
Reading the butler’s comment against the grain of its dismissive irony, it
gestures toward two ways in which committed art might engage audiences.
On the one hand, it evokes the representation of subalterns in an “organic
intellectual” mode in order to articulate group identity to itself. Although
the butler claims that “the poor know all about poverty,” a central tendency
in left-wing thought emphasizes the crucial importance of cultural work in
instilling such knowledge as a means of transforming a latent class identity
into a self-conscious and sovereign collective agent. As Paula Rabinowitz
has observed, this role for documentarians as articulators of heretofore
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
inchoate masses traces back to Marx’s claim, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of
Louis Bonaparte (1852), that “they cannot represent themselves; they must
be represented!”3 On the other hand, insofar as the quip anticipates a bourgeois audience for representations of subaltern subjects, it figures documentary as a means of expanding the frontiers of the dominant to include
formerly excluded or resistant entities in a larger totality. What Sullivan’s
butler drolly describes as the prurient interests of the “morbidly rich” could
be read another way, as the desire to accept or appropriate formerly despised
and excluded “others” into the family. As the United States mobilized for
World War II, these two tendencies, which we might call “cultural frontist”
and “civic nationalist,” respectively (taking our cues from work by Michael
Denning and Gary Gerstle), emerged forcefully and were visible, often in
contradictory and overlapping ways, in the art of the period. Documentary
work, with its foregrounding of the relationships between subalterns, mass
audiences, and artists, offers critics a particularly vivid illustration of this
dynamic.4
I have taken this detour through Sullivan’s Travels as preparation for discussion of a different trip: that of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret BourkeWhite in the summer of 1936 to the South to research what would become
their first documentary book, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). Like Sullivan,
Caldwell and especially Bourke-White combined sensibilities formed through
the production of popular artworks (e.g., Caldwell’s work on Hollywood
scripts and his bestselling novels Tobacco Road [1932] and God’s Little Acre
[1933]; Bourke-White’s advertising work and journalism with Time Inc.’s
Fortune and Life) with left-wing commitments to documenting the lives of
poor and dispossessed Americans. Also like Sullivan, the authors of Their
Faces confronted problems inherent in the aesthetics and politics of documentary: how to represent the locations of the subjects of the documentary
text relative to those of the intended audience and of the documentarians
themselves; how to represent the subjectivity of impoverished rural dwellers
who “cannot represent themselves”; and how to devise a mode of address
that avoids sensational appeals to the prurience of what Sullivan’s butler calls
the “morbid rich.” In engaging these issues, Caldwell and Bourke-White’s
text proves much stranger and more complex than it may appear. In subjecting Their Faces to close critical scrutiny, I am arguing against a virtual critical
consensus that likens Caldwell and Bourke-White to Sullivan in a thoroughly unflattering way, reading them as naïve and shallow purveyors of
mass culture whose attempts to document rural poverty fall short of either
science or art. Their Faces, or so the argument goes, sells its subjects cheaply,
with inadequate regard for their representation, in the political and aesthetic
senses.5 I will argue that such arguments reify “documentary,” viewing it as a
form or as a means of producing accurate representations. Instead I will argue
THE ROAD TO SOMEWHERE
63
that You Have Seen Their Faces, whatever its aesthetic or social-scientific
faults, engages in a productive struggle with what I believe to be the central
problems of documentary as a mode. Where others have found breaches of
ethics regarding the representation of subalterns in this text, I find experiments with the documentary mode’s characteristic mix of first-person testimony and impersonal third-person observation. In Bourke-White and
Caldwell’s text, scale shifts rapidly, captions place readers uncomfortably
close to and frustratingly far from the action, and the “witnesses” to the
South’s traumatic poverty and social divisions give contradictory testimony.
These experiments introduce a modernist self-reflexiveness into the text,
such that the contingencies of representation come into focus. These contingencies carry political resonances as well, contaminating the text’s central
theme of the liberalization and modernization of the South with a stark
presentation of the unevenness and uncertainty of any such “progress.”
My broader point in taking a widely dismissed or derided text so seriously is not to recover it as a modernist masterpiece or an exemplary model
for cultural political practice: although it has its moments, it is ultimately
neither. I want, instead, to apply interpretive pressure to a text that vividly
testifies to two of the most prominent aesthetic and political problems within
Depression-era American culture: the uncanny intimacy with strangers that
emergent image-driven media permit on the printed page and the problematic status of unmodern and illiberal “folk” within a modernizing “nation.”
Despite its dismissal by many critics, Their Faces is exemplary in its use of an
aesthetics of interruption to represent a fissured social landscape, thereby
unsettling the confident position of the titular “you” who would consume
the other through the transparency of the photo-text and calling attention to
the limitations of the hegemonic New Deal discourse of a unitary liberalization and modernization directed from the “nerve center” of Washington.
From this standpoint, the well-documented failures of Bourke-White and
Caldwell’s attempt are at least as interesting as the successes, for they speak to
the tensions and contradictions within the era’s ideas of “the people” and
“modernity.”
“FACES I COULD NOT PASS BY”
Like the fictional John L. Sullivan, Margaret Bourke-White came to documentary work through a conversion of sorts. On assignment with Fortune in
the summer of 1936, Bourke-White left New York to photograph the social
and environmental devastation of the Dust Bowl. Her experience there, recounted in her autobiography, marks an important shift in her work:
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I was deeply moved by the suffering I saw and touched particularly by the
bewilderment of the farmers. I think this was the beginning of my awareness
of people in a human, sympathetic sense as subjects for the camera and
photographed against a wider canvas than I had perceived before. During
the rapturous period when I was discovering the beauty of industrial
shapes, people were only incidental to me, and in retrospect I believe I had not
much feeling for them in my earlier work. But suddenly it was the people who
counted. Here in the Dakotas with these farmers, I saw everything in a new
light. How could I tell it all in pictures? Here were faces engraved with the
very paralysis of despair. These were faces I could not pass by.6
One can read this passage through two major metanarratives. Most obviously, it tells of the maturation of an artist who moves through childish “rapture,” an indiscriminate attraction toward pretty things, and arrives at a
more committed ethical stance, more “sympathetic” and possessed of a
broader, more complex perspective. More subtly it speaks to a formal shift:
Whereas her early work focused on the decomposition of industrial objects
in order to reframe their elements as pure form, as art, after her experience
in the field, she begins to view photography as recomposition. In this new
conception Bourke-White emphasizes the ways in which the camera builds
channels of association in space, linking human subjects to the “wider canvas” of their social contexts, and in time, freezing moments that draw the
photographer and her subjects together in a powerful frisson of sympathy
and then offer themselves up to their audience through their mass reproduction and distribution.
Though moved and invigorated by the Dust Bowl assignment, BourkeWhite returned to her New York studio immediately afterward. It was there,
and explicitly in reaction to the theory and practice of studio-bound advertising work, that the decisive moment of her “conversion” took place. She
was assigned to make photographs for a Goodyear Tires advertisement “in
which a Gargantuan tire track ran across two center pages [of the magazine],
the imprint so big it looked like a road in itself. My assignment . . . was to
capture the very soul of the tire, its footprints on the sands of time.”7 In her
autobiography, she describes in amusing detail the chicanery Goodyear engages in to synthesize this “soul” in their labs, spending vast sums on the
production of a single quite useless oversized tire with custom-cut extradeep treads, then having Bourke-White make the track on the floor of her
studio by rolling the tire through an impasto of ersatz mud. This effort,
which would have seemed perfectly normal before her trip to the Dust
Bowl, disturbed her now, since her mind was “on another road clogged with
fine-blown topsoil and imprinted on the wind.”8 The last straw, it seems,
came when she heard a rising young ad executive unveil the “courageous
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65
and revolutionary proposal” that Bourke-White photograph a “real tire.”
This was too much:
The circle of madness was closing in on itself. Rubber was chasing rubber about
a vacuum. I longed to see the real world which lay beyond the real tire, where
things did not have to look convincing, they just had to be true. I felt I could
never again face a shining automobile stuffed with vapid smiles. Never again
could I build and rebuild the road that led nowhere.9
It is a moment worthy of Jean Baudrillard’s writings at the high-water mark
of postmodern theory, with its clever depiction of the vertigo that follows
the realization that, in the era of mass reproduction of art, the real and its
image become indistinguishable as they chase one another around within
the “culture of the simulacrum.”10 What stands out in sharp relief, however,
is the prepostmodern confidence with which Bourke-White asserts her ability to escape this “vacuum.” Within this vacuum, technicians work at producing an aura that “speaks” to an undifferentiated mass of people in an
unspecified set of places and times. Bourke-White tells us that, once one
bursts out of it, one finds fresh air and a road that leads to a somewhere
where “things . . . just had to be true.” The real automobile brings one into
contact with faces “engraved . . . with despair.” In other words, their experiences are written right on their faces, guaranteeing their fidelity to truth.
Whereas these faces refuse to let anyone “pass by” without recognizing their
humanity, those riding in automobiles on the “road to nowhere” wear fraudulent and “vapid” smiles that exert no particular ethical force on whoever
looks at them.
At this point the outlines of an important trajectory in Bourke-White’s
work begin to emerge. In formal terms this moves from an aesthetics of decomposition focused on industrial shapes abstracted from function through
the production of aura for Madison Avenue to, finally, the framing of ordinary faces in a documentary mode. The shift in aesthetics moves in parallel
fashion with an important institutional shift, one that also has three major
moments. The first has Bourke-White producing images for industry (e.g.,
Otis Steel, where Bourke-White worked from 1927 to 1928) that aggrandize
its production in the eyes of employees and shareholders but are limited in
their reach to “internal” uses. The second carves out a broader niche, having
Bourke-White create auratic images (e.g., advertisements for mass-market
periodicals like Time) designed to channel and focus consumers’ desires
throughout a broad public sphere. The final moment represents a decisive
shift: it preserves the address to a broad American public; it does so, however, not to elicit page-flipping fantasies about better living, but to confront
readers with particular faces from distant places, faces that speak of social
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and ecological violence and demand a response. Whereas the intended audience for the latter two moments remains substantially the same (i.e., a broad
middle-class readership), the location of the artist has changed dramatically,
moving from the “road to nowhere” of the studio with its trickery to the real
road that brings Bourke-White and Caldwell within range of the faces of the
suffering tenant farmers of the mid-1930s.
In imagining an outside to the regime of simulation, one that offers itself
to anyone with four wheels and sense of adventure, Bourke-White joins
Sturges’s Sullivan and a host of real writers and artists from the Depression
era: authors of travel narratives like Nathan Asch’s The Road (1937), directors of documentary films like Pare Lorentz’s The River (1938), and of course
the team of documentary photographers under Roy Stryker working within
the FSA (1935–1943). As in Bourke-White’s confessions above, such narratives often equate lighting out for the territory that lies outside of the centers
of cultural production with going Left, moving away from the State and corporate institutions that dominate political and cultural life and exploring the
possibilities of left-wing populism via direct contact with the everyday lives
of ordinary people.11 This equation, however, is not without its problems, for
one finds throughout texts in this tradition moments in which the purest
products of the hinterlands have extensive knowledge of the very mass cultural manipulations artists like Bourke-White were trying to escape. Indeed,
as Morris Dickstein argues, adventurers escaping the cities and moving into
the American hinterlands in search of a more settled and authentic “folk”
would have found at every turn people driven by dreams of mobility themselves, as evidenced by the widespread fascination with “road” movies like
Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) and even by the frenetic though
more abstract movements found in the production numbers of Busby Berkeley and in the rapid-fire banter of its screwball comedies.12 Thus, at the
intersection between metropolitan producers of culture “on the road” and
their documentary subjects in the hinterlands lies a basic irony: whereas the
work of the dominant documentary photographers of the era is “all about
going nowhere,” freezing forced migrations into static icons like Dorothea
Lange’s famous “Migrant Mother” portrait, the most popular mass cultural
forms of the period are “all about movement, not the desperate simulation of
movement we find in the road stories, but movement that suggests genuine
freedom.”13
Despite Bourke-White’s narration of her conversion to documentary
work as a clean break, it is more accurate to describe her post-1935 photojournalism as issuing from a messier mixture of influences. Her new focus
on human subjects and their social contexts has as its most important legacy
its canny combination of the iconicity one associates with the classic 1930s
documentary photographers (e.g., Lange and Walker Evans) and a careful
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67
attention to popular tastes and desires gleaned from her magazine and advertising work. Bourke-White’s work on Their Faces, in fact, took place between stints at two Time Inc. magazines: Fortune and Life. As we shall see in
chapter 5, working for Life hardly removed artists from the kind of careful
composition and manipulation of a mass audience’s experience of reality
Bourke-White imagines above as a “vacuum.” Rather, it placed them in an
ambiguous location between documentary subjects and a mass audience
from which the truth of this encounter, such as it existed, had to come to
terms with a complex nexus of material realities and immaterial desires.
Though Bourke-White ignores this messiness in her 1963 autobiography,
she subtly acknowledges it in an article on her dawning political selfawareness for the Nation in 1936 in ways that register the influence of
Depression-era linkages of “culture” and “work.” As in the above-cited passage, she satirizes Madison Avenue’s perversity in substituting fakes for the
real thing:
Imperceptibly the nature of my work underwent a change. Instead of being
turned loose for a month in an automobile factory to portray the drama of
the manufacture of the motor car, I was sent out with a tissue-paper layout,
drawn by the art director of an advertising agency, with a group of smartly
garbed and professionally smiling models, to show the style points of the
finished car.”14
But here, the inauthenticity of the subject is paired with the authenticity of
the process:
The desire for technical excellence leads one into this kind of thing with a
magnet. I felt . . . that the art-for-art’s-sake idea had no place in modern
photography. The function of photography was to do a job, to do skillfully and
effectively the task of selling soap flakes, perfume, or motor cars. The degree of
technical facility required is so great that advertising teaches invaluable
lessons. . . . Here we have a use for photography which increases still further the
photographer’s approach to realism.15
Whereas advertising had begun in a quasi-documentary mode, it is now
abstracted from on-location shooting, and its realism is limited to a formal
approach. For Bourke-White, this has stripped the “old, joyous, workmanlike feeling” from advertising work, and she ends the piece with a call
for “artists . . . playwrights, engineers, [and] all creative workers” to join
the “American Artists’ Congress” then forming.16 She thus reveals her affinity with emergent 1930s linkages of “culture” with “work,” and especially
with writers like Kenneth Burke, who counseled left-wing artists to see
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themselves as “propagandists” for socialism who use the techniques of
advertising against capitalism.17
The critical habit of seeing Bourke-White as a sellout, plain and simple, or
as a shallow and insincere convert to Left politics, misses not only the subtlety with which she understood her own position, but also the way that
position relates to the broader discourse among Depression-era artists regarding the social role of art. The road that takes Caldwell and Bourke-White
down South in the summer of 1936 connects metropolitan artists with “folk”
in the hinterlands as it serves as a conduit for the mass culture the latter
consume and thereby gain much of their understanding of the world.
Bourke-White’s ruminations on her career as an artist reveal a wish for a
documentary practice that employs the technical precision of advertising
work and its keen sense of how to persuade a mass audience while preserving the close contact with social reality that Madison Avenue prefers to synthesize. Accordingly, the road, for Bourke-White, is less a means for artists
to discover the naked truth of rural America and Americans than it is a place
through which an alternating current flows between metropolis and hinterland in a two-way circuit of influence.18
CLOSE CAPTIONS
The title of You Have Seen Their Faces hails readers strangely, as a “you”
standing opposite a “them” in a manner suggestive of public modes of looking, of museums or carnivals, places that offer a glimpse of the freakish and/
or exotic to a mass audience. Their use of the present perfect tense, however,
suggests that the text does not offer (or perhaps not primarily) something
exotic: you have seen this before. The tense hints that the divide between self
and other is more temporal than spatial: in the title, as in certain aspects of
the text, the movement from “you” to “them” results in a Platonic recovery
of forgotten knowledge. The conservative implications of this are obvious
enough: in place of a dialogical model or a model in which the “I” mediates,
through the text, between reader and “folk,” the title seems to offer up the
full presence of the text’s subjects, such that readers come to know them
face-to-face. As we shall see in more detail, this encounter sits within a narrative frame of national romance, in which middle-class American readers
are encouraged to recognize inhabitants of the “sick” South as forgotten or
disavowed members of the national family. The most conspicuous way the
text subsumes readers and documentary subjects within this national unity
is through the seven groupings of photographs placed between the chapters
of the text. In particular, it is the authors’ controversial use of invented cap-
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69
tions that fosters the feeling of directness and intimacy that seems to promise unity where there had been division between the subjects and the readers
of the documentary text.
As Roland Barthes argues in “Rhetoric of the Image,” the caption is the
verbal supplement that “anchors” the proliferating significations a given
image might generate, channeling the reader toward a discrete set of ideological meanings.19 Each of the seventy-five images in Their Faces has a caption in two parts: a location (city and state) and a statement in quotations,
attributable to a “voice” emanating from the photograph.20 In a disclaimer
at the beginning of the text, the authors make a paradoxical claim in behalf
of the two halves of the caption: Whereas they insist that “(n)o person,
place, or episode . . . is fictitious,” they admit that “(t)he legends under the
pictures . . . express the authors’ own conceptions of the sentiments of the
individuals portrayed” and that the captions “do not pretend to reproduce
the actual sentiments of these persons.”21 Each caption, then, “anchors” the
image in two places at once: on the one hand the rock of location, figured as
an actual spot on a universally shared map, and on the other a softer and
more sentimental place wherein meet the raw materials of the real encounter between the photographed subjects and the documentarians, the desires
and fantasies of the documentarians, and the responses of readers, conditioned by the conventions that govern the interpretation of photographic
portraits.
This second site, while scattered among a diverse range of agents in
one sense, has a particular moment of production in another. Bourke-White
recounts it thus:
We wanted a result in which the pictures and words truly supplemented one
another, merging into a unified whole. We had a kind of ritual about this.
We would arrange eight pictures in the middle of the floor. We backed away
and, sitting against the wall separately, wrote tentative captions and then put
them side by side to see what we had. Many times the final caption was a
combination of the two—the thought mine and the words Erskine’s, or vice
versa. . . . But it made no difference who contributed what, because by now
we were sure that the book had unity.22
This ritual is at once excessive and restrictive: excessive in that it breaches
the conventions of mimetic representation by putting fanciful words in the
mouths of their subjects, restrictive in that it renders the discontinuous experiences of those subjects (and of the authors’ interpretations of them) as
a “unity.” What stands out in sharp relief here is the inadequacy of BourkeWhite’s earlier distinction between the studio in which aura is produced
and the field in which the real simply exists. If the authors’ “ritual” proves
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anything, it is that both spaces are implicated in the same kinds of magic.
The “unity” that results from this magic, then, is synthetic in both senses
of the word, replacing the “natural” material of their encounters in the
field with substitutes made under laboratory conditions and generating
a unity that renders a discontinuous array of voices and desires as one
voice.
The most basic use of such captions pairs a portrait meant to invoke “folk”
simplicity with a caption that puts words in subjects’ mouths, giving the illusion of direct address. Consider, for example, an image from the second
portfolio in the text, in which we find an elderly black woman smiling and
looking up and to her left (figure 2.1).23 The caption reads, “I reckon I
forgot to remember how old I is” (43). What white, middle-class readers
might otherwise experience as alterity, as something from a different race or
region or class that demands further study, gets assimilated to a benign
bemusement, a “forgetting to remember” that evokes the passage of time in
a pleasingly rustic and universal manner. That the subject is a black woman
intensifies the pleasure many of these readers might have experienced in
1937, couching the phrase in a piquant dialect and rendering the note of
quaint confusion as part of a racial inheritance.24 Most important, the
caption anchors our attention on the face that occupies the center of the
photographic frame. Rather than consider the nexus of social and economic
relations that structure her life, relations that would force attention outside
of the frame and call attention to the incompleteness of the document, the
caption works its plenary magic, having the subject address us directly in an
illusion of full presence. The “unity” thus forged is dubious to say the least,
and Caldwell and Bourke-White have been rightly chastised by many critics
for their occasional exploitation of popular racist types: the most notorious
of these instances features a plump, watermelon-eating African American
woman, surrounded by her children. The caption reads, “I got more children
now than I know what to do with, but they keep coming along like watermelons in the summertime” (39). It is this sentimentality and lack of regard for
verisimilitude, or even plausibility, regarding the transcription and translation of the voice of the “native informant” that has opened Their Faces up to
criticism and neglect.25 The texts in this photo-documentary tradition that
have fared the best, critically speaking, have two major tendencies. The first
tendency, best exemplified by Paul Taylor and Dorothea Lange’s An American
Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939), is toward social scientific
protocols that foreground the text’s indexical aspect: texts in this tradition
make comprehensive maps of social reality and humanize those maps by
featuring the painstakingly recorded faces and voices of those suffering
from the problems featured in the study. The second, best exemplified by
the subject of chapter 4, James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise
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71
Fig. 2.1 Margaret Bourke-White, “Atoka, Tennessee, ‘I reckon I forgot to remember
how old I is,’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
Famous Men (1941), foregrounds the aesthetic and ethical problems of representing otherness.
What unites these two tendencies, despite their obvious differences, is an
orientation to what art historian Gretchen Garner calls “spontaneous witness,” a “practice focused on social reality and on human life, informed by
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the strong feelings of the photographer.”26 Critics have so prioritized the notion of “witness” in documentary work that it has become virtually definitive
of this aesthetic mode: to document is to serve the public as a witness to
social problems with sympathy and accuracy. Given the blatant racism and
sentimental distortion involved in the above captioned photographs, one
can understand why the authors of both American Exodus and Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men, as well as the vast majority of critics of documentary
since the 1930s, have chastised Bourke-White and Caldwell for their seemingly arbitrary and naïve (or cynical) mixture of fact and fiction in their
text.27
This interpretation, however, papers over some problems inherent in the
“spontaneous witness” critical mode, and it neglects to consider some of the
advantages of constructing documentary as an explicitly synthetic practice.
One might ask, for example, how “spontaneous” are any comments made or
poses struck by subaltern subjects in the presence of metropolitan documentarians, their automobiles, cameras, notebooks, and the like. In a later
documentary collaboration, Caldwell and Bourke-White provide a hilarious
send-up of the ubiquity of metropolitan observers in the small towns and
rural areas of the Depression-era U.S. and, hence, the severe limits on the
spontaneity of natives’ self-presentation in their presence. Encountering a
gas-station attendant alongside a rural highway, Caldwell removes his notebook and starts to ask questions, but the man immediately whips out a
printed card that reads as follows:
I am 36 years old. I smoke about a pack of cigarettes a day, sometimes more
and sometimes less, but it evens up. I take an occasional drink of beer. I am a
Baptist, and Elk, and a Rotarian. I live with my own wife, send my children to
school, and visit my in-laws once a year on Christmas Day. I wear No. 9½
shoes, No. 15½ collar, and No. 7¼ hat. I shoot a 12-gauge shotgun and have a
27-inch crotch. I like rice, sweet potatoes, and pork sausage. I vote for F.D.R.,
pull for Joe Louis, and boo Diz Dean. I wouldn’t have anything against Hitler
if he stayed in his own backyard. I don’t know any Japs, but I’ve made up my
mind to argue with the next one I see about leaving the Chinese alone. I’m in
favor of the AAA, the CCC, the IOU, and the USA. If I have left anything out,
it’s an oversight. My business is selling gasoline and oil. If you want your tank
filled, just nod your head. If you don’t want anything, please move along and
give the next fellow a chance. I thank you.28
It hardly matters that this story itself has an apocryphal ring. The point is
that the authors insert within the text a reminder of the performative aspect
of all ethnographic and documentary work. At many points in Their Faces,
Caldwell and Bourke-White take advantage of the experimental possibilities
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73
that invented captions afford in order to stage the encounter between the
titular “you” and “their faces” within a synthetic and overdetermined space
in which subject positions shift and swap in unexpected ways. These moments in the text that diverge from the simple ventriloquizing of “folk”
figures shake up the stable relationship between viewer and viewed promised by the title: the canny use of invented captions at such moments dislodges the reader from the privileged position of the unseen seer, allowing
this position to “float.” The slipperiness of this position has a wide range of
effects that are worth examining in detail.
Consider, for example, a photograph depicting a classroom full of African
American students seen from an elevated spot in front of the blackboard
(figure 2.2). The caption ventriloquizes a teacher reading them a story in
which a “fairy godmother . . . turned . . . the little white girls . . . into princesses”
(89). Whereas the portraits of the black women discussed above are captioned such that they address the reader intimately and directly, this caption
issues from a mouth that lies outside of the photograph’s frame but inside the
diagesis; the photograph speaks, in other words, from the approximate point
of the camera eye itself.29 The caption thus places the reader ambiguously,
either as pedagogue, visitor, or voyeur; moreover, this place is racially charged,
Fig. 2.2 Margaret Bourke-White, “Scotts, Arkansas, ‘And so the fairy godmother
turned all the little white girls into princesses,’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret
Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
implicating the reader in a node (i.e., a school) through which texts and institutional structures reproduce understandings of self and other. This latter
point is magnified by what seems to be the fictional teacher’s interpolation of
the word “white” into the fairy tale to modify “girls”: what primary-school
reader in the 1930s, after all, would deem it necessary to underscore the race
of its exclusively white protagonists in this way?30 In this light, the caption
reads more ambivalently, perhaps conveying in resentful tones the exclusion
of blacks from the text or, more subversively, the notion that racially marked
“white girls” might be turned into unmarked, black “princesses.” In any case,
the photograph itself is innocuous enough: it is the caption that dislodges
readers from the comfortable space of sympathy or voyeurism. Whereas
the two portraits discussed above present readers with others who are innocent and even familiar, allowing readers to sympathize without prior or
extrinsic knowledge, the schoolhouse photograph dislocates readers, calling
attention both to their own racial identity and to the relationship between
that underscored identity and the role played by racial codes in the scene
being documented.
A more dramatic example of this pattern occurs in an image in the next
portfolio, part of a series depicting the religious lives of white sharecroppers (figure 2.3). In this image, a knot of worshipers is watching a woman
being “born again”; the caption reads, “Fanny’s boy” is “sitting in the
window watching his Aunt Nell come through” (137). The address of this
caption clearly situates the addresser as one familiar with the community
and its inhabitants, but what of the addressee? Is he or she a coparticipant,
sharing in the narration of the event as it happens, like baseball fans commenting on a game as they watch? A stranger, like the reader, for whom the
appellation “Fanny’s boy” is not likely to mean anything at all? Or does this
voice come from outside the diagesis altogether, staging an encounter in
which the addresser is narrating to the addressee while flipping through a
family photo album? Heightening the ambiguity in this photograph is the
private and ritualized aspect of the subject: in order to get this image,
Bourke-White and Caldwell had to jump through the window of a Holiness
Church in South Carolina and work quickly with a small-format camera
and flashbulbs.31 This is one of the few images in this text that works within
a “candid camera” mode, which would ordinarily freeze a moment in time
in order to satisfy the audience’s curiosity about things usually gone unseen. The caption complicates this interpretive frame, inserting the viewer
into the field, as it were, thus emphasizing his or her unfamiliarity with its
inhabitants, traditions, and protocols. At such moments, Their Faces exhibits a rougher texture than critics have acknowledged, foregrounding the
various artifices that bring disparate sets of “faces” (i.e., the readers’ and
subjects’) into contact.
Fig. 2.3 Margaret Bourke-White, “Exminster, South Carolina, ‘That’s Fanny’s boy
sitting in the window watching his Aunt Nell come through,’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate
of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
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“DON’T THINK THESE KNOW-IT-ALLS DON’T
THINK THEY KNOW”
A central feature of New Deal discourse is the presence of a technocratic
elite that directs a national project of modernization and rationalization
from Washington, D.C. outward, integrating areas occluded from modernity into the various organic systems that compose the nation. This logic
constructs “the people” as a homogeneous mass, a stored-up reserve of potential energy waiting to be incorporated into the system by the directives of
the executive-branch “brains trust.” Indeed, the metaphor of executive power
as a brain that directs the members of the body politic is ubiquitous in the
era. H. G. Wells, for example, described Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a ganglion
for reception, expression, transmission, combination, and realization, which
I take it, is exactly what a modern government ought to be,” and photographer Edwin Rosskam entitled his 1939 documentary book on the rapidly
growing federal government Washington: Nerve Center.32 The attribution of
a natural, almost biological mastery on the part of the federal government
accompanied visions of ordinary Americans suspended in states of inertia
and confusion. For Sherwood Anderson, America was “puzzled” by the
Depression; for Edmund Wilson, it had the “jitters”; perhaps most dramatically, for Archibald MacLeish in Land of the Free, his documentary book
on the Depression, a multitude of nameless Americans form a chorus, singing a plaintive admission of ignorance: “We wonder/We don’t know/We’re
asking.”33 Absent in this vision of masterful center and puzzled periphery is
a notion of alternative locations for political agency. In political terms this
represents a familiar shift in the workings of the federalist state from “states’
rights” and/or local control to the authority and centrality of the federal government. Culturally, this conceit shores up a tradition of “civic nationalism”
aimed at subsuming various American racial, ethnic, and regional traditions
within an overarching American unity centered in the expertise and authority of the U.S. leadership.34
In Their Faces, Caldwell and Bourke-White often pull from this discourse,
figuring the South as a sick member of a healthy body (or, alternatively, as a
vice-prone and wayward member of a national family); as such, their narrative reflects a characteristic New Deal vision of knowledge as an invigorating
flow from center to periphery that heals the wounds caused by maldistribution of capital and the asymmetrical development of culture and society.
This affinity is borne out formally though the third-person voice that narrates most of the text, which might be called a “voice-over” by way of analogy with the soundtracks of Pare Lorentz’s New Deal documentary films or
Time Inc.’s March of Time newsreels.35 This text deviates from the terms of
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the “nerve center” discourse, however, at various points in which the documentary subjects refuse their roles as passive recipients of knowledge and
claim agency as sites of different knowledge grounded in local structures of
feeling. At such points, which emerge most forcefully in the first-person informant narratives that bookend each chapter, the position of the documentarian is jarred from its alignment with reason and modernity and slips into
a less comfortable place between center and periphery, articulating voices of
others whose knowledge clashes with the normative consensus narratives of
New Deal civic nationalism.
In some ways, Bourke-White and Caldwell’s text thus reveals the limitations of its authors’ imagination in ways that are interestingly symptomatic
of the broader Depression-era imaginary regarding “the people” and modernization. But their inclusion of voices and images that interrupt progress
toward a unitary and modern nation must also be accounted for as a strength
of the text insofar as it reveals the challenges for a Left politics that is both
progressive and rooted in “people’s culture.” As historian Alan Brinkley
has noted, the presumed objects of the “brain” discourse in American
hinterlands did not necessarily submit to the directives of others’ rational
planning. In examining the appeal of Charles Coughlin and Huey P. Long in
the Depression era, he emphasizes the distinctive way the populist discourse
of the period organized space, such that “local problems were not usually
the fault of local people or institutions” but should be blamed on what Long
described as the “distant power centers,” or what Coughlin termed “the hidden forces which have conspired against the common people of the world.”
For Brinkley, this geography is part of a rational response (though one
lumped together, to be sure, with irrational elements, like racism) to the
conditions of economic inequality and political disempowerment that obtained in rural and small-town spaces in the Depression-era U.S.36 One of
the virtues of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s text is its subtle registering both
of the dominant modernizing ideology and the resistance to it grounded in
local structures of feeling.
The tensions that are so legible in the text between, on the one hand, the
popular and the local and, on the other, the rational and universal, are also
conspicuous in Caldwell’s own biography. Caldwell, the son of a liberal Presbyterian preacher of extremely modest means, grew up in Wrens, Georgia, a
small town in the Cotton Belt. Like his father, Caldwell was a strident critic
of the South’s economic inequality, racism, and conservatism in ways that
put him at odds with many of his Southern literary contemporaries, such as
the Agrarian circle at Vanderbilt, not to mention ordinary white Southerners, from whom he received hate mail and death threats for his unflattering
representations of the region.37 Moreover, he was deeply involved with the
literary Left of the period: for example, he was a coeditor of the Anvil, a
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left-leaning modernist “little magazine” and a signatory of the call for the
formation of the American Writers’ Congress in 1935.38 Nevertheless, he
was always ill at ease in literary circles and harbored a great deal of insecurity about his relative lack of education and polish. And as a chronicler of a
degraded Southern peasantry, which formed the subject matter of most of
his work, he constantly risked being viewed as something of a rube himself,
whose skill in evoking Southern scenes was thought to stem from his own
provinciality. As a favorable but telling review of his story collection, American Earth, put it, Caldwell “had a varied career among the people of whom—
and like whom—he speaks.”39 Caldwell, in other words, straddled the line
between “native informant” of Southern ways of life and metropolitan expert (not to say, “outside agitator”), descending from on high in order to
modernize or reform them.
Each of the chapters of Their Faces begins and ends with a short first-person informant narrative, with the majority of the text coming from Caldwell’s
third-person narrative. As in the photographs’ interplay between distanced
images and ventriloquizing captions, the narrative’s overarching structure
sets up a tension between a detached and disembodied voice and the voices
that issue from the “faces” of the text’s title. The difference in voice is reflected
further in differences of location and of expertise: on the one hand, a voice
that speaks for science and has access to an archive of knowledge and to theories regarding social, political, and economic processes; on the other, voices
whose purview is pitifully narrow.40 Most of the first-person sections seem
calculated to add pathos to the rather clinical and factual tone of the thirdperson sections; in some cases, they move more in the direction of dramatic
irony, providing readers with a poignant contrast between the real economic
and political conditions described in the dominant narrative and the inadequate cognitive maps by which the informants navigate these conditions.
The dominant trope by which Caldwell’s narrative voice establishes its
mastery over these first-person voices found in the text is that of the South
as a sick body, victim of unpredictable natural forces and, especially, of its
own bad habits:
The plantation system has been wringing the blood and marrow from the South
for two hundred years and, as fast as that is accomplished, the institution of
sharecropping is being set up as a means of extracting the last juice of life from
its prostrate body. . . . [It] can survive only by feeding upon itself, like an animal
in a trap eating its own flesh and bone. (74–5)
Caldwell then addresses the region as a doctor would a patient, integrating
its various symptoms within a diagnostic theory and (increasingly toward
the end of the text) prescribing various therapies. As Caldwell wraps his
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narrating voice in the mantle of expertise and professionalism, he relegates
two other groups to the fringes: local leaders, who look more like symptoms
of the society’s sickness rather than agents of its cure, and analysts from the
“outside,” who become incorporated into the body of Southern culture and
thus lose their professional detachment.
Members of the first group, Caldwell suggests, are inadequate to the task
of exercising a rational, directive function:
Slavery, climate, and hookworm have been favorite causes for generations of
finger-pointing pulpiteers and pamphleteers. High-tariff and free-silver
advocates had their opportunity to pin something on somebody somewhere,
but when they had had their day, the South was still sick. Blaming it all on
the failure to build the Nicaraguan Canal was for a time a serious-minded
occupation. The coming of the boll-weevil, the army-worm, and the
screw-worm brought forth a new generation of bush-beaters and
stump-thumpers who were certain they held the secret of the South’s
troubles in the palms of their hands. After all these years the sun still
rises in the East and sets in the West and the South is still sick. (26)
Bourke-White and Caldwell, it is implied, improve upon such efforts by
embracing a means (the serious documentary book, not the “pamphlet”)
and a location (the disinterested “outside” from which the scientist works,
not the “pulpit”) that elevates them above the shallow and self-interested
efforts of their local competitors.
Members of the second group, however, resemble Caldwell and BourkeWhite more closely:
Scientists with microscopes and theologians with Bibles come to the South to
tell it what is wrong with it, and stay to buy a home and raise a family. Gaping
tourists come to pick its flesh to pieces, and remain to eat fried chicken and
watermelon for the rest of their lives. (26)
These intellectuals and tourists (like the authors of Their Faces) are figured as
metropolitans whose desires to engage the South stem from various
sources—evangelism, scientific inquiry, prurience—all of which lead them
into incorporation into the community rather than to the kind of critical
engagement Caldwell reserves for his own project. This incorporation is
evoked compactly here as the desire to perform exploratory surgery on the
dying body of the South gives way to a different kind of cutting, one that
subsumes outsiders within the observational field and figures their picking
at traditional Southern food as a sign of their organic relationship to the
(still grievously ill) corpus of Southern society.
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The third-person narrative of Their Faces largely fulfills this diagnostic
function, providing a broad historical, sociological, and ecological contexts
for the South’s ills: for example, it explores the differences between the fertile
Delta and the ecologically ravaged rest of the Black Belt (75) and maps out
the hierarchy that keeps the exploitative structure of sharecropping in place,
from absentee landlords, managers, and overseers, on down to virtually enserfed African American laborers (50). The first-person informant narratives that crop up at various points within the main third-person narrative
of Their Faces provide a counterpoint to this broad mapping, injecting into
it vivid testimonies regarding how the structures and conditions Caldwell
describes are lived. These accounts rub against the grain of the narrative’s
masterful tone, expressing uncertainty, dislocation, nostalgia for an imagined past that was more settled, and despair about the future. The presence
of such voices is ubiquitous in Depression-era culture, facilitating flows of
sympathy between members of a national “family” in ways I have discussed
above with regard to the photographs. But just where voices might coalesce
into a nationalist and populist unity in this text, we find instead important
points of rupture. At such points, the text raises crucial questions about the
unstable relationship in Depression-era culture between “the people” and
the State.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of this rupture occurs in chapter 3, in
which Caldwell’s laying bare of the plantation system’s social hierarchy is
bookended by narratives from two informants. First comes that of a Southern banker, whose position affords him a relatively sophisticated understanding of the faulty economic structures of the sharecropping system. He
recognizes that only one out of ten farmers turns a profit, and that his own
bank’s routine functioning contributes to the misery of the other nine, yet
his narrative ends on a plaintive note regarding any possible solution: “I
don’t know. I don’t even know anybody who knows” (82). This admission of
bewilderment, framed as it is within Caldwell’s masterful third-person explications of Southern history, economy, and politics, does not offer itself up
to sympathy (although that element is present) so much as it places the
banker, despite his relatively high social position, on the other side of the
line dividing those who know (including, gradually, readers of the text) from
those who lack even the hope of knowing. The second narrative comes from
further down the social scale, from a white farmer who tells Caldwell that,
while Northerners are incapable of “running niggers,” their Southern counterparts are more than equal to the task, given their wealth of experience
(73). In concluding this familiar vilification of the “outside agitator,” the informant raises the question of the location of knowledge: “But don’t think
these know-it-alls don’t think they know how [to manage African American
workers]. . . . They’re making damn fools of themselves” (ibid.). At this
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81
moment, two realms of knowledge come into direct conflict: that of the
informant, for whom the correctness of social analysis diminishes exponentially, like gravity, with the distance between the analyst and the social problem under examination, and that of the narrator, for whom various forms of
technical expertise, along with the mechanisms of representative democracy, provide a universal framework within which to work out local problems regardless of where one happens to be standing. The double negative
that structures the informant’s statement reinforces the ironies created by
this intersection of fields and knowing subjects. When the informant urges
Caldwell not to think the know-it-alls don’t think they know it all, the tortuous construction subtly recruits the author to the side of the “we” that excludes outside expertise. In so doing, he also calls attention to a peculiar
aspect of Caldwell as a gatherer of first-person accounts and third-person
narrator: he is a native of northern Georgia who, despite his spending much
of his adult life in Maine and New York City, maintained a distinct Southern
accent and a soft touch in talking to locals in his travels.41 Thus the informant imagines, quite plausibly, not only that Caldwell might share his virulent
racism, but also his valorization of local people’s common sense over the
abstract rationality of the know-it-all.
These two informant narratives thus neatly frame this text’s thematization of the location of knowledge, displaying the South as a zone in which
inhabitants’ maps are inadequate but inflecting this inadequacy in two very
different ways. On the one hand, the banker’s statements suggest that locals
know that they don’t know what plagues them and, presumably, welcome
the intervention of experts who do. The structure of Caldwell’s narrative
solves, in some sense, this dilemma, depicting the cultural field of the South
as an unregenerate island whose inhabitants are waiting for the arrival of
experts to fertilize it with “outside” knowledge, the kind of knowledge that
proliferates in Caldwell’s narrative. On the other hand, the racist’s statements
promote a theory that relegates knowledge that comes from afar to the realm
of the “foolish,” particularly to the extent that it claims universality (i.e., the
preserve of the know-it-all, the brains trust, the think tank). The temptation
simply to reject this move as evidence of a “sick” cultural pattern is powerful:
from the vantage point of the educated liberal reader, the informant stands
beyond the pale of a set of universal values; furthermore, the construction of
the “local” on which he grounds his analysis excludes the thoughts and beliefs of a large and local African American minority. To dismiss this voice
thus, however, reading it solely as an instance of false consciousness in need
of remediation, threatens to unmoor the documentary project in important
ways. By including this voice from the “folk” that resists the rational-technocratic voice that predominates throughout the text, Caldwell poses an important dilemma for practitioners of documentary. What is the relationship
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between the knowledge it produces and the localized knowledges it
encounters in the field? What happens when readers of the documentary
text “see their faces” with a glimmer of familial recognition only to find that
these faces have voices that resist inclusion into a modernizing liberal
nation?
These problems emerge most forcefully, as is often the case in this text, in
captioned photographs. Underneath a pair of images in which African
Americans sit outside of shacks covered with advertisements lies the
caption, “Of course I wouldn’t let them plaster signs all over my house, but
it’s different with those shacks the niggers live in” (figure 2.4). It would seem
that this photograph plays on a picturesque mode common in documentary
photographs of the era, emphasizing the quaintness of the mixture of Madison Avenue modernism and “folk” vernacular. The caption, however, strips
the image of the pleasures this mode offers: in place of the ideal distance
between a solitary viewer and scene, a distance that frames a bit of “local
color” and thereby renders it pleasing to metropolitan viewers, the caption
places these viewers in the intimate and unwelcome company of a racist
who recruits them to his decidedly unpicturesque reading of the scene.
Through this caption we are riding shotgun, as it were, with the most antiliberal elements of a divided cultural landscape defined largely by racial
membership and racial terror. As such, the text’s larger project of (re)unification of estranged regions, races, and classes into a subsuming democratic,
egalitarian unity proves to be riddled with contradictions: at key moments
such as this, the reader is inserted into a place from which no larger synthesis seems possible.
CONSUMING THEIR FACES
I have argued that Their Faces sets up a paradigm wherein the documentarians play the role of doctors working on the “sick body” of the cotton South
and readers assume the guise of concerned family members hoping for a
complete recovery and swift return to the national home. As we have seen,
the text also contains conspicuous moments in which this pattern breaks
down: the patient claims not to be sick; the doctors’ expertise is called into
question; and the “family” proves unstable, including and excluding members arbitrarily, depending on the place and time. The text’s final chapter
attempts to resolve these tensions, envisioning a near future in which the
South is rejuvenated and subsumed within a modernized, more perfect union. One would expect the images to further this project, particularly in light
of the claims Bourke-White makes in her autobiography regarding “unity”
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Fig. 2.4 Margaret Bourke-White, “Montgomery, Alabama, ‘Of course I wouldn’t
let them plaster signs all over my house, but it’s different with those shacks the
niggers live in,’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
as the guiding principle in the book’s combination of images and text. Instead, however, the groups of images that precede and follow the last chapter
cut against the grain of the narrative: the final images and captions express a
note of resignation and defeat that undercuts the final chapter’s hortatory
note of national reconstruction. These sequences also feature grotesque
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presences that work in uncanny fashion to keep the text from settling into
either tragic or comic metanarratives.
In the final chapter, Caldwell shifts from a diagnostic to a prescriptive
mode, sketching out a recipe for the South’s restoration. In so doing, he first
clears a space by naming all the groups offering competing solutions: plantation owners’ defense of the status quo; politicians’ cynical invocation of
an imminent future in which conditions will improve “naturally”; sociologists’ faith in either “sterilization of the mentally and physically unfit” or
“educational advantages and health instruction”; and tenant farmers’ desperate ignorance and gullibility (165). Having remarked on the inadequacy
of competing proposals, he proposes two treatments for the South’s maladies: “collective action by the tenant farmers themselves,” and “government
control of cotton farming” (ibid.). Perhaps predictably, he then synthesizes
these populist and liberal-technocratic strains: government experts will descend to tinker with the local socioeconomic machinery, but they will do so
under the auspices of a “non-political” commission composed of “sociologists, economists, and Southern agronomists” along with “at least one
sharecropper and field hand,” the tenant farmers’ union, and a landlord
(168).
At once technocratic and representative of “the people,” this dream of
frictionless synthesis of local citizens and outside experts flies in the face of
the deeply fractured social landscape Caldwell and Bourke-White have
taken such pains to document. Caldwell smoothes over this contradiction
with a culminating vision worthy of Hollywood. He claims that, while no
such remedies are likely to help the “wasted human beings” whom the backward economy of cotton cultivation has destroyed, it does have promise for
the vital “young people” who “have the power in themselves to fight against
any system that attempts to break their bodies and spirits as it did their parents” (168). This emerging generation promises not just a rebirth of a region,
claims Caldwell, but a nation as well: “With hope and a dream before them,
they can change a hell into a living paradise. When fear has been banished,
and self-respect restored, America will wake up to find that it has a new region to take pride in” (169). With all the subtlety of Tim LaHaye’s fundamentalist “Left Behind” fictions, Caldwell envisions a rapture in which the
chosen rise up obscurely into America, waking up in a paradise regained,
showing no trace of the traumas that had marked them in life.
But what is left behind in this awkward narrative closure? One might expect the text to give readers a glimpse of what lies in store for the nation in
its closing pages: a fair field full of folk, perhaps, or at least some muscular
youths toting scythes. Instead we get a set of images in which no trace of
heroism or uplift is visible. The first image in the portfolio that closes the
book slyly underscores this irony: it features a meticulously painted sign
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Fig. 2.5 Margaret Bourke-White, “Hull, Georgia, ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve
lived on this place since the world began,’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret
Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
mounted to a crooked post that reads, “Look . . . ‘Now Is the Day of Salvation’ ” (171) (figure 2.5). What follows are images of the opposite: stasis and
decay, including prostrate bodies, junked cars, and eroded landscapes. At
the end of this series (and, indeed, of the book) are two astonishing closeups of faces. The first is of a woman, seemingly on the brink of tears, her
face prematurely etched with wrinkles in a visual rhyme with a photograph
of eroded fields found earlier in the same portfolio (figure 2.6). The second
is of a man who confronts the viewer with a masklike face, his eyes
obscured by shadows; the caption reads, “It ain’t hardly worth the trouble
to go on livin’ ” (figure 2.7). In both images, the faces address the viewer
frankly and with full self-possession; Bourke-White’s careful lighting and
large-format camera lend each a sculptural quality. Coupled with the raw
despondence of the captions, these faces testify against the rapturous
closure of Caldwell’s narrative. These faces lack the vitality and youth to
regenerate a sick society and damaged landscape, but neither are they
allowed to stand in for bits of human trash to be cleared from the landscape
by rational planning.
These final images leave the book suspended between a comic resolution
in which planners descend from Washington to reconstruct the nation and
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Fig. 2.6 Margaret Bourke-White, “Locket, Georgia, ‘I’ve done the best I knew how all
my life, but it didn’t amount to much in the end,’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret
Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
a tragic one in which a complex of social and political questions is condensed into the ethical demand made by the suffering human face whose
voice addresses the reader. In so doing, these photographs use the formal
means of photography and layout to imbue the degraded and seemingly
trashy with aura: in a sense, the subjects of these portraits become celebrities, their faces enlarged on the page nearly to life-size.42 It may be the case
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Fig. 2.7 Margaret Bourke-White, ‘Locket, Georgia, “It ain’t hardly worth the trouble
to go on livin’, ’ ” 1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA,
New York, NY.
that these faces work in concert with the narrative in a familiar agitprop
mode, shocking our sympathies as the narrative urges us to support new
political and economic policies. The agitation, however, recruits our
sympathies not for the vibrant and productive masculine youth who holds
the key to the future in most 1930s propaganda on both left and right, but
for the losers, those used-up and inexpert faces from the crowd who testify
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to the uneven progress of modernization and the unequal distribution of its
fruits. The disjuncture between the text and images here thus expresses an
underlying contradiction that often slips through the cracks of Depressionera representations of the poor and dispossessed.
These overlapping and contradictory tendencies toward comedy and
tragedy at the end of the text share one basic quality: in both, the reader is
recruited to participate in an effort toward unification with the suffering
South. As such, both set up imaginaries in which the readers are asked to
traverse social and geographic divisions in order to incorporate the suffering
faces and ravaged landscape into an encompassing national family. Alongside these comic and tragic strains that emerge at the end of the text, however, runs a grotesque offshoot which calls the stability of these positions
more deeply into question. The line-up of grotesques who litter the text’s final two portfolios raises important questions about location. In these images, things are never as and where they should be: mouths are missing teeth,
faces are stained with snuffjuice, children are covered in dirt, and mattresses
have cotton batting spilling out of their skins. The most disturbing and uncanny of these photographs is a family portrait of sorts, in which an elderly
man and woman and a young boy sit on the stoop of a shack (figure 2.8).
Several things are wrong with this picture—a generation, that of the boy’s
parents, is missing; the boy is ill-clothed and his genitals spill out from under his shirt; and the subjects engage neither the camera nor one another, all
sharing the same downcast expression.
All this goes unnoticed at first, however, because of the huge goiter than
projects from the old woman’s neck, distending her face and throwing her
entire body, it seems, out of balance. The standard reading of Bourke-White’s
documentary work is that it is too sentimental, which is to say, too easily
consumed. It is appropriate, then, to end my reading of her text with an image that so sticks in the craw of its reader. Goiters often result from malnutrition and make it difficult to swallow and breathe properly. The huge goiter
that projects from this image thus protrudes into the reader’s space in two
ways: on an allegorical level it points to the maldistribution of educational
and material resources that subtends the conditions described in Their
Faces; on a more self-reflexive level it also makes the image of this condition
itself harder to swallow. At just the point at which readers might sympathize
with the subjects of the photograph, the photograph interrupts this relay: in
its depiction of a woman whose goiter renders both eating and speaking
difficult and painful, this image simultaneously underscores both the inability of the subjects of these photographs to represent themselves in their
own voices and the problems inherent in readers’ swallowing of such images whole, imagining their own knowledge of the subjects’ circumstances
to be adequate.
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Fig. 2.8 Margaret Bourke-White, ‘Sweetfern, Arkansas, “Poor people get passed by,” ’
1936. Photo © Estate of Margaret Bourke-White/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN
THEY APPEAR
What, in the end, are we to make of this strange text? I have argued throughout this essay that Their Faces is not primarily sentimental in its approach;
rather, it mixes the sentimentality with a powerful self-reflexivity that compels readers to consider the troubling implications of consuming images of
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poor and dispossessed others. Neither should it be read as a canny bit of
hucksterism that appropriates the lives of the powerless in order to turn a
profit. Finally, it is not my intent to perform a simple reversal of the critical
orthodoxy on this text, arguing that its simplicity and thinness is, to the
careful and politically savvy reader, complex and semiotically dense, however true that may be at certain points and in certain ways. I want to suggest
instead that Their Faces engages, in its formal repertoire, important concerns
within American modernism: the place of the intellectual in an unevenly
modernizing society, the relationship between residual subcultures and an
emergent national culture, and, especially, the relationship between cultural
production and the desires of the masses. The strangeness of this text, particularly in the disconnect between the wish-fulfilling narrative closure (i.e.,
the national romance of North/South reunion) and the tragic and grotesque
faces and bodies that usher readers out of the text, stems from the intractableness of these questions at this moment.
In closing, I want to return to Bourke-White’s retrospective commentary
on the making of Their Faces from her autobiography. I began the chapter
with Sullivan’s dilemma: how to find “the real thing” in a world saturated
with images. In her memoir, Bourke-White relates an aporetic and uncanny
moment that sits in stark contrast both to the rather romantic narrative closure Caldwell provides for Their Faces and the satiric ending Sturges gives to
Sullivan’s Travels. Reflecting on her own travels, Bourke-White observes the
ways in which the material artifacts of advertising mediate metropolitan
producers of culture and consumers at the fringes:
As we penetrated the more destitute regions of the South, I was struck by the
frequent reminders I found of the advertising world I thought I had left behind.
Here the people really used the ads. They plastered them directly on their
houses to keep the wind out. Some sharecropper shacks were wrapped so snugly
in huge billboard posters advertising magic pain-killers and Buttercup Snuff
that the home itself disappeared from sight. The effect was bizarre.43
What strikes Bourke-White here as a “bizarre” effect does so primarily
because it dismantles the binary according to which she has structured her
“conversion” from advertising work to documentation, from the “road to
nowhere” to the depiction of naked reality. Here, the most frivolous products of commodity culture are recycled by consumers in ways never anticipated by Madison Avenue, both to relieve the monotony of dwellings with
few ornaments and, more practically, as insulation. In so doing, rural dwellers employ the little engines of aura production that come from the metropolis to mask the nakedness, the vernacular eloquence, that is supposed
to inhere in rural poverty. Inside the effect is amplified:
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The walls from floor to ceiling were papered in old newspapers and colorful
advertising pages torn from magazines. Very practical, Erskine explained to me.
Good as insulation against either heat or chill, and it’s clean and can be replaced
for next to nothing. I had the uneasy feeling that if I explored around enough, I
would find advertisements I had done myself.44
Bourke-White’s uneasiness registers what the narrative’s ending works so
hard to repress: that mass cultural products travel in unexpected ways, such
that divisions between city and country, “folk” naïveté and metropolitan
expertise, documentarians and documentary subjects, prove to be quite
porous when subjected to scrutiny. In documenting an exotic space and trying to integrate it into the subsuming “pattern” of American culture, one
finds that one has been preceded, even by oneself. Precisely where BourkeWhite had hoped to find “real” people who live outside of the mad cycle of
advertising-driven consumerism, she finds . . . more advertisements, as well
as people who are formed and informed, not to mention pleased and
warmed, by them.
This uncanny recognition soon gives way to a second that is more significant. As Bourke-White is leaving the house, she takes one more look: “As
we drove off, I glanced over my shoulder. The snuff-wrapped shack looked
like an immense cocoon which I felt might at any moment hatch a huge bug
that would walk away with the house.”45 In this Kafkaesque moment, the
homeliest of “folk” sites is rendered unheimlich, not by a presence haunting
it from the immemorial past as in so many gothic fictions, but by the products of an emergent modernity. The divergence between Bourke-White’s
uncanny vision and the upbeat nationalism of the text’s end is striking:
whereas the latter has Americans waking up to find the integrity of their
nation magically restored, the former has more radical implications. BourkeWhite’s vision is suspended between comic and tragic frames and figures the
“folk,” not as an inert mass waiting passively to be reconstructed by outside
experts, but as an unclassifiable organism undergoing metamorphic change,
a change whose outcome eludes prediction.
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3
Moving Violations
Stasis and Mobility in James Agee and Walker Evans’s
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941)
Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the
use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.
—Woodrow Wilson, “The Young Man’s Burden” (1906)
The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rock of the Caucasus, the pyramids of
Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability
itself is nothing but a more languid motion.
—Michel de Montaigne, “Of Repentance” (1580)
Each of us is a kind of crossroads where things happen.
—Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (1977)
In the summer of 1936, as Caldwell and Bourke-White undertook their
3,500 mile tour of the Deep South, James Agee and Walker Evans hopped in
the car to head out on a research trip of their own: on assignment for Fortune, they drove from New York to central Alabama to research and write a
photographic essay of about ten thousand words surveying the plight of tenant farmers in the agricultural crisis of the mid-1930s.1 The article never
materialized, mostly because of Agee’s unwillingness to conform to any
known norms of journalism, but the project emerged four years later as the
471 pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.2 Despite a number of favorable
reviews, the book sold well under a thousand copies and languished in obscurity until its reissue in 1960, after Agee’s death and the posthumous publication of his Pulitzer-winning novel, A Death in the Family (1957). On one
level, Famous Men is simply an example of poor marketing: had it been
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published, the article would have circulated widely among the influential
upper-middlebrow audience of Fortune and, had the book followed close
behind, it would have capitalized on the widespread fascination in the mid1930s with the plight of sharecroppers in the region referred to by President
Roosevelt as “the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” Instead, the book was
only excerpted in a couple of modernist “little magazines” prior to release
and was published in 1941, after the vogue for tenant farmers had passed
and public interest was focused on war mobilization and celebrations of
America’s exceptional diversity and democracy. The immeasurably more
market-savvy duo of Bourke-White and Caldwell played the game perfectly,
in contrast. You Have Seen Their Faces was a critical and commercial
success—it was a bestseller and made the “best of 1937” lists of several influential magazines; their next collaboration, North of the Danube (1939),
dramatically captured the Nazi advance through central Europe as it unfolded; their third and final documentary book, Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (1941),
was a national bestseller that caught the wave of war mobilization, celebrating American culture as a pluralist and democratic alternative to fascism.3
To read this contrast, however, simply as evidence of the Agee and Evans’s
ineptitude as marketers fundamentally misunderstands their project; in
many ways, the lack of circulation was the point. Early in Famous Men, Agee
engages in a metareflection on the task at hand, mapping out the concentric
lines of force that circumscribe the “folk” lives at the center of the project:
I realize that, with even so much involvement in explanations as this, I am liable
seriously, and perhaps irretrievably, to obscure what would at best be hard
enough to give its appropriate clarity and intensity; and what seems to me most
important of all: namely, that these I will write of are human beings, living in
this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their
heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered, and
loved, by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of
still others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still
others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book, and who
were actuated toward this reading by various possible reflexes of sympathy,
curiosity, idleness, et cetera, and almost certainly a lack of consciousness, and
conscience, remotely appropriate to the enormity of what they were doing.4
The geography sketched out in this tortuous sentence is striking: innocent
rural dwellers sit at a center that is figured as earthbound and static; “over
their heads” and outward to the horizon lie those who work to the specifications of the Luce publishing empire, the central intelligence agency that
directs intellectual work. In between these two groups are, on the one
hand, the “monstrously alien” spies who shuttle between the innocents and
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Central Command, gathering information as they escape detection and, on
the other, the “still more alien” readers of the text the spies produce. The
anger that animates this sentence is focused both on Agee himself and on
readers: Agee believes that both writers and readers of the “folk” are in constant danger of selling the innocents out through inappropriate and “casual”
treatment of what, in fact, partakes of a sublime “enormity.” This anger, however, conjures up the prospect of an alternative and as yet unarticulated
practice, ways of seeing, writing, and reading that respect the ethical and
aesthetic problems bound up in documenting the lives of the poor and dispossessed.
Famous Men is obviously not a Fortune article: on the contrary, among
other things it is a strident critique of what the authors view as the undemocratic structure of mass media corporations, the superficiality and exploitativeness of their products, and the degraded reading practices they inspire.
Accordingly, the text represents its authors’ attempt to revise the topography
of the relations between writers, their subjects, the material texts that represent those subjects, and readers. My central argument is that Agee and
Evans’s attempt to overcome the alienation that they attribute to mass cultural modes of representation is grounded in three related oppositions between stasis and mobility/circulation: (a) the singular work of art vs. the
mechanically produced piece of mass culture; (b) the absorbed perceiver of
serious art vs. the distracted, pleasure-seeking cultural consumer; and (c)
the rooted “folk” vs. (auto)mobile metropolitans. Most fundamentally, the
text reflects its authors’ attempt to dwell with their relatively immobile and
earthbound subjects: in contrast to Caldwell and Bourke-White, who crisscrossed the South in search of material, Agee and Evans spent two months
in and around the tiny rural community of Mills Hill, Alabama, sleeping, in
Agee’s case at least, in a bug-ridden bed belonging to one of his subjects.5
The text attempts to translate the experience of inhabiting the lives of poor
rural dwellers to readers in as intact a state as possible: readers are browbeaten throughout the text to treat it not as diversion or stimulation or even
education, but as “an effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is”
(9). The most radical (if futile) extension of this wish to transmit the intensity of the author’s in-dwelling experience focuses on the material text itself:
Agee urges us not to “think of it as Art” (12); he claims that “this is a book
only by necessity” (xi); and he urges us to imagine its words spoken aloud
and to read them in one sitting (ibid.). Most arrestingly, he fantasizes about
an Adamic book out of which pops up the object matter of the experience it
relates: “phials of odors,” “plates of food and of excrement,” “a piece of the
body torn out by the roots” (10).
It would be both simple and pointless to argue that the project is illconceived, even impossible: that no “folk” in 1930s America is “static” in any
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sense; that the differences in outlook and mentality that separate educated
metropolitans from brutalized victims of the Depression-era agricultural
crisis cannot be overcome even by a long stay with careful observation; that
readers’ responses cannot be guaranteed even by the most strenuous writerly guidance; that the medium of the mechanically produced book cannot
convey the singular intensity of any experience without significant “signal
loss.” The more common approach has been to laud the text, and its authors,
for the strenuousness and self-awareness of the attempt, such that the text
gains value and authority precisely for its foregrounding of its own aesthetic
and ethical failures. It is the only documentary project of the Depression-era
U.S. to have found a secure perch in the canons of American and modernist
studies and has been read, often with dazzling subtlety, as the ne plus ultra of
American modernism: Alfred Kazin declared it “the documentary book to
end all documentary books” shortly after its publication, a verdict that has
been upheld by several generations of subsequent critics with remarkable
consistency.6
This emphasis on the singularity of Famous Men and its transcendence
both of its narrow historical context and of other instances of Depression
documentary has impoverished our understanding of it. I would like to join
several recent critics in contesting hagiographic and/or monumentalizing
readings of the text: against the authors’ and many critics’ insistence on the
text’s exceptional and singular status, I will read comparatively and contextually.7 Most broadly, my book places Famous Men in the company of two of
its counterparts from the era that vanished from critical view until quite recently, in order to reassess the range of formal strategies and thematic concerns characteristic of the Depression-era documentary book. But I want to
contextualize the book in other, more local ways as well. In so doing, I will
combine a rather perverse reading of the text that foregrounds the relatively
few and oblique moments that feature cars and highways with several
detours through relevant biographical and cultural historical contexts, including: Agee’s exploration of the emergence of auto tourism for Fortune; a
comparison of Evans’s photographs in Famous Men with his other work
from the era; and, most important, recent historiography on the emergence
of cars and driving in rural spaces in the interwar U.S. The work of social
geographer Tim Cresswell has been particularly helpful in placing the meanings and values attached to “stasis” and “mobility” in Famous Men within a
broader discursive context. Cresswell argues that twentieth-century ideas
regarding space can be best understood through two opposing value systems: a “sedentarist metaphysics” and a “nomadic metaphysics.” The first
“sees mobility through the lens of place, rootedness, spatial order, and belonging” and views “mobility . . . as [a] morally and ideologically suspect”
divergence from a more properly settled state. The second “puts mobility
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first, has little time for notions of attachment to place, and revels in notions
of flow, flux, and dynamism.”8 Famous Men very much springs from a “sedentarist metaphysics,” one that valorizes people and things that stay in place
and vilifies movement, both on the literal level of bodies in motion and the
more abstract level of the “movements” associated with mass reproduction
and circulation of culture as well as readers’ habitual modes of speedy, distracted, and inattentive cultural consumption. Whereas critics have traditionally valued Famous Men because they share its “sedentarist metaphysics”
to a great extent, my analysis finds points of friction between a sedentarist
and a nomadic metaphysics, both within the pages of Famous Men and between that text and relevant intertexts produced by Agee, Evans, and other
modernist artists. My overarching aim, then, is to dislodge a monumentalized text from its niche and put it back into circulation, revealing
in the process its relationship to the distinctive patterns of movement—of
bodies, images, and print—that characterize the Depression era.
MODERNISM, STASIS, AND THE “FOLK”
Before considering the relatively few and oblique moments in which Famous
Men includes cars within its frame, I would like to examine the way it associates its rural subjects with stasis. Homes and dwelling sit at the center of
Famous Men: the authors expend most of their energies, and the text most of
its pages, on documenting three households in the rural outpost of Hobe’s
Hill, Alabama—the Gudger, Woods, and Ricketts families.9 Twenty-seven of
the text’s thirty-one photographs depict the three families’ homes (e.g., exteriors, interiors, domestic objects, or portraits set in or around the homes),
and a large part of the text is devoted to an exhaustive depiction and cataloguing of the objects and practices that occur within their walls and in the
immediate vicinity.10 Viewed through Agee’s and Evans’s respective lenses,
the austerity that defines the three families’ lives metamorphose into something in excess of mere necessity, that is, into something beautiful. In the
“Shelter” section that lies near the center of the text, Agee moves through the
Gudgers’ home with meticulous care, describing its composition and contents literally down to a clapboard’s nail holes and a comb’s broken teeth
(111–65). Throughout this inventory, he finds that the austerity the Gudgers’
poverty has forced upon them squares with his own aesthetic: the bedrooms,
for example, “are so great and final a whole of bareness and complete simplicity that even the objects on a crowded shelf seem set far apart from each
other, and each to have a particularly sharp entity of its own” (137). Scarcity,
in other words, begets sensibility, an appreciation for the integrity of each
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object. For Agee, this trait is common to “all really simple and naïve people,”
who
incline strongly toward exact symmetries, and have some sort of instinctive
dislike that any one thing shall touch any other save what it rests on, so that
chairs, beds, bureaus, trunks, vases, trinkets, general odds and ends, are set very
plainly and squarely discrete from one another and from walls, at exact centers
or as near them as possible, and this kind of spacing gives each object a full
strength it would not otherwise have, and given their several relationships, as
they stand on shelves or facing, in a room, the purest power such a relationship
can have. (ibid.)
Agee footnotes this observation about “all really simple and naïve people”
with the addendum, “And many of the most complex, and not many in between” (ibid.). At this moment, the collectors become the collected: as elements in the collection that constitutes Famous Men, the Gudgers are severe,
discrete, static, and meticulously arranged; likewise, as collectors themselves, they surround each object with negative space, fastidiously avoiding
the mixtures and disarray that rob each icon of its “full strength.” Agee and
Evans thus share with the Gudgers a sensibility that is familiar to critics of
modernism: a poetics of the image.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of “imagism,” as articulated by Ezra
Pound in his influential essay, “A Retrospect” (1918), is its investment in
an aesthetic form that convenes the simple and the complex in an instant,
in a moment of space and time that renders the undifferentiated flow of
experience as a verbal icon. In Pound’s classic definition, a poetic image is
“that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant
of time.”11 Properly rendered, the image “gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of
sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works
of art.”12 Paradoxically, the production of these riches depends upon or
inheres in asceticism. In Pound’s view, the decoration of the poetic image
robs it of its power: poets must use “no ornament, or good ornament”;
they must “use no superfluous word”; they must present the object with
“fewer painted adjectives impeding the shock and stroke of [the image].”13
For Pound, work of the preceding era is meretricious and effeminate, solicitous of a promiscuous and unproductive relationship between poet/
text and reader. In place of this aesthetic, he promotes one that places
readers at a distance from the textual icon from which they can take it
straight—austere, direct, free from emotional slither.”14 The spatiotemporal dimension of this theory—and its connection with my arguments
regarding Agee and Evans’s text—draw into focus with remarkable clarity
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in a poem often used to illustrate imagism, Pound’s “In a Station of the
Metro.” The poem’s two lines—“The apparition of these faces in the crowd/
Petals on a wet, black bough”—capture a transitory moment in which bodies circulate through the metro, a conspicuously modern form of rapid
transit.15 Out of the welter of these commuters’ uncoordinated movements,
the poem pulls out something extraordinary: an “apparition” rendered as
an organic whole, faces that no longer circulate through the station but
have been frozen into the imperceptible movement of natural growth. As
it subjects the random and asymmetrical flow of travelers to the even spacing of organic form, the poem puts space between its speaker and the flux
of faces of which he is part, a space that facilitates the transformation of
the latter into objects of aesthetic contemplation that sit outside of vulgar
time and place.
Just as Pound opposes the spareness and separateness of objects in imagism to the “luxurious riot” he attributes to Victorian poetry, Agee compares
the austere and intuitive modernism of the Gudgers’ “collection” with that of
a neighboring family, the Rickettses. If the Gudgers epitomize the virtue of
those who turn scarcity into beauty through venerating the isolated object,
the Rickettses stand in for those whose aesthetic is a crude translation of a
desire for abundance. Agee writes that they “are much more actively fond of
pretty things” than the Gudgers and that their “fireplace wall is crusted deep
with attractive pieces of paper into the intricate splendor of a wedding cake
or the fan of a white peacock” (174). Simply put, this is simplicity gone awry,
in which the virtues of symmetry and separateness have given way to the
vices of excessive and palimpsestic mixture and overlay. In a bravura performance, Agee gives a sense of the inexhaustible nature of the Rickettses’
desires as he describes the various colorful mass cultural scraps that line
their wall: “Indian virgins watching their breasts in pools” sit next to “fullblown blondes in luminous frocks leaning back in swings”; “husbands in
tuxedoes” sit next to “rich landscapes with rapid tractors”; “medievalists at
Christmas dinner” sit next to “roasts of beef ” and “bulldogs in tophats wearing spectacles” (175–76).
Whereas the Gudgers’ aesthetic matches their straitened circumstances,
expressing the unselfconscious beauty of mere sufficiency in which every
home, dweller, and domestic object abides in its separate space, the Rickettses’ collage layers and mixes spaces and times promiscuously. This works
both within the collage itself, in which social classes, historical epochs,
geographic regions, and even biological species mix indiscriminately, and
in the collage’s relation to the home in which it is displayed. A pair of
Evans’s photographs from the text speaks eloquently to this second context. In the first, we see a small section of the fireplace wall Agee discusses,
covered with wall calendars, comic strips, and magazine covers in an
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arrangement that gestures at the promiscuity Agee describes in the passage quoted above (figure 3.1).
In a manner typical of Evans’s work, however, this photograph puts
some distance between the reader and the various desires bound up in the
collage. Whereas Agee puts readers in the position of the disoriented and
seduced “folk,” overwhelmed by the various possibilities legible in the collage, Evans allows for a cooler and more sociological gaze in which one
Fig. 3.1 Walker Evans, “Fireplace in Frank Tengle’s home. Hale County, Alabama,”
1936. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
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ironic fact predominates: the Rickettses have abandoned the cyclical
rhythms of the agrarian calendar. The jarring presence of four calendars
set to different seasons and years suggests that they have lost their place in
a temporal order or, perhaps, that they want to import multiple places and
times into the neutral and stable space/time of “home.” In the second, we
see another of the Ricketts’ sanctified spaces, a “prayer meeting room”
that necessity has transformed into a “cotton room” (figure 3.2).
Fig. 3.2 Walker Evans, “Cotton room, formerly prayer meeting room. Frank Tengle’s
farm. Hale County, Alabama,” 1936. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress.
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If the first image speaks to the impulse to relieve the sameness and tedium of
repetitive work and few opportunities for consumption, the second testifies
to the gap that separates the family’s dreams of economic abundance and
geographic mobility from its actual lack of means to achieve them. Here,
too, the wall opens up to the world outside in the form of a gaping hole in
the fireplace, but in this instance the breach signals the Rickettses’ tenuous
grasp on “sanctuary” in any form. The hand-lettered sign reads, “PLEASE
BE quITE every body is welcome,” and the generosity of the sentiment is
underscored with pathos by the obvious fact that the structure is open to any
intrusion, welcome or not.
I began this section with the “collections” of the Gudgers and the Rickettses in order to draw attention to the text’s two opposing tendencies in
rendering the “folk.” On one hand, the Gudgers are austere, self-sufficient,
and have a demarcated space for each thing within their ambit. On the other,
the Rickettses are promiscuous, excessive (in desire, if not in practice), and
arrange things haphazardly and densely. Agee and Evans place their sympathies with the Gudgers’ tendency in myriad ways throughout the text: for
example, Agee’s choice to live at the Gudgers’ house throughout his trip;
Evans’s choice to place photographs of the Gudgers before those of the other
two families; and the disproportionate number of pages devoted to descriptions the Gudgers’ home and family members.16 This sympathy between
elites and a certain kind of “folk” sensibility is one of the most prominent
hallmarks of literary modernism, ranging from Pound’s revisions of Provencal and Anglo-Saxon epic poetry to Lorca’s experiments with traditional
Iberian lyrics in his Poem of the Deep Song (1931) to the “renaissances” that
wedded “folk” materials to a modernist poetics in African American and
Irish writing of the early twentieth century. Most often in this tradition the
other of this union of high and low is the diabolical middle: a mass culture
that is figured as encroaching, leveling, virulent, mobile, and metamorphic.17
If a central concern of modernism is to preserve the old order by taking
traditional material and “making it new” in Pound’s famous dictum, mass
culture figures as a dangerous seduction to “folk” such as the Rickettses,
stripping them of a coherent sense of space and time and rearranging the
order of things in a way that ushers in bewilderment and instability. Furthermore, the Ricketts family demonstrates the increasing extensiveness of
mass culture in the 1930s, since it can be delivered to places as remote from
metropolitan centers as Hobe’s Hill, and its intensiveness, composing part of
the environment in which the family spends its most intimate moments.
Movement is the key term in this articulation of values: the most precious
artwork is that which renders flux as stasis; the most valuable people are
those who dwell in place; and the most dangerous wants are those that
import other places and times into one’s home.
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PETRIFIED MAN, SNAKING ROAD: ROADWAYS
AND RURAL SPACE
As we have seen, Agee and Evans’s sympathies (rendered schematically above
as a preference for the Gudgers over the Rickettses) are grounded in a phobic
attitude, shared with “high modernists” such as Pound, toward mass culture
and mass mobility. A close examination of this sympathy for “folk” who remain fixed in place reveals ways in which Agee and Evans take pains to exclude from their frame what is perhaps the most important social and cultural
emergence in interwar rural America: that of new forms of automobility.18 In
light of what the 1920s and 1930s do to rural life, in other words, we need to
read the Rickettses’ collage (and, indeed, all of Famous Men) differently. For
Agee and Evans, the collage signifies the weakness or even absence of an organizing consciousness that gives a spatial and temporal order to things; they
read it as a symptom of the Rickettses’ being overwhelmed by the power of
mass culture to shatter traditional ways of organizing experience. I read the
Rickettses’ wall not as the absence of order or its destruction altogether, but as
a place wherein the contours of an emerging order are becoming visible, albeit in fragmentary form. At the heart of this emergent order lay new kinds of
movement: vicarious movements fostered by the mechanical reproduction of
culture (e.g., photo-based magazines and cinema), the shrinking and shifting
of space and time made possible by the new telecommunications (e.g., the
telephone and radio), and, especially, the increasingly convenient and rapid
movement of bodies in space made possible by bicycles, cars, and airplanes.19
Within this complex and slow-developing set of emergences that began in the
1880s, I will focus on the radical impact made by one of these technologies,
the automobile. Cars and driving occupy center stage both in the culture of
the Depression era and in contemporary historiography on the period; the
relative absence of cars in Famous Men, then, coupled with the strong moral
charge with which the authors invest those who “know their place,” stands out
in high relief. Before returning to Agee and Evans, I would like to explore the
history of the automobile’s arrival in the unevenly modernizing South of the
interwar era, using William Faulkner as a tour guide of sorts.
Near the beginning of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Anse Bundren,
feckless patriarch of the clan whose misadventures lie at the center of the novel,
laments having to live on a roadside. In a long soliloquy, he describes roads,
and the mobility they foster, as a fundamental violation of the order of things:
(I)t want no luck in it [living on a roadside], because the Lord put roads for
traveling: why He laid them down flat on the earth. When He aims
for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road
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or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it
up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man. And so He never aimed for folks to live
on a road, because which gets there first, I says, the road or the house? Did
you ever know Him to set a road down by a house? I says. No you never, I says,
because it’s always men cant rest till they gets the house set where everybody
that passes in a wagon can spit in the doorway, keeping the folks restless and
wanting to get up and go somewheres else . . . . If He’d a aimed for man to be
always a-moving and going somewheres else, wouldn’t He a put him longways
on his belly, like a snake?20
In Anse’s bizarre worldview, houses and people are vegetative, primordial,
and rooted. On the other side of this divide lie the mobile things the Lord lay
flat—the snakes and roads that signal an end to Edenic harmony. Despite
the tall-tale hyperbole, we can see the contours of a more familiar pastoral
mode in Anse’s rant: the settled house came first, and the snaking road followed, ushering in a new and worse age in which nothing will stay in its
place. The dislocation fostered by the road’s incursion into the household
moves in two directions. First, it brings people and products from cities and
towns to one’s threshold, summoning a contamination anxiety Anse evokes
vividly as strangers’ “spit(ting) in the doorway.” Second, and consequently,
this flow of stuff from economic and cultural centers to peripheries infects
rural dwellers with a compulsion to move, to desire what they don’t have, to
become like snakes, with big mouths and no roots or limbs.
Anse Bundren has obvious liabilities as a social geographer: his irrational
fear of commerce and exchange, his illogical decoupling of transportation
infrastructure from patterns of settlement, and his metaphysical grounding
of all ecological and social orders in God’s plan. He does have one signal
virtue, however: he registers the profound transformation wrought upon
rural landscapes by roads and cars in the 1920s and 1930s. One need not
endorse Anse’s vision of a prelapsarian Mississippi hill country and its subsequent Fall, but the connections he makes between the inner desires of rural dwellers and an ever-denser and ever-broader network of roads and
highways in the era raise issues that are central to the study of American
modernism. In many ways the most unsettled of Faulkner’s novels, As I Lay
Dying is a thought experiment in the collisions and intersections that arise
when the not-yet-modern imaginaries of rural dwellers come into contact
with the extending reach of modern forms of transportation, discipline, and
commerce. The grotesque comedy of the experiment inheres in its reductio
ad absurdum: the Bundrens live on a bluff so steep, a visitor has to be towed
up with a plow line; the family hasn’t ventured to town in twelve years; and
they are so far removed from modern rationality that they fail to understand
the fundamental facts of reproduction and death. When the death of the
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matriarch forces the family to hitch up the mules and go to town, the ensuing journey ends in tragicomedy: the little boy Vardaman soothes his grief
and confusion with his first banana, the intelligent but eccentric son Darl is
betrayed by his own family and shipped off to the asylum in Jackson, and
Anse “get(s) [himself] them teeth.”21
The various exchanges that occur as the novel ends dismantle its tragic
(or mock-tragic) structure—both the primary tragedy of the matriarch’s
death and burial and the secondary tragedy of the clash between the Bundrens’ peasant consciousness and the ways of the city. Of the many exchanges
that take place as the novel ends, I will focus on two: Anse’s acquisition of a
new wife and a portable phonograph. Anse’s marriage to the new Mrs. Bundren culminates a series of exchanges (beginning with the dentures that
make him a marketable mate) that allows the Bundrens to retreat from the
urban zone of locomotion and exchange and return to rural isolation. It also
allows Faulkner to swap the novel’s tragic frame for a comic one in a satiric
metacommentary on the ease and fungibility commodity exchange offers. In
other words, what was to be the unraveling of the Bundrens becomes their
recomposition or restoration in a slapstick version of the marriage plot. The
restoration is not, however, a marriage of “folk” isolation to modernity; the
Bundrens show no signs of assimilating to the world of the town, the automobile, and money. Given what we know about Anse, the new wife offers
not so much natural fecundity or economic productivity as sufficiency,
enough unpaid work to keep the family alive. The lone souvenir of the Bundren’s journey to town (besides Anse’s dentures, which primarily function as
a means of wooing a wife) is the portable phonograph that is the bride’s only
dowry. The phonograph would seem to offer the family a liberating point of
contact with metropolitan culture and stoke their desires for more of its
products. In the novel’s absurd logic, however, it appears as something more
ambiguous. Like the Bundrens themselves, the phonograph is monotonous
and entropic: it is not a node in a perpetual motion machine of consumerist
desire, but a spring whose slow unwinding always anticipates its own coming stasis.22
Faulkner’s absurd tragicomedy engages one of the central problems in the
culture of American modernism: how to represent the rapidly amplifying
differences in consciousness between those who are fixed in place, relatively
speaking, and those who move to the rhythms of emergent technologies—
like the photograph, the radio, the phonograph, the airplane, and the automobile—that manipulate and reformat perceptions of space and time. The
Bundrens and their ilk, in their oblique relationship to modernity, play a
central role within its imaginary. Most fundamentally, such “folk” make the
contours of the strange new world of modernity visible by contrast. This
contrast between old and new gives rise to a wide array of affective responses:
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for example, the urge to preserve folkways from the homogenizing force of
the modern, to assimilate outmoded “folk” practices and consciousness to
the Enlightenment ethos of technocratic modernity, and to recruit rural
dwellers to a radical and populist political project that mediates “folk” and
modern.23 The Bundrens present problems for all of these agendas: they are
not sturdy enough to serve as exemplars of premodern sustainable subsistence economy; they would be so much dirt in the gears of any technocratic
social engineering project; and they seem virtually incapable of any stable
consciousness, much less the radical and insurgent consciousness sought by
modernist-era Left movements.
Faulkner’s novel gives us one of the most extreme examples of a 1930s
folk grotesque that aims, arguably, to deconstruct contemporary theories of
social engineering and management as well as theories that fetishize the eloquence and creativity of the “folk.”24 This negative and deconstructive aspect
is underscored formally by the novel’s narrative structure: each chapter gives
readers access to a different character’s mental life, thereby making the novel
a bewildering and paratactic clash of unmodern imaginaries with no central
narrative presence to organize them into anything systemic or hierarchical.
The more typical pattern in the era’s discourse, however, particularly during
the Depression, is to put the isolation of the “folk” in dialectical tension with
the expanding and increasingly interconnected spaces of modernity.25 Of all
the sites one might examine to get at this dialectic of “folk”/modern—for
example, the factory settings where “folk” become proletarians, the technologies of telecommunication where isolated spaces are linked in networks,
the products of mass culture that link center and periphery through consumption—I will follow Anse Bundren in focusing on the roadside and the
automobile. Cars and driving link urban centers and rural hinterlands in
new ways, foster new kinds of subjectivity organized around the pleasures
and problems of speed and distraction, and reorganize rural landscapes as
dispersed and increasingly interconnected social, cultural, and economic
networks. As such, the emergence of a new and distinctly modern “roadside” topos is one of the most distinctive features of American modernity.
At this point I will move from interpretive readings of cultural artifacts to
consider the ways in which such artifacts relate to the historical moment
from which they emerged. The advent of the poetics of imagism, with its act
of freezing movement and thus giving readers a “sense of freedom from time
limits and space limits,” coincided with the emergence and gradual diffusion
of the automobile, a machine that achieves a “sense of freedom” through
nearly opposite means, rendering static figures in the landscape as an exhilarating visual flow and giving individuals access to a wider sociocultural
range.26 In this process, the strict divisions between city and countryside
that accompanied the preceding era’s urban-centered industrialism started
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to evolve into a more complex, decentered network predicated on the automobile.
To get a sense of how these changes registered at the time, we can examine two documents from the 1930s: the first is a federal commission’s report
on the effects of automobile-driven changes in settlement and consumption; the second is Charles and Mary Beard’s history of the emergence of
new technologies of space-time compression, with a particular focus on the
reconfiguration of the rural/urban divide. Taken together, these documents
provide a sharp contrast with the phobic relationship to movement evinced
by both Pound and Agee, emphasizing the utopian aspects of the automobile. The first of these documents, the report of the Hoover Commission on
Social Trends (1933), examines the profound shift from an industrialism
organized around urban-centered hub-and-spoke development to a more
complex and interconnected network of city centers, industrial zones located at urban peripheries, and residential suburbs, all increasingly linked
via highways to outlying rural areas. The Committee observed that this
linkage of formerly distinct areas into “supercommunities” was “unique in
the history of settlement” and “introduced a territorial division of labor
among local institutions and neighboring cities.” This new mode of social
and economic organization, which the Commission called “metropolitanism,” was not relegated to urban areas and their peripheries but was swiftly
becoming “the communal unit of local relations throughout the great
nation.”27 This transformation was particularly dramatic in rural areas,
where “the union of open country and village” cars and driving afforded
created “a larger and more modern” world for rural dwellers, a world in
which classifications of “rural” and “urban” [were] losing much of their
distinctiveness.”28
Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization (1930) concurs with this analysis but emphasizes the cultural impact of these developments, especially in rural areas. The authors celebrate metropolitanization
as an “emancipat(ion)” from the isolation felt by rural dwellers and from the
oppressiveness of the dirty steam-based technologies for urbanites. They
argue that the car and electrification
quickened travel and transportation, spread new arteries for the distribution of
goods, and brought backward places within the grasp of urban modes and
manners. Through the agency of the automobile the normal cruising radius of
the average family, limited to four or five miles in the days of horse-drawn
vehicles, was widened to forty or fifty miles. To farmers as well as villagers, the
moving picture machine made manufactured amusement and urban mental
patter swiftly available; while the radio carried the ideas and noises of the city
to every nook and cranny of the country as if on the wings of the wind.29
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What occurred on the macroscopic level as the reorganization of the landscape extended to the farthest reaches of the hinterlands and permeated the
most intimate areas of private life: the home, the family, and even the individual body and mind.
By carrying into the family circle labor-saving machines, “canned” information,
and stereotyped mental excitements, [automobiles and electrification] invaded
every relation of life, business, and society, spreading urban standards, values,
and types of conduct over the whole nation. . . . It could not be denied that the
influence of the new motor and machines was as subtle as the electricity that
turned the wheel, lighted the film, and carried the song.30
The Beards’ depiction of these emergent forces issues from a technocratic
perspective: from the vantage point of the urban-dwelling expert, rural ecology and society exist as a mere inchoate potential waiting to be articulated
as part of a new and growing grid. Automobility and electrification are thus
a literal means of as well as a figurative model for modernization: cinema
and the radio, for example, “hard wire” urban-based forms of consciousness
(i.e., the “mental patter” of the city) into the minds of rural dwellers in ways
that promise a better integrated American economy, society, and culture.
This celebratory narrative of centralization and rationalization persists in
the more recent historical literature, emphasizing the ways in which cars and
tractors increasingly welcomed rural dwellers into a liberal polity characterized by material abundance, cultural diversity, and social services provided
by a new class of professional experts. As automotive historian James Flink
puts it, “By making available a far wider range of recreational possibilities
and social contacts, the automobile ended rural isolation.”31 Thus, when they
slipped behind the wheel to visit department stores, had goods arrive
through Rural Free Delivery, traveled by bus to consolidated schools, and
found broader markets for their agricultural wares, rural dwellers left the
purely passive state of isolation Marx called “the idiocy of rural life” and
entered a new and modern zone in which the various and disparate elements
of localized agrarian societies began to cohere into a national (and increasingly global) economic and cultural system.32
There is ample evidence for the argument that rural dwellers did in fact
embrace the automobile as a means of overcoming isolation: automobile
registrations in rural areas grew from 85,000 in 1911 to 2.1 million in 1920
to 9.7 million in 1930;33 still more relevantly for the study of Famous Men,
registrations quadrupled in Alabama between 1920 and 1930.34 Although
rapid and intensive diffusion of automobiles throughout rural spaces undoubtedly provided new social, cultural, and economic opportunities, one
might as easily emphasize the traumatic aspects of this shift. Coupled with
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the roughly simultaneous rise of mechanized agriculture, the adoption of
the automobile in the rural U.S. after World War I fostered a breathtaking
demographic shift in which roughly thirty million rural dwellers moved
from farms to towns and cities between 1925 and 1965. As historian John
Stover writes, this “mass outpouring represents one of the great migrations
in . . . history, greater in scope and numbers than the exodus of Europeans
and Asians to the United States in the 140 years from 1820 to 1960.”35 Perhaps the most vivid and ironic evidence of the unequal way in which the
benefits of modern mobility were distributed can be seen in the emergence
of a new job description fostered by the tractor and the automobile, the family of “migrant laborers” who crisscross the landscape in cars, following the
dictates of an increasingly centralized agribusiness industry.36
My larger point is not to adjudicate this historiographic controversy, but
to shed light on the complexities of representing a social field in which nothing stays in its place and in which the stakes of technological innovations
register in radically different ways from different social positions. In thinking of how the movements under examination played out for rural dwellers,
rather than on them, as historians like the Beards imagine, Hal Barron’s recent arguments regarding the modernizing of rural American landscapes
are particularly useful. Barron argues that the reorganization of rural life
around local cultural and commercial centers gave rise to a “translocal rural
society and culture” that is a hybrid of residual and emergent structures of
feeling, resisting the influence of city-based mass culture at many points
even as it embraces its technologies.37 Thus, through such developments as
the adaptation of radio to rural styles, modernization begets a new sense of
“country” identity that does not so much assimilate to metropolitan norms
as engage them in a dialectic of accommodation and resistance. Faulkner, as
we have seen, picks up on the strangeness and instability of this process,
figuring the intersection of modern mobility with practices and modes of
being formed in a more static milieu in ironic terms.
Agee and Evans touch glancingly on this process in Famous Men—for
example, in their examination of the Rickettses’ collage—but they invest
most of their attention and sympathy not with the emergence of new kinds
of rural mobility and consciousness but with the persistence (or, perhaps,
bare subsistence) of a rapidly disappearing preautomotive way of life. The
Gudgers, the Woodses and the Rickettses have no cars, no telephones, no
radios, and no phonographs. They have few books, and what access they
have to mass cultural images in any form is limited to ephemera like magazine ads and a few family relics. For Agee and Evans, this isolation and stasis
creates a negative space around these individuals that is analogous to the
even spacing Agee observes around the Gudgers’ knickknacks, one that allows each entity to reveal its full presence to the observer. The Gudgers’
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signal virtue, for Agee and Evans, is not only that they are not part of anything other than themselves, but also that they are too static to participate
in anything that looks like a movement. Social geographer Edward Soja has
described the imaginary that invests space with value along urban and rural
lines thus:
To be urbanized still means to adhere, to be made an adherent, a believer in a
specified collective ideology rooted in extensions of polis (politics, policy, polity,
police) and civitas (civil, civic, citizen, civilian, civilization). In contrast, the
population beyond the reach of the urban is comprised of idiots, from the Greek
root idios, meaning ‘one’s own, a private person,” unlearned in the ways of the
polis (a root akin to the Latin sui, “of its own kind,” with generis, “constituting a
class alone”). Thus to speak of the “idiocy” of rural life or the urbanity of its
opposition is primarily a statement of relative political socialization and
spatialization, of the degree of adherence/separation in the collective social
order, a social order hinging on urban nodality.38
It is the very idiocy of the Gudgers, in this sense, their capacity for being selfcontained, self-sufficient, and self-identical, that makes them fit subjects for
Agee and Evans’s project. The very separateness and isolation that was a barrier to full development of the individual and of the species in Marx figures
throughout Famous Men—and within the strand of modernism that issues
from Pound’s prescriptions—as a precious essence of humanity that aesthetic form must preserve and venerate.
THE IDIOTIC SUBLIME
Why is this “idiocy,” in Soja’s sense, so compelling, both for Agee and Evans
and for the critics who have given their text such priority? The separateness
and singularity that Agee attributes to the Gudgers catalyzes a reaction, according to the text’s logic, with both the authors and their readers, in which
the infinitesimal merges with the infinite, giving off a spark of sublimity.
This process depends upon the aesthetics of the static object and of negative
space discussed above, an aesthetics that is clearly manifest in one of Agee’s
addresses to the reader at the beginning of the section on “Work.” There,
Agee laments his inability to capture the texture of Annie Mae Gudger’s
working life in words with the appropriate forcefulness and warns readers
that they “cannot for one moment exchange places with her”; nonetheless,
he urges them to engage Gudger ethically and offers, as a means of doing so,
one of Evans’s photographs:
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There is no way of taking the heart and the intelligence by the hair and of
wresting it to its feet, and of making it look this terrific thing in the eyes: which
are such gentle eyes: you may meet them, with all the summoning of heart you
have, in the photograph in this volume of the young woman with black hair.
(283)
Agee goes on to describe Gudger, appropriately comprehended, as both “a
single, holy, unrepeatable individual,” and, more abstractly, as a unit of humanity “to be multiplied . . . by the two billion human creatures that are alive
upon the planet today” (ibid.). Facing the union of particular and universal
embodied within this photograph, Agee instructs readers to “contemplate,
try to encompass, the one annihilating chord” made up of “all these individuals” (ibid.).
Under what conditions does the perception or reproduction of a single
and quite ordinary life become this “annihilating chord”? It is a central
question for Famous Men and, here and elsewhere in the text, its answer
depends upon a peculiar configuration of world, artist, reader, and text, one
in which the union of a particular set of aesthetic protocols, readerly practices, and, perhaps, a numinous quality immanent in the subject itself coalesce and render ordinariness as sublimity. In the present example, Agee
“captions” one of Evans’s photographs in order to circumscribe rather severely the ways in which it might be read (figure 3.3). Agee’s primary goal
is to preclude what might be called a sentimental reading, forbidding us to
“exchange places with” Gudger.39 Agee also proscribes a purely formalist
reading of the image. We might be tempted to read the photograph as a
modernist experiment with abstract shape and line in which a body and a
home become pure form, an interplay between the rigid geometry of Gudger’s hair part and the stark clapboards and the undercutting asymmetries of
the wood’s grain, the face’s lines, and the shirt’s dots. Agee’s text ratchets up
the claims for the work this image does so tightly, however, that any such
readings appear in profoundly bad faith. Agee teaches us how to read
Gudger ethically, and if we walk the narrow path of proper perception he
lays out, we gain access to something so normal and humble that it becomes otherworldly, even apocalyptic. This ethics is also inscribed in the
moment of the portrait’s production. As William Stott has noted, Evans’s
use of a large-format (8” × 10”) view camera foregrounds the photographic
apparatus: its bulk and obtrusiveness lend a performative aspect to the
event and thus makes the subject less the target of a “shot” than a collaborator in the making of the image.40 This represents an intensification, arguably, of the Poundian aesthetics of the image that renders the transitory and
mobile as something organic; Annie Mae grows into her own image, to
paraphrase Benjamin’s analysis of early photographic portraiture.41 This
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Fig. 3.3 Walker Evans, “Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife,” 1936. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Purchase, 2000 Benefit Fund, 2001 (2001.415) ©Walker Evans Archive,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
rendering of the human figure as a rooted and emplaced entity is reinforced
in the photograph by the visual rhyme linking the severe horizontality of
Gudger’s wrinkles and hair to the grain of the clapboards of her home behind her. Evans’s camera thus catalyzes a reaction in which an instant of
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ordinary life is translated faithfully, as it were organically, to a mass of readers, becoming in the process something timeless and universal, something
literally invaluable.
The desire to move the documentary encounter—the meeting of mass
audience, documentarian, and documentary subject in the synthetic space
that is not wholly “field” or “text”—out of everyday life and into a transcendent realm lies at the heart of Famous Men. In this section I want to call
attention to just how anomalous this move is with regard to other contemporaneous work of Agee and Evans themselves. Much has been made, in
particular, of Evans’s role as the exception to the excesses of Depression-era
culture, as the rare artist who remained faithful to art in an era in which
aesthetics was subordinated to politics.42 While it may be true that Evans
was less inclined that his peers to hew to the line of Roy Stryker, director of
the FSA, who employed Evans and other photographers at mid-decade, it is
not the case that Evans devoted himself solely to an aesthetics of “humanity”
in the sublime mode Agee so strenuously stipulates above.43 On the
contrary, most of Evans’s work throughout the period is, if anything, antisublime in its focus on the vulgar materials of an emergent modernity. Furthermore, a transcendent “humanity,” whatever that might be, is much less
in evidence in his work than a vision of particular humans conditioned by
particular social and historical pressures. Finally, most of Evans’s best work
in the period addresses readers not with the kind of vigorous call to worship
Agee summons them with above, but with a sly wink, reminding them that
even mere “documents” can be dialectical images, demanding an active
process on their part to link the photographs with broader sociological codes
and historical circumstances; readers thus stand outside of the intense intersubjective situation Agee describes above as they strike a flaneur’s pose.
To render Evans, in other words, in the priestly garb of the high modernist misses the Evans who is the son of an advertising executive from
the Midwest. This Evans is obsessed with things that move laterally across
the landscape and with objects, like roadside billboards and hand-painted
signs, meant to be seen while moving. 44 Evans’s interest in these emergent forms of mobile perception come into focus in a couple of photographs shot in small-town Alabama around the same time as the authors’
research for Famous Men, when Evans was on assignment with the FSA.
The first, entitled “Roadside View, Alabama Coal Area Company Town”
(1935), depicts a world in which whatever “humanity” exists is translated
along thoroughly modern lines of force (figure 3.4). Electric and telephone wires dominate the middle ground, conveying the reader’s gaze
diagonally from the margins of the image to its center. Also converging
toward this focal point are the new blacktop road and the neat row of
identical houses. The lone person standing off to the left looks like a
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AMERICAN MODERNISM AND DEPRESSION DOCUMENTARY
Fig. 3.4 Walker Evans, “Roadside View, Alabama Coal Area Company Town,” 1935.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.258.352) ©Walker
Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
stage prop dropped into the scene to provide a sense of the inhuman scale
of the utility poles, a sense enhanced by his reverential posture, head tilted
up in the direction of the wires. These details underscore the emergent
power of corporations to house bodies, move them in space, direct their
labor, and channel their thoughts and desires. Undercutting this dystopian
mode is the photograph’s use of elevated perspective. Whereas the wires
and dwellings signal a set of enforced movements by an undifferentiated
mass of employees, the viewer is privy to a different kind of motion. The
“GAS” sign in the image’s upper left corner hails the viewer as an auto tourist; this bit of language floating over the scene serves as a witty invitation for
viewers to refuel and return to their effortless survey of the local scene.
The second photograph, entitled “Roadside Stand Near Birmingham”
(1936), appears at first as a nostalgia trip: the boys struggling under the weight
of ripe watermelons, the charming hand-painted signs, and the mounds of
produce bespeak a picturesque and timeless pastoral (figure 3.5). This
nostalgia, however, is ironized in various ways that are typical of Evans’s
work. Most blatantly, the promises of “honest weights” and “square dealings”
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Fig. 3.5 Walker Evans, “Roadside Stand Near Birmingham,” 1936. FSA-OWI
Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
painted on the façade, which are intended to allay consumers’ fears of fraud,
summon up a countervailing anxiety; this is an economy in which probity
must be advertised rather than implied by unspoken communal norms.
More subtly, the sense of agrarian abundance is compromised by the prominently displayed chalkboard, where the unpredictable fluctuations of price
emphasize the pivot between the naturalness and pleasure and solidity of the
proffered melons and the networks of exchange one must navigate in order
to possess them. Furthermore, and this is where Evans’s wit is most evident,
the house of business is itself less stable than it seems. Despite the claims of
the sign that sits atop his structure, there is nothing “old” or “reliable” about
a fishmonger who moonlights as a mover of homes. This image thus serves
as a stark reminder that, in the world of the Gudgers, the Rickettses, and the
Woodses, all that is solid is rapidly melting, including the most private and
seemingly substantial domestic structures. The gigantic fish swimming surreally across this building’s façade thus winks at the viewer, hinting at a more
general liquification of an agrarian order’s roots.
In closing my discussion of the relationship between Evans’s work on
Famous Men and the rest of his oeuvre in the period, I want to consider the
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project that most unsettles received ways of talking about the aesthetics and
ethics of Evans’s depictions of Hobe’s Hill, Alabama: the roughly six hundred
photographs Evans took between 1938 and 1941 (that is, between the research for Famous Men and its publication) in the subways of New York City.
In this project, Evans roamed the subways carrying a thirty-five millimeter
Contax camera concealed beneath his coat, with the lens poking out between two buttons and with a shutter wire threaded through his sleeve. This
work rather neatly inverts the logic behind nearly every image found in Famous Men: technically, through the substitution of an anonymous and nearly
aleatory relationship between photographer and subject for the ethics of cooperation and mutual regard in the production of the image; thematically, in
the shift from the hinterlands and “folk” stasis to the artificially lit, subterranean, and mobile zone of the subway, a place that compresses space and
time; and formally, with the contrast between the sculptural, finely drawn,
and carefully framed “folk” figures and the often rakish, off-center orientation and awkward cropping that the subway environment demands.
Nonetheless, the prominently displayed yet anonymous first subject in
the book that emerged from this work in 1966, entitled Many Are Called,
suggests an uncanny set of links (figure 3.6). Remember that Agee asks us to
read Gudger bifocally, both as an entity from another place and time with
whom we cannot exchange places, and as part of an “annihilating chord”
that comprises all of the earth’s population. In this unnamed subway rider
we find Gudger’s doppelgänger, in whom the rather mystical and apocalyptic union of the one and the many appears as something more commonplace
and literal. Anyone could fill the space occupied by this woman at the next
stop; given enough time, nearly everyone will.45 By placing these two photographs (and their two subjects) in the same critical frame, I want to move
outside of the moralizing and humanist discourse that insists upon the static,
face-to-face encounter as the normative site for the “responsible” representation of the other, examining this ethics in dialectical tension with the
spying that lies at the heart of documentary. Alongside their important differences, we should note that both of these images foreground the technical
apparatus that brings them into being: on the one hand, an increasingly oldfashioned photographic mode that recruits subjects as collaborators in the
production of the image; on the other, an emergent practice in which life is
caught unawares by a “spy” probing the publicity of the subway in order to
catch the privacy urban crowds confer. This act of foregrounding renders the
documentary record of everyday life in such a way that it teaches its consumers to attend to the way spaces and times are caught, split, duplicated,
and disseminated in modernity. It also provides a window into the way
movements like these beget new kinds of fame, of family, of belonging, and
of longing.
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Fig. 3.6 Walker Evans, [Subway Passenger, New York], 1938. The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Walker Evans Archive, 1994 (1994.253.499.1) ©Walker Evans Archive,
The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
JAMES AGEE, FORTUNE, AND “THE GREAT
AMERICAN ROADSIDE”
Despite the intensity with which he works within a “sedentarist metaphysics” throughout Famous Men, Agee shares with Evans a preoccupation with
the emergent forms of popular mobility that were so prominent in Depression-era culture. Not only did Agee write an introduction to Many Are
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Called, but he spent most of his career writing for mass-circulation publications (e.g., Fortune, Time, and the Nation) on subjects, most prominently the
cinema, that relate to popular cultural energies and practices. Agee’s masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, has been canonized largely on the
basis of its deployment of strategies associated with “high” modernism: as
we have seen, a poetics of the image as well as a primitivist coupling of complex urban dwellers with simple “folk.” By linking this masterpiece with
Agee’s less famous work, I want to emphasize the peculiar way in which the
former is structured by its repression of the emergent popular desire to move
in space and its hypostatization of “folk” who inhabit a world that, as Agee
himself recognizes so acutely elsewhere, can no longer be fixed in place.
Finally, I want to draw attention to Agee’s journalism in order to examine
the different faces documentary work presents in different textual materializations; if Agee has written the “documentary book to end all documentary
books,” what are we to make of his more modest work, disposable texts
designed to circulate widely and topically?
In order to touch on these concerns, I will focus on a long essay Agee
published in Fortune on the emergent automotive tourism, “The Great
American Roadside” (1934). This essay explores the new spaces automobility engenders in ways that make it a companion piece to Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, albeit one that the copious literature on the latter text has neglected. Famous Men represents the attempt to inhabit the farthest margins
of metropolitan modernity, zones where things and people largely stay in
place. The central object of Agee’s analysis in “The Great American Roadside” is the latent energy of middle-class Americans as manifested through
the institutions and cultural forms that arise from the wide diffusion of automobiles in the 1920s and 1930s. The essay that results is a harbinger of
postwar criticism of popular culture, work that treats the practices of everyday life seriously, with a critical edge but without the aristocratic hauteur of
Henry James, the reflexive vilification of mass culture of some parts of the
interwar Left, or the antibourgeois satire of Mencken. Agee accords relative
autonomy to the participants in roadside practices, recognizes himself to a
large degree in the desires that animate those practices, and writes in an
ethnographic mode that attempts to describe such practices on their own
terms.
The most vivid example of Agee’s sensitive readings of popular everyday
life is his analysis of the “tourist cabin,” precursor to the motel. Like other
major roadside institutions (e.g., food stands and “tourist trap” spectacles like
waterfalls and caves), the cabins evolve rapidly and spontaneously in response
to the new wants and needs driving begets. In order to emphasize this adaptive aspect of the cabins, Agee addresses the reader as a “you” who encounters
the familiar problem of where to stop at day’s end during a trip: “Over the
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next hill you catch the vista of a city, smack in your path, sprawling with all
its ten thousand impediments to motion: its unmarked routes, its trolley cars,
its stop and go signs, its No Parking markers.”46 Whereas the city imposes its
own logic and structure on the traveler, the cabin has been formed in the
crucible of the roadside, offering what amounts to a happy synthesis of private domesticity and the fluidity of market capitalism:
You swing the car in. . . . You unload what luggage you need; you have but a few
feet to carry it. Inside you have just what you need for a night’s rest, no more
nor less. And you have it with a privacy your hotel could not furnish; for this
night this house is your own. And in the morning you will leave without
ceremony, resume the motion you left off the day before without delay.47
At just this point, one might expect a Jamesian critique of a “hotel civilization” in which even the spaces of dwelling, privacy, family, and intimacy
become public and commercial. Although Agee does play this game to some
extent in Famous Men, as in the case of the Rickettses’ collage, here he reserves judgment, claiming that “the point the satirist misses when he lampoons American folkways is that most folkways make sense” and that “as an
invention [the tourist camp] is more satisfying than a hot dog.”48
Having established the familiarity of the “roadside” as part of a set of indigenous American practices, the essay pivots to a more critical stance that
contests commonsensical notions about its meaning. One expects roads to
be strictly instrumental, a means of passing efficiently from one settlement
to another. The roadside that emerges along with the automobile, however,
unsettles this expectation:
(M)ore and more powerfully, the habit is upon us to refuel and eat and sleep
and amuse ourselves not in the towns as towns—they slow us up—but along the
open roadside which is a new kind of town in itself, and in the little towns that
have all but turned themselves into roadsides.49
The roadside is paradoxical for Agee: it is a place where settlements are unsettled by movement but movement resolves itself into observable patterns
that constitute a new kind of settlement. This paradox also attaches itself to
the way roadsides engage travelers’ desires. Agee points out that the “restiveness” of Americans behind the wheel is “describable only in negatives. Not
to eat, not for love, nor even for money, not for fear, nor really for adventure,
nor truly out of any known necessity is the desire to move upon even
the most docile of us.”50 Movement becomes, in the new regime of the roadside, an autotelic activity, a perpetual motion machine of desire: the automobile “was good because it continually satisfied and at the same time greatly
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sharpened [Americans’] hunger for movement . . . the profoundest and most
compelling of [their] racial hungers.”51
Given Agee’s observation that the desire that animates the roadside can
only be described in negative terms, it is perhaps unsurprising that his article concludes with an analysis of a negative space, that of the roadside cave.
“The cave,” Agee argues, “is something very special in the roadside life. Not
quite fish and not quite fowl, it combines the art of nature and the art of the
entrepreneur. Yet it is pure roadside, for it is an institution built by and for
the roadside.”52 Thus far in the article Agee has shown how the basic building blocks of human culture get swept up and rearranged by the logic of the
roadside: homes become “tourist cabins,” towns become roadsides, roadsides become towns, and so on. At this point even nature gets sucked into
this vortex, with elevators sunk into the earth, meadows converted to gravel
parking lots, the darkness of the caves illuminated with electric lights, and
the strangeness of natural rock formations domesticated by cute names (e.g.,
“Juliet’s balcony” and the “Alcove of Angels”).53
The roadside caves, with their capacity to turn mere empty space into
mass entertainments, are a limit case of or object lesson in the roadside’s
power to transform the landscape to conform to drivers’ desires for spectacle and novelty. In the section of the essay that culminates in the exploration
of caves, Agee moves the focus from the intimacy and specificity of his reading of tourist cabins and roadside foodways to a broader perspective that
figures the totality of the roadside as something sublime. In an extended
metaphor, he likens the masses of travelers to the movements of the ocean:
the “habitual waves” that carry midwesterners to the Gulf Coast, the “great
hinterland wave” that crashes on Manhattan each summer, the “concentric
whirl” that visits the Chicago Fair.54 By emphasizing the boundlessness and
massive scale of new forms of mobility, Agee presents readers with a revised
national map, one in which populations constantly shift in ways that are not
so much social or rational as they are meteorological. As such, this new formation presents a challenge worthy to any artist who has ambitions of devising new forms to capture the complexities of a modernizing nation. In the
final paragraph of “Roadside,” Agee gives one last catalogue of the bewildering range of roadside sites that “are somewhere near infinite in number and
variety and strength.” At the end of this list he writes:
You could go on like this forever. The American autoist does, reacting delicately
to the wonders of this land out of the midst of his easy coma, in ways so
revealing of his inmost mind that someone must one day do a trilogy in his
honor, in full homage to his roadside. The work won’t date, we assure you. Not,
at any rate, before the spirit that most deeply moves this people is tamed out of
their blood.55
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Among many other ambitious projects Agee outlined in the 1930s, this trilogy never materialized.56 Agee did, however, begin a very different trilogy,
one based not on the dynamism of mass mobility and mass desire, but on
the ethical sublime that is sparked by the encounter between mobile intellectuals and static “folk.” Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is the only text Agee
completed of the three he planned. The rest of this chapter will engage the
question of why Agee and Evans moved from considerations of masses in
motion to “folk” desperately hanging on to a place.
ABJURING AUTOMOBILITY, INHABITING
THE “FOLK”
Despite its lighthearted and gently satirical tone, Agee’s “Roadside” essay
raises questions for the interpretation of Famous Men that are quite serious:
given the thoroughness with which driving changes one’s perception of the
landscape, one’s relationship to people and places, how can Agee and Evans
avoid seeing their subjects through the lens of the “easy coma” of the roadside sensibility? More troubling, given that their middle-class audience for
the text is habituated both by modern modes of mobility and tourism, and
by mass media texts that mimic the pleasures of mobile perception, how can
the authors avoid turning their vulnerable subjects into just another disposable spectacle to be consumed at high speed? At the beginning of this chapter I pointed to some of the ways Agee’s prefatory writings attempt, however
implausibly, to direct readers’ responses into self-reflexive and ethically serious channels. Here I would like to consider another such moment, one that
acutely evokes the extremity with which Agee insists the text be read and the
barriers to achieving such a reading practice. In an arresting analogy, Agee
demands that, as a warm-up for reading the text, readers listen to recorded
music with an intensity that approaches what Agee demands for his own
text:
Get a . . . phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit
down to a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or of Schubert’s
C-Major Symphony. But I don’t mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn
it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as
close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly
as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking.
Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. . . . If it
hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music;
not only inside of it, you are it. (12–13)
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On one level, this is pure silliness: some forty years after Jacques Derrida’s Of
Grammatology, who takes seriously the notion of abolishing the belatedness
of representation to arrive at full presence? But this is not really Agee’s point,
for the analogy captures a more complex situation that is still quite familiar
to us today: in a world covered with layers of representations—here, the text
depicting the listening to the recording of a performance of a score notating
whatever went on between the Romantic genius’s ears—what pleasures,
truths, and intensities can one achieve? Agee fully recognizes the problem,
and one must add to his description the vaudevillian twist that, as of 1941,
the hypothetical listener is limited to 78 RPM records that must be changed
every few minutes to take in the entire Meisterwerk.57 Agee’s admittedly partial and flawed solution to the dilemma is to arrest the flow of representations typical of mass cultural consumption—the pleasurably unpredictable
flow of radio programming, the hum of background music as one goes about
one’s domestic business, the industrial production and mercantile circulation of recordings around the globe—with one’s body, lying on the floor
breathless and immobile. He thus proposes a way of overcoming the deauraticization that Benjamin attributes to mechanically reproduced art, reinvesting it with numinousness in a ritual suited for interwar middle-class
life.58
This simultaneous desire for presence and the recognition of the technologies and infrastructures that mediate presence structures Agee and
Evans’s project on a macroscopic level. And here, too, the authors present a
provisional and paradoxical means of using modern technologies that mingle and manipulate times and spaces in order to arrive at something like the
sublimity of presence. On a formal level, Evans evokes stasis by emphasizing
posed portraits executed by a large-format camera, thus working quite selfconsciously against the “candid” style that was emerging with the rise of
faster film speeds and smaller cameras. Agee parallels this by his extensive
use of ekphrasis and of catalogues, literary techniques that mime photography in their relentless recording of mise en scene; the narrative of Famous
Men, such as it is, unfolds in an uneven and contradictory temporal flow in
ways that frustrate readers’ desire to move from place to place in a rapid and
orderly fashion. The automobile, however, is the most important of these
strategies and technologies: like the phonograph in Agee’s analogy, it is the
vehicle that conveys the perceiver to the threshold of the real, yet the automobile must be somehow forsaken or its limitations overcome if one is to
gain access to the sanctum sanctorum beyond this threshold.
I do not, of course, attribute divinity to Agee and Evans’s text, or to the
subjects whose lives it represents; on the contrary, one of my aims is to dispel
the devotional and humanist atmosphere that suffuses many prior readings
of it.59 This approach entails a somewhat perverse reading strategy, given the
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terms Agee prescribes for his readers: I will largely ignore the center of the
text—Agee’s ruminations on the three tenant families, their houses, and
their few possessions—and focus on a few peripheral events that frame the
narrative in important but overlooked ways. I use the metaphor of center
and periphery here in two senses. First, I want to focus on moments in the
text that occur at the geographic periphery of Famous Men, the towns and
cities and roadsides that lie at the fringes of the tenants’ small purview. These
moments are also peripheral in narrative terms. They unfold just before and
after the central core of the book, thus enfolding the text’s depiction of the
tenants’ private and domestic lives within the more public and unsettled
movements between city and country that make the text possible.
These events all involve automobiles, objects that literally conveyed the
authors from metropolises on the East Coast to the backwoods of Hobe’s
Hill where their subjects lived, and to all points in between. Within the text
these machines thematize the different relationships to space and time that
separate Agee and Evans from the spatially and culturally isolated subjects
whose lives they document. Two sketches that precede part I of the text illustrate the role the automobile plays in framing the text. In the first, Agee
and Evans hitch a ride with a New Deal official and a local landlord who
want to show them some local color. In this episode, automobility is aligned
with social and economic power, as the four white men descend upon an
extended African American family enjoying a Sunday dinner. To Agee’s horror, the landlord engages several of the men in demeaning sexual banter and
then presumptuously demands that several others entertain the authors with
some a cappella singing. In Agee’s description, the performance takes on a
mechanized quality: despite the obvious skill of the singers (and Agee is
quite moved by their voices), after each number, they “were abruptly silent”
or “wooden” and “do not look at us, nor at anything” (27). Agee pays them
fifty cents in response, “trying at the same time, through my eyes, to communicate much more,” but the singers “thanked me in a dead voice, not
looking me in the eye” (28).
In the “Roadside” essay, Agee advances the argument that the automobile
engenders spectacle, but in a way that emphasizes the liberating quality of the
experience, its delivery of a certain kind of visual abundance to an everincreasing part of the population. Here, more troubling implications emerge,
as the sudden appearance of the car compels a performance in a field charged
with inequalities rooted in class and caste. The mode of interaction between
elite and “folk” that Agee and Evans take such pains to document in the center
of the text, an ethics rooted in the exchange of looks, appears here as its inverse: the exchange of money between unequals whose eyes never meet. The
problem recurs more forcefully in another of these prefatory sketches, “Near
a Church.” There, the authors are driving in search of subjects to photograph
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and come across a roadside church whose vernacular beauty compels them to
stop. Agee emphasizes the way the car allows for the rapid combination of
perspectives, “arranging” the massive subject in space the way one might manipulate objects before painting a still life:
It was a good enough church from the moment the curve opened and we saw
it . . . But as we came even with it that light so held it that it shocked us . . . so
that the same instant we said Jesus. . . . I put on the brakes and backed the car
slowly, watching the light on the building, until we were at the same apex, and
we sat still for a couple of minutes. (35)
Having arrived at the best spot for viewing, Agee writes that the church “lost
nothing in its stasis” and launches into a spasmodic description of “what
would be trapped, possessed, fertilized, in the leisures and shyness which are
a phase of all love for any object,” culminating in his desire to jimmy a window to reveal the secrets of its interior.
At just that moment, a “young negro couple” passes by on foot, who make
“thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera” (36).
Their “grave(ness)” makes the authors “ashamed and insecure in our wish to
break into and possess their church,” so Agee walks after them to ask them
how to get permission to enter it (36). In his haste, Agee “broke into a trot,”
which instantly strikes the couple with terror: the woman’s “whole body . . .
jerked down tight as a fist into a crouch from which immediately . . . she
sprang forward into the first motions of a running not human but that of a
suddenly terrified wild animal,” and the man stood “not straight but sick, as
if hung from a hook in the spine of the will not to fall for weakness” (37-8).
Having caused such distress, Agee is filled with self-loathing: “I wanted only
that they should be restored and showed how I was their friend, and that I
might melt from existence. . . . The least I could have done was to throw
myself flat on my face and embrace and kiss their feet” (38). Realizing the
futility of this gesture, Agee says, “I stood and looked into their eyes and
loved them, and wished to God I was dead” (38–39).
The most obvious theme these two sketches share is their examination of
looking: who is permitted to look at whom and what power those looks
entail. As such, they constitute a couple of parables about the pitfalls of fieldwork in ways that have been extensively documented and theorized in recent work: representing the other is never innocent, one can never observe
a given field without changing it in the process, and the like.60 What is less
obvious, however, is the way mobility plays into these scenes. In the first, the
automobile confers a mastery over space that dovetails with political and
economic mastery, such that the group of white men can surprise black families at any moment on their own domestic terrain, instantaneously turning
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a home into a roadside spectacle. In the second, the pleasures and powers of
looking at objects from a car window gives way to the sadism and masochism looking produces in the racially charged field of the rural South. For
the black couple, the roadside is a space of surveillance in which they must
perfectly modulate their pace to avoid trouble; when Agee breaks into a trot
to overtake them, it is a recapitulation of the privilege associated with driving at the opening of the sketch. The form his masochism takes at the end is
thus no accident: his fantasy carries out an inversion of the power dynamic,
throwing himself to the ground in a relinquishing of his ability to move in
space and kissing the couple’s feet.
After these prefatory scenes of roadside tension and conflict, the automobile disappears from the narrative for hundreds of pages, as Agee exhaustively describes the people, homes, and objects of the three farming families.
Near the end of the text, however, the narrative abruptly shifts into reverse,
relating the origins of the authors’ intimate association with the Gudgers,
Woodses, and Rickettses. In this scene, Agee and Evans have encamped at a
Birmingham hotel, taking a break from their research trips into the small
towns and rural spaces of central Alabama. The time spent in the hinterlands, it seems, has made Birmingham loom large in the authors’ minds as
an endless menu of the choices that feed liberal selfhood, for the metaphor
of appetite suffuses the entire episode:
(W)e ate bloody foods in chilled rooms and drank liquors, we ate up the streets,
their facades, their show-windows, the distributions of traffic and people along
these troughs, their lights at night, their odors of soft coal and auto exhausts,
the faces and forms of their women, as men starved or dried to husks in a desert
might eat or drink. (330)
Thus the sensory deprivation of the hinterlands, for those acculturated to
cities, finds its satisfaction in the “dynamic and heartening streets . . . of a
relatively condensed and sophisticated civilization” (329).
Having gotten their initial fix, the two men separate. Agee, looking to
prolong the pleasures he finds in the rapid flow of images, takes a long drive
in which the visions of plenty transform themselves at highway speed into
nightmares of excess. Throughout this long passage, vehicular speed seems
to generate a parallel inner state, a manic condition in which everything is
reduced to its blurred image framed by the rectangle of the windshield, like
a sped-up film. At first, the ride is pleasantly narcotic: Agee “lay down into
the driving as if into a hot bath . . . just watching the road disinvolve itself
from the concealing country and run under me with its noise and the tires
and the motor” (331). The innocuous disentanglement of individual mind
from subsuming environment quickly gives way to a vertiginous feeling in
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which Agee’s disembodied sexual desire pursues the prostitute he has seen at
a filling station just up the road: “my mind ran on ahead and slowed around
her,” Agee writes, and he then launches into a fragmented series of dark fantasies in which erotic desire leads inexorably to anomie (332).
This line of thought accelerates and finally culminates in a kind of carsickness, as Agee wishes to purge himself of all content:
Who the hell am I. I don’t even want a drink, and I don’t even much want to
die. . . . I could put my foot to the floor right now and when it had built up
every possible bit of speed I could twist the car off the road, if possible into a
good-sized oak, and the chances are fair that I would kill myself, and I don’t
care much about doing that either. (339)
As in his earlier encounter with the African American couple, Agee’s automobile-driven hunger for visual stimuli culminates in an illness whose cure
is immobility, here fantasized at its outermost limit, death. The apocalyptic
union of the rooted and the deracinated, which here threatens to undo Agee
completely, by means of psychological dissociation if not actual death, repeats itself in a more comic vein shortly thereafter, as Agee composes himself enough to avoid roadside trees and drive to the Gudgers’ house.
As Agee arrives, a storm rolls in, driving him indoors and creating a moment
of enforced and spontaneous intimacy. As the storm passes, the Gudgers invite
Agee to stay, but he declines politely, hops in his car, and attempts to navigate the
treacherous mud and clay roads back to his lodgings in town. As he pulls away,
driving, the paradigmatic exercise of the free will in motion, metamorphoses
into a curious passivity. Driving under such conditions, he writes that:
you feel less like an “operator” than like a sort of passive-active brain suspended
at the center of a machine, careful to let it take its own way, and to hold it at
all in restraint only by little ticklings of an end of a whip: your senses are
translated, they pervade the car, so that you are all four wheels as sensitively
as if each were a fingertip; and these feel out a safe way through rather by
force of will or wish than by any action. (359–60)
The car then gets bogged down, foreclosing this vision of the automobile as a
prosthetic extension of the human mind and body, but Agee experiences this
mishap as liberation rather than frustration. In contrast with the disorienting
slipperiness of driving Agee experiences unaided bodily movement anew:
I was stationary in the middle of a world of which all members were stationary,
and in this stasis, a sour odor of the earth and of night strengthened into me
steadfastly until, at length, I felt an exact traction with the country in each twig
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and clod of it as it stood, not as it stood past me from a car, but to be stood in
the middle of, or drawn through, passed, on foot in the plain rhythm of a
human being in his basic relation to his country. (360)
As this rather mundane and low-comic event unfolds in Agee’s mind, it
grows in significance, becoming an allegory of his entire project. The three
families whose lives are at the text’s center occupy the “natural” landscape as
entities that know their place: they inhabit the “plain rhythm” that sits in
contrast to the fragmented perception that occurs out of the window of a
speeding car.
The car, in turn, stands in for those who shuttle between metropolis and
hinterland, those experts who produce and disseminate knowledge:
I began to feel laughter toward it as if it were a new dealer, a county dietician, an
editor of Fortune, or an article in the New Republic; and so, too, at myself,
marveling with some scorn by what mixture of things in nature good and beneath
nausea I was now where I was and in what purposes: but all the while I kept on
walking . . . less by need . . . than for gratification in feeling them approach me once
more in changed pace and purpose and depth of feeling and meaning. (361)
The car is an overdetermined figure here, standing in for experts working
within various government and corporate structures, and even for the material text Agee is contracted to make out of experiences during this trip (i.e.,
an article for a mass-circulation magazine). For all of their diversity, however, these metaphors all share the quality of being containers of knowledge
and expertise that move in time and space. As such, they stand opposite a
different kind of knowledge, which is less knowledge than experience, metaphorized as “exact traction” with the ground that grounds a different way of
knowing things. In swapping the disorienting velocity of car travel for the
“exact traction” of walking, Agee at once reintegrates his psyche, disavows
the textual and automotive vehicles that make documentary work possible,
and in the process renders the increasingly permeable boundary between
modernity and the “folk” in the stark terms of quasi-religious rebirth.
In an epigraph to Famous Men, Agee links the authors to King Lear, the
sovereign who is humbled by his own arrogance and goes undercover, in effect, to experience the lives of “poor naked wretches” first-hand (xii).61 At the
moment in which he leaves his car to enter the Gudgers’ home, however, Agee
appears in a different guise, less like Lear than Prospero. Lear is unlike Agee
and Evans in that he does not quite choose the nature of his punishment. In a
tragic mode, something immanent in his character forces him there, where he
learns a lesson that arrives too late. Prospero, in contrast, is ever the canny
political operative: he is a producer of culture, a propagandist, and his showy
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decision at the end of the play to “abjure these books” and play it straight is no
less an act of magic than his more obviously spectacular acts.62
In thus abjuring the magic of mobility, Agee seeks to shift the ground of
the documentary encounter in important ways, dissolving the distinctions
that separate him from his subjects by figuring himself, not as an autonomous and mobile intellectual with contacts to the metropolis, but as a tree:
Each plant that fluted up in long rows out of the soil was native to its particular
existence and personality, stood up branching out of its special space in the
spreading of its blood, and stayed there waiting, a marked man, a tree: as
different as the difference between a conducted tour of a prison and the first
hours there as a prisoner. (361)
One might expect this episode to resolve itself along the lines of a familiar
ethnographic pastoral mode, with the participant-observer leaving the fragmented topography and schizoid mentality of the modern metropolis for a
more organic, agrarian order.63 What one finds in this text, however, is a peculiar conception of space in which the pastoral middle ground between
natural savagery and (over)civilization is at once constricted and greatly expanded. Agee is both a “tree,” bare biological existence and indigeneity, agent
of a text that flowers from Hobe’s Hill in a autochthonous manner, and a
disinterested expert on tour, who reads local particulars as integers in a subsuming systemic calculus, publishing his findings to a mass audience that has
only an abstract connection to the subject matter. The great failure of Famous
Men is to conceive of documentary work such that it mediates between the
autochthonous and the technocratic and seeks out ways to articulate new
relationships between the new forms of movement available to subalterns by
means of new media that were emerging to engage a broad mass of readers.
Its great success, rooted deeply in this failure, is the precise way it registers
the ironies of operating across and within these spaces. Famous Men, while it
is not the “documentary book to end all documentary books,” is one important voice of several in the period heralding both the end of an American
folkloric project enabled by the gap between a static and innocent “them” and
a mobile knowing “us” and the need for a sense of modernity as that in which,
to paraphrase James Clifford, the exotic is not only nearby, but in motion.64
CODA: AUTOMOTIVE HOMECOMINGS
My main line of argument throughout this chapter has been that Famous Men,
often read as an endpoint of American modernism or even its apotheosis,
reads quite differently in light of contemporary developments “on the ground”:
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namely, the emergence and wide diffusion of new forms of automobility. To
my mind, Agee’s (and to a lesser extent, Evans’s) sleight of hand in parking the
automobile at the periphery of the text and focusing our attention on their attempts to occupy a “folk” niche with a different spatial and temporal dynamic
impoverishes the text in ways that have been overlooked. In closing, I would
like to briefly compare Famous Men with a roughly contemporary and apparently quite similar text, Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men, in order to show
in sharper relief both what is excluded from the former text and the implications of that exclusion.
Mules and Men grew out of fieldwork Hurston undertook in 1928–1929
in and around Eatonville, her hometown in central Florida. Like Agee,
Hurston was an expatriated Southerner who had risen quickly in elite cultural circles in New York City. Also like Agee, Hurston’s research and writing
constituted an ambivalent trip “home,” in which deep sympathies with the
ethnographic “subjects” competed with obligations to a professional ethic
(academic in Hurston’s case; journalistic in Agee’s). Both writers also had
tricky relationships with patrons. Hurston’s text is authenticated in a patronizing manner by her academic mentor at Columbia, the anthropologist
Franz Boas; the author also makes a stagy nod to Mrs. R. Osgood Mason, the
wealthy white woman who had “financed the whole expedition,” including
the Chevrolet that Hurston drove South.65 Likewise, Agee bristles at the limitations imposed by his corporate patronage quite explicitly in ways we have
seen, acknowledging his enmeshed relationship to Time Inc. even as he
presents his own text as, in part, a protest against it.
Finally, automobiles figure ambiguously within both texts, marking out
the difference between their professional and elite drivers and “folk” subjects
whose movements in space are strictly delimited. The ways that Hurston and
Agee represent this figure, however, differ sharply. As we have seen, Agee’s
reliance on the automobile must be exchanged for a more pedestrian mode
in order to inhabit the “folk” niche fully enough to produce the kind of text
he desires. For Hurston, the car is a much more plastic entity, an object that
both elevates her in the eyes of the “folk” and facilitates her ability to range
over central Florida and quickly collect data that constitute a “cross section
of the Negro South in one state.”66 Hurston acknowledges that her car may
present problems, insofar as it appears to locals as a status symbol and
thereby compromises her ability to blend into the surroundings, but she
claims that “I didn’t go back there so that the home folks could make admiration over me because I had been up North to college and come back with
a diploma and a Chevrolet”; since locals know her from birth, she anticipates that they will hold her in no special regard. In the first page of the narrative proper, Hurston tucks in a sly allusion to this issue as she makes her
entrance to her native village of Eatonville and sees a knot of men gambling
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outside the general store: “ ‘ Hello, boys,’ I hailed them as I went into
neutral.”67
Almost immediately, however, these claims to a neutrality rooted in ordinariness and indigeneity get undercut by the celebrity accorded to Hurston
by virtue of her car, her dress, and her cosmopolitan mien. Like Agee, she
foregrounds the ironies that are woven into all attempts to “write culture”;
unlike Agee, however, Hurston does not set up hard divisions between metropolitan sophistication and “folk” innocence, or between the static “folk”
and the mobile fieldworker. Perhaps the most memorable and vivid example
of this difference occurs early in the text, when Hurston offers a few Eatonville residents a ride home at the end of a party in a neighboring town. Dazed
with fatigue and the local moonshine, Hurston reports that “the little Chevrolet . . . was overflowing with passengers but I was so dull from lack of sleep
that I didn’t know who they were. All I knew is they belonged in Eatonville.”68
In the car, Hurston describes a pleasurable and erotically charged interplay
of voices:
Somebody was woofing in my car about love and I asked him about his
buddy—I don’t know why now. He said, “Ah ain’t got no buddy. They kilt my
buddy so they could raise me. Jus’ so Ah be yo’ man Ah don’t want no damn
buddy. Ah hope they kill every man dat ever cried, ‘titty-mamma’ but me.
Lemme be yo’ kid.”69
Another voice suggests that Hurston is being sexually pursued from other
angles as well: “You [the “woofer”] sho’ Lawd is gointer have a lot of
hindrance.”70 The contrast with Agee’s text is remarkable: Rather than exchange the car that brings her to her subjects for “exact traction” with the
ground and a more tree-like mode of perception as Agee does, Hurston literally opens the car door to her subjects. Packed into the itinerant intimacy
of the car’s interior, distinctions get jostled: Hurston becomes the object of
her subjects’ desires, backseat drivers help her to navigate the local terrain,
individual bodies and voices merge and jostle together both in the packed
car and in the hazy memories of the night, and with the help of a liberal
dose of local moonshine, boundaries between participating, observing, informing, speaking, and writing get blurred. One need not deem Hurston’s
text a solution to the insoluble problems inherent in documentary work any
more than Agee’s is: as Hazel Carby has argued in a slightly different context, Hurston’s representations of the “folk” tend to efface important material and historical realities as they celebrate a vision of racial and cultural
communion.71 Hurston’s car, however, provides a useful model for a representational practice that articulates the tropes of stasis and mobility quite
differently. In her text, the “folk” partake of the pleasures of speed and social
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connectivity the car affords, and Hurston experiences driving, not only as
the instrument of an empirical gaze that allows one to be everywhere and
nowhere and always in “neutral,” but also as a moveable hearth of sorts, a
site in which individual consciousness is suspended in a shared element of
common reference.
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4
From Eye to We
Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941),
Documentary, and Pedagogy
Machiavelli merges with the people, becomes the people; not, however, some “generic” people, but the people whom he, Machiavelli,
has convinced by the preceding argument—the people whose consciousness and whose expression he becomes and feels himself to be,
with whom he feels identified.
—Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (1968)
No “we” should be taken for granted when looking at other people’s
pain.
—Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (2003)
How in hell did you happen?
—Sociologist Robert Park, upon meeting Richard Wright
John Ford’s film The Grapes of Wrath (1940) closes with Ma and Pa Joad
behind the wheel of their truck, fulminating about the injustices perpetrated
on them by the unholy trinity of police power, corporate greed, and natural
disaster.1 At the end of her rant, Ma Joad ends on an uplifting note: “We’re
the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. We’ll go on
forever, Pa, cause we’re the people.” This populist “we” totes its banner
through much of Depression-era culture; it is visible, for example, in the
pious yet ordinary heroes of Frank Capra films like Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington (1939) or the chanting audience-turned-chorus in Clifford
Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935). This trope has not aged well, critically
speaking, primarily because it assumes that which it should trouble: the existence of a broad unity, “we, the people,” which, as contemporary critics
routinely affirm, is an overdetermined entity, internally divided by other
133
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categories, such as race, sexuality, and class. As in the case of the Joads,
invocations of “the people” in Depression-era culture generally conform to
a racial profile: that of rural whites with tattered clothes and empty bellies
whose mouths are nonetheless filled with a rough eloquence. Behind these
examples of the “worthy poor” lie various others deemed less worthy of notice (e.g., the Chicano migrant laborers whose absence is so prominent to
contemporary readers and viewers of The Grapes of Wrath) or, when noticed, less deserving of sympathy.
This chapter examines Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), a
photo-documentary text that both partakes of the era’s characteristic
emphasis on collective identity and critiques it. Wright’s text eschews the
romantic populism of Ma Joad’s speech in favor of a more radical and experimental stance. In Black Voices, “we” never simply issues from “the
people,” the democratic totality of the Rooseveltian “forgotten men” who
constitute the bedrock of the republic. Rather, saying “we” in this text challenges received notions of geography, history, and identity. In other words,
the common sense that enables the righteous anger audience members share
with Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath—that we are we because we have always
been here—is disabled in Black Voices by means of a collective narrative
voice that is raced and classed. As such, it speaks to readers from an alien
position that is nonetheless domestic and hence challenges the dominant
Depression-era nationalist/populist structure of feeling.2 The most obvious
aim of Black Voices is to narrate, in words and images, the passage of African
Americans from slavery through Jim Crow to (proleptically) full citizenship
and equality. The result is a text that celebrates the heroic emergence of
African Americans from various forms of oppression into modernity and
equality but undercuts this comic metanarrative with a deeply ironic sensibility. The “we” that reveals the march of blackness into modernity adopts a
pedagogical stance toward itself, paradoxically, emphasizing the split between the modern and wide-ranging voice that “speaks” this text and the
millions of more constricted and provincial voices from which it has emerged
in a violent history. Likewise, and more radically, it figures readers as pupils,
insisting on their blinkered relationship to blackness and demanding that
they recognize African Americans as a collectivity on the national and international stage. Black Voices does hold out the prospect that this process
might culminate in the kind of encompassing “we” that is ubiquitous in the
era’s culture; it does so, however, without privileging the United States as the
endpoint of collective identity formation. Instead, the text experiments with
a first-person plural that convenes and divides groups variably, along lines of
class, race, and region.
Given the enormous stature of Wright, Black Voices has received surprisingly little critical attention; in framing my discussion of the text within the
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question of pedagogy and collective identity formation, I will demonstrate
its centrality within American modernism. This effort links Wright’s text
with two familiar and salutary emphases in recent criticism: the “cultural
front” that linked intellectuals with a multiethnic and laborist politics in the
1930s and 1940s; and the “New Southern Studies,” an emerging interdisciplinary project that dispenses with the received tradition’s emphasis on cultural isolation and regional distinctiveness and embraces a more critical
perspective, one grounded in poststructuralist theory, a focus on migration
and movement on a global scale, and in comparative approaches.3 More
narrowly, in emphasizing Wright’s deployment of the first-person plural,
I am arguing against a dominant critical line on the form of the documentary book. From William Stott’s landmark work on 1930s “documentary
expression” to more recent work by W. J. T. Mitchell, critics have privileged
photo-documentary texts that foreground the workings of interior subjectivity, ethical struggle, and the essayistic partiality of the first-person singular; moreover, they have branded texts with a more collectivist orientation as
“propagandistic” and as insufficiently complex and modernist.4 Here, I follow in the footsteps of critics such as Frederick Jameson and Barbara Foley,
whose work argues in behalf of a modernism that teaches, and whose teaching has as its horizon the construction of more self-aware and complex
collectivities.5 Wright’s Black Voices has value to us for its experimental
stance that seeks out new ways of seeing and saying “we.”
CONSTITUTING THE PEOPLE
To say “we, the people” resonates powerfully to American audiences, linking
the present moment to the point of origin of a national republican tradition.
Michael Warner, in his work on the discursive underpinnings of this “we,”
argues that it emerged as a solution (if a paradoxical and partial one) to the
problem of providing legal legitimacy to a revolutionary republican movement. As such, it had to be both immanent (i.e., constituted by “the people”
without the mediation of representation or monarchy or a preexisting legal
matrix) and transcendent (i.e., bearing authority over any given manifestation
of “the people” and maintaining that authority across space and time). This
solution came in the form of a printed document whose authority derived,
in many ways, from its performative decoupling of itself from individual
authorship and its broad diffusion among citizens. The constitutive “we,”
according to Warner, “is speaking to itself: the evidently untraced origins
and universal audience of the printed text allow the people always to be
both authoring and reading, both giving and receiving its commands at
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once.”6 This “we” lives in the ambiguous space of print, circulating throughout space and time, instantiating the national moment of origin anew with
each reading. Therein lies its power, Warner argues, to subsume competing
collectivities and discourses: “There is no legitimate representational space
outside of the constitutive we. When somebody calls out to the people, you
will answer. You inhabit the people, but this is not true of any group to which
you belong, the people being the site where all lesser collectivities are
evacuated.”7
Wright invokes this subsuming national “we” but subjects it to sharp critique. Wright’s “we” is no less performative than that of the Constitution and
no less problematic and paradoxical, but it is nearly opposite in effect.
Whereas the constitutive “we” of America’s founding documents summons
a reader who always already dwells within it, and as such, always functions
as both reader and writer, Wright’s “we” dramatically splits writer from
reader, situating the reader as a “you” apart from the writerly “we”:
Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or
upon the hard pavement of the city streets, you usually take us for granted
and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect,
and we are not what we seem.
Our outward guise still carries the old familiar aspect which three
hundred years of oppression in America have given us, but beneath [our]
garb . . . lies an uneasily tied knot of pain and hope whose snarled strands
converge from many points of time and space.8
Whereas the constitutive “we” of the United States is conceived of as originary, plenary, and speaks to and from “the people” with one voice, Wright’s
“we” has no knowable origins, is partial, and must be decoded visually and
from a distance. Moreover, in place of the self-present “we” that the nation’s
founding documents constitute, Black Voices posits a pair of antagonistic
subject positions: a (white) “you” who routinely misrecognizes, who mistakes
the outer “garb” for the inner self of the other, and a (black) “we” who speaks
to readers from the far side of a racial and social and narrative divide.
The most obvious effect of Wright’s narrative gambit is to displace readers
hailed as white from the complacent and unmarked position from which
they might otherwise sympathize with the titular “black voices” or appropriate them into an encompassing national unity. At just the point where the
audience of The Grapes of Wrath joins Ma Joad in saying “we’re the people,”
Wright confronts it with a “we” that is a people but hardly the people in the
received American tradition. Moreover, this gambit puts readers on the
defensive by figuring this “we” as an obscure object rather than a transparent
image. Vision—seemingly the most natural and authoritative means of
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acquiring knowledge—appears here as something suspect, as it mistakes the
outer “garb” or “guise” for the real thing, which is in fact a “knot” that can
only be untied through readers’ intellectual labor, an intensive process of
historicization and self-examination.
At this point a crucial question arises: what is the status in this text of
subjects who slip between the cracks of its dramatic we/you mode of address? In linguistic terms, “we” is notoriously hard to fix: most commonly,
it convenes an “I” and a “you” in an encompassing manner, as in Ma Joad’s
speech above; alternatively, as Wright demonstrates above, it may join an
“I” with a third-person entity over and against a “you” it addresses. Emile
Benveniste describes this ambiguity in terms of “inclusive” and “exclusive”
uses of the first-person plural. “ ‘We,’ he argues, “annexes an indistinct mass
of other persons to ‘I’”; this annexation, however, can either include the
“you” over and against an abstract “they,” or vice versa. Hence the strangeness of “we”:
If there cannot be several “I’s conceived of by an actual “I” who is speaking,
it is because “we” is not a multiplication of identical objects but a junction
between “I” and the “non-I,” no matter what the content of this “non-I”
may be. This junction forms a new totality which is of a very special type
whose components are not equivalent: in “we” is it always “I” which
predominates since there cannot be “we” except by starting with “I,” and
this “I” dominates the “non-I” element by means of its transcendent quality.
The presence of “I” is constitutive of “we.”9
Wright exploits, in other words, the way “we” in English condenses two
functions, such that one can never be sure who is being “annexed” at a given
moment and who is positioned outside of its walls.
In mounting his critique against the hegemonic “we” that incorporates
readers and effaces differences, Wright runs into a related problem: where to
locate readers—most conspicuously Wright’s educated African American
peers—who belong neither to the “folk” aligned with the narrating “we” nor
to the white bourgeois readership that the “we” interpellates. This chapter
focuses on the pedagogical aspect of the text, its attempt both to confront
white readers with the work required to untie the historical “knot” of blackness and to usher a provincial and unlettered “black folk” into modernity.
The presence of African Americans as consumers of culture and as agents of
interpretation haunts this conceit, revealing an aporetic aspect of the text
whereby one never quite knows who is looking at whom, and to what ends.
This problem points at a limitation inherent in Wright’s project, a failure to
account for the range of possible permutations of seeing and being seen in a
field riven by divisions of race and class; this failure, however, proves
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productive, calling attention to the “dark mirror” in which Wright urges
readers to simultaneously constitute our friable and overdetermined collective identities and subject them to critical analysis.
I began this chapter with an implicit nod to the epic: The Grapes of Wrath
owes its vast success, both on the page and on the screen, in large part to the
way it recruits readers to participate in an emergence on a vast historical,
social, and geographical scale. As in the classical tradition, The Grapes of
Wrath infuses ordinary people with divine speech, a speech that binds a nation of listeners with a tale of origins and future destiny, all grounded in a
collective sense of place. Wright’s text also shares the classical epic’s encompassing range of space and time and its ambitions to speak to a wide
audience about an unprecedented emergence.10 But in the end, Wright’s text
conjures both the muse-inspired voice and the unity of the nation only to
demystify them. The “black voices” of the title are joined not by an aboriginal connection to language and soil but by a shared process of assembling a
functioning vernacular amid thoroughly modern scenes of forced translation, migration, and exploitation. The ethnos the traditional epic establishes
appears here not retrospectively, as the finished work of a group of heroes
but prospectively, as a contingent and contested set of collective identities
poised at the uncertain brink of a synthesis or catastrophe. Finally, the muse
of Wright’s text lives not in the pantheon but in the archive. The speech that
gives the narrative its authority derives its power from access to vulgar materials (photographs, autobiographical experience, public records) and to
theories acquired through intellectual endeavor, not from any other source,
immanent or transcendent.
WHITE EYES, BLACK IMAGES
From its opening passage, Black Voices confronts a mass of bourgeois readers with their own lack of sophistication in reading the complexity of the
rural “folk.” Thus the documentary record of African American lives—most
prominently, the photographic portrait—is not the endpoint of the text but
the beginning, ushering in a process of historical inquiry that links archival
artifacts and the raw data of fieldwork to the “snarled strands” of social geography and history. Walter Benjamin argues that, as increasingly minute
slices of everyday life make their way into mass publication, the writer must
assume the burden of captioning the image:
The camera will become increasingly smaller and smaller, more and more
prepared to grasp fleeting, secret images whose shock will bring the
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mechanism of association in the viewer to a complete halt. At this point
captions must begin to function, captions which understand the
photography which turns all the relations of life into literature, and
without which all photographic constructions must remain bound in
coincidences.11
Black Voices embodies this ethic in important ways, promoting a documentary aesthetic that at once estranges its readers from the documentary subject and offers a way back via captioning, imagined as a social and historical
mapping of the relationships between disparate social locations and subject
positions.
The aesthetics of Benjaminian captioning appear most dramatically in
the first photographic montage in Black Voices. Just after the text announces
that the black image is not a transparent representation of blackness but a
“knot,” it unveils a curious spectacle: a series of six captioned photographs of
workers doing jobs typically allotted to African Americans under Jim
Crow—service work (“the black maid” and “the black waiter”), entertainment (“the black dancer”), unskilled labor (“the black sharecropper”), and
skilled labor (“the black industrial worker”) (18–23). Each photograph
frames a black figure or figures within a socioeconomic role, housing African
American subjectivity within the close quarters of the definite article, thereby
having each specimen stand in for the entirety of a genus, as in a museum
display. This moment in the text, itself framed within Wright’s sketch of the
African American experience during the Middle Passage and as slaves on
Southern plantations, would seem to figure the “black voices” as mere objects, both of the white-dominated economy and, within the context of the
book’s reception, of the reader’s gaze.
George Natanson advances a critique along these lines in his work on the
“black image” in New Deal discourse, arguing that Wright’s conceit of the
African American multitude as a “we” narratable by himself places Wright
in a position analogous to white oppressors, “treating the black millions as a
monolithic mass” in a “fundamental act of cultural suppression,” when in
fact “10.8 million ‘ordinary’ black voices were no more blendable than 12
million white voices.”12 I will return below to the important question Natanson raises regarding the troublesome implications of an African American
intellectual’s ventriloquizing the “folk”; here I want to call attention to what
Natanson’s critique leaves out: Wright’s use of these images to confront an
implied white readership with the inadequacy of its own historically conditioned gaze. A style of representation, in other words, that would seem to
move with the grain of a racist gaze, sits here within an ironic frame, forcing
viewers to look at themselves looking at images of African Americans and
thereby rendering what has heretofore been a domestication of African
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American subjectivity within subservient economic and social roles as a
“knot,” a node in a historical dialectic in which the viewer is implicated.
This estrangement effect is at work in all of the images in this series; perhaps the most dramatic instance is the image entitled “The Black Maid”
(figure 4.1). The subject kneels on a step and scrubs a staircase. We see her
from behind, a vantage point that renders her as a faceless and voiceless
drone. Moreover, her polishing of the steps depicts her labor as an ironic
inversion of upward mobility: she cleans up the traces we leave behind as
we ascend without ever leaving her knees.13 This works out in a more complex fashion in “The Black Dancer” (figure 4.2), as our point of view places
us as paying customers, as it were, in a cabaret act, commanding the labor
of African American women as they cater to our desire for exoticism/
eroticism. This photo also underscores the implication of the viewer into
the economy of the photograph, but this time the influence is more direct:
we are no longer voyeurs, seeing the real without rendering it self-conscious
in any way; rather, we are part of a performance calculated to cater to our
Fig. 4.1 Jack Delano, “Negro Maid, Washington, D.C.,” 1941. FSA-OWI Collection,
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
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141
Fig. 4.2 Russell Lee, “Negro cabaret. Chicago, Illinois,” 1941. FSA-OWI Collection,
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
desires. My point here is that, despite Natanson’s countervailing argument,
Wright’s project at this point in the text has little to do with concocting an
adequate representation of blackness in all of its internal diversity; rather,
it is an attempt to intervene in a sphere of mass-produced representations
such that the conditions under which these representations are routinely
consumed become themselves the object of the critical gaze rather than
the invisible and normative position from which to evaluate representations of reality.
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INHERITORS OF SLAVERY: TRAUMA, RACE,
AND REPRESENTATION
The second chapter of Black Voices opens with a curious portrait: superimposed with the chapter title “Inheritors of Slavery,” it depicts a husband
and wife, both sharecroppers, sitting on a cornshuck bed (figure 4.3).14 On
the wall behind them are photographic portraits of this same couple taken
twenty years earlier. Both the real couple and their images on the wall
share the same air of self-possession, but the contrast in dress is stark: the
portraits-within-the-portrait display well-dressed and still youthful
figures framed in gilt, while the figures within the larger frame have tired
expressions and frayed clothes, no longer able, it seems, to hide their lives’
lack of ornament. In part, this image does similar work to that of earlier
photographs under discussion, forcing readers to move beyond customary
responses into more complex modes of engagement. Rather than experience pity for the tattered laborers from a safe distance, readers must, in
their encounter with this photograph, simultaneously recognize their
difference from the material conditions of the subjects and their likeness
with the impulse to dress up for portraits and to hang flattering images of
one’s self proudly on the wall. Thus the image uncannily links the comforts
of “our” home with the pathos of “their” poverty not only through a sentimental appropriation of the plight of the other, but also through the recognition of parallel urges in self and other.
The caption, however, signals an important shift in Black Voices. Thus far
I have argued that Wright’s text enacts a drama in which the “we” that narrates has something to teach an implied white readership about blackness.
This demand for a fuller recognition of African American subjectivity and
citizenship is indeed at the heart of the text, but this photograph and the
material that follows it moves beyond this focus on recognition to one that
is more materialist or redistributionist.15 The pathos of this photograph lies,
in large part, in its inversion of the usual terms of bourgeois inheritance.
Whereas inheritance ought to speak to intergenerational transfers of capital
(i.e., money, but also social and cultural forms of capital), here the portraits
point out an ironic inversion of this narrative, by which the desire for
material comfort and prestige lingers while one’s actual circumstances
steadily decline. In thus calling attention to the problematic role of inheritance in African American history and culture, Wright broadens the scope of
Black Voices in three important ways. Most obviously, the focus on traumatic aspects of African American history (e.g., the Middle Passage, Jim
Crow-era racial terror) underscores the past violence visible in present circumstances. By focusing on the material aspects of this violent inheritance,
FROM EYE TO WE
143
Fig. 4.3 Jack Delano, “Negro preacher and his wife sitting under photos taken of
them twenty years ago,” 1941. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division,
Library of Congress.
Wright also yokes the text’s demand for recognition from dominant whites
to a parallel demand for redistribution of resources: as we shall see, this is
one of the ways in which Black Voices moves beyond a narrowly race-based
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discourse to embrace other orders of affiliation, such as social class. Finally,
in calling attention to the cultural aspects of inheritance qua tradition,
Wright carves out a new niche for the narrator. Insofar as the “we” that narrates Black Voices collates and articulates the minutiae of African American
history, often using bodies of theory drawn from Enlightenment traditions,
it displays a complex (and somewhat contradictory) pedagogical relationship to the “black folk” itself. This last mode of inheritance counterbalances
the declension narrative suggested by the portraits-within-a-portrait discussed above, suggesting a more hopeful (if as yet unfulfilled) accumulation
of cultural capital and its egalitarian distribution.
A second photograph in this chapter draws a tight focus on this aspect of
“inheritance” as trauma. In contrast to the subtle irony of the portraits-within-a-portrait, this image confronts the reader with blunt force. In this grisly
scene of a lynching, white men crowd around a pine tree, surrounding the
bloody body of a black man hanging from a noose; as such, it represents the
black body as pure object (figure 4.4).
The whites stare grimly at the camera as if for a sports team portrait; the
dead body meets the camera in profile. The photograph is uncaptioned and
bleeds to the edges of the page, leaving no margin. Insofar as this photograph represents the sheer physical fact of lynching, it works within a sublime mode that is unique in this text. Whereas most of the text’s images
share the social scientific ethos of the era’s government-sponsored photography projects, with its focus on typicality and “everyday life,” this photograph
comes from the files of International News Photos and records an instance
of spectacular, newsworthy violence. In its sheer brutality, the image occupies the other of the two extremes of the spectrum of documentary photography, opposite the radical self-reflexivity analyzed above. In its violence,
this image defies categorization or comment, a feature that is underscored
formally by the uncaptioned and “bleeding” layout. While most of Black
Voices features images that are subordinate to the text, illustrating Wright’s
narrative and bearing captions that reiterate its words, at this moment the
emphasis shifts decisively. On the previous page, Wright’s text embeds its
discussion of lynching within the larger economic context of the sharecropping system, briefly noting that “most of the floggings and lynchings occur
at harvest time” and that “our bodies will be swung by ropes from the limbs
of trees, will be shot at and mutilated” (41, 43); the image itself, however,
speaks to the limits of ekphrasis in a rare moment when the captioning function of the text is allowed to lapse. Arguably, the central message of this
photograph is the singular violence of the event to which it refers, its resistance to being represented.16
And yet, this image is not exhausted by its role as evidence of a singularly
traumatic event; in fact, the history of the production, dissemination, and
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Fig. 4.4 Unknown Photographer, “Farmers Around Hung Black Man,” 1936.
International News Photos. Reprinted with permission; ©Bettmann/CORBIS.
distribution of such images suggests a nearly opposite interpretation. Photographs of lynching circulated within a public sphere dedicated to white supremacy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the form of
press photographs, postcards, and souvenirs.17 As an eyewitness account
suggests, photographs of lynchings like the one found in Black Voices might
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be seen less as documents capturing an event in medias res than as the products of spectacles staged explicitly for photographic reproduction:
Kodaks clicked all morning at the scene of the lynching. People in
automobiles and carriages came from miles around to view the corpse
dangling from the end of a rope.. . . Picture card photographers installed a
portable printing plant at the bridge and reaped a harvest in selling
postcards . . . of the lynched Negro. Women and children were there by
the score. At a number of country schools the day’s routine was delayed
until . . . pupils could get back from viewing the lynched man.18
As this quotation makes clear, while the image of a lynched black body may
confront us as something sublime, it also comes from a historical context in
which such traumas are rendered routine and systemic, both on the primary
level of the body and at the secondary level of the production and consumption of its image. Around this horrific event turn the wheels of modern institutions and technologies: the photographic apparatus that reproduces
the image onsite and disseminates it to an eager public, the automobile and
concomitant infrastructure that allows ever-wider access to large-scale spectacles such as lynchings, and even the schools, whose “day’s routine” is
“delayed” in order to aid in the deeper inscription of a subsuming routinization, that of whites’ subjection of blacks.
In fact, Grace Hale argues that the emergence of such “spectacle lynchings” in the late nineteenth century “transformed a deadly and often quiet
form of vigilante ‘justice’ into a modern spectacle of enduring power.”19 It
should not be seen, she claims, as an atavistic reaction against modernity but
as a paradigmatically modern use of the technologies of cultural reproduction to create and maintain a stable whiteness.20 The image of the lynched
victim in Black Voices, then, speaks to two distinct moments of trauma: the
primary moment capturing the sublimity of the body in pain, but also a secondary moment, that of the exclusion of African Americans from the regime
of representation of their own lives. This extends beyond the domestic and
casual ability to freeze time with a click of the Kodak to a broader exclusion
from the institutions that produce culture. From this standpoint, the inclusion of a lynching photograph within this text gains further significance as
the exercise of a kind of textual power that has been historically denied to
the “black folk.” Although whites have always had the power of staging spectacular events for public consumption that contribute to the exercise of political hegemony (and lynching photos are a paradigmatic case), African
Americans have traditionally been (equally paradigmatically) the objects of
spectacle. Through the textual power of layout, of manipulating fragments
from the archive in the creation of new articulations of a collective history,
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147
such an image changes radically. Whereas it once embodied the state of subjection in which one’s body is made to say things counter to one’s desire, here
it appears as a powerfully charged element in an emergent self-narrating collectivity, a “we” with the means to narrate its own history. Wright thus participates in what Hale describes as a “never-ending dialectic” in which whites
coordinate both physical and textual forms of racial terror and blacks (journalist Ida B. Wells is arguably the most important precursor) contest this
narrative within national and international public spheres.21
Just as this image speaks to an emergent form of agency rooted in black intellectuals’ production of a rearticulated cultural inheritance, it also points to a
parallel emergence at the point of consumption. Especially for its
African American readers, this image speaks from a traumatic history that generates a powerful sense of embattled collectivity.22 In ending this section I want
to consider a third photograph, one that further explores the role played by
African Americans as consumers of text. In this photograph, a sharecropping
family sits in a room literally covered with words: the walls are lined with pages
of newsprint, dailies cover the table, and each family member pores over a book
(figure 4.5). The joke here is similar to that of the portrait of portraits: the read
here (i.e., the “folk” object of the reader’s gaze) are figured as readers, and the
surfaces of their home, which lies far from the centers of cultural production,
Fig. 4.5 Russell Lee, “Five children of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, studying their
lessons by lamplight. Creek County, Oklahoma,” 1940. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints
and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
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are awash in the products of the metropolis.23 This effect is heightened further
by the gaze of one of the children, which is shifted momentarily from the columns of text to meet the camera eye, watching us reading her in effect, a move
that dramatically reveals the dialectic that connects the “you” constituted by
readers of the book to the “we” constructed by the narrative voice. One might
interpret this image as a celebration, along the lines of Benedict Anderson’s famous argument, of the power of the nation as “imagined community.” Even
in the farthest reaches of the cultural and economic hinterlands, print draws
inhabitants into the polity; contrariwise, and this is enhanced by the girl’s
breaking through the “fourth wall” of the image, print allows the readers of
Black Voices to admit the “black folk” into the national family by virtue of a
shared relationship to print culture.24 The text surrounding this image, however, constricts such a reading severely, framing the image of the “folk” as
readers within a repressive set of institutional arrangements. Not only does
economic scarcity force most African American children to work six months
of the year, but the white supremacist political leadership also diverts funds
from black schools to white ones (65–66). Moreover, inasmuch as black students have access to print in schools, that access is subject to censorship: the
dominant “Lords of the Land,” argues Wright, “delet(e) all references [in
textbooks] to government, voting, citizenship, and civil rights” (64).
Despite these political and economic constraints, Wright continues, the
black folk “love books inordinately, even though we do not know how to
read them, for we know books are a gateway to a forbidden world. Any black
man who can read is a hero to us. And we are joyful when we hear a black
man speak like a book” (64). Thus the circuit that seems to join middle class
(white) reader and peasant (black) “folk” in the photograph is revealed by
the text to be riddled with shorts. Recognition of the “black folk” as part of
the national family, in other words, must be moored to a redistribution of the
means of acquiring literacy. In the absence of this redistribution the text offers two sources of potential energy. The first is the awareness among the
“folk” themselves, however tenuous, that literacy confers power, mobility,
and autonomy. The second is the eloquence of the “we” itself, a voice that
“speaks like a book” from within the pages of Black Voices.
BOUND NORTH BLUES: WRIGHT AND THE SOUTH
What is the relationship between Wright’s “we” and its antecedent, the millions of voices of the “black folk”? Black Voices is undeniably of and for a
dispersed folk, which is to say representative of its experiences and commit-
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ted to its survival and success, but to what extent can it claim to be narrated
by this “folk”? One of the hallmarks of American modernism is the prominence of textual strategies (e.g., Zora Neale Hurston’s folklorics, John A. and
Alan Lomax’s field recordings) that create an aura of direct contact with the
pure expressive products of the “folk.”25 Most such texts subscribe to a preservationist logic, casting “folk” voices as evanescent traces of a bygone era
that must be saved from a rationalizing and homogenizing modernity. Black
Voices, in contrast, is arguably antifolkloric: rather than represent “folk”
voices as fragile cultural niches in need of protection, the text situates them
within the subsuming frame of the evolution of a normative modern and
modernizing voice, that which is embodied by the “we” itself. The “folk”
voices within this text, in other words, serve as an index against which the
emergence of black modernity can be measured; as such, they are not intended to speak from a stable place of otherness, from another culture, as it
were, so much as from various moments in a progressive evolution that
moves teleologically from South to North, from neofeudalism to industrial
production, from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, and from an unindividuated
collectivity to a consciously formed group identity.
Wright’s meditation on the relationship between “folk” and modern, intellectual and masses, and literacy and oral culture should also be seen as
part of a long discursive tradition in African American thought. Frederick
Douglass’s autobiographical writings are an important early reference point:
referring to slaves’ singing of “sorrow songs,” he claims that, as an illiterate
slave, “I did not . . . understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs,” that “I was myself within the circle; so that I neither
saw nor heard as those without might see and hear.”26 The rest of his narrative, then, relates his acquisition of literacy as a means of activating a critical
potential by moving in and out of the enclosed circle of the lives of “black
folk.”27 W. E. B. Du Bois similarly emphasizes the split between an unlettered
“folk” and a tutored “talented tenth” as its cultural vanguard. In his reflections on his tenure at a small, rural Southern school, he notes, “I have called
my tiny community a world, and so its isolation made it; and yet there was
among us but a half-awakened common consciousness.” Although this commonality, borne of a common oppression, “caused us to think some thoughts
to-gether,” these thoughts, “when ripe for speech, were spoken in various
languages.”28 One also thinks of two notable texts from the Harlem Renaissance that anticipate Wright’s examination of African American modernity.
Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923) shuttles across the Mason-Dixon line and culminates in the encounter between the deracinated Northerner Ralph Kabnis
and an ancient ex-slave: the meeting emphasizes the difficulty, and perhaps
impossibility, of meaningful communication across the lines of class,
education, and region that split “blackness” in the interwar era. Likewise,
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though with a more optimistic perspective, in Mules and Men (1935) Zora
Neale Hurston claims that her academic training has endowed her with the
“spy-glass of Anthropology,” which allows her to see her own indigenous
culture in full, and the narrative that follows mediates extensively on the
epistemological and political problems that stem from the encounter of the
“black folk” with a tutored intellectual like herself.29 Wright’s contribution to
this discourse, as we have already begun to see, is to use the ambiguous
location of the first-person plural to contest both the relatively firm spatialization of the “black folk” as Southern in Hurston and Toomer and the bipolarity of the “Veil” or the “circle” in the discourse of Du Bois and Douglass.
Wright’s “we” allows for the formation of collective identities that exceed
racial boundaries as well as the continued exploration of fissures within
blackness along lines explored previously by the aforementioned writers.
The evolution of Wright’s titular “voices” unfolds in a dialectic that opposes the ubiquity and magisterial sweep of the narrating “we” to the constricted geographies and blinkered outlook of the black “folk.” The latter,
viewed through the narrative lens of the former, appear in a tragic light as an
inchoate potential that lacks the means to articulate itself effectively. The
photograph that accompanies the first sentences of chapter 2 illustrates this
perspective: it features a old white man in the foreground, presumably a
landlord, with one leg planted aggressively on the rear bumper of a sedan
(figure 4.6). Behind him, crowded in the left side of the frame, are several
African American men on the porch of a country store. In the contrast this
photograph draws between a central and proprietary whiteness and a marginal and silent blackness lies a point of origin for the text’s treatment of its
eponymous “voices”: within the Southern context, they can never be read
simply as full essence, as the embodiment of a “folk” nation’s wishes. Rather,
they always issue from the fringes, speaking from places dominated by
whites and cut off from the aura of mastery and mobility with which the
photograph invests the automobile.
The accompanying text works in a parallel fashion, describing the Black
Belt as a “psychological island” (30); the rest of the chapter portrays this
isolation not merely as the absence of cultural commerce with other groups
but as subjection to white discipline and terror. The first “folk” voices that
emerge are meant to evoke the pathological consequences of this isolation,
mixing self-hatred and hatred of various others: for example, poor whites (“I
don’t like liver/I don’t like hash/I’d rather be a nigger/Than poor white trash”
[46]) and white immigrants (“Red, white and blue/Your daddy was a Jew/
Your ma’s a dirty dago/Now what the hell are you?” [43]).30 These voices, for
Wright, arise from a false consciousness traceable to the legacy of slavery
and segregation: regarding the “attitudes of opposition” to other oppressed
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151
Fig. 4.6 Dorothea Lange, “Plantation owner. Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale,
Mississippi,” 1936. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library
of Congress.
groups, Wright tells us that “it is as if the Lords of the Land had . . . cast a spell
upon us, a spell from which we cannot awaken” (47).
The equation between Southern “black folk” and false consciousness
structures Black Voices at a deep level. The only indigenous sources of resistance to the degrading status quo of the segregated South given any attention
in the text are African American religion and the blues. Wright does ventriloquize a preacher, emphasizing his skillful use of antiphonal structures
and messianic imagery to bind the “folk” in a “heightening of consciousness” that would seem to facilitate collective desires for better lives in the
profane world (73). Likewise, Wright emphasizes the blues as a source of
pleasure—a “string of ditties that make the leaves of the trees shiver in naked
and raucous laughter”—that provides solace and binds the community. But
Wright emphatically rejects these “folk” forms as inadequate to the task of
organizing a coherent collective response to modern conditions, claiming
that the blues “are not enough to unify our fragile folk lives in this competitive world” (75). What is missing, according to Wright, is an intellectual
supplement, one capable of directing bodies and minds in a manner appropriate to modernity (figured as “this competitive world”).
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Wright leaves a crucial question unasked at just this point: why must the
blues be read as mere cultural residue? As Houston Baker has argued extensively, the blues is a quintessentially modern mode of expression, unfolding
within a dialectic that binds “the mastery of form” to “the deformation of
mastery.”31 For Baker, the “indisputably modern moment in Afro-American
discourse” need not wait, as in Black Voices, on migration North and integration into multiethnic urban spaces and industrial production. On the contrary, he locates it in the encounter between the “intellectual poet” Sterling
Brown and the blues singer Ma Rainey: in encounters like these, popular
and elite meet in a “fluid field” to share in the expression of “a nation of common concern and culturally specific voice.”32 In addition to Baker’s theory of
“blues modernity,” recent historical scholarship questions a teleology in
which modernization moves unproblematically from the “folk” South to
urban-industrial North, for example Robin Kelley’s research on relationships between African Americans in the Black Belt in the 1930s and organizers from the CP-USA. Kelley’s work powerfully demonstrates that the two
groups collaborated in the construction of a Left political movement that
nonetheless pulled from an Afro-American and agrarian structure of feeling. Most memorably, Kelley recovers examples of spirituals like “Give Me
That Old Time Religion” that were revised to redirect their messianism away
from Christ and toward a workers’ paradise: in this instance, the lyrics were
changed to “Give Me That Old Communist Spirit.”33
As Kelley and Barbara Foley both point out, adherents of this distinctive
brand of Communism rallied around the “Black Belt Nation Thesis” first
approved by the Communist International in 1928.34 This doctrine, which
arose from Party attempts to come to terms with the diverse range of nationalist movements that arose from the end of Czarist rule in Russia, argued
that African Americans constituted a nation based on their distinctive language, history, and culture, and that this entitled them to sovereignty in territories in which they made up a majority of the population. Wright was
hardly ignorant of such developments in Communist theory and practice. In
his autobiography he recounts his first exposure to Stalin’s writings on
nationalism:
The method by which scores of backward peoples had been led to unity
on a national scale . . . enthralled me. I had read with awe how the
Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia to
listen to the stammering dialects of peoples oppressed for centuries by the
czars. I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when
I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people a
language, newspapers, institutions . . . how these forgotten folk had been
encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs
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meanings and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly
superior ways of living.35
The ambiguities in this passage are telling. At once Wright evinces a desire
for the “folk” to preserve their “ancient customs” and figures the speech in
which those customs inhere as “stammering,” developmentally prior to a
fully articulated modern speech. The “commitment” Wright makes here is
pedagogical: he wants to emulate those who engage “folk” subjects as an expert and to mold them in his own image.36 I will return to the question of
Wright’s relationship to pedagogy and its relationship to Black Voices. For
present purposes, I am most interested in all of the exclusions and repressions in this text centering on the relationships between blackness, Southernness, and modernity. Given Wright’s declared commitment to a politics
that preserves a place for “folk” expression, it is curious to say the least that
the narrative of Black Voices maps the passage of African Americans from
feudalism to modernity in teleological (and undialectical) terms, figuring
the South as pure residue and the North as the exclusive site from which
African Americans may progress.
Wright himself was hardly deaf to these implications, as is evident in theoretical writing like “Blueprint for Negro Culture” and blues poetry like “The
FB Eye Blues.”37 The relegation of “folk” forms like the blues to mere residue
in Black Voices speaks to important limitations in its sociogeographical
project. Wright’s metanarrative of progress-through-migration demands that
the move to the urban North play the normative role in becoming modern;
to embrace the blues as a sign of indigenous Southern modernity would force
a thoroughgoing revision of the theory that enables his evolutionary tale.
This teleology is particularly legible in the movement from the second to the
third chapter, a transition that shifts the narrative focus from neofeudal South
to industrial North. Clearly, neither the church’s messianism nor the blues
sensibility’s improvisation/pleasure are “selected for” in Black Voices’ evolutionary narrative. At the end of chapter 2, a negative voice displaces these affirmative and antiphonal forms and signals an end, however haltingly, to the
sort of accommodation and dissimulation the Jim Crow system demands.
This naysaying voice arises from a series of conflicts between “black folk” and
Satanic tempters that attempt to keep them at home and in their place: first
the “folk” voice refuses the seductions of a thinly veiled Booker T. Washington
figure, who argues in behalf of Southern whites’ good faith and counsels
blacks to work within the system; then, it declines duplicitous paternalists’
offer “to build [African Americans] a big school”; finally, it falls silent in the
face of a lynch mob. While the first two scenes allow for the emergence of a
new voice, one suited to the text’s evolutionary logic in that it has learned to
say “no” and thereby refuse its stunted potential for growth within the confines
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of Jim Crow, the last circumscribes this potential within the brutal and preverbal code of violence promulgated by Southern whites.38
If there is to be an emergence of a modern African American subject, in
other words, it will be at the cost of migration: the acquisition of language lies
northward, while the South remains a zone in which the only means of survival lies within a quasi-verbal and ritual-bound accommodationism. Wright’s
insistence on this teleology may well speak to the historical reality captured so
devastatingly in the aforementioned lynching photograph; in so doing, however, it ignores the possibilities of other modernities: those rooted in the kinds
of local organizing and mobilizing seen in the Alabama of Robin Kelley’s
research, in the blues modernity Baker elucidates, and, finally, in the nascent
civil rights struggles that began in the South at the close of World War II.
WRIGHT, EXPERTISE, AND THE CHICAGO SCHOOL
OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY
I have argued throughout this piece that Wright’s “we” occupies a transcendent vantage point, one concerned with mapping the historical and geographical terrain associated with black migration. Increasingly as the text crosses
the divide that splits it along so many different lines (rural/urban, South/
North, folk/mass), it interweaves micro- and macroscopic views, such that
the narrative combines embodied itineraries with abstract maps.39 This peculiar form of bifocal vision works in a tragic mode, emphasizing the discontinuity between the peasant consciousness of rural African Americans and the
invisible abstractions that structure their lives in new urban surroundings:
Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go
to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall and
sprawling centers of steel and stone. . . . How were we to know that, the
moment we . . . set our awkward feet upon the pavements of the city, life
would begin to exact of us a heavy toll in death? (93)
This grotesque scene, in which the very bodies of the “folk” prove unsuited
to the built environment of the city, raises crucial questions: Given the gap
between the shock of the “unprepared folk” and the confidence with which
the narrative voice outlines this scene, where is this voice speaking from?
Assuming this position can be established at all, does it not stretch the
boundaries of the first-person plural to the breaking point by collapsing the
disorientation of the “folk” and the sophisticated theorization of this disorientation into the same “we”? Some answers to these questions lie in an
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underexamined source: Wright’s relationship to contemporary social-science
paradigms. For Wright, migration North came along with a migration into
two kinds of “science”: Marxism, as is well known, but also the sociology that
was becoming the dominant paradigm for understanding the modern city,
that which emerged in the early 1920s among a group of sociologists (including Robert Park, Louis Wirth, and Horace Cayton) associated with the
Chicago School of Urban Sociology. Black Voices is deeply indebted to Chicago School theory in many ways, but it contests that theory’s construction
both of the relationship of the scientific observer to the experimental “field”
and, by extension, of the role of science in society at large.40
In terms of method, Chicago School research blended the abstraction of
quantitative methods (around which the discipline was rapidly consolidating) with the particularizing and humanizing force of documentary materials (e.g., ethnographies, photographs, informant narratives). In political
terms, such work emerged from a pragmatist strain of urban reform that
emerged from Progressive-era liberalism and aimed at alleviating the suffering of immigrant workers adjusting to urban life and industrial labor.41 The
vision that emerged from this group (unsurprisingly given the prominence
of émigrés and ethnic minorities among the group’s members) emphasized
the linguistic and cultural diversity of the modern city, depicting urban life
as a confluence of economic rationalization on a massive scale on the one
hand and a bewildering mishmash of localized institutions and traditions on
the other. While this confluence has been imagined in a utopian mode then
and since by theorists ranging from Henri Lefebvre to Marshall Berman,42
for Chicago School theorists it was most often viewed dystopically, figuring
the city as an “ecology” in which individuals and groups must adapt or languish. While an ecological theory of the city provides a dynamic means of
describing the chaotic range of interactions between social groups in modern urban life, it has two major liabilities that Black Voices implicitly contests: it hypostatizes the political and economic status quo and hence lacks
critical force; and it fails to imagine political agency in any form other than
individual adaptation and mutation to fit that status quo.
The preeminent theorist of the new ecological “urbanism” was Louis
Wirth, whose pioneering work influenced Wright deeply, particularly in an
essay Wright cites in his preface to Black Voices, “Urbanism as a Way of Life.”
In this essay, Wirth attempts to move beyond merely quantitative and/or
geographic definitions of the city, instead envisioning “urbanism” as both a
material entity and an imaginary, as a location and a social pattern, as a geographical center and a process of cultural infiltration into the hinterlands. In
so doing, he remaps urban space, emphasizing its essential heterogeneity
and exploring the effects of this heterogeneity on its inhabitants. The cultural mixing that is, for Wirth, the hallmark of the modern city, has both a
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positive, secularizing/rationalizing and a negative, fragmenting/dissociating
force. Of these he emphasizes the negative, evincing a powerful sense, also
audible in Black Voices, of the inappropriateness of “folk” acculturations to
urban spaces. Wirth claims that, for the “folk” who move from the countryside to the city, “formal control mechanisms and competition furnish the
substitutes for the bonds of solidarity that . . . hold a folk society together.”43
In Wirth’s social ecology, individuals and groups are engaged in an oftenbrutal process of individuation, specialization, competition, and adaptation
in which only that which is modern and rational is guaranteed survival.
Wirth tempers the potentially eugenic cast of his analysis by paying careful
attention, in ways characteristic of Chicago School writing, to the felt experience (what I am calling the “itineraries”) of urban living. In a passage that
prefigures Wright’s own discourse, Wirth briefly slips into the first-person
plural to describe the ways in which urban life demands that citizens decode
social reality visually: “We see the uniform which denotes the role of the
functionaries and are oblivious to the personal eccentricities that are hidden
behind that uniform. We tend to acquire and develop a sensitivity to a world
of artefacts and become progressively farther removed from a world of
nature.”44 Wirth’s “we” is an at least somewhat plastic entity, shaped in a
“folk” environment but able to be molded by the city’s rational public sphere.
The progressive impulse behind Wirth’s argument works within a fundamentally liberal logic, advocating the judicious addition of technocratic
supplements from university-trained experts to ensure the harmonious
functioning of the urban ecology or, at the very least, to protect endangered
species that fail to adapt. Wright clearly owes a debt to this theory—first and
foremost, to its thesis regarding the unstable reactions catalyzed by the sudden introduction of rural dwellers to the industrial city—but his peculiar
first-person plural deforms this social scientific discourse in ways that need
further examination.
Wright often told the story of his first encounter with Robert Park, the
legendary cofounder of the Chicago School. After dignifying Wright by announcing, “I rise in your honor, sir,” the septuagenarian professor asked,
“how in hell did you happen?”45 Wright’s very existence, it seems, posed a
challenge to received descriptive and predictive models of sociology—even
as an object Wright resisted inclusion into its paradigms.46 As a subject of
science Wright presents more troubling problems, problems that threaten
the confident position from which Park delivered his quip. The discourse of
social science relies on a substitutive principle whereby a professionally authorized eye/I makes observations and draws conclusions about a social
“field,” imagined as extrinsic to that observer. This vantage point, in turn,
offers itself to readers without losing its empirical authority. “Itineraries”
may be cited within this discourse, as in Wirth’s ventriloquy of urban dwell-
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ers’ confusion cited above, but they must be subsumed within a “map” that
plots subjective experiences along abstract and rational axes. The ideological
aspects of Wirth’s discourse are likewise oriented technocratically, toward
preservation and upkeep of the “natural” systems and laws that structure the
city’s functioning without questioning the naturalness of those laws themselves. Wright’s “we” diverges from this frame in that it occupies an ambivalent location that is both of the “folk” and external to it. The partiality of
Wright’s narrative voice reframes scientific description, which no longer exists as disinterested knowledge production or as an instrument of a university-based program of social management. Rather, it links social theory to
the unfolding of an ethnic history as part of a political program that seeks
primarily to transform, rather than manage or describe, the current order.47
There are many examples of Wright’s ambivalent appropriation of Wirth’s
urbanization thesis in Black Voices, with its emphasis on the confluence of
imaginaries constituted in rural environments and the material urban conditions that confound them; perhaps the most dramatic is the photo-textual
montage dedicated to the “kitchenette.” After a brief discussion of the economic underpinnings of exploitative and racist real estate practices focusing
on “kitchenettes,” tiny one-room apartments marketed to poor African
American families, Wright presents an extraordinary prose poem composed
of fifteen consecutive sentences sharing the subject “The kitchenette” (e.g.,
“The kitchenette is our prison . . .”; “The kitchenette injects pressure and
tension into our individual personalities . . .”), illustrated with pictures of
African American families amid squalor (104–11). The repetition in this passage reads like a perverse sales pitch; it inhabits the formal structures of
advertising in order to unmask their duplicity. As such, it simultaneously describes the disjuncture between the material conditions of urban workingclass life and the advertising industry’s description of them and, through the
deadening repetition, rearticulates the euphemism “kitchenette” as a source
of “death” and a “seed-bed” for disease (106–7). As in Wirth’s work, this moment emphasizes the mismatch between rural dwellers’ expectations of square
dealing and face-to-face economic relations on the one hand and the reality
of an exploitative order dominated by real estate investment trusts and redlining banks. What sets Wright’s text apart from Chicago School discourse,
however, is the multivalence of his narrative voice. At once it ventriloquizes
the forms of the marketing pitch (e.g., repetition of catchy euphemisms, the
combination of “copy” and photographs), deforms them in a game of ironic
reversal, and assumes a heroic role that articulates the pitiful voices of the
“kitchenette” class as an emergent group’s demands for justice.48 In so doing,
Wright’s “we” begins to imagine a social science that is located, not in the
transcendent “universality” of elite corporate and educational institutions,
but in the desires of masses who have historically been excluded from them.
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CULTURAL WORK AND THE “BLACK FOLK”
Wright’s tale of urbanizing peasants ends in an antinomy. On one side, he provides a normalizing portrait of the heroic male proletarian whose consciousness changes naturally, as it were, through the experience of industrial labor:
In industry . . . we encounter experiences that tend to break down the
structure of our folk characters and project us toward the vortex of
modern urban life. It is when we are handling picks rather than mops,
it is when we are swinging hammers rather than brooms, it is when we are
pushing levers rather than dust-cloths that we are gripped and influenced
by the world-wide forces that shape and mold the life of Western
civilization. (117)
It is a strangely conservative notion: the “black folk” will simply “encounter”
forces that shatter them, reprocess the pieces in a “vortex,” and spit them out
onto a conveyor belt as pure products of “Western civilization.” One thinks
here of Charlie Chaplin falling into the inscrutable machinery of the factory
that employs him in Modern Times; unlike Chaplin, however, Wright’s workers lose any trace of anarchic playfulness, emerging from the process with
the stamp of machinelike modern masculinity.
On the other side of Wright’s antinomy lie those who can’t modernize at
all. At the end of a discussion of blacks’ geographical location, along with
poor white ethnics, in “transition area(s)” between industrial and residential
parts of the city, he stakes out a tragic site within this larger zone that is
exclusive to African Americans:
Under the black mourning pall of smoke from the stacks of American
industry, our observing Negro eyes watch a thousand rivulets of blood
melt, fuse, blend, and flow in a common stream of human unity. . . . For
years we watch the timid faces of poor white peasants . . . pass through this
curtain of smoke and emerge with the sensitive features of modern men.
But our . . . cheekbones remain as unaltered as the stony countenance of the
Sphinx. (102)
Wright does go on to provide a social context for this process, citing segregated housing patterns, discrimination in hiring, and the like; nevertheless,
this passage figures the end result of these social patterns—exclusion from
the “family” of modern civilization—in astonishingly phenotypical terms,
going so far as to invoke the cheekbones of the Sphinx as a point of genetic
origin from which African Americans fail to evolve. Houston Baker has
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observed that Black Voices, like other interwar texts written by male African
Americans, conflates modernism with masculinism.49 He argues that this
conflation aligns African American men with industrial production and
with fantasies in which the machine displaces organic motherhood, a displacement that figures African American women as “ahistorical remnant(s)
of folk culture” relegated to a constricted domestic sphere and cut off from
the modernizing power of industrial labor.50 Although I agree with Baker
that Black Voices constructs its vision of modernity largely by its difference
from “women’s work” and its distance from the domestic areas in which it
occurs, I want to pursue this line of critique a bit further, examining a crucial
absence in Black Voices Baker leaves unexplored. What remains unarticulated
in the text’s attempt to locate agency in the muscular body of an emergent African American male proletariat and its concomitant constriction of African
American womens’ agency is the place of specifically cultural work.
Returning to the antinomy Black Voices sets up, it is readily apparent that
Wright himself belongs to neither of its poles, the machine-bred “men in the
making” of the chapter’s title, nor the various groups (e.g., agricultural workers, most women, the elderly) that lie outside of the factory. At this point one
must consider the other “we” that haunts this narrative, the “we” composed
of cultural workers like Wright in his guise as urbanite and artist, as researcher
with access to archives, and as theorist armed with sociological models for
understanding the flows of capital and bodies that structure individual experience.51 What process of Bildung, of education and acculturation, has formed
this voice? In posing this question, I do not wish to pose a second antinomy,
suspending Wright between the “folk” as locus of authenticity and the placelessness of disinterested rationality, reading Wright’s oeuvre as a melancholy
drifting away from roots. Rather, I want to consider a question that Wright’s
narrative largely ignores: what kinds of pedagogy are required to make the
expert and articulate “we” that speaks this text, and how does this voice itself
act as a pedagogical agent in a broader project of modernization?
These questions go largely unanswered in this text itself; for the beginnings of an answer, the best source is Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy,
published four years after Black Voices. I am most interested in Wright’s encounter in that text with his father in Mississippi. The encounter took place
in June, 1940, when Wright was traveling from Cuernavaca, Mexico, where
Wright lived briefly in a colony of American artists after the enormous success of Native Son, to Chicago to do research for the last two chapters of
Black Voices. On the way, he visited his father’s family on a farm outside of
Natchez, Mississippi.52 As in his above-cited reflections on the Sphinxlike
aspect of the unreconstructed African American masses, Wright emphasizes
the deep divisions between himself and the “black folk” when he sees his
father for the first time in twenty-five years on a “Mississippi plantation . . .
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holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands.”53 He observes that, in
the years since they last saw each other
my mind and consciousness had become so greatly and violently altered
that when I tried to talk to [my father] I realized that, though ties of blood
made us kin, though I could see a shadow of my face in his face, though
there was an echo of my voice in his voice, we were forever strangers,
speaking a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality. . . .
I stood before him, poised, my mind aching as it embraced the simple
nakedness of his life, feeling . . . how chained were his actions and emotions
to the direct, animalistic impulses of his withering body.54
Father and son stand here on either side of an impasse that seems to
divide humanity into higher and lower forms; the city’s work on Wright has
been so powerful and complete that he has become as if a different species,
blinking at his progenitor across an unbridgeable gap. The rest of Wright’s
autobiography works out the implications of this moment, primarily through
its treatment of Wright’s migrations in time, space, and especially in consciousness.
What gets negotiated in the encounter between the “folk” and the growing sophistication of the plebeian intellectual in this narrative? Two moments from Wright’s text gesture toward an answer. The first comes when a
teenage Wright reads a story he has written to a naïve girlfriend. Whereas
the above encounter unsettles Wright, who finds uncanny “echoes” and
“shadows” of himself in his otherwise alien father, here he experiences his
distance from the “folk” as pleasure. Although Wright’s “environment contained nothing more alien than . . . the desire to express one’s self in writing,”
having tried it, he experiences gratification in “the look of astonishment and
bewilderment of the young woman’s face when I had finished reading” and
“her inability to grasp what I had done.”55
The pleasure of distinction, of elevation over the masses, recurs in the
text when Wright tells about his trips as a clerical assistant to an insurance
salesman whose circuit includes the poor farming communities of the
Mississippi Delta. Wright, it seems, is a valuable asset not so much for his
clerical skills as for the spell his relatively urbane manner casts over naïve
rural families, who “bought their insurance from us because they felt that
they were connecting themselves with something that would make their
children ‘write n’ speak lak dat pretty boy from Jackson.’”56 This is a complex
moment that troubles the binaries around which Wright structures so much
of this text as well as Black Voices. Wright would have us believe that the
“naïve” families are merely superstitious, buying a fetish (insurance) that has
no real connection to what they want (beauty, articulateness, power). While
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this may be true in some sense, the desire bound up in Wright’s encounter
with these rural dwellers forces us to reconsider the barrier Wright has constructed throughout his narrative between “folk” consciousness and his
own: Here, the farm family, like the newsprint-reading family photographed
in Black Voices, has access to the city and to the centers of cultural production, however attenuated that access may be, and its members see their own
better selves in Wright’s “pretty” urbanity. The encounter here between nascent intellectual and static “folk” diverges from the stark and unbridgeable
terms of Wright’s encounter with his father, revealing the “folk” as desiring,
self-conscious subjects. Despite their lack of sophistication, these family
members seek something—fluency in urban forms and styles—that contests
Black Voices’s schematic construction of the Black Belt as a zone left behind
by modernity.
This moment of negotiation, which Wright ignores or represses here,
concerned as he is to depict his own process of aesthetic Bildung and his
gradual separation from the “folk,” returns toward the end of the text in
Wright’s musings on the Communist politics of 1930s Chicago. In a wellknown moment, Wright criticizes Party attempts to recruit African Americans in the streets of Chicago. Wright had been working as an insurance
policy collector, a job that gave him a window into the disastrous microeconomics of the black urban masses. When the party leadership “claimed that
Negroes were . . . about to rise and join their white fellow workers to make a
revolution,” such claims ring false to Wright, who “knew that the Negroes
were lost, ignorant, sick in mind and body.” Thus, according to Wright, the
party vanguard and the black masses are separated by “a distance so vast that
the agitators did not know how to appeal to the people they sought to
lead.”57
Wright’s critique grants the relative correctness of the agitators’ theory
(roughly, the common political interest of working-class whites and blacks
in that moment) but casts doubt on the technique. Further evidence of this
doubt comes when his mother finds his copy of a socialist magazine and
recoils at its cover, which depicts a muscular male figure in overalls leading
a mass of workers.58 Wright is indignant at first, but upon reflection concedes her point, recognizing that “the wild cartoon did not reflect the passions of the common people.” He continues, “I reread the magazine and was
convinced that much of the expression embodied what the artists thought
would appeal to others, what they thought would gain recruits. [The CPUSA] had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language.”59
It is precisely this focus on language—imagined not, as in the classic
Bildungsroman, as a means of individual liberation and discovery but as a
means of articulating masses to themselves—that might bridge the antinomy Wright constructs in Black Voices, with obsolete and impenetrable folk
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consciousness on one side and the spontaneous generation of a complete
and efficient proletarian identity on the other. The itinerary through Wright’s
autobiography I have sketched suggests what might bridge this enormous
gap. Wright makes it clear that neither a vanguard transmitting the gospel
to its flock nor the simple swinging of hammers rather than brooms will
suffice. The most conspicuous blind spot of Black Voices—its failure to mark
out a place for cultural work and a theory of how cultural production engages masses pedagogically—is intimately related to Wright’s own postwar
critique of his comrades in mid-1930s Chicago. Conversely, Black Voices’
most conspicuous success lies in its experimentation with a mobile and
plastic expressive agent capable of mediating the economic, geographical,
and cultural asymmetries and discontinuities of a modernizing multiethnic
society.
RACE AND NATION IN WRIGHT’S DARK MIRROR
The final section of Black Voices opens, like the other three, with a photograph captioned only with the chapter’s title, “Men in the Making.” Its
subject, a youthful steel mill worker, gazes directly at the camera with an air
of self-possession and confidence that we are to link, one assumes, to the
industrial labor his garb suggests (figure 4.7). Black Voices avoids close-ups
for the most part, emphasizing the implication of individual bodies in
broader social contexts. The appearance of this close-up thus looms large,
rendering this “man in the making” as a poster child of sorts for an emergent African American modernity. This photograph is closely linked to the
only other close-up in the text, a portrait of an old and seemingly blind
sharecropper featured on the first page of the text.60 In contrast to the confident and direct gaze of the young worker, this sharecropper is looking up
and to the left of the camera, oblivious, perhaps, to its presence (figure 4.8).
On the most basic level, these two portraits compactly restate the text’s overarching narrative: I was blind, but now I see. The narrative tissue that
connects these two faces tells us that the “black folk” have become a cohesive
and clear-eyed group of self-making men ready to take their place in “the
sphere of conscious history” (147). As such, these photographs would seem to
signal a comic resolution to this “folk history,” fulfilling all wishes for the
emergence of a fully modern African American subject and enlisting us in his
or her behalf.
But of course the pronoun signals the problem here: As African American
modernity is synthesized before our eyes in these photographs, who is doing
the looking and to what end? Is this agitprop aimed at white middle-class
Fig. 4.7 Arthur Rothstein, “Steel worker in Pittsburgh steel mill. Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania,” 1938. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library
of Congress.
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Fig. 4.8 Jack Delano, “Tony Thompson, born in slavery. Greene County, Georgia,”
1941. FSA-OWI Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
liberals, recruiting them to a fuller recognition of African Americans’ equal
standing within American society? Or is it a Pilgrim’s Progress for black
readers, pointing out both the fraught path out of (Southern) serfdom and
the rich rewards of arriving in (Northern, urban) modernity? And where do
educated black readers fit in this paradigm, those who are neither radically
estranged from the “black folk” nor in need of guidance along the path to
modernity? In its final chapter Black Voices leaves this question of where to
locate the readerly gaze open, figuring the photographic gaze not as a voyeur’s glimpse through a window but as a disconcerting gaze into a mirror.
FROM EYE TO WE
165
The close-up of the old man found at the beginning of chapter 1 speaks to
one way of looking: that in which the audience, envisioned as white and
middle class, is confronted with the distortions inherent in its own habitual
framing of blackness. In this context, the photograph provides readers not
with a transparent representation of an other but with a mirror held up to
their own blindness. When the second close-up appears in the text’s final
chapter, it ushers in a new round of this mirror game, confronting the implied white readership not with a coded message regarding its own lapses in
understanding blackness, but with a self-possessed gaze that demands mutual recognition. At just the point where the text might construct an expansive “we” that subsumes the former “folk” into a liberal multiethnic nation,
however, it becomes more circumspect, contemplating both smaller, ethnic,
and larger, laborist and international, orders.
Wright frames this moment of racial mirroring variously, offering a set of
possible articulations of black/white engagement organized around two
poles. On one side are various expressions of anger and alienation, which
Wright attributes to “inarticulate” agents “filled with a naïve, peasant anger”
(145). These include violent outbursts like the 1935 riot in Harlem, black
nationalist dreams of a return to Africa or the founding of an African
American “49th state,” and an identification with Japanese fascism as an
alternative to global white hegemony (143–45). On the other side are
approaches that recognize the “identity of interests” between poor whites
and poor blacks, an identity that arises only after acceptance of “the death
of our old folk lives . . . that enabled us to cross class and racial lines, a death
that made us free” (144). The chief example of such an approach is the labor
movement, which, Wright claims, has finally recognized amid the “general
dislocation” of the 1930s the necessity of cooperation across the color line
(145).
Alongside this summary of political choices Wright places, at the end
of the text, an ethical choice addressed to the reader. Returning to the
figure of the mirror, he provides readers (and, synecdochally, “America”)
with a choice:
If America has forgotten her past, then let her look into the mirror of our
consciousness and she will see the living past living in the present, for our
memories go back . . . to the time when none of us, black or white, lived in
this fertile land.
Look at us and know us and you will know yourselves, for we are you,
looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives! (146)
The final sentence is a valuable index of just how tentatively Black Voices
moves toward a bridging of the gap between the readerly “you” and the
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speaking “we” that structures its address. In some ways, the sentence’s most
emphatic claim—that “we are you”—would seem to parrot the old Popular
Front party line with which I started this chapter: “We’re the people, pa!”
While it does pull on this broadly inclusive language, this sentence moves
against the grain of an American populism grounded in an ahistorical “national character.” Instead, it holds “nation” in abeyance, figuring history as a
contradictory and overdetermined site. His location of the “living past living
in the present” in the “black folk” demands that aspirants to a fully realized
American nation conceive it dialectically through the racial, spatial, economic, and historical antagonisms that constitute it. This working through,
in turn, requires a reconsideration of national “inheritance”: a listening and
looking to ancestors (and their descendants) whom readers are not accustomed to imagining as “part of the family.” Finally, the mirror itself, in which
one might find the union of the readerly “you” and the narrating “we,” is a
dark place, impenetrable by a scientific or voyeuristic gaze in which looking
produces only knowledge and bliss. In this caesura between “we” and “the
people,” Wright revises the first-person plural, not as the always already constituted, but subjunctively, as a not-yet known subject and object of study.
5
“We Americans”
Henry Luce, Life, and the Mind-Guided Camera
In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs
the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The “anything whatever” becomes the sophisticated acme of value.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)
We had an insatiable desire to search out every facet of American life,
photograph it and hold it up proudly, like a mirror, to a pleased and
astonished readership. In a sense our product was inbred: America
had an impact on us and we had an impact on America.
—Alfred Eisenstaedt, staff photographer, Life (1966)
As Richard Wright was setting up his textual “dark mirror” in which readers
might see, however obscurely, a new order, Henry Luce, the board chairman
and editor-in-chief of Time Inc., was working out his own vision for the nation in an article provisionally entitled “We Americans.”1 The article was
published in the February 17, 1941 issue of Life with its new title, “The
American Century.” Its central thrust is to convince Life’s twenty million
readers to mobilize for war against the Axis powers. Luce concedes that
the Axis poses no imminent threat to the homeland, but that Americans
had better intervene nonetheless: “We are not in a war to defend American
territory. We are in a war to defend and even to promote, encourage
and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world.”2 Luce’s
subsequent arguments all stem from the millennial notion that “America,”
whatever it has been in the past, is no longer a mere state defined by legal
jurisdiction but an expanding set of ideas and practices radiating from U.S.
territory outward. This extension of power manifests itself in various ways:
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economically, through the “system of free economic enterprise” that is alone
“compatible with freedom and progress”; technically, as America sends out
its “engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, and educators,” who will be
“eagerly welcomed” around the world; morally, as America sends a “humanitarian army” to act as “the Good Samaritan of the entire world”; and
politically, since Americans are the “inheritors of all the great principles of
Western civilization.”3 In summing up this entire development, Luce revises
Herbert Hoover’s recent statement that America should be a “sanctuary of
the ideals of civilization” that were threatened by fascism and communism.
For Luce, Hoover’s views limit the destiny of the U.S. to a needlessly isolated
and defensive position within a dynamic global modernity. Instead, Americans should embrace “our century,” becoming “the powerhouse from which
the ideals [of civilization] spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what
the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.”4
In many respects, this essay seems unremarkable today, both for its
family resemblance to an imperial vision of “manifest destiny” from the
generations preceding Luce’s (with its division of the world into savage and
civilized zones and presumption of the U.S.’s unique mandate to convert
the former into the latter) and its persistence in our own era, though it has
become harder for the neoconservatives who now bear Luce’s torch to convince the public that our technicians will be “eagerly welcomed” around
the globe with each suicide bomber and torture scandal. As bland as the
rhetoric may sound to our ears, the discursive shift it performs—from
sanctuary to powerhouse, from static territory to deterritorializing expansion and intensification of power, from citizenship in a particular state to
participation in a diffuse and supranational economy unmoored from state
control—marks a profound revision of the United States’ identity and
function, both domestically and abroad. Luce’s Anglo-Saxon pedigree, Ivy
League education, and his position atop a large corporation would seem to
position him as a bearer of the turn-of-the-century “white man’s burden”
who renovates its increasingly antique terms for mid-century ears. But to
read him this way underestimates the newness of the forms and technologies
with which he pursued his vision of empire. As board chairman of Time Inc.,
the most dynamic and influential media corporation to emerge in the interwar
period, Luce occupied the leading edge of a rapidly developing process of
industrialization and consolidation of the production of culture, what Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno began thinking of as the “culture industry”
just as Luce was writing his essay.
When Luce spoke in the name of “we Americans,” he did so with an intimate knowledge of the differential distribution of power and influence
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within this collectivity. From the beginning of Time Inc. in the early 1920s,
Luce sought to maximize the internal cohesiveness and external authority of
industrial capitalists like himself and the college-educated members of the
professional-managerial class (PMC) who both read and produced his
publications.5 Neither this ideological function nor using magazines to fulfill it were new as of 1941. As Richard Ohmann has demonstrated, the mass
circulation magazines of the turn of the century virtually invented “mass
culture” two decades prior to the creation of Time Inc.; moreover, these
mass-circulation magazines addressed a primarily PMC audience and
consolidated its sense of identity as a class: such magazines as Munsey’s and
McClure’s “helped stake out and survey the cultural ground being settled by
the professional-managerial class, even as they made themselves a class.”6
Time Inc. represents a significant extension and consolidation of this process,
in ways that can be seen both in its development of new media outlets and in
formal innovations within their pages. The first two major products put out
by Time Inc.—the newsmagazine Time (1923) and the business-oriented
Fortune (1930)—intensified the process Ohmann describes, creating a new
medium for national news to a PMC audience with the former and pioneering
upward, as it were, by addressing industrial capitalists and promoting their
social authority with the latter. Over the course of the Depression era, Luce
turned his energies to extending his demographic reach by developing cheap
or free productions: the March of Time radio segments (1931) and newsreels
(1935) and the photo-magazine Life (1936), products that were consumed
by millions rather than hundreds of thousands and reached deep into the
lower middle and working classes. One way to understand the “we” of Luce’s
address is suggested by this set of institutional developments: it moves from
educated elites outward in a process of unending colonization; it is internally
split into separate and unequal demographic groups; and its “voice” issues
from a “central intelligence” addressing a passive and anonymous mass of
consumers. Dwight Macdonald (a former Time Inc. employee) captured
some of the anxieties raised by the breadth and intensity of Time Inc.’s reach
in an article for the Nation in 1937: “An organization which puts ideas into
30,000,000 heads is a powerful little gadget to be under the control of a single
individual.”7
Macdonald’s ironic metaphor of Time Inc. as a “little gadget” can be read
in earnest in one sense: despite their “middlebrow” position in the cultural
field, all of the major Time Inc. productions in the interwar era brought with
them major innovations in the formal repertoire of mass media. I will discuss
some of these innovations below with regard to Time and Fortune, reserving
most of my attention for Life, Time Inc.’s most dramatic success of the era and
the publication whose experiments with photography and text make it
most relevant to discussions of Depression-era documentary expression
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and especially the documentary book. In chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book I
have emphasized the many ways in which modernist photo-textual media
like the documentary book employed an aesthetics of interruption, confronting readers with discontinuities between word and image and metonymic relationships between the inside and outside of the photographic
frame. As we shall see, Luce’s dream for Life was to tame these unruly aspects
of photo-textual experimentation, creating a continuous textual space in
which readers would marvel at new and spectacular ways of consuming everyday life. This domesticated textual space, then, provides us with a map
of sorts of the expanding consensual “we” Luce imagined in his essay on
the “American century”: if, in Ohmann’s words, the “quality” magazines of
the turn of century “helped chart social space” for the PMC, Life represents
a broader and more ambitious act of cartography that knows no territorial
or demographic limits.8 Where the authors of the three documentary books
at the heart of this study saw a fractured social terrain that demands a refracting, prismatic lens through which to properly view it, Life presented
readers with a prefabricated unity in which one could participate by “just
looking.”
Viewing Time Inc. as a “gadget” emphasizes its integral and machine-like
functioning. As Macdonald himself was well aware from his unhappy stint
at Fortune, working for Time Inc. in the interwar era required one’s subjection
to a large-scale and steeply hierarchical division of labor, with a few chief editors
at the top, relatively well-paid writers, photographers, editors, and layout artists
in the middle, and a host of underpaid (and mostly female) researchers and
secretaries at the bottom. On a more textual level, one’s individual creative
work at any of these nodes was effaced, since Time Inc. pieces, with rare
exceptions, bore no bylines and had to fit within the uniformity of “Timestyle.”
In its subjection of individual creative autonomy to the demands of highly
disciplined and coordinated production processes, Time Inc. was typical of a
range of emerging and/or rapidly expanding cultural-industrial institutions,
including the Wall Street-funded “studio system” in Hollywood, the advertising
industry, and the radio networks. This broad development has important
implications for the utopian wish, examined in chapter 1, of committed
“brain workers” aligning themselves with other laborers against parasitic
“business men” and their functionaries. As the growth of the culture industry
pushed more artists and intellectuals into its institutions and the New Deal
art projects began to flag in the late 1930s, it became increasingly clear that
being a “brain worker” was less a matter of commitment than compulsion.
As Dos Passos and others began to observe in the mid-1930s, the relationship
between writers and bureaucracies militated against the autonomy of “craft”
and compelled a subordination of writers’ idiosyncratic aesthetic visions to
the requirements of the mass production of culture. Thus what appeared in a
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romantic light to the authors of the Culture and the Crisis pamphlet as the
natural inclination of writers to turn their talents to making culture for
the public benefit shifted throughout the late 1930s and 1940s toward a more
melancholic vision of intellectual workers whose work was increasingly
subordinate to an alienating division of labor and bureaucratic discipline.
The rise of the culture industries also put pressure on the faith in the
processes and technologies of industrial modernity as a neutral means that
can be oriented toward any political ends. Much of the interwar Left might
have nodded in agreement with Bertolt Brecht’s faith in the artist as inventor
whose “innovations” do not “renovate ideological institutions on the basis of
the existing social order” but rather “force [those institutions] to surrender
that basis.”9 The consolidation of the cultural field by the media corporations
that emerged in the interwar era, however, proved far more resistant to innovation (much less a more revolutionary “renovation”) than Brecht or likeminded artists in the U.S. imagined. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer,
writing in exile in the Depression-era U.S., were acutely aware of the implications of this consolidation, both for artistic autonomy and democratic
politics. In their work on the “culture industry,” they echoed (albeit in a dystopian rather than a celebratory tone) many of Luce’s pronouncements about
the imperial reach of “American values,” the hierarchical organization that
pertained both inside the media corporation and within the society it projected on the pages of its products, and the blithe passivity textual environments like that of Life hoped to instill in their consumers. At the end of the
chapter, I will invoke Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Time Inc. and
other players in the “culture industry,” not to give it the last word on mass
culture—I am too invested, as is evidenced throughout this book, in the
potential for even the most marginalized subalterns to maintain some subjectivity and even agency despite corporations’ increasing dominance of the
public sphere—but to provide a window into the distinctiveness of Luce’s
dreams for the production of a limitless consensus grounded in economic
and political inequality. Whatever their liabilities as ventriloquists of the
desires and reading practices of ordinary people, Adorno and Horkheimer
understood what cultural-industrial tycoons like Luce were after with
uncommon clarity. As Luce was mulling over the organization of Life, he
envisioned the publication in a memo to colleagues as springing from a
“mind-guided camera.”10 The phrase is resonant, both for its effacement of
an entire network of coordinated labor that goes into making media products like Life, and its fantasy of panopticity, in which no corner of the nation,
or indeed the world, escapes the machinery that captures and controls space
and time. The dialectics of Adorno and Horkheimer help to reveal the way
this vision of internal organization was linked to a vision of external social
control, through what we might think of as a “camera-guided mind.”
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INCORPORATING TIME
Henry Luce was born in Tengchow, China to missionary parents on April 3,
1898. His father had emigrated to China after attending Yale and Union
Theological Seminary in order to evangelize the vast numbers of Chinese
who, on the heels of their defeat by the Japanese in the war of 1894–95, were
thought by evangelicals of the elder Luce’s generation to be particularly ripe
for conversion. The younger Luce was educated in colonial British schools
until the age of fourteen under a system of strict discipline and classical
learning; along with Greek and Latin, he seems to have taken in an idealized
notion of American society, chafing against his British peers’ national chauvinism and wishing he had been born in an American small town.11 When
Luce was fourteen, a family friend sponsored his education at Hotchkiss, an
elite boarding school in Connecticut, where he excelled academically and
displayed the first seeds of his lifelong interest in journalism, winning the
editorship of a campus literary magazine, the Literary Monthly. There he met
the boy who would become cofounder of Time Inc., Briton Hadden. Both
Luce and Hadden matriculated to Yale, where they edited the Daily News
together. After graduating, both worked in the newspaper industry, where
they grew equally frustrated with various aspects of the era’s journalism: the
lack of a strong professional ethic among their peers; the haphazard arrangement of news on the page; and the bias toward local events rather than
national and international issues.12
In late 1921, Hadden and Luce quit their jobs at the Baltimore News to
pursue their dream of addressing these problems by creating a weekly “newsmagazine,” tentatively entitled Facts, that would collate and digest news from
across the nation for the benefit of college-educated professionals. That summer, they managed to raise $86,000 from seventy shareholders to start the
publication, renamed Time, in March 1923.13 Time was both produced by
and pitched at members of the PMC, a group whose numbers and social
influence had been on the rise since the late nineteenth century in the U.S.;
the magazine’s departures from the journalistic practice of the era are best
seen in that light. Most obviously, the magazine sought to replace the profusion of disorganized data that confronted readers of dailies with what might
be thought of as a Taylorized reading process, what Terry Smith calls “a . . .
line organization of . . . consumption.”14 Time would assimilate a week’s worth
of news into a portable format that, according to the editors’ estimates, could
be read in an hour: in the prospectus, Luce and Hadden emphasized this
aspect of the magazine, claiming that it would “collect all available information
on all subjects of importance” and reduce it to its “essence” in the form of
“approximately 100 short articles” of 400 words or less.15 The magazine
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would be, in a sense, a device offering professionals general competence
more quickly and easily than more comprehensive publications; in the words
of the prospectus, Time is not interested in breadth of coverage, but in “HOW
MUCH IT GETS OFF ITS PAGES INTO THE MINDS OF READERS.”16
It also sought a broad national readership, “aim(ing)” at “every one of
[the] million” college graduates in the U.S.17 This distinguished it both from
the relentlessly local orientation of contemporary newspapers and from the
more exclusive pose of magazines like the New Yorker, which claimed from
its beginnings in 1925 that it offered nothing to “the old lady from Dubuque.”18
Although Time’s pose was not as urbane and exclusive as Smart Set or the
New Yorker, it nonetheless partook of a similarly “smart” style, employing an
array of distinctive tropes, such as inverted sentence structure, mock-epic
epithets (“bald-pated,” “weed-whiskered”), and cute neologisms (“tycoon,”
“politricks”).19 In so doing, Time diverged both from the dryly factual presentations of newspapers like the New York Times and from the sober, academic style of more high-cultural publications like Harper’s and the New
Republic, what Hadden derisively called “on the other hand” publications.20
The success of the magazine through the 1920s and 1930s coincided with a
deep restructuring of the magazine industry, one that reflected the rising
prominence of the PMC. While Time gained readership and advertising revenue,
a number of venerable magazines organized around nineteenth-century
notions of a normative “high” culture failed.21 More tellingly, the Saturday
Evening Post began a slow decline, culminating in editor George Lorimer’s
resignation in 1936. The rapid rise of Time’s “smartness” can thus be seen in
conjunction with the gradual eclipse of the Post’s “folksiness” as the rhetorical
mode that best reflects the collective ethos of the PMC as it moves from the
1910s to the interwar era, a trend that accelerates through the 1930s and
1940s.22
After a bumpy start, Time became wildly successful by the late 1920s (circulation rose from less than 9,000 in 1923 to over 300,000 by 1930).23 The
end of the decade brought with it three developments, however, which
deeply affected the company’s development: the launch of a new magazine,
the financial weekly Fortune; the sudden death of Briton Hadden from streptococcus; and of course the stock market crash.24 Hadden, who had largely
controlled the content side of Time and left the business side to Luce, had
disapproved of the new venture. His death opened the way for Luce to exert
a much broader control over both sides of the company and to proceed unhindered with the launch of Fortune. Luce and Hadden had previously set
up an “Experimental Division” of the company to explore ways of moving
beyond the newsmagazine into new territory. Fortune was the first of the
company’s several successful experiments. It built on some of the innovations Time had brought to the magazine world, particularly in its conception
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of its audience. Time capitalized on the sharp increase in the production of
post-secondary graduates in the era; by delivering this high-consuming
PMC readership niche to advertisers, it garnered higher per-page rates than
peer publications with much higher circulations (e.g., the Saturday Evening
Post and Collier’s).25 Fortune was pitched at a yet smaller but more exclusive
slice of the reading public—the business-class elite Luce referred to in a prospectus as “the aristocracy of our business civilization . . . the 30,000 whose
influence in the industrial and financial community outweighs that of
30,000,000.”26 As befits the emphasis on a wealthy clientele, the magazine
was a luxury object of sorts: at 184 pages on high-quality paper stock with
handsewn bindings, the first issue weighed over three pounds; it also had the
richest colors of any contemporary publication, including the first color
photographs in American journalism.27 Its cover price of one dollar (approximately $13 in 2008, adjusted for inflation) made it unlikely to attract a
large readership, particularly in the wake of the crash, yet it proved a financial
success throughout the Depression on the strength of its ability to give
advertisers access to a high-consuming and trendsetting elite.28
The success of Time and Fortune paid political and well as economic dividends, putting Luce on a path to become a force to be reckoned with by
figures in industry and politics by the late 1930s. Time’s “smartness,” from
the very beginning, inculcated in its readers not only a fluency in the rhetorical style of the young college-educated American elite, but also a party
line: Luce often claimed to be “biased . . . in favor of God, the Republican
party, and free enterprise.”29 Luce was a self-described “liberal” Republican
and, as such, a harbinger of the postwar development of “neoconservatism.”30 This vision is articulated both in his assumption that a “business
aristocracy” should both embody the highest values of the nation and exert
dominance over its PMC and working-class counterparts, and also in his
attempt to defeat isolationist and reactionary elements within the Republican
Party and promote an interventionist internationalism in which America
would preside over a new global economic, political, and cultural order.
The first part of this program appears in an address Luce made in 1930 at
a gentleman’s club in Chicago, entitled “Aristocracy and Motives.” Here Luce
argues that the “closing of the frontier” elaborated by the historian Frederick
Turner in 1893 has ushered in a new era, in which the horizontal social relationships of the frontier must give way to a vertical order, with the new business class on top:31
Not until now has the aristocratic principle been necessary to American life.
For there is a direct substitute for aristocracy, and that is pioneering. As long
as men can move laterally they need not move vertically. But when they must
move upward or nowhere, then that movement must be on some ladder of
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aristocracy, however curiously it may be constructed. America’s lateral days
are over. For the young men today it is upward or nowhere. And, looking
upward, they see little except the making of money.32
Luce then refers approvingly to Mussolini’s development of such an invented
aristocracy, but he claims that the U.S. must organize its version not around
rank conferred by the State but by the nascent aristocracy of talent he sees in
contemporary corporate boardrooms. This mode of leadership, Luce argues,
“need not be autocratic,” but it “must be aristocratic”; moreover, it must
“includ(e) within itself ” the highest causes of the time: scientific advancement,
the “efficient distribution of wealth,” and peace.33 With Time, and especially
with Fortune, Luce had forged what he believed to be a reflection of the values
of this “aristocracy” and a means of creating and maintaining its collective
sense of self.34
Although it may seem curious in light of his promotion of aristocracy, the
remaining major products of Time Inc.’s Experimental Division in the 1930s
were all addressed to a broad swath of the U.S. population: the March of
Time’s radio addresses and newsreels, and Life magazine, the most formally
innovative and commercially successful product of Time Inc. ’s Experimental
Division. In one sense, these efforts did move away from Luce’s niche marketing and his politics of fostering a neoaristocratic order. More broadly,
however, these experiments allowed Time Inc. to spread its political vision
on an unprecedented scale, using cutting-edge technologies of sound and
image reproduction to extend the corporation’s reach from college-educated
elites to one-fourth of the U.S. population.35 Life was the lynchpin of this
development, using an emerging medium, the “photographic essay,” along
with a new emphasis on the “two-page spread” as the basic unit of composition
rather than the isolated captioned image or column of print.36 As such, the
editors and technicians of print who made Life can profitably be seen as part of
a broader experimental stance in the modernist era regarding hybrid visualverbal representation, along with the cinematic montage aesthetic of Sergei
Eisenstein, the cut-ups and collages of the surrealist movement, and the
documentary books examined in chapters 2, 3, and 4 of this book. Unlike
these, however, which emphasize the friction between text and image and
the power of layout to dislodge conventional ways of mapping images onto
readers’ presumptions about social reality, Life’s layouts sought out ways of
using the image to domesticate.37 The magazine thus anticipates the “total
flow” of televisual discourse, weaving together word/image and content/
advertising into a seamless whole.38 Robert Graves, a managing editor of
Life in the 1960s, made a similar point in homelier language when he
claimed, “I always thought it was the business of Time to make enemies—
and of Life to make friends.”39
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LIFE BEGINS
On November 19, 1936, the first issue of Life hit newsstands and mailboxes.
On its inside cover is a photographic montage depicting an anonymous
birth with the boldfaced caption “Life Begins” (figure 5.1).40 The layout is
a rehearsal of sorts for the sort of performance that was the magazine’s
bread and butter over the next thirty-five years: it invests an ordinary act
undertaken by ordinary people with extraordinariness, intensifying it
with dynamic layouts, vibrant colors, and expensive paper stock and
glamorizing it by sending it simultaneously to half a million households.41
Fig. 5.1 Andre Da Miano, “Life Begins.” Life, November 23, 1936: 2. Courtesy
of Andrew Da Miano; reprinted with permission.
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The text supplements this visual narrative of birth breathlessly, marveling
at the miraculous workings of the human body as it calls attention to the
machine that records them:
The camera records the most vital moments of any life: its beginning. A few
hours ago, the child lay restless in its mother’s womb. A second ago, its foetal
life was rudely ended when the surgeon snipped its umbilical cord—through
which the unborn child had drawn all its existence from its mother. Then, for a
second or two, the child hung lank and unbreathing between two lives. Its blood
circulated and its heart beat only on the impetus given by its mother. Suddenly
the baby’s new and independent life begins. He jerks up his arms, bends his
knees and, with his first short breath, gives out a red-faced cry.42
Reading with the grain, we are to recognize that Life is something new and
adorable, a chip off the old block, utterly at home in our hands.43 A bit more
clinically but no less innocently, the text calls attention to the presence of the
peculiarly autonomous camera that captures an event that is both spectacular and ordinary, seemingly transmitting it to readers without human mediation. The guileless pose notwithstanding, this “red-faced” offspring of the
1930s was hardly innocent: as Wendy Kozol has argued, this is only the first
of many of Life’s deployments of images of infants, children, and “ordinary”
American families whose effect is to shore up patriarchal and bourgeois
norms.44 I would like to emphasize instead a different valence of the focus on
the infant: here Life casts its readers in the role of infants, undiscriminating
observers who are dazzled by the world’s sheer visual plenitude. Time Inc.
quite self-consciously plays the part of paternalistic (if anonymous) guardians, who protect, instruct, and delight their wards. This development was
not without its ambiguities: in some ways, Life was a democratizing force,
paralleling rural electrification and rural free delivery of post in bringing
knowledge of national and international developments in politics, society,
and art to the cultural periphery. And the medium itself arguably allows for
more agency on the part of the reader than other forms, like radio and cinema, then available to working-class readers with little cultural capital or purchasing power. The artist James Montgomery Flagg, for example, found the
first issues of Life “fascinating . . . like the newsreels on your knee,” thereby
emphasizing both Life’s continuity with other emergent image-driven news
media and the greater potential for readers’ control of the pace and order in
which the spectacular images are consumed. Nevertheless, a closer look at
Time Inc.’s internal discourse regarding Life suggests that the magazine was
designed not to empower its readers with interpretive agency but to put
them on the knee, as it were, of industry leaders, schooling them according
to the terms of a profoundly authoritarian and imperial imaginary.
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Life represents a synthesis of sorts of the various Time Inc. publications
up to that point. Like Time, it sought to bring domestic and international
news to a broad audience: Life’s audience, however, outstripped Time’s million college graduates, addressing, in Luce’s words, “half of humanity.”45 Like
the March of Time newsreels and radio shows, it employed emergent technologies to speak to social groups who lacked the literacy or inclination to
read traditional print media. Like Fortune, its production values were luxurious, with expensive paper, colorful layouts, and top photographic and literary talent.46 The magazine was an instant success, selling out its first weekly
runs of around 500,000 copies instantly: copies were resold for ten times
face value and, according to observers, some who got precious copies threw
parties to display them to jealous friends.47 Within two years, circulation
had grown to two million; by the end of the decade, including “pass alongs,”
Life was read by almost twenty million Americans.48
As was the case with Fortune, the experiment with Life involved innovations on both the editorial and business sides of the enterprise. I will examine Life’s aesthetics below; for the moment, I would like to consider the ways
in which Life quite consciously facilitates an extension of advertisers’ influence on the production of culture. In an address to the American Association of Advertising Agencies just months after the debut of Life, Luce argues
that no vital and intelligent press will stem from giving “the public what it
wants,” since that public is “incapable of judging the spiritual value of its
reading material.”49 Instead, advertisers constitute the court at which media
companies must plea. Readers’ access to edifying culture thus depends upon
advertisers’ taste and discretion:
Your court is . . . the Appropriations Committee of the American press: you are
the Commissars, you exist as an alternative to the People’s Commissariat of
Public Enlightenment. Here today I make application not for a few incidental
pennies; I ask that you shall appropriate over the next ten critical years no less
than $100 million for the publication of a magazine called Life. You cannot
escape a reply to this question. . . . We will keep hammering persistently on your
doors, asking for the money week after week. . . . If you do, there will be Life. If
you do not, there will be no Life.50
Luce hardly needs to spell it out: if they abdicate their cultural leadership,
advertisers will cede the field to the kinds of cultural bureaucracies then
emerging in Stalin’s Soviet Union or, closer to home, Roosevelt’s New Deal,
in which the State guides the production of culture for the ostensible benefit
of “the people.” Advertisers are thus “inextricably involved with the ethical
and cultural standards of the American press,” according to Luce; he argues
further that “the fate of Western Civilization can be influenced by the indi-
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vidual and collective behavior of American Advertisers in the next ten
years.”51
Subtending this plea is Luce’s phobic attitude towards collectivities that
exist outside of the cultural and political reach of the “business aristocracy.”
Curiously, Luce subscribes neither to liberal laissez-faire, with its emphasis
on the order that is thought to emerge organically from the calculations of
self-interested, rational individuals, nor the governmental administration of
inchoate masses. Instead, he envisions a corporate elite—an updated version
of what Edmund Burke famously called the “natural aristocracy without
which there is no nation”—as the disciplining force that preserves social order, in large part, by maintaining control of mass culture.52 Later in the same
speech, Luce refers to the philosopher Ortega y Gassett’s Revolt of the Masses
(1932) (which Luce had received as a gift from the advertising tycoon Bruce
Barton),53 a polemic against the dangers of modern crowds that calls for the
renovation of the State as a source of “pure dynamism” that is capable of
keeping mass energies in check.54 In Luce’s paraphrase, modernity breeds
crowds that pose a threat to society: “not merely Hitler’s crowds, or Mussolini’s, or Stalin’s . . . but the crowds on American beaches, the crowds in the
movies—the even vaster crowds you advertisers yearn for—mass circulation. These crowds . . . will destroy civilization.”55 Against these crowds Luce
pits the “purely informative function of journalism”:
[Time Inc.’s] proudest boast will always be that we have fearlessly, eagerly, and
effectively transmitted significant information—not from one archive to
another, but from the boisterous new fronts of the world into the minds of
living and literate and free people. But we also believe that, vital and even sacred
though this informative function is, it is not enough.56
The press must also serve as a “powerful instrument” to “exorcise the doubt
which is conquering the Western world or to discover and rediscover standards of faith and excellence by which men may live.”57 Luce’s program to reform journalism moves beyond the mere transfer of “information.” In order
to channel popular energies, facts must be integrated within overarching
faith-based metanarratives. Consumers are “free,” from Luce’s perspective,
only in the sense of being liberated from their own alleged barbarism; they
sit, in this paradigm, as an object of cultural programming, possessed of the
ironic freedom to choose from a compulsory menu drawn up by Madison
Avenue executives in the employ of industrial monopolies and the publishers who depend upon them for revenue.
In other words, the freedom Luce imagines here is severely constricted
and differentially assigned. Advertisers, publishers, and technicians of print
and image join in a pioneering enterprise, taming the wild and destructive
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instincts of modern crowds as they range among the “boisterous new fronts
of the world.” The rigor and excitement of exploration enjoyed by the producers of magazines is translated for consumers into a vicarious and static
form in products like Life. The freedom of consumers in this paradigm, such
as it is, stems paradoxically from the power of the magazine to mold their
collective common sense about beauty and truth and domesticate their own
“boisterous” urges.58
THE WORLD’S PICTURE STORY
The most conspicuous formal aspect of Life is the primacy of photography.
Life was not the first periodical to use photographs by any means, nor was it
the first photo-based magazine.59 Nonetheless, its rapid success speaks to
the novelty with which it used photographs to drive narrative, inverting the
traditional relationship between narrating word and illustrating image. The
prospectus given to prospective advertisers in 1936 vividly captures this aspect of Time Inc.’s aspirations for the magazine:
To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the
poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things—machines, armies,
multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work—his
paintings, towers, and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things
hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the
women that men love and many children; to see and take pleasure in seeing; to
see and be amazed; to see and be instructed.60
The list moves triumphantly through a progression that suggests ways readers might use Life: as a repository of “great events” that gives ordinary readers
access to a vicarious majesty; as a phantasmagoric trip through unimagined
and incommensurable spaces, giving readers access to the moon and the
Amazon in the same sitting; finally, as a rendering of normality as spectacle
that distances banality (“the women that men love and many children”) and
refigures it as something numinous. The prospectus further emphasizes the
organization of the magazine’s content around the poles of the domestic and
exotic, separating its photographs into two classes: “Record” and “Revelation,” with the former referring to specimens of ordinary reality and the latter to the capture of extraordinary moments.61 Such a majestic viewpoint
would seem to put readers on top of the world; the passage ends, however, in
quainter terms, situating readers as pupils or perhaps carnivalgoers, as amazed
as they are edified.62 Terry Smith argues that the prospectus represents
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Luce’s paradoxical offer to readers of “submission to the spectacle”: whereas
the new medium offers readers something of the “excitement, openness, and
liberating promise” that one associates with modernism’s “making it new,”
this potential energy is bound within an “ideological closure” that renders
readers passive before a flow of newness that is stabilized into an eternal
sameness.63
The prospectus continues in a different vein, ushering its readers (i.e.,
prospective advertisers, not Life’s mass readership) behind the curtain to
reveal the machinery that creates this subsuming pedagogical address:
These pictures have been selected and arranged experimentally to demonstrate
our conviction that, while the camera has achieved high efficiency as a reporter
and recorder of our time, a journalistic job remains to be done in articulating a
language of pictures. Not to see our time is not to know it. Thousands of
cameras are seeing it, in fragments, all over the world every day. And more and
more cameras can be sent to get even better visual fragments. Yet nowhere in
the world, least of all in the U.S., is there a periodical devoted to piecing the
world’s picture story together intelligently as Time pieces together its factual
story.64
Photography is a deeply metonymic means of representation, and the prospectus acknowledges this fact anxiously. The 1930s brought the democratization of photography on a massive scale, such that visual reality could be
reproduced by an increasingly large percentage of the population: by 1932,
83 million rolls of film were developed per year in the U.S., a fact that obviously concerns the prospective makers of Life, who wish to incorporate these
metonymic fragments within a metaphorical totality, the “world’s picture
story.”65 Time represents a parallel attempt to subject the fragmentary data of
experience to a subsuming ideological frame. As its own prospectus claims,
“Time is conceived of as written by one man, not any one man you can see,
but a sort of superman—the sum total of the very men (perhaps sometimes
only three or four) who really ‘make it.’ ”66 With Life, this sense of an elevated
and unifying narrative consciousness persists, but it is not so much the “superman” with whom readers might identify as an omnipresent yet disembodied eye whose purview ranges from the world-historical register of what
Luce called the “Big News-Story of the Week” to the beau monde of New
York society (“Life Goes to a Party”) to celebrity gossip, like Shirley Temple’s
travels, to utterly ordinary persons, places, and things, like the “love songs”
of crickets.67 As in the case of the advertisements that were liberally mixed
in with them, Life’s pairings of images and text had no bylines and thus constructed a synthetic corporate “voice” that hailed readers with an address
that was, by turns, intimate and distant, elevated and homely.68
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If Time and especially Fortune taught elite readerships to think of themselves as “supermen” whose job it was to discipline the thoughts and actions
of the masses, what does Life teach those masses themselves? Luce began to
ruminate on this issue in the early days of Life’s publication, thinking of ways
to yoke the photographic image to an aesthetic that would overcome what
he considered the “inherent evil” of journalism: namely, that it magnified
bad news and minimized the orderly procession of everyday life. To Luce,
the “most exciting discovery” of Life’s producers “is the extraordinary power
of the photograph to dramatize and lend fresh interest . . . to the good . . . [to]
the normal and calm as distinct from that which is disruptive or fantastic.”69
In a 1937 internal memo, Luce linked this emergent visual aesthetic to the
obsolescence of the conventional verbal essay:
You can pick practically any damn human or sub-human institution or
phenomenon under the sun, turn a crack photographer on it . . . and publish
with pleasure in eight pages the resultant PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY. Fifty or
twenty years ago, people used to write “essays” for magazines. Essays for
example on the bee. The essay is no longer a vital means of communication.
But what is vital is THE PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY.70
As Luce develops the distinction, what emerges is the capacity of the imagedriven essay to slip loose of the genre’s moorings in discursive thought (one
thinks of Montaigne’s use of the term essai to connote intellectual “struggle”
with one’s self). For Luce, the photographic essay generates the very opposite
of struggle:
The first word to achieve a new technical meaning to the editors of LIFE was the
word Charm. Charm is the most important quality which LIFE needs which
cannot be extracted from the ordinary processes of journalistic thought. We
find that we must definitely plot and plan for Charm. Charm does not come
naturally out of the news. And the Charm which comes naturally out of the
camera is mostly moonlit landscape stuff which we cannot use. Yet we intend
that every issue of LIFE shall have the quality of Charm.71
The charm of Life’s visual technique, for Luce, is its capacity to render reality
as something that demands no particular response; readers of Life, unlike
their counterparts who read Time and Fortune, fall under the spell of the
magazine’s renderings of reality. In Luce’s words, Life “does not come to its
reader with any such burden of responsibility. . . . And so the reader can relax. And so he does.”72 Furthermore, and perhaps more to the point:
To LIFE, the sit-down strike is not Labor Problems or Big Words between a
dozen men you really don’t give a damn about. In LIFE, the hot news of the
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sit-down strike is that the people sit down! Or don’t. So simple. So unlike the
NEW YORK TIMES. So relaxing. And yet so true.73
Luce’s dream for Life was to create a mode of propaganda that spreads its
good news without agitation. Rather than confront readers with the gap between “is” and “ought” by means of images that jar readers from conventional ways of seeing things, the charm of this mode of visual presentation
suffuses even the most contentious situations, assuring readers that, sitting
or standing, the various elements of the social status quo know their place.
LIFE SENTENCES: TIME INC. AND
INTELLECTUAL LABOR
Just as the architects of Life hoped to subdue a mass readership through a
new visual rhetoric, they also sought to rationalize and discipline their own
writers, photographers, and technicians. This was implicit from 1923 onward with Time, whose writers had no bylines and were expected to write in
“Timestyle”; as we have seen, each writer, researcher, editor, and photographer thus contributed to the conceit of a “superman” who spoke for Time.
The planners of Life emphasized this aspect of the new magazine in distinguishing between the “haphazard” use of photography in contemporary
journalism and Life’s proposed use, according to Luce, of a “mind-guided
camera” that will “harness the main stream of optical consciousness of our
time.”74 This metaphor does indeed describe the subsequent development of
Life and, I would argue, of the televisual media that dominate the postwar
era: the instrumentalization of the cultural work of journalists, described
metonymically as disembodied “cameras,” who moved from cultural centers
to hinterlands in such a way that directives issued from increasingly few
“minds” and exerted increasingly greater control over an increasingly larger
force of cultural workers.75 As we have seen, the aim of the extension of this
“mind-guided camera” was the creation of a camera-guided public mind, a
habitually consensual populace schooled by photographically driven narratives to trust in the stability and naturalness of the status quo. At this point,
I would like to examine the internal and institutional implications of Luce’s
vision of the “mind-guided camera” by looking at reactions from three wellknown writers employed by Time Inc. during the 1930s: Dwight Macdonald, Archibald MacLeish, and James Agee. All three dissented, though in
different ways, from Luce’s vision for Time Inc., and their dissents point to a
struggle over representation waged within the culture industries in the Depression era.
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In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which contain
his first discussion of the “alienation” of labor, Karl Marx lays out a central
irony at the heart of industrial production. A few quotations from his long
list of parallelisms will suffice: “the more value [the worker] creates, the
more worthless he becomes”; “the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker”; and “the more intelligent the work, the duller the
worker.”76 Something similar (though not as stark or neat) is at work in the
industrialization of cultural labor in the interwar era, of which the rise of
Time Inc. is a central part. Time Inc. is undeniably a site of innovation, as
we have seen with Life and other products of its Experimental Department.
The development of the bureaucratic machinery responsible for these innovations, however, entailed the disciplining and instrumentalizing of its
employees in ways that were, if not as obviously harsh and cruel as those
Marx described in the mid-nineteenth century, nonetheless oppressive,
particularly in light of the distinctive self-consciousness among intellectuals of the era, discussed in chapter 1, of their status as “brain workers”
aligned with the broader labor movement.77 In 1930, when he was asked
why he had staffed Fortune with writers known for “creative” work rather
than experts in business, Henry Luce quipped, “it is easier to turn poets
into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers.”78 From its
employees’ perspective at least, the most distinctive feature of Time Inc.
was its relentless Fordization of cultural production, such that the innovation of the products is paired with the regimentation and standardization of
the creative processes of the writers, photographers, and researchers who
made them.79
Dwight Macdonald, who was a staff writer for Fortune from 1929 to 1936,
vividly described this process, and especially its discontents for individual
writers, in a three-part series written for the Nation in 1937. Macdonald had
just quit Time Inc. after a six-year tenure at Fortune in the wake of editors’
rejection of his harshly critical piece on U.S. Steel. Although the Nation articles bear witness to his still-fresh anger over that incident, they also reflect
cogently and broadly on the organization of Time Inc. in ways that go beyond personal pique.80 The governing trope throughout these essays is that
of Time Inc. as an industrial machine with Luce at the controls: the company
is a “powerful little gadget,” Macdonald sardonically states, “under the control of a single individual” that “puts ideas into 30,000,000 heads” each
week.”81 Like such predecessors as Hearst and Pulitzer, Luce uses this machinery for political purposes; he does so, however, with greater subtlety.
While wrapping his publications in the mantle of “objectivity” and the avoidance of “windy bias,” the magazines quietly incorporate the perspective of
the American “business class”: “Ever since Luce the poor missionary’s son
became Luce the member of Skull and Bones—wealthiest, most sacrosanct,
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and most reactionary of Yale undergraduate societies—his relation to the
ruling classes has been ‘we’ and not ‘they.’”82
As the machine metaphor suggests, at Time Inc. everyone below Luce,
from top editors to the lowest-paid secretaries, is instrumentalized:
Like all machines, [Time Inc.] is vastly impersonal. Its products bear the name
of no individual author, appearing as pronouncements ex cathedra with the
whole weight of the organization behind them. The mechanism is unparalleled
in journalism. A corps of researchers gather [sic] the raw material from
newspapers, libraries, interviews, phone calls, learned and technical journals,
cables and telegrams from special correspondents all over the world. A corps of
writers strain [sic] this material clear of all editorial bias and fabricate it into
articles, movie and radio scripts, picture captions. A corps of editors, headed by
Luce in person, revise [sic] the finished product word by word, removing any
last lingering odor of partisanship. After such triple-distilling the indescribably
pure product is ready for the printer—who presumably wears antiseptic rubber
gloves.83
Some instruments, however, are treated better than others, as we see with
Macdonald’s caricature of the senior editor prototype:
The specifications for an editorship at Time, Inc., are those for a good radio set:
maximum receptivity and minimum static (read: independent thought). After
years of selective breeding, Luce has developed a set of human instruments
delicately adapted to their great task, the transmission of the dynamic radiations
of the Lucian personality out of the ether on the printed page. These
instruments are devoted, flexible, intelligent (but not too intelligent). They
do everything but talk out of turn. They are well oiled with salaries ranging
form $15,000 to $35,000, plus blocks of bonus stocks.84
Although the editors may be “well oiled” transmitters of the boss’s will,
when they pivot to engage the actual products of the machinery of cultural
production, Macdonald portrays them as so much sand in the gears:
The most efficient person in the place is a poet. Once [an] article is . . . written, it
is pulled apart by several editors—usually of a lower grade of intelligence than
the writer—rewritten here and touched up there. Sentences are deleted,
paragraphs wrenched from their place and stuck bodily in some incongruous
section, where they perch like cows stranded on barn roofs by a passing
tornado. By the time it is over, the article is a shambles, bleeding internally at a
dozen points where vital organs have been excised by the editorial scalpel.
The better it was as first written, the more it suffers from being thus dismembered
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and reassembled. The assembly-belt method works better with automobiles than
with journalism.85
Macdonald retreats here into a Ruskinesque framework, in which the “organic” work of the craftsman is destroyed by an unfeeling machine. Elsewhere in his analysis, however, he ties this wish for the creative autonomy of
intellectual workers to struggles between the writers and researchers who
largely produce the publication’s articles and the executives who mold them
to fit the editorial line.86
Despite the organization’s conservative ethos, the writers are almost invariably “liberals,” according to Macdonald, whose analytic training and ongoing exposure to social problems through their research virtually preclude
reactionary politics. As Macdonald puts it with sarcastic flair, “Fortune
breeds liberals, perhaps through the workings of a dialectical principle.”87
The liberalism of the writers leads to struggles over both the content of the
magazines—Macdonald notes that writers forced a leftward drift at Fortune
for several years in the early 1930s—and the organization of the company
itself. To this latter, Macdonald emphasizes the stark difference between
Luce’s model for a successful media corporation—“Mussolini’s corporative
state”—and the rank and file employees’, which is rooted in a labor union
model.88 In fact, employees at Time Inc. started a local unit of the Newspaperman’s Guild in 1936, against the wishes of Luce; moreover, employees
aligned with the CP-USA started a short-lived pamphlet, High Times, that
criticized the company’s internal structure and external editorial line.89
Archibald MacLeish, who edited and wrote for Fortune from its founding
in 1930 to 1938, voiced similar criticisms of Time Inc. Given MacLeish’s
higher position within the corporate hierarchy compared to Macdonald, his
somewhat more moderate political orientation, and his more diplomatic
and self-effacing style, the sharp edge of his criticisms speaks to the wide
diffusion of discontent among creative workers at Time Inc. MacLeish also
left Fortune due to frustration both with the hierarchical organization of
Time Inc. and its increasingly conservative editorial line. Echoing Macdonald’s
critique of the relationship between editors and writers, he complained to Luce
in a 1937 letter that it “struck me as just plain silly” that “a man doing the actual
productive work of writing the magazine was less valuable to the corporation
than the same man doing something about the production of the magazine.”90
Having reflected more deeply on the matter, MacLeish had come to see things
more clearly:
I now see where the whole weakness of my Fortune position lies. . . . I may
believe a good writer more valuable than twenty “executives” but that won’t
change the fact that the corporate pyramid will be a pyramid capped by people
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with official titles. And all that being so, my position is very obviously
untenable. I can’t sit half-way up the pyramid & refuse to admit that it is a
pyramid. Or, better, I can’t sit half-way up the pyramid & demand that a special
lift be built to hoist me straight up into space by my boot straps. I have either
got to climb by the pyramid like anyone else. Or I have got to get off.91
After his resignation, MacLeish worked as a leading literary New Dealer,
first as the Librarian of Congress and later at the Office of War Information.
Given his obvious flair for directing and working in bureaucracies, especially
in comparison to the more elitist and individualistic Macdonald, MacLeish’s
bitterness perhaps carries extra weight as an index of writers’ disappointment at
their collective lack of freedom to coordinate their creative work as they see fit.
In a follow-up letter to Luce more than a year later, MacLeish extended a
more personal line of criticism. After asserting that Fortune had briefly been
“the one great journalistic innovation of our time,” MacLeish claimed that
“it is now part of a publishing enterprise in which not more than a dozen or
so people know each other’s names and not more than half that many . . .
stand by each other in the only work that finally counts—the writing of the
journals.”92 He tied this development to Luce himself, whose “success” had
dulled his faith in the “necessity for fundamental change.” MacLeish then
sketched an alternative path (albeit an implausible one) for Luce, one that
carried with it a vision of a different, more populist media apparatus:
I don’t know—you were meant to be a progressive—a pusher-over—a pryer-up.
You were meant to make common cause with the people. . . . You would have
been very happy I think if you could have felt that the New Deal was your affair.
Because it was your affair. You would have been very happy inside yourself as
one of the leaders in a democratic revolution in this country . . . . Its [sic]
presumptuous to guess about another man’s happiness but I think you would
have been. I think you hate being rich. I think you hate being a pal of the people
who want you to be their pal. I think you would have liked to write The People
Yes.93
Misguided as MacLeish’s presumption about Luce’s happiness seems in retrospect, it nonetheless indicates the vividness of the Depression-era wish
that Time Inc.’s formidable machinery of cultural production and distribution might be democratically oriented, both within the company, such that
employees would have a maximum of creative autonomy, and without, such
that its products would “make common cause with the people.”
If MacLeish voiced an optimistic wish for an efficient yet populist Time
Inc., James Agee, another Fortune writer of the mid-1930s, provides a much
darker view of dissent within the ranks and the circumscribed nature of that
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dissent’s horizon. In a letter to Walker Evans in the same year that MacLeish’s
letters were written to Luce, Agee alluded to his and Evans’s recent jockeying
for positions at Life. Neither of them, Agee states, “would give a fuck to
work on the Magazine proper”; instead, the men were apparently pursuing
“either . . . an Experimental thing” or “a satisfactorily inviolate section of the
magazine under our own direction.”94 To this end, Agee speculated on recruiting the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom, it was rumored,
“Life is trying to Get.” Agee hoped that Cartier-Bresson, along with other
like-minded artists, would join with Evans and himself to open up what he
terms “gang-fuck possibilities versus Luce.”95 Perhaps predictably, Agee’s
plan failed, but it is intriguing both for its testimony to the belief that experimental artists such as himself, Evans, and Cartier-Bresson might have
had sufficient agency to carve out an autonomous niche within Life, and its
recognition that the shape of the “Magazine Proper” was quickly hardening
into a form inhospitable to meaningful experimentation. Taken together,
these three insiders’ lamentations regarding Time Inc. similarly summon up
the sense that the Depression era can be seen as a last gasp of sorts for utopian imaginings of a cultural apparatus whose reach is geographically wide
and demographically deep, yet allows for artists to address “the people” with
some degree of aesthetic experimentation and autonomy.
“THE CULTURE INDUSTRY” AND LIFE: ENLIGHTENMENT
AS MASS RELAXATION
The most systematic and strident critique of the emergent mode of cultural
production typified by Time Inc. came not from insiders, but from exiles.
Having fled Germany in the mid-1930s to escape the Nazi threat, Theodor
Adorno and Max Horkheimer spent most of the 1930s to 1940s in the United
States, where Horkheimer reestablished the Institute for Social Research
(formerly of Frankfurt) at Columbia University in 1934.96 Their immersion
in the strangeness of American mass culture manifests itself most fully in a
chapter of their well-known collaboration, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1941),
entitled “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Through
this lens, Life draws into sharper focus, both in its particular formal repertoire
and its position as part of a subsuming “culture industry” that contributes to
what the essay’s authors call the “transition to the world of the administered
life,” a situation in which subjectivity is colonized by industrial culture,
rendering individuals as objects of a homogenizing and domesticating
corporate discourse.97 To read this essay in conjunction with the various
plans and theorizations of Luce and his staff as they planned Life is an
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189
uncanny experience: one finds many of the same themes in both places;
the key, however, modulates from the cheerful ring of Luce’s pronouncements about the coming American Century and his celebrations of “charm”
to the dissonant “negative dialectic” of Adorno and Horkheimer that
reads the products of Time Inc. as part of a broad and systemic culmination in the 1930s and 1940s of the totalitarian spirit of Enlightenment.
The liabilities of Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis have been widely
noted, especially as regards the thoroughness with which they believe that
the conditions that victimize ordinary people under monopoly capitalism
rob them of the capacity for resistance or independent thought.98 Their investment in narrating modernity as moving toward totalitarianism blinds
the authors, in my view, to the gap between the dream of total control articulated by figures like Luce and what actually happens in the encounter between readers and texts. Throughout this book, I have pointed out various
ways in which the subaltern subjects of documentary exert some influence
over the composition of the texts that result; likewise, I have pointed out the
many ways in which encounters between readers and texts might generate a
surplus of meanings whose effects can never be fixed a priori. To this extent,
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critics are right to point out that the pronouncements of the former on the meaning of Life and other similar cultural products in no way anticipate all the ways in which mass cultural texts might be
used by consumers. At the end of the chapter, I will demonstrate, through a
look at two excerpts from Life, some of the strengths of Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of mass culture as well as its weaknesses.
Having said that, “The Culture Industry” clearly recognizes the central
implications of the rise of corporations like Time Inc.: the subordination of
culture to industry; the subsuming of artists’ creativity by a hierarchical
regime of discipline; and the threat posed to participatory democracy by
the colonization of leisure time by industrial concerns. Moreover, Adorno
and Horkheimer’s text embeds its critique on a formal level: reading their
work, with its agonized “negative dialectic,” provides a powerful countermodel to the enforced harmony Luce promotes as the basis of his “we Americans.” What “The Culture Industry” lacks in charm, in other words, it makes
up for with its performance of a skeptical, self-reflexive mode of civic participation that might form the basis of a more enlightened order.
“The Culture Industry” begins by engaging the same argument, more or
less, that Luce had read through Ortega y Gasset: that modernity is characterized by the dissolution of traditional values and the specter of the masses’
dissolution of all social order. For Luce, these spontaneous effects of modern
urbanization and secularization must be tamed by giving the “business aristocracy” a monopoly over cultural production, which is precisely what he
hoped to promote through Time Inc. Adorno and Horkheimer describe
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Luce’s project similarly, albeit with the halos stripped off the heads of the
businessmen:
The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established
religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of precapitalism, together with
technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural
chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on
everything. Films, radio, and magazines make up a system which is uniform as
a whole and in every part.99
The uniformity is not limited to the realm of culture; rather, cultural production is increasingly bound up in a subsuming and interlocking set of
monopolized industries, such that the production of magazines or films
partakes of the same techniques by which General Motors produces automobiles: the fragmentation of the labor process, the exploitation of economies of scale, and the segmentation of consumers into a proliferating range
of niches.100 Luce alludes to this process memorably in his address to American advertisers, posing as a supplicant to the “court” of industry. According
to Adorno and Horkheimer, this is no mere pose, but a clear reflection of the
subordination of the culture monopolies to industry: the former are “weak
and dependent in comparison” to the latter.101
Whereas the bourgeois art of the nineteenth century exercised a critical
function (bought, the authors argue, at the price of exclusion from the serious business of society), contemporary culture is coterminous with industry, saturates everyday life, and borrows its material from the banality of
everyday life: in the culture industry, “the whole world is made to pass
through the filter of the culture industry,” with the result that “real life” becomes “indistinguishable from the movies” at particularly powerful moments in an ironic bit of reification that mocks the defamiliarizing force of
great bourgeois art.102 The very name of Life signals such a shift: its prospectus’s above-cited infinitives (e.g., “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness
great events;” etc.) signal the collapse of the event into its representation in
precisely the manner “The Culture Industry” describes. Alongside the conflation of reality with representation, the essay points out the increasing indistinctness of advertising and “content.” Advertising, in this new aesthetic
economy, is not merely a means to fund cultural content, its “elixir of life,”
but also the ideal to which all content of the culture industry tends, the “pure
representation of social power.”103 The authors note, in this context, that Fortune and Life are on the cutting edge of this trend: in their pages, “a quick
glance can now scarcely distinguish advertising from editorial picture and
text.”104 This analysis is borne out by various comments regarding Life by
Depression-era advertisers. George Gallup, who worked in advertising be-
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191
fore becoming a pollster, observed that Life would “doubtless create a new
technique for pictures which [advertisers] should learn and be able to adapt”;
in addition, an anonymous advertising executive working for Paramount
told Life’s editors, “we’re gonna run you ragged—copy your technique so
that you can’t tell ads from editorial pages.”105
The subordination of editorial content to advertising, and of the culture
industry to larger industries, parallels a broader and more diffuse subordination for Adorno and Horkheimer: that of ordinary people to capital. What
Time Inc. suggests with its vision of artistic autonomy reduced to the “mindguided camera,” Adorno and Horkheimer render as the existential condition
of virtually everyone in the era of monopoly:
The possibility of becoming a subject in the economy, an entrepreneur or a
proprietor, has been completely liquidated. . . . Everybody became an
employee. . . . The attitude into which everybody is forced in order to give
repeated proof of his moral suitability for this society reminds one of the
boys who, during tribal initiation, go round in a circle with a stereotyped
smile on their faces while the priest strikes them.106
Both Luce and the authors of “The Culture Industry” reject the notion that
mass media simply give people what they want, though this critique comes
from opposite ends of the political spectrum. Luce insists that the natural
aristocrats of modern society must use the media to direct mass energies; his
contribution to this effort is the use of his media laboratory to synthesize
“charm” using cutting-edge technologies of reproduction, a “charm” with
which he hopes to subdue audiences by reinforcing the naturalness of the
given social order and obviating the need for conflict.
Adorno and Horkheimer agree with this description of the culture industry, rejecting the liberal argument that markets deliver cultural commodities
in proportion to the desires of a mass public or publics. Rather, they argue
that the development of the technologies that disseminate mass culture
stems from “the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest” and that “the result” of this group’s hegemony is not a meeting of the
masses’ preexisting needs but a “circle of manipulation and retroactive need
in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.”107 The forms of mass
cultural leisure, for Adorno and Horkheimer, relate dialectically to the routinization that characterizes labor in industrial monopolies. On the one hand,
this routinization causes such mental fatigue that “what happens at work, in
the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it
in one’s leisure time.”108 Under these circumstances, worker-consumers relinquish the challenge of “thought” and “negation,” embracing the “pleasure”
that “always means not to think about anything” in a “flight . . . from the last
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remaining thought of resistance.”109 On the other hand, the processes of the
mass production of culture stipulate that the unruliness of life will never
find expression in cultural commodities, since the latter are invariably structured formulaically. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the “fragment,” which had
been a “rebellious” element of art from romanticism to modernism, is
replaced by the “formula,” the “prearranged harmony” that makes “a mockery”
of the struggle to reconcile the general and the particular that characterizes
“the great bourgeois works of art.”110
To this negative critique of the culture industry as “mockery,” the authors
add a more positive engagement, examining the capacity of the culture industry to gather bits of social reality and falsify them through a process of
reification. Using photography as the master trope for this operation, the
authors argue that this ideology “has as its objects the world as such”; it
“makes use of the worship of facts by no more than elevating a disagreeable
existence into the world of facts in representing it meticulously. . . . Whatever
the camera reproduces is beautiful.”111 This is the sense in which Luce claims
that photographs of barechested abalone divers, sit-down strikers, and praying mantises can be equally “relaxing” and speak equally to the profusion of
fascinating objects and events that need only the most limited kind of verbal
elucidation. This most “natural” form of aesthetic reproduction mimics
the biological life cycle, proving its resistance to change through endless
repetition of the same formulas; thus, argue the authors, “the same babies
grin out of magazines,” eliciting in readers the “well-founded amazement
that mothers, in spite of everything, still go on bearing children and that the
wheels still do not grind to a halt.”112 As we have seen, this analysis dovetails
neatly with Life’s own narrative of origins as the birth of a medium that gives
readers an “innocent” glimpse of the pure products of biological and social
reality.
As I mentioned above, a disturbing aspect of “The Culture Industry’s”
critique is its captioning, so to speak, of readers’ responses in a language they
themselves would not use. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the affective response of a given reader of mass culture testifies almost solely to the damage
the entire complex of industry wreaks upon him or her. Thus, they argue, the
very question “what do people want?” is always cynical, since it is addressed
to “those very people who are deliberately to be deprived of this
individuality.”113 In this critical mode, the truth of the nexus of cultural consumer, product, and industry always depends upon the intervention of the
critic, whose dialectic floats freely throughout the system, weaving together
what remains unthought by the actual participants. This gives rise to the
irony that the people who are authorized to produce and consume the imaginative and critical works that are the only authentic sites of resistance to
the totalitarian face of Enlightenment comprise an elite that is even smaller
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than Luce’s “business aristocracy.”114 This critical mode also locates dissent
in an unspecified space outside of the “world of the administered life” that is
immune to the work of stripping subjectivity and critical capacity that the
culture industry performs on everyone else. Throughout this book, my critical mode has worked quite differently, examining works that use demotic
language and “straight” photography to address nonelite readers. These
works quite often arrest or interrupt conventional expectations regarding
both form (e.g., Wright’s use of an alien first-person plural) and content
(e.g., Caldwell and Bourke-White’s ventriloquizing of a racist and antiliberal
“common sense” that confounds American “unity”). These interruptions,
however, do not embody or perform the kind of relentless negativity Adorno
in particular invests with value (e.g., Schönberg’s atonal music or Beckett’s
narratives); instead, in my readings at least, they posit readers invested with
the agency to forge new sympathies, imagine new maps of social space, and
construct different collectivities out of the fragments of a (dis)assembled
traumatic past.
With this problematic in mind, I would like to point out the importance
of speculating about the kinds of pleasure and even resistance one might
locate in the encounter between mass cultural texts—even those like Life
whose intended uses are unyieldingly conservative—and their readers. The
sole moment in “The Culture Industry” that takes up this challenge provides
a way in:
In spite of the films which are intended to complete her integration, the
housewife finds in the darkness of the movie theater a place of refuge where she
can sit for a few hours with nobody watching, just as she used to look out of the
window when there were still homes and rest in the evening. The unemployed
in the great cities find coolness in summer and warmth in winter in these
temperature-controlled locations.115
The passage speaks neither to the generosity of the contemporary moment
in expanding the realm of culture to workers nor to anything remotely progressive in its consumption. But it does suggest the provision of a space,
however circumscribed, within which the readers of mass cultural texts can
escape their status as objects of a disciplinary gaze, one that might nurture
new kinds of subjectivity. Thus we might consider (though Adorno and
Horkheimer themselves do not) a productive power within these spaces of
distraction, the possibility that audiences might compose dreams out of the
materials the culture industry presents that speak to their desires and experiences in ways that elude given formulas.116 A variation on this theme
presents itself in unlikely fashion in the pages of an early issue of Life. In the
section “Pictures to the Editor,” in which subscribers were encouraged to
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submit their own snapshots, a woman from Wyoming named Isadore Fox
Arbenz predicts that “one day” the magazine “will run pictures of the oil
industry, derricks, drillers, boom towns” (figure 5.2).117
As she continues, she expresses both the pleasure she garners from
the magazine and a keen awareness of the ways in which that pleasure is
mediated by larger social, economic, and cultural forces:
But why in all the articles on oil, are the thousands of us who are left, after the
booms are over to pump oil, run stations and keep the oil moving, always
forgotten? We live in remote places similar to the enclosed photo—several miles
from the nearest “Camp” and from 25 to 50 miles from the nearest town. One
family to a station and we know the meaning of isolation. Small wonder we
enjoy LIFE.
The photograph submitted by Arbenz does not follow the prescription
Adorno and Horkheimer attribute to the culture industry. Rather than
celebrate the naturalness of the social or render “real life” such that it is
Fig. 5.2 Isadore Fox Arbenz, “Lonely Life”. In Life, December 21, 1936: 2. Reprinted
with permission.
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“indistinguishable from the movies,” this image works dialectically to
thematize a series of gaps: between the vast concerns that exploit natural
resources and the ordinary people who keep the machines running; between
the thrilling scale of industrial machinery and processes photographed by
professionals and the more prosaic perspective captured by ordinary snapshots; and between the tendency of mass media to select extraordinary objects and people and the democratic claims of ordinary people as fit subjects
for media representation.118 Arbenz’s professed enjoyment of Life thus accrues layers of irony that complicate Adorno and Horkheimer’s depiction of
a radically objectified cultural consumer. It may be true that, as she gazes
through Life’s virtual window to relieve the tedium of her life, the pleasure
thus gained is that of submission to the spectacle, acquiescence to the very
order that oppresses her, and the like, just as “The Culture Industry” asserts.
But her presentation to the magazine of her own image captioned with her
own words inverts this relationship, albeit within the terms of the grossly
asymmetrical relationship between culture industry and consumer. She
thereby fashions her own life as a landscape seen through a window open to
millions of readers and offered to them as an example of a social reality
whose value inheres in its unspectacular aspects. Arbenz thus becomes, if
only temporarily and partially, a producer of Life in ways that call to mind
Walter Benjamin’s roughly contemporary speculations on new media. In his
essay, “The Author as Producer,” Benjamin calls for the emergence of media
unlike the newspapers of his day, which he sees as fragmented aggregations
of “information” addressed to a fragmented and passive mass of readers. The
“wall-newspapers” produced by Tretiakov in the Soviet Union, in which the
“news” is written by workers and posted in the public space of the factory,
point the way to a new “theater” for writing, in which distinctions between
producers and consumers, writers and readers, base and superstructure, begin to fade. As the writing function is more broadly distributed,
the conventional distinction between author and public, which is upheld by the
bourgeois press, begins in the Soviet press to disappear. For the reader is at all
times ready to become a writer, that is, a describer, but also a prescriber. As an
expert—even if not on a subject but only on the post he occupies—he gains
access to authorship. Work itself has its turn to speak.119
Luce, obviously, is no Tretiakov, Life no wall-newspaper, and Arbenz no producer of Life in any but the most attenuated and contingent sense. But the
very presence of a “pictures to the editor” section within the magazine reminds us that the postwar development of the culture industries was not
inevitable, and that even the most conservative agents within them permitted some use of their “theater” by ordinary people in ways that call attention
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to the gaps between manufactured “charm” and demotic “snapshots” of reality.120
It seems inappropriate, however, to end with a glimpse of utopia, given
the faintness and evanescence of this populist voice within Life. Another
instance in which Life displayed a layout from “outsiders” not on the magazine’s staff, a series of captioned photographs depicting brain surgery, is
more typical and embodies the tensions that animate the magazine: between
expert and amateur, profit and truth, spectacle and social documentary (figure 5.3).121 At first glance, one is struck by the visual rhyme linking the expertise of the surgeon with that of the photographer: just as the doctor
manipulates the surgical field with his scalpel, the photographer takes slices
of the event, which are then arranged to reveal the structure and meaning that
the untutored eye might miss amid the chaos of blood and gore. The caption,
however, reveals the tenuousness of this linkage. The layout was produced by
the German camera maker Leica to promote its new thirty-five millimeter
cameras, whose small size and rapid film advance allowed for the nimble
shooting of fast-moving processes like this one. The surgery is revealed to be
as backward as the photography that depicts it is cutting-edge: it is described
as a “homeopathic” procedure frowned upon by “topnotch surgeons,” one
that recklessly removes the patient’s entire skull and inserts a plate of celluloid
atop his brain in order to relieve the “adhesions” wrongly thought to cause
epilepsy. The caption then shifts attention away from this act of quackish
Fig. 5.3 Leica Camera AG, “Speaking of Pictures . . . .” In Life, November 26, 1936, 2–3.
Reprinted with permission.
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violence and toward the photographs that index it: the pictures are “an indisputable record of a disputable operation” and indicate the advanced state of
photography as of 1936. The caption closes with a request to all scienceminded readers to submit work that will help the magazine “go even farther
in bringing the laboratory into the layman’s living room.” Such is Life’s meritocracy, that intrinsic quality trumps professional credentials: “the contributor with the crackerjack story, graphically told, may suddenly wake up to
find” that his or her work has appeared not merely in the “pictures to the
editor” section, but “as a special act in the main part of the magazine,” with
compensation commensurate with that of a staff photographer.122 As is often
the case in Life’s aesthetics, the manifest content of this layout is haunted by
latencies in a deeply surreal manner. In one sense, this depiction fuses advertisement with editorial content, allows readers the pleasures of sadism
while containing such unruliness within the mantle of experts’ disavowal,
and recruits new customers for Leica as it dangles before Life’s readers the
prospect of producing, rather than merely consuming, the magazine’s spectacle. What lies beneath this discourse, however, is a mute gesture toward
the wish that animates Luce from the beginning of Time: the transfer of information, not between archives, but into brains, the colonization of consciousness by the “business elite,” and the suturing of celluloid within the
very minds of a mass of subjects to relieve any pressures that might arise
from unwanted adhesions.
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Epilogue
Depression Documentary and the Knot of History
An art may be of value purely through preventing a society from
becoming too assertively, too hopelessly, itself.
—Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (1931).
Near the end of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, James Agee writes, “The last
words of this book have been spoken and these that follow are not words;
they are only descriptions of two images. . . .”1 In a similar spirit, I declare
that the last words of my book have been spoken; what follows are descriptions of two moments that speak to the motives behind this book and sum
up its aims. The first came when I was stuck in the floundering early phases
of the project. The more time I spent with Depression-era documentary
texts and the secondary literature on them, the more clearly I saw how not to
read them. I vaguely knew that there was no point in merely reinscribing the
privilege often granted to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an exceptional
documentary text on the strength of its formidable self-reflexiveness, its
agonized ethical scruples, and its refusal of crude ideological formulas. To
do so would not only deepen the rift between “modernism” and “documentary” that I wanted to bridge, it would also provide yet another tedious argument that interwar texts prove their value by performing the very kinds of
interpretive difficulty that keep professional readers of texts in business. But
this was only an impetus, not yet an analysis. My frustration, and the writer’s block that so often comes with it, mounted until I came across Walter
Benjamin’s enigmatic essay, “A Brief History of Photography” (1931).
Although its title is literally accurate—the essay is only fifteen pages
long—“A Brief History” provides a dizzyingly panoramic view of photography from its origins to the 1930s, tracing the co-evolution of photography’s
aesthetics and its technical apparatus. Although it took some time for the
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full implications of Benjamin’s argument to register, his discussion of photographic portraiture provided precisely the kind of immediate flash of insight
the essay’s author often discovers in the work of others. In an elliptical
moment within a broader historicization of the photographic portrait,
Benjamin describes the work of his contemporary, the German photographer August Sander, whose 1925 Antlitz der Zeit (“Face of Our Time”)
compiles selections from his ongoing attempt to catalog the entire occupational and phenotypical range of contemporary German society in photographic portraits.2 For Benjamin, Sander’s project exemplifies, along with
the work of interwar Soviet filmmakers and French Surrealists, a shift in the
conception of portraiture: whereas Victorian-era photographers offer up an
“intimate” view of the sitter, these modernist artists detach the photographic
portrait from the wishes and purposes of its subject, rendering the face as an
object of abstract contemplation and analysis rather than intimate encounter.3
Sander approaches his subjects scientifically, argues Benjamin, but with a
stubbornly inductive method that embraces Goethe’s ideal of a “sensitive
empiricism,” one that attends carefully to the object’s particularity. Sander
thus, according to Benjamin, steers clear of the prejudices inscribed by the
period’s authoritative promulgators of racial theories.4
Despite this sensitivity, Benjamin recognizes quite clearly that a physiognomic taxonomy of society cannot avoid being implicated in the insurgent
racial ideologies of early 1930s fascism; he therefore mordantly advises the
publisher to ignore the bad economic climate and keep the presses running,
for
overnight, works like those of Sander can grow into unsuspected actuality.
Power shifts, such as we face, generally allow the education and sharpening of
the physiognomic conception into a vital necessity. One may come from the
right or from the left—he will have to get used to being viewed according to
where he comes from. One will have to see others the same way. Sander’s book
is more than a book of pictures; it is a book of exercises.5
One must untangle the irony and fill in some ellipses to make sense of this
passage, but in working through it, Benjamin’s words opened up a new and
exciting path for my engagement with Depression documentary. I take
Benjamin to mean, first, that approaches to photography grounded in the
intimacy of “concern” and the ethics of mutual regard fail to recognize that
deep historical currents have dissipated the very uniqueness and depth—the
“aura” in Benjamin’s lexicon—from the image that such approaches take as
their starting point. Stripped of its function as a container for intimate experience, photography makes itself useful in a different way: as a means of “the
education and sharpening” of vision. Most basically, it imparts sociological
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201
and physiognomic data that is often lost in the fleetingness of ordinary perception: an anatomy of a proliferating range of facial features, body types,
uniforms, gestures, temperaments, milieus, and personalities of which
Sander’s corpus is such a rich trove. More abstractly and decisively, the “lesson” of Sander’s visual pedagogy urges viewers toward a heightened awareness that, in a society whose everyday life is saturated with mass-produced
images, one’s very self is preceded and mediated by its own image. Fascist
ideology exploits this situation by foreclosing speculation and reifying the
limitless range of phenotypical and social diversity into crude binarisms
and hierarchies. In this political context, Sander’s project takes on a special
urgency, since its relentless pursuit of the particular overruns such simple
conceptual enclosures and cultivates the kind of acute self-consciousness
regarding representation and difference that fascism does its best to drive
out of civil society.
In the wake of reading this essay, I began to realize that my books of pictures were also books of exercises in Benjamin’s sense. His figure precisely
captures my sense that the Depression-era documentary texts that interest
me should not be read solely, or even primarily, as channels for the transmission of particular experiences that readers then experience at secondhand,
as armchair tourists or voyeurs. Alongside the localizing and agitational
function that can never be evacuated from documentary work, one might
attend to a second level of signification that confers another kind of utility:
something like a grammar of social relations that guides the ethic of serious
play that characterizes the best teaching and learning. I hope that my engagement with several of the Depression-era books I find most provocative
provides a model for further experimentation and might itself serve as
something of an exercise book, in Benjamin’s sense.
The second moment that helped crystallize this book arrived more painfully in the form of a marginal comment. While reading some notes from a
reader of a draft of what is now chapter 4, on 12 Million Black Voices, I noticed an unexpected comment next to my analysis of Wright’s use of the
figure of the “knot.” With characteristic frankness, he urged me to tease out
the links between Wright’s text and Melville’s Benito Cereno and, at the end,
goaded me a little: “My friend, you are missing a real literary-critical
opportunity!”6 Fool that I am, I paged through some biographies, found no
reference to Wright’s reading Melville, and allowed my ignorance of Melville’s
tale to fester. After many months, I picked up the text and started to wind my
way through the knot that binds the two writers. As many readers will know,
Melville’s novella relates the encounter of Amasa Delano, a captain from
Nantucket, with a strange ship, the San Dominick, which is captained by a
seemingly feckless Spaniard, Benito Cereno, and crewed by a rag-tag remnant of sailors who can scarcely manage the slaves who are the ship’s main
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cargo. The gothic plot gradually pulls the veil from Delano’s (and the reader’s) eyes to reveal the awful truth: the bestial and submissive slaves actually
run the ship, Cereno’s fawning, diminutive “body servant,” Babo, is the ringleader of the insurrection, and the diligently working slaves are poised to
slaughter everyone if anyone reveals the ship’s actual state of affairs.
Melville being Melville, the plot is only an occasion for extravagant discursiveness. The central strand concerns the relationship between knowledge and vision: the atmosphere of the novella is crepuscular, opening with
“shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come,” and the interior
of the ship, once Delano enters it, proves similarly resistant to being taken in
by the naked eye.7 The text makes constant reference to eyes and vision,
most strikingly in the handful of moments in which white crew members
shoot meaningful glances at Delano in hopes of alerting him to the machinations of the slave conspirators. Delano, whom the narrator describes as “a
man of such native simplicity as to be incapable of satire or irony,” amply
bears this description out: he only knows what he sees and sees what he
knows, so much so that any datum or implication that cannot be simply
explained fails to register.8 Chief among his simplicities is his racism: liberal
Nantucketer that he is, he “[takes] to negroes, not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs” and comments frequently
upon the God-given good nature of Babo and the other slaves. Thus the
dramatic irony thickens as, amid several strange encounters with Cereno
and other crew members in which something seems fishy, nothing can penetrate Delano’s gullibility: each time, he conjures up skeptical interpretations
of the evidence before him only to dismiss them in favor of explanations in
line with his prejudices. This pattern continues until Delano disembarks
from the San Dominick, at which point Cereno jumps ship after him, the
slaves explode in anger, and Delano “saw the negroes . . . now with scales
dropped from his eyes . . . in ferocious piratical revolt.”9
Of the several incidents in which crew members vainly try to prick
Delano’s suspicions, one stands out, so much so that it serves as the master
trope for the novella. Wandering the decks while Babo and Cereno confer in
private, Delano ruminates on the prospect of the sailors’ being in league
with the slaves and just as quickly dismisses it, assuring himself that “they
[the slaves] were too stupid.”10 Immediately thereafter, he encounters an old
salt with “hands full of ropes”:
Captain Delano crossed over to him and stood in silence surveying the
knot; his mind, by a not uncongenial transition, passing from its own
entanglements to those of the hemp. For intricacy such a knot he had never
seen in an American ship, or indeed any other. The old man looked like an
Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon.
EPILOGUE
203
The knot seemed a combination of double-bowline-knot, treble-crownknot, back-handed-well-knot, knot-in-and-out-knot, and jamming-knot.
At last, puzzled to comprehend the meaning of such a knot, Captain
Delano addressed the knotter:—
“What are you knotting there, my man?”
“The knot,” was the brief reply, without looking up.
“So it seems; but what is it for?”
“For some one else to undo,” muttered back the old man, plying his
fingers harder than ever, the knot being now nearly completed.11
While Captain Delano stood watching him, suddenly the old man
threw the knot towards him, saying in broken English,—the first heard in
the ship,—something to this effect—“Undo it, cut it, quick.” It was said
lowly, but with such condensation of rapidity, that the long, slow words in
Spanish, which had preceded and followed, almost operated as covers to
the brief English between.12
As Delano dumbly handles the knot, an elderly slave quickly and apologetically takes it from his hands, mumbles something about the feeble-mindedness of the old sailor, and “with some African word, equivalent to pshaw, he
tossed the knot overboard.”13
The knot is a figure of condensation. In its tangles are mingled all that
Delano, in his native simplicity, would prefer to keep separate: crew members and slaves, Spain and Egypt, denotation and connotation, utility and
ornamentation. Even the proposed methods of solving the knot are themselves knotted. Delano’s puzzled contemplation of the sublime knot is dispelled by the insistence of a “quick” binaristic reading practice: Undo it, or
cut it. The irony, of course, is that to “undo” the knot that binds master and
slave could never be “quick,” whereas to cut the Gordian knot merely recapitulates the imperialistic logic that created slavery in the first place by meeting tangled complexities with brutal, decisive violence. Melville’s pun on
“quick” activates the sense that cutting the problem to the “quick” may reveal, on the one hand, that what one had taken as socially “dead,” as chattel,
bestial and inert, proves to be quite “quick” instead, and on the other, that
the blade that attempts to cut through the “knot” of the other in search of a
blissfully simple solution might give one’s own quick a painful cut.
In the end, the knot is neither cut nor undone, but thrown overboard like
a mutineer, accompanied by a tossed-off line in an untranslatable tongue.
There it lurks beneath the surface of the tale as Melville gratifies readers’
desires both for cutting and undoing, the coup de grace and the denouement. White supremacy is first restored violently, as the firearms and sabers
of Delano’s men overwhelm the slaves’ spears and hatchets. After this bit of
vigilantism, which spares the lucrative bodies of as many slaves as possible,
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the legal loose ends are tied, and the leader Babo tried and killed.14 By resolving the unruliness of the plot thus, Melville reveals the subtle way in
which the knot has not vanished from the novella but, rather, has been displaced from the plot only to resurface on the level of narrative. As he satisfies
readers’ expectations regarding white supremacy both in extralegal violence
and legal jurisprudence, Melville seems to offer them a narrative knot that is,
perhaps excessively, first cut and then quickly undone.
This denouement, however, is itself unraveled by the peculiar way Melville
ends the narrative. Although the narrator tells us that the “scales dropped
from [Delano’s] eyes” when the slaves tried to prevent Cereno’s escape, the
end of the novella reveals Delano’s deeper blindness in ways that warn readers of the tangled web of history. After presenting excerpts from the legal
testimony regarding the mutiny, the narrator recurs to a prior conversation
between Cereno and Delano en route to Lima, Peru, the site of the trial, and
apologizes to readers for his failure to stick to the continuities of space and
time that fiction usually maintains: “Hitherto the nature of this narrative . . .
has more or less required that many things, instead of being set down in the
order of occurrence, should be retrospectively, or irregularly given; this last
is the case with the following passages, which will conclude the account.”15
Melville’s aside to readers, assuring them that the narrative irregularities are
necessitated by the tale’s irregular content, finds a ghostly echo in the subsequent conversation between Delano and Cereno. As the men rehearse the
traumatic incidents recounted in the text and congratulate themselves and
each other on their good faith in the face of the slaves’ deceptions, Delano
notices Cereno’s distress and urges him to buck up:
“You generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully enough. But the past is passed;
why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the
blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”
Because they have no memory,” he dejectedly replied; “because they are not
human.”
“But these mild trades that now fan your cheek, do they not come with a
human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades.”
“With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, señor,” was the
foreboding response.
“You are saved,” cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and
pained; “you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?”
“The negro.”16
Delano speaks here in the voice of a familiar brand of sunny liberalism: He is
a friend of the mild trades and believes that their winds blow away the bad air
of history and carry Americans toward their inevitable triumph. Cereno’s
EPILOGUE
205
lapse into the monastic silence he will keep until his imminent death speaks
to the opposing logic of history as knot. Cereno hails from the feudal past
that is liberalism’s shadow and belies its claim to enact an heroic and linear
march toward the end of history. Or perhaps it is better to say that Cereno’s
pastness is not passed, that he is marked by the violent traumas bound up in
the figure of the “negro” that Delano would rather forget. Melville’s punning
again sums up the text’s subterranean binding of opposites by revealing that
the geological trade winds that should blow one’s cares away as they gradually equalize all men through commerce also facilitate the slave trade that
gives the lie to liberals’ professions of natural law. Cereno’s pregnant silence
in the face of this irony makes a mute rhyme with the culminating image of
Melville’s tale, the stripped skull of Babo, the “hive of subtleties” that sat “fixed
on a pole in the Plaza and met, unabashed, the gaze of the whites” as it looked
upon the interred bones of the master he murdered.17
Having at last seized Melville’s knot, it is easy to see how thoroughly implicated it is with Wright’s: just as Babo is both pure object and pure subject,
abject before the law and perched above it, unmasked and enigmatic, so are
Wright’s “black voices” indistinctly placed in the dark mirror that obscures
the boundaries of self and other in a space framed by a traumatic history. In
casting Benito Cereno aside, if only for a while, I risked the unconscious
repetition of Delano’s mistake. I thus felt properly chastised by the muse of
history when I discovered the remarkable coincidence that Franklin Delano
Roosevelt is a descendent of the real Amasa Delano, of whose experiences
Benito Cereno is a remarkably faithful fictionalization.18 This coincidence
places the contrast with which I began this book—between the masterful
vision of Roosevelt and Wright’s “knot” that disrupts it—in dialogue with
social and literary histories of longer duration, allowing us to see the crises
of the 1850s alongside those of the 1930s, and the proto-documentary writing of Melville, with his knotty reworkings of contemporary political issues
and popular narratives into subversive allegories, alongside the Depressionera work of Wright and others.
I can think of no better example of the tortuous movements traced out by
the “snarled strands of history” to which Wright refers than those binding
Amasa Delano’s advice to forget the passed past to his descendant’s sunny
inclusion of the “forgotten” into the national covenant on terms that render
these latter still more invisible. The value of documentary projects like
Wright’s inheres in their contesting of such unidirectional and univocal narratives of history: Depression documentary replaces the passivity of the
winds of change with a quickening history, one that reminds us that documents can be jarred loose from their positions in triumphal processions and
enliven us by testifying to the barbarism that haunts our collective past.19
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NOTES
Introduction
1. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The Second Inaugural Address. ‘I See One-Third of a
Nation Ill-Housed, Ill-Clad, Ill-Nourished,’ January 20, 1937,” in The Public Papers and
Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Macmillan,
1941), 4–5.
2. For a discussion of the diffusion of FSA photographs in the mass media, see Cara
A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington [D.C.]:
Smithsonian Books, 2003).
3. Roy Emerson Stryker, “The FSA Collection of Photographs,” in In This Proud Land:
America 1935–1943 as Seen in the FSA Photographs, ed. Roy Emerson Stryker and Nancy
C. Wood (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), 7. Note that the name of
this project changed as it was swirled around the New Deal’s infamous “alphabet soup.” It
started under the Resettlement Authority, became part of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in late 1937, and later was housed within the Office of War Information (OWI)
as the Roosevelt administration shifted resources from fighting rural poverty to war
mobilization. In the interests of simplicity, I will follow common usage throughout this
book by consistently using the term FSA: “FSA archive,” “FSA photographs,” etc.
4. See Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, xi, Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art,
and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 336–39, Marion
Stange, “‘The Record Itself ’: Farm Security Administration Photography and the Transformation of Rural Life,” in Official Images: New Deal Photography, ed. Pete Daniel
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 2.
5. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United
States (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 11.
6. William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986), 214–15.
207
208
NOTES TO PAGES 7–10
7. Ibid., 214.
8. Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York
(New York: Penguin Books, 1997). Abigail Solomon-Godeau makes a similar argument,
claiming that “the success of photography as an image-making technology—its amazingly rapid expansion and assimilation to all discourse of knowledge and power—was
precisely a function of its confirmatory aspects. This in turn suggests why we cannot
legitimately speak of a nineteenth-century documentary practice that in any way functioned against the grain of documentary ideologies.” See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History, Institutions, and Practices
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 172.
9. See Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1990), 6–7.
10. For a survey of recent theories of populism, see Francisco Panizza, “Introduction:
Populism and the Mirror of Democracy,” in Populism and the Mirror of Democracy, ed.
Francisco Panizza (New York: Verso, 2005), 1–31.
11. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London; New York: Verso, 2005).
12. Ibid., 74.
13. Ibid., 85–86.
14. Ibid., 146–50. The “forgotten man,” of course, comes from Roosevelt’s famous
speech: see Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The ‘Forgotten Man’ Speech. Radio Address, Albany,
N.Y., April 7, 1932.” In The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed.
Samuel I. Rosenman (New York: Random House, 1941), 628. “Bottom dogs” refers to
Edward Dahlberg’s novel of the same name, which spawned a subgenre of the proletarian
novel in the Depression era; the “Negro farthest down” comes from Hurston’s shorthand
for the black “folk” who were her primary literary subjects, itself borrowed from Booker
T. Washington’s 1913 book, The Man Farthest Down. See Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks
on a Road (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 145, Edward Dahlberg, Bottom Dogs (San
Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961), Booker T. Washington, The Man Farthest Down: A
Record of Observation and Study in Europe (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1913).
15. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose
Literature (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), 490–91.
16. Ibid., 489–91.
17. Ibid., 493, 495.
18. For a useful sketch of this history, see Robert Schulman, The Power of Political Art:
The 1930s Literary Left Reconsidered (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000), 1–11.
19. Kazin, Native Grounds, 496.
20. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New
York: Schocken, 1968), 90.
21. I take the figure of the image as “resident alien” from W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture
Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994), 418.
NOTES TO PAGES 11–13
209
22. See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writing, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 220–38.
23. Although primarily concerned with the long tradition of Howellsian realism,
Kazin’s book does end with an ambivalent evaluation of literary modernism. In brief, he
laments the tendency, most evident in the work of Van Wyck Brooks, to dismiss modernist literature as counterproductive or decadent in light of the antifascist struggle, thereby
emphasizing that modernist experimentation is part of what keeps art vital amid the
enormous historical “pressure” caused by the Depression and the rise of fascism. See
Kazin, Native Grounds, 514–19.
24. Modern Language Association, “MLA International Bibliography,” accessed via
Literature Resource Center, Gale Databases, 18 August 2008.
25. Richard Poirier, “The Difficulties of Modernism and the Modernism of Difficulty,”
in Critical Essays on American Modernism, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992), 104–11.
26. I take the metaphor of genre as “contract” from Fredric Jameson, The Political
Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1981), 106.
27. For the classic argument regarding the relationship between aesthetic “difficulty”
and the formation and maintenance of elites, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social
Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1–8. For
more recent work that examines this phenomenon in interwar American literature,
see Thomas F. Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge
[England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Leonard Diepeveen, The Difficulties of Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2003).
28. Quoted in Jack C. Ellis, The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of EnglishLanguage Documentary Film and Video (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989), 7.
29. Tyrus Miller, “Documentary/Modernism: Convergence and Complementarity in
the 1930s,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 2 (2002).
30. Bernice B. Rose, “Introduction,” in Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism, ed.
Bernice B. Rose (New York, NY: PaceWildenstein, 2007).
31. For a comprehensive survey of this tradition, see Stott, Documentary.
32. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,
Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 80–85.
33. Some recent books that share this broad affinity include: Joseph Entin, Sensational
Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); John Lowney, History, Memory, and the Literary
Left: Modern American Poetry, 1935–1968 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006);
Philip M. Weinstein, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2005).
34. William Carlos Williams, Patterson (New York: New Directions, 1992), 6.
35. Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 29. Though I
find Pound’s formulation illuminating, I do resist his hard distinction between poetic
210
NOTES TO PAGES 13–15
permanence and disposable news, like many critics who are invested in the recovery of
artifacts from the cultural archive that have not “stayed news” but thereby carry a salutary
political charge in the present. Cary Nelson’s work has been extremely influential in this
regard; see Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the
Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
36. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books,
1982), 165.
37. Marianne Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore, ed. Grace Schulman (London
New York: Penguin, 2003), 135.
38. Ibid., 135.
39. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1971), 13. Emphasis added.
40. Bill Nichols argues along similar lines in a recent article, claiming that interwar
documentary cinema in the U.S. failed to engage the emergent montage aesthetic of the
European avant-garde and emphasizing the need for critics to recover this aspect of documentary in the present. See Bill Nichols, “Documentary Film and the Modernist AvantGarde,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 4 (2001).
41. For an account of the Rothstein affair, in which the photographer moved a desiccated cow’s skull in order to more vividly depict the effects of the Dust Bowl, thus inciting
howls of protest from conservative journalists and politicians, see James Curtis, Mind’s
Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1989), 71–77.
42. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed.
Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 38.
43. I take the phrase “fictions of the real” from the title of Alan Trachtenberg’s chapter
on literary realism as a response to what he calls the “incorporation” of the United States.
See Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded
Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 182–207.
44. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays and Lectures, Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 20.
45. James Agee and Walker Evans, Three Tenant Families: Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men (Boston; New York: Mariner Books, 2001), 10.
46. For a provocative study of the way interwar visual culture makes what Walter Benjamin calls the “optical unconscious” draw into focus, see Michael North, Camera Works:
Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press,
2005). I agree with North that the technology of the camera helped to deconstruct “natural” visual processes, but within this broad agreement, our approaches are nearly opposite,
insofar as he emphasizes that photography is a “language,” whereas I emphasize, with Barthes and others, the friction created by combining analogical media like photography with
the more purely arbitrary code of language. For a recent reading of the image that emphasizes this friction quite broadly and interestingly, see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures
Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
NOTES TO PAGES 15–18
211
47. Stryker, “FSA Collection,” 8.
48. Entin, Sensational Modernism: Experimental Fiction and Photography in Thirties
America, 11.
49. Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World
Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 20, 6.
50. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism.
51. Quoted in ibid., 197.
52. This book itself engages a historically specific instance of Eysteinsson’s broad argument by contrasting the interruptive documentary practices of the documentary books I
examine in chapters 2, 3, and 4 with Time Inc.’s striking success in developing a “continuity”
style of social documentation with Life in the late 1930s, the subject of chapter 5.
53. Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism, 228.
54. Ibid., 213–14.
55. For a brilliant analysis of the way photography “arrests” the orderly progression of
dominant narratives and clears a space for new ways of thinking about historical process,
see Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 59–63.
56. Examples of this poststructuralist revision of documentary as evidence include the
various volumes in the Visible Evidence series from the University of Minnesota Press
and Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993).
57. Here and throughout this book, I use the term folk despite its lack of currency in
recent cultural criticism. My intention is not to rehabilitate “folk” as an analytic term but
to examine it critically as a term in broad circulation in early twentieth-century discourse. One might name this “folk” as subalterns, dispensing with the quaintness of the
former term, or more locally and specifically, as “working-class rural dwellers.” But to do
so would shift emphasis away from the textual construction of the specific subjects such
terms name, and it is the messy process of this textual construction that is a central focus
of this book. The “folk,” as I use the term, refers to the crossroads wherein metropolitan
cultural workers and their subaltern subjects meet in a space contaminated by normative
discourses of modernization. For a brief but illuminating historical gloss on “folk,” see
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 136–37. Note also, as an index of the declining importance of the term, that it does not appear in a recent updating of Williams’s project, Tony
Bennett et al., New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 2005).
58. Stott, Documentary, 275.
59. To be fair, Stott also emphasizes the role of documentary as “witness,” as in the
passage cited earlier in this chapter. In his book, he vacillates between a naïve emphasis
on the “human document,” thought to convey an originary experience or feeling to readers, and a more sophisticated reading of documentary as mediated “witness.”
60. Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840–1940
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 178–87. That I disagree strenuously with the
212
NOTES TO PAGES 18–20
opposition that Shloss and many others make between an “ethical” Agee/Evans and an
“exploitative” Caldwell/Bourke-White will become clear in chapters 2 and 3.
61. Lili Corbus Bezner, Photography and Politics in America: From the New Deal into
the Cold War (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 5.
62. The notion of the “concerned photograph” (or photographer), whose work is motivated by ethical and or political sympathies with subjects and seeks to convey these sympathies to viewers, traces back to the influential exhibit of the photojournalism of
Werner Bischof, Robert Capa, David Seymour, Andrè Kertèsz, Leonard Freed, and Dan
Weiner at the Riverside Museum in New York in 1967. In an essay accompanying the
exhibit’s catalogue, Cornell Capa defines “concerned” photography in terms of witness,
and the epigraph to the volume states, “To photograph which demands personal commitment and concern for mankind.” See Werner Adalbert Bischof, The Concerned Photographer: The Photographs of Werner Bischof, Robert Capa, David Seymour (“Chim”),
Andrè Kertèsz, Leonard Freed, Dan Weiner (New York: Grossman, 1968), unnumbered
page.
63. Gretchen Garner, Disappearing Witness: Change in Twentieth-Century American
Photography (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 50.
64. Ibid., 5.
65. Ibid., 247.
66. In some ways, my critique is less of Garner’s book than of the tendency of art historical readings of images to focus on the close reading of images in isolation. As a literary critic whose primary object is the photo-text, I am more interested in what
documentary images can be made to mean through the secondary work of captioning
and layout than in those images’ expression of a particular sensibility, feeling, or “spontaneous” moment in time and place. I should also note that, despite her overarching focus
on “spontaneous witness,” her book moves out of this mode at numerous points to consider the technological underpinnings and the mass cultural contexts in which photography has been produced and consumed, which gives her book much of its dynamism.
67. Bertolt Brecht captures what I mean here in his extended analogy between his
“epic theater” and a hypothetical street scene in which eyewitnesses describe a car accident to new arrivals on the scene. Brecht emphasizes the ways in which the witnesses
dispense with the naturalism of the professional actor in communicating the meaning of
the event, which would allow the auditor to forget herself in a fantasy of direct experience
of the lapsed event. Instead, they emphasize their secondariness and the contingency of
their descriptions by adopting different “roles,” ignoring continuities in space and time,
and involving the auditor herself in the performance. See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1964), 121–29.
68. Cara Finnegan’s recent work on the photographs from the federal government’s
FSA project of the 1930s and 1940s is an excellent example of the latter: rather than focus
on the production of this archive as most critics have, looking at the bureaucratic leadership that organized and administered the project or the individual photographers who
NOTES TO PAGES 20–30
213
went into the field, Finnegan focuses on the point of consumption, looking at the way
particular magazines framed the same images in radically different ways: as social science, as art, and as mass media information/entertainment. Although my methodology
is quite different, I share with Finnegan a view of “documentary” as a diffuse set of practices that links several distinct forms of cultural labor and that must be read, in part at
least, rhetorically. See Finnegan, Picturing Poverty.
69. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London:
New York: Verso, 1994), 7.
70. Ibid., 23–24.
71. Ibid., 31–32.
72. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1981), 9.
73. See Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images.
74. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 106.
75. Ibid., 99.
76. Ibid., 115.
Chapter 1
1. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas (New York: Norton, 1934), 290.
2. See, for example, Marx’s mediations on the harmonization of “mental” and “manual” labor, and of nature and culture, under communism in Karl Marx, “Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Karl Marx/Frederick Engels: Collected Works (New
York: International Publishers, 1975), 296–97.
3. On the development of democracy as a “long revolution,” see Raymond Williams,
The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). On the role of cultural “outsiders” in American modernism, see Marcus Klein, Foreigners: The Making of
American Literature, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
4. For a compact genealogy of “intellectual,” see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A
Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1985),
169–71.
5. William Dean Howells, Literature and Life: Studies (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1911), 1–35.
6. Christopher P. Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 16, 111–12.
7. Howells, Literature and Life, 33.
8. A. Joan Saab, For the Millions: American Art and Culture between the Wars, Arts
and Intellectual Life in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2004), 15–17.
9. Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the
Welfare State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 6.
214
NOTES TO PAGES 30–35
10. Ibid.
11. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the
Twentieth-Century (London; New York: Verso, 1996), xiii–xx.
12. Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 17–20. I also note that even though Saab focuses on
the New Deal, she emphasizes the tensions between the “cultural front” and New Deal
liberalism as artists employed by the FAP sought to do their work on their own terms. Her
analysis of Stuart Davis is particularly compelling in this regard; see Saab, Millions, 24–30.
13. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
14. See Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1994); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin
Books, 1996), 5; Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Penguin, 1985), 68.
Interestingly, Du Bois anticipates the later linkage of literature and labor by envisioning
himself as a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture.”
15. T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed.
Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 38.
16. Ibid.
17. Michael Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers,” in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed.
Michael Folsom (New York: International, 1972), 186.
18. John Dos Passos, “The New Masses I’d Like,” New Masses 1 (1926): 20.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.: 21.
23. Walter B. Kalaidjian, American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism
and Postmodern Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 28–35; Maria
Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 151–90.
24. I discuss Benjamin’s theory of the “author as producer” in detail at the end of chapter 5. See Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writing, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 220–38.
25. Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication,” in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964),
52.
26. Ibid.
27. The essay was published under the name of “Irwin Granich”; Granich changed his
name to Mike Gold to avoid persecution of radicals by the federal government in the late
1910s amid the notorious “Palmer Raids.” See Michael Folsom, “Introduction: The Pariah
of American Letters,” in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York:
International, 1972), 10–11.
28. Michael Gold, “Towards Proletarian Art,” in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed.
Michael Folsom (New York: International, 1972), 65.
NOTES TO PAGES 35–38
215
29. Ibid.
30. I borrow the term “plebeian writer” from Michael Denning. In Denning’s anatomy
of the “cultural front” that pursued socialist aims in the interwar period, he distinguishes
between three subgroups: “moderns,” established middle-class writers who “converted”
to socialist politics, “émigrés,” who imported intellectual currents from the Americas and
across the Atlantic, and “plebeians,” writers from minority, immigrant, and/or workingclass backgrounds, who were publicly educated and newly authorized to publish. See
Denning, Cultural Front, 58–62.
31. Gold, “Towards Proletarian Art,” 66.
32. Lawrence Hanley, “‘Smashing Cantatas’ and ‘Looking Glass Pitchers’: The Impossible Location of Proletarian Literature,” in The Novel and the American Left: Critical
Essays on Depression-Era Fiction, ed. Janet Galligani Casey (Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 2004), 133.
33. Granville Hicks provided an early model for a canon of working-class literature.
See Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition: An Interpretation of American Literature since
the Civil War (New York: International Publishers, 1935). Examples of the recovery
work that has been undertaken under the aegis of “new working-class studies” include
Laura Hapke, Labor’s Text: The Worker in American Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); John Russo and Sherry Lee Linkon, New Working-Class
Studies (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2005); Nicholas Coles and Janet
Zandy, American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
34. Other important cultural institutions of this period include the John Reed Clubs,
which fostered young, unproven, and especially working-class writers, the panoply
of “mushroom mags” that proliferated in the 1930s, and the Artists’ Union, which
provided a forum for intellectual exchange and professional solidarity among visual
artists.
35. Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers,” 188.
36. For accounts of proletarian literature that critique its androcentric and misogynistic aspects, see Paula Rabinowitz, Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in
Depression America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 17–62;
Kalaidjian, American, 138–59.
37. Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers,” 188–89.
38. John Dos Passos, “Review of 120 Million,” New Masses 4 (March 1929): 23.
39. Sherwood Anderson, “A Writer’s Note,” New Masses 8 (August 1932): 10.
40. See, for example, Sherwood Anderson, Poor White: A Novel (New York: B. W.
Huebsch, 1920) and Dark Laughter (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927). It is interesting
to note that, in Gold’s autobiographical novel Jews Without Money, he reflects bitterly on
his truncated education, ironically inserting a scene in which a teacher gives him a copy
of Emerson’s essays in recognition of his talent without recognizing that the pressing
financial needs of his family leave no time for reading. See Mike Gold, Jews Without
Money (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996), 304–5.
216
NOTES TO PAGES 38–42
41. Philip Rahv, “Proletarian Literature: A Political Autopsy,” in Essays on Literature
and Politics, 1932–1972, ed. Arabel J. Porter and Andrew J. Dvosin (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1978), 299–300.
42. Philip Rahv and William Phillips, “Problems and Perspectives in Revolutionary
Literature,” in Communism in America: A History in Documents, ed. Albert Fried (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 184.
43. V. F. Calverton, “Proletarianitis,” Saturday Review of Literature 15 (1937): 4. Quoted in Barbara Foley, Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction,
1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 103.
44. Barbara Foley provides a subtle analysis of the tricky problem of evaluating the
reception of “proletarian literature.” She concedes that the movement never found anything like the broad working-class audience it sought, pointing out, for example, that Jack
Conroy’s The Disinherited sold fewer than 3,000 copies. She correctly insists, however,
that this failure should be contextualized within the broader economic collapse, which
decimated the publishing industry at precisely the moment of proletarian literature’s heyday (as Michael Szalay points out, there was a 50 percent drop in publishing revenue
from November, 1929 to the end of 1933), and workers’ use of libraries to access books,
including examples of “proletarian literature,” that is not accounted for by sales figures.
See Foley, Radical Representations; Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 42.
45. Paul Buhle, Marxism in the United States: Remapping the History of the American
Left (London; New York: Verso, 1987), 156.
46. Untitled, New Masses 4 (July 1928): 2.
47. The classic study of the “second great transformation” is Robert H. Wiebe, The
Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). For more recent work that
emphasizes the unevenness of this phenomenon, see Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The
Second Great Transformation in the Rural North, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1990).
48. Raymond H. Merritt, Engineering in American Society, 1850–1875 (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1969), 9–11.
49. For a reading of the figure of the cowboy as a response to “incorporation” in late
nineteenth-century American culture, see Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of
America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982),
21–25.
50. As Cecilia Tichi has demonstrated, the public fascination with the engineer is legible in a wide range of texts and practices in the U.S. in the 1910s and 1920s, including
children’s literature and toys like the Erector Set, popular fiction featuring engineers as
heroes, and advertisements. She also points out that the “synthesis” I mention above
works within a nationalist imaginary, with the engineer combining Western ruggedness
and masculinity with Eastern technical acuity and sophistication. See Cecelia Tichi,
Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 98–118.
NOTES TO PAGES 42–47
217
51. William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American Dream: The Technocrat Movement,
1900–1941 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 3.
52. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Viking Press,
1921), 166. At home, Veblen was particularly influenced by two developments that fostered a sense of collective identity and agency among engineers. He was encouraged by
the formation of the “New Machine” movement, a group of fifty progressive engineers
founded in 1916 by Henry L. Gantt, Frederick W. Taylor’s former assistant. He also
applauded the formation of the American Society of Civil Engineers, whose president
claimed that engineers were the “priests of material development.” See Akin, Technocracy,
7, 52.
53. Veblen, Engineers, 1–26. Veblen uses the term “sabotage” in its precise etymological sense, which refers not to destruction of the technologies of production but to the
sound made by workers’ wooden shoes (sabots) dragging on the shoproom floor during
coordinated slowdowns. This, to Veblen, is the master trope for the unproductive ethos
of modern industrial production.
54. Ibid., 80–81.
55. “Cadastration” is a mapping practice aimed at locating the entire human and natural resources of a territory; its use dates back to the Roman Empire’s use of mapmakers to
draw up a capitastrum, or poll tax register (OED).
56. Veblen, Engineers, 166.
57. Veblen draws on a reductive theory of “instinct” consistently throughout his
thought, posing a constructive “instinct for workmanship” associated with the working
class and technicians and a wasteful/destructive instinct for “sportsmanship” or “display”
that is characteristic of aristocracy and the capitalist class. See, for example, Thorstein
Veblen, The Instinct of Workmanship (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 2.
58. Quoted in Akin, Technocracy, 24.
59. Ibid., 70.
60. See, for example, Harold Loeb, Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like (New
York: Viking Press, 1933). There, Loeb describes in amusing detail the cultural richness
of a technocratically ordered society.
61. Quoted in Akin, Technocracy, 55.
62. Ibid., 101.
63. Quoted in ibid., 142.
64. The list includes many of the leading literary and intellectual figures of the Depression era, including Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Lewis Corey, Malcolm Cowley, Countee Cullen, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, Sidney Hook, Langston Hughes,
Grace Lumpkin, Isidor Schneider, Lincoln Steffens, and Edmund Wilson.
65. League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford, Culture and the Crisis: An Open
Letter to the Writers, Artists, Teachers, Physicians, Engineers, Scientists, and Other Professional Workers of America (New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1932), 3.
66. Ibid., 18.
67. Quoted in Akin, Technocracy, 146.
218
NOTES TO PAGES 47–54
68. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 293–305.
69. Michael Gold, “Two Critics in a Bar-Room,” Liberator 4 (1921): 30.
70. John Dos Passos, “The Writer as Technician,” in American Writers’ Congress, ed.
Henry Hart (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 79.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 80.
74. Ibid., 82.
75. Ibid.
76. John Dos Passos, U.S.A (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1937), vii, 462.
77. Thomas F. Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism (Cambridge,
U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 117–61.
78. Dos Passos, “The Writer as Technician,” 81.
79. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Jacques Derrida,
Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1998).
80. Dos Passos, “The Writer as Technician,” 82.
81. Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York:
Dutton, 1980), 307.
82. Quoted in John William Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in
America, 1741–1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 166.
83. John Dos Passos, The Big Money (New York: Mariner Books, 2000), 75.
84. Quoted in Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey, 289. Edward
Bernays and Ivy Lee were two pioneers of the profession of “public relations,” which
emerged in the early twentieth century. Dos Passos had met Ivy Lee during his Russian
travels in the 1920s and based the character of J. Walter Thompson in U.S.A. on Lee. In
fact, there were Soviet models for the use of new techniques and technologies of mass
persuasion as well, as Dos Passos was no doubt aware from his travels. The most famous
example is the cinema of the early Soviet era; still closer to Dos Passos’s conception here
are the advertisements and packaging for consumer goods, from cigarettes to galoshes,
done by Mayakovsky, Rodchenko, and other Constructivists from 1923 to 1925. See
Kalaidjian, American, 34–35.
85. Kenneth Burke, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” in American Writers’
Congress, ed. Henry Hart (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 87.
86. Ibid., 91.
87. Ibid., 89.
88. Ibid., 92.
89. Frank Lentricchia and Michael Denning have both addressed the negative reception of Burke’s speech. Whereas Lentricchia emphasizes the incompatibility of Burke’s
theory with the doctrinaire, unsophisticated Marxism of his peers, Denning insists,
NOTES TO PAGES 54–61
219
correctly in my view, that Burke’s way of thinking about culture is a central part of the Depression-era “cultural front” and that, despite the vigorous criticism, Burke remained on good
terms with many literary communists. See Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 21–25; Denning, Cultural Front, 442–45.
90. Burke’s “anticipation” of Gramsci only makes sense in the strange temporality of
the latter’s writing and reception: Burke and Gramsci were contemporaries, but the seminal “prison notebooks” Gramsci was still writing in 1935 under the close supervision,
shall we say, of Mussolini’s regime and were first widely available in English in 1971.
91. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 175.
92. Ibid.
93. Richard Wright, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” in Richard Wright Reader, ed. Ellen
Wright and Michel Fabre (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 48.
94. Ibid., 42–44.
95. Ibid., 49.
96. Chapter 4 deals extensively with Wright’s treatment of these issues in his 12 Million
Black Voices (1941) and his autobiographical writings.
97. Ellison, Invisible Man, 7.
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., 567.
100. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1967), 16–22.
101. For Maxwell, Native Son in particular has been widely misread as anticipating
Wright’s later break from the Party, when it in fact is a deeply felt critique of the Party’s
failures to comprehend racial issues in the U.S. that nonetheless honors the validity of its
broader aims. See William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing
and Communism between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 187.
102. The term “vital center” comes from Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 book of the same
title. This book both exemplifies and helped to shape the Cold War vision of the U.S. as
an exceptional state in world history, typified by its unique unity-in-tension. See Arthur
Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949).
103. “Technostructure” is Galbraith’s term for the bureaucracy that manages productive
forces in a liberal industrialized polity in order to (allegedly) guarantee abundance and
order. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1967), 86.
Chapter 2
1. Preston Sturges et al., Sullivan’s Travels (Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2001),
DVD.
2. Brian Henderson, “Introduction,” in Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), 524.
220
NOTES TO PAGES 62–68
3. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London;
New York: Verso, 1994), 1–16.
4. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London; New York: Verso, 1996); Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and
Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
5. Among the many critics who read the book in this vein, see James Goodwin, “The
Depression Era in Black and White: Four American Photo-Texts,” Criticism—A Quarterly for Literature & the Arts 40, no. 2 (1998): 291–93; William Stott, Documentary
Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 218–23;
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 295–98; Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the
New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1992), 26; Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840–1940
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 181–87. Alan Trachtenberg, in his introduction to the 1995 paperback reissue of Their Faces, opens the way to a more nuanced reading of the text. See Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their
Faces (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), i–viii.
6. Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1963), 110.
7. Ibid., 111.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., 112.
10. See Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected
Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84.
11. As we have seen in chapter 1, Mike Gold and Kenneth Burke link pioneering with
Left politics in their critical work in the 1930s. See Michael Gold, “Go Left, Young Writers,” in Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology, ed. Michael Folsom (New York: International,
1972), 186–89.
12. Morris Dickstein, “Depression Culture: The Dream of Mobility,” in Radical Revisions: Rereading 1930s Culture, ed. Bill Mullen and Sherry Linkon (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1996), 236–40.
13. Ibid., 238.
14. Margaret Bourke-White, “Photographing This World,” Nation 142 (February 19,
1936): 217.
15. Ibid.: 217–18.
16. Ibid.: 218. For a compilation of the Congress’s proceedings, see Matthew Baigell
and Julia Williams, eds., Artists against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American
Artists’ Congress (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986).
17. See the extensive discussion of Burke and “cultural work” in chapter 1 of his volume.
18. James Clifford neatly captures the kind of irony I am pointing out Bourke-White’s
work in his discussion of the work of ethnologist James Walker, whose work on the Pine
NOTES TO PAGES 68–72
221
Ridge Sioux reservation between 1896 and 1914 resulted in an agglomeration of texts in
which the “informants” begin “to function as co-authors, and the ethnographer as scribe
and archivist as well as interpreting observer”; in this shifting field, argues Clifford, “we
can ask new, critical question of all ethnographies. However monological, dialogical, or
polyphonic their form, they are hierarchical arrangements of discourses.” See James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986), 17.
19. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 40.
20. The book contains a total of seventy-five photographs, but only sixty-four captions: some photographs are grouped into series, with one caption and place name referring to multiple images.
21. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New
York: Viking, 1937), 6.; all subsequent references in parentheses in the text, except as
noted. James Goodwin points out this paradoxical aspect of Faces; see Goodwin, “The
Depression Era in Black and White: Four American Photo-Texts,” 292.
22. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 137.
23. I use the term “portfolio” to refer to the groupings of photographs that intersperse
the text. In the original 1937 Viking Press edition, there are seven such portfolios, one
before the chapter and one after each subsequent chapter; in addition, the verso side of
each layout is left blank. In each subsequent edition, including the most recent (1995)
edition available through the University of Georgia Press, all of the photographs are
grouped into four portfolios, with photographs printed on both sides of the page, presumably to cut costs. The result is a much less elegant combination of images and text,
with the portfolios interrupting the chapters in two places and, in general, fewer opportunities for images and text to complement and contest one another.
24. Even here, however, one must qualify one’s attribution of a racist gaze. Whereas the
caption works within the tropes of plantation fiction to some degree, as do other captions
beneath photographs of African Americans in the text, the photograph itself elevates
rather than diminishes its subject. Its low angle and tight cropping of the face, along with
its three-quarters angle at which it meets that face, combine to lend the subject an inscrutable air. The fine grain of the photograph allows us to see the wrinkles etched on her face
but not to imagine that we know her in any final way. In this way the photograph reframes
the caption, rendering the subject’s ignorance of her age less as a sign of primitive status
than as a strategy for maintaining privacy and for gaining status through a kind of agelessness.
25. See, for example, Natanson, Black Image, 26.
26. Garner, Disappearing Witness, 2003, 50 (see introduction, n. 63).
27. Agee’s venom towards Bourke-White is most obvious in the “appendix” to his
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that consists of an unedited puff piece on her work in
the New York Post; Agee means for us to link Bourke-White’s designer clothes and high
222
NOTES TO PAGES 72–77
salary, both of which impress the reporter deeply, with her thoughtless exploitation of
her unfamous subjects down South. See James Agee and Walker Evans, Three Tenant
Families: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston; New York: Mariner Books, 2001),
398–401. Lange and Taylor are gentler but no less direct in their critique of Caldwell and
Bourke-White’s captions. In their preface, they include the following disclaimer: “We
adhere to the standards of contemporary photography as we have conceived them. Quotations which accompany photographs report what the persons photographed said, not
what we think might be their unspoken thoughts.” See Dorothea Lange and Paul Schuster Taylor, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal &
Hitchcock, 1939), 15.
28. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (New York:
Duell, Sloan, 1941), 10–12.
29. The term “diagesis” refers to the fictional world, both within and without the camera’s frame, conjured up by a given representation. Though it is much more commonly
used to describe cinema than photography, I borrow it here to emphasize the explicitly
dramatic and fictional aspects of Bourke-White and Caldwell’s text.
30. Interestingly, a close inspection of the photograph reveals that the students are
reading Anna Cordt’s The New Path to Reading, a relatively new, “Whole language” reader
of the interwar period. The approach of this series, like that of its longer-lived contemporary, the “Dick and Jane” reader, was predicated on familiar scenes and objects, by way of
shortening the distance between the world within the text and the world without. Needless to say, this approach would have failed almost farcically in the kind of classroom
Bourke-White photographed, in ways that Toni Morrison later examined so acutely in
her historical novel of the 1940s, The Bluest Eye (1970). See Anna Cordts, The New Path
to Reading (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1929).
31. Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White, 1st ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1986),
170.
32. H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1934), 681–82.
And see Edwin Rosskam, Washington: Nerve Center, ed. Ruby Black (New York: Alliance
Book, Longmans, Green, 1939).
33. Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1935),
Archibald MacLeish, Land of the Free (New York: Harcourt, 1938), 88, Edmund Wilson,
The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932).
34. For a reading of the dominance of “civic nationalism” in the Depression era, see
Gerstle, American Crucible.
35. MacLeish’s aforementioned Land of the Free makes this debt explicit: in the introduction, MacLeish refers to the text as a “sound track” to accompany the progression of
images.
36. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Vintage, 1983), 150, 57.
37. Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road (New York: Knopf,
1995), 239.
NOTES TO PAGES 78–94
223
38. Ibid., 223.
39. T. K. Whipple and Malcolm Cowley, “Two Judgments of American Earth,” New
Republic 67 (June 17, 1931): 131–32.
40. It is difficult to determine the boundary between fact and fiction in these firstperson narratives, or between the documentation of the voices of native informants and
what we might think of along the lines of dramatization or fictionalization. As in all
documentary art, there are elements of both in these passages: the experiences of indigenous people, with what Caldwell renders sensitively as a transcription of their vernacular, and the fictional process of selection and collage. At any rate, the precise balance of
facticity and fictiveness at any given point has no bearing on my larger argument, which
is that the form of the text moves between the poles of a masterful omniscience and a
puzzled or defensive localism.
41. Dan B. Miller claims that Caldwell modulated his speech skillfully to match the
local accent in his travels throughout the South, and Bourke-White herself describes his
skill in winning the trust and sympathy of ordinary people in her account of their journey in her autobiography. See Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road,
223; Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 125–26.
42. Indeed, for some readers, Bourke-White’s links to the world of advertising and
mass culture manifest themselves unflatteringly in an appended note on her photographic technique. There, she evinces none of the ethical seriousness and sensitivity I have
emphasized throughout the text, dwelling on the finer points of various cameras, problems of lighting and movement, and the like. For an acute analysis of Bourke-White’s
relationship to celebrity and mass culture, see Rabinowitz, Represented, 56–74.
43. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, 127.
44. Ibid., 128.
45. Ibid.
Chapter 3
1. Agee was a staff member of the magazine; Evans was on loan from Roy Stryker’s
team of photographers located in the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration, with the understanding that all of his work from the trip would be deposited in
its archives.
2. For a detailed narrative of the project’s itinerary through Time Inc., Harper’s, and
finally Houghton Mifflin, see William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 261–65.
3. Dan B. Miller, Erskine Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco Road (New York: A.A.
Knopf, 1995), 238, 60–62, 82–84. To add insult to injury, Harcourt Press rejected Agee
and Evans’s manuscript, claiming that the success of Their Faces was such that “competition would be ruinous.” See Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 154.
224
NOTES TO PAGES 94–102
4. James Agee and Walker Evans, Three Tenant Families: Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men (Boston; New York: Mariner Books, 2001), 10. All subsequent references to this text
will be in parentheses, except as noted.
5. The more fastidious Evans probably chose to stay in an insect-free local inn. See
James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 322.
6. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Literature (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), 495. For subsequent criticism that singles
out Famous Men as a culmination of the era’s cultural production, see Michael Rogin and
Kathleen Moran, “ ‘What’s the Matter with Capra?’: Sullivan’s Travels and the Popular Front,”
Representations, no. 71 (2001): 107; Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams:
Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1998), 246–51; Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society
in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 182; Stott, Documentary, 266.
7. See, for example, Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 158–92; Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary (London; New York:
Verso, 1994), 36–75; William Solomon, “Wound Culture, the 1930s, and the Documentary Grotesque,” Arizona Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2002).
8. Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York:
Routledge, 2006), 26.
9. Agee changed most names of people and places in the text to protect the privacy of
his subjects: Hobe’s Hill in the text is Mills Hill in actuality; the Gudgers are the Burroughses, the Woodses are the Fields, and the Rickettses are the Tengles.
10. For the text’s reissue in 1960, Evans amended the portfolios of photographs, omitting or recropping several and doubling the number of images from thirty-one to sixtytwo. In the second edition (and all subsequent editions), thirty-nine of the sixty-two
photographs depict some aspect of the three homes. This represents a marked shift
toward less static subject matter, since many of the additions depict small town main
streets, rail yards, shops, post offices, and the like. For a detailed description of the differences between the two editions, see Stott, Documentary, 278–81.
11. Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” in Literary Essays (Norfolk, CT: New Directions,
1954), 6.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 12.
14. Ibid.
15. Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro,” in Modern American Poetry: An Introduction, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1919), 106.
16. In the section entitled “Shelter,” for example, Agee devotes fifty-four pages to the
Gudgers but only eleven pages to the other two families combined. Having said that,
Agee does hedge this seemingly preferential treatment with a bit with a prefatory note to
the descriptions of the Woods and Ricketts families, in which he admonishes us not to
assume that their “relative brevity” mean that Agee finds them of less significance (167).
NOTES TO PAGES 102–106
225
17. The classic text on the negative role mass culture plays in the constitution of modernism is Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). For more recent views on the
subject, see the essays collected in Kevin J. H. Dettmar and Stephen Watt, eds., Marketing
Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996).
18. I use the term automobility rather than the more straightforward driving in order
to encompass, on the one hand, the infrastructure of roads and highways that developed
alongside the single technology of the automobile and, on the other, to emphasize the
practices and affects that develop with the use of automobiles.
19. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 1–2.
20. William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text (New York: Vintage, 1990),
37.
21. Ibid., 52.
22. If the phonograph fails to induct the Bundrens into modernity, neither does it
resolve neatly to “folk” isolation. Like Anse’s marriage itself, the phonograph sits on the
fault line between the world of the town and that of the hillside farm: Anse’s son Cash,
whose very name suggests commodity exchange, continually repeats his desire for the
phonograph, fantasizing at the end of the novel about the family’s listening to mail-order
records together in the wintertime (261).
23. Examples of preservationist projects in the era include Zora Neale Hurston’s and
John A. Lomax’s efforts to record Afro-American songs and folklore; the first and most
radical phase of the New Deal saw the implementation of large-scale assimilative projects,
such as the electrification of rural spaces by the Tennessee Valley Authority; for work that
mediates between a “folk” sensibility and a revolutionary politics, see Aunt Molly Jackson’s songs collected in Charlotte Nekola and Paula Rabinowitz, Writing Red: An Anthology
of American Women Writers, 1930–1940 (New York: Feminist Press at the City University
of New York, 1987), 184–86.
24. Erskine Caldwell’s Depression-era fictions (e.g., Tobacco Road [1932] and God’s
Little Acre [1933]) also belong in this category and share some of the same aims. Caldwell, however, balances the depraved and unmodern grotesquerie of the “white trash”
with masculine heroes whose courage and sexual vitality combines “folk” virtue with a
proto-Marxist consciousness.
25. Examples of texts that explore this tension include Richard Wright’s “Long Black
Song” (1938), in which a white traveling phonograph salesman ignites a violent conflict
with a black sharecropper, and Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934), with its antic
deconstruction of “folk” authenticity.
26. Henry Ford, for example, introduced his Model T in 1909, three years before
Pound published his first formulations of imagism; moreover, the period just before and
after World War I saw both the broad diffusion of automobiles and the rise to cultural
prominence of an imagist poetics.
226
NOTES TO PAGES 107–111
27. Joseph Interrante, “The Road to Autopia: The Automobile and the Spatial Transformation of American Culture,” in The Automobile and American Culture, ed. David L.
Lewis and Laurence Goldstein (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), 91.
28. President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States: Report of the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends, with a Foreword
by Herbert Hoover (New York, London: McGraw-Hill, 1933), 497.
29. Charles Austin Beard and Mary Ritter Beard, The Rise of American Civilization
(New York: Macmillan, 1930), 745.
30. Ibid., 745–46.
31. James J. Flink, The Automobile Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 153. In addition
to Flink, for work on rural automobility that shares the “comic” frame, see Michael Berger, The Devil Wagon in God’s Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893–1929 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979); John Bell Rae, The Road and the Car
in American Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). For work treating this shift more equivocally, see Hal S. Barron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great Transformation in the Rural
North, 1870–1930, Studies in Rural Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1997); Interrante, “Road.”
32. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: With Related Documents, ed. John Edward Toews (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 69.
33. Berger, Devil Wagon, 151.
34. Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939–1989 (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1990), 3.
35. Quoted in Flink, The Automobile Age, 154.
36. I do not mean to suggest that automobility begat migrant labor in a simple and
monocausal shift. I do, however, want to point out that the adoption of the car among
rural dwellers proceeds alongside the expansion of migrant labor. Whereas single men
riding freight trains predominate in the earlier pattern, the automobile allows entire
households to become migratory. For an extended argument along these lines, see Interrante, “Road,” 95–104.
37. Barron, Mixed Harvest, 194.
38. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory (London; New York: Verso, 1989), 234–35.
39. A vibrant and challenging literature reclaiming “sentimentality” from the moralizing and/or mandarin tendencies of many critics has emerged in the past twenty years.
For an excellent genealogy of its use in critical discourse, see June Howard, “What Is
Sentimentality?” American Literary History 11, no. 1 (1999). Many influential critics of
documentary work have applauded Famous Men for its lack of sentimentality, invariably
in comparison to the contemporary work of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret BourkeWhite, the subject of my chapter 2. This is misleading in the extreme; if the passage I have
quoted here demonstrates anything, it is Agee’s deep investment in the intersubjective
and ethical and emotional dimensions of reading that the newly expanded and intensified study of sympathy and sentiment examines. For work in this latter tradition, see
NOTES TO PAGES 111–120
227
W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994); Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Stott, Documentary.
40. Stott, Documentary, 268–69.
41. There is, of course, a difference between the objectifying force of Pound’s poem,
whereby disembodied “faces” are metaphorized by blossoms, and Evans’s and Gudger’s
collaboration in what is a profoundly intersubjective artwork. Nonetheless, as in Pound’s
theorizations of imagism, Gudger’s image accrues a larger part of its power by its spareness and its iconic, isolated aspect.
42. Critics who approvingly describe Evans as an exception to the politicized artists of
the Depression era include Evan Carton and Janis Bergman-Carton, “James Agee and
Walker Evans: Tenants in the House of Art,” Raritan 20, no. 4 (2001); Shloss, Light, 189–90;
Stott, Documentary, 267–89; J. A. Ward, American Silences: The Realism of James Agee,
Walker Evans, and Edward Hopper (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1985), 148.
43. Stryker generally guided the photographers in his organization through “shooting
scripts” that served the government’s aims of propagandizing in behalf of the New Deal.
Evans bristled at this intrusion on his autonomy from the start, later claiming that Stryker
didn’t “guide” his work and that he “didn’t give a damn about the Washington office [of
the FSA]—or about the New Deal really.” See Mellow, Walker Evans. For a close analysis
of how these scripts helped to shape the FSA archive, see Alan Trachtenberg, “From
Image to Story: Reading the File,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988),
60–63.
44. A recent collection of Evans’s work admirably captures this aspect of his work,
focusing on the photographers attention to the “roadside” formation and to his penchant
for “captioning” photographs surreptitiously by including bits of text in the frame from
mass cultural forms such as posters, billboards, and shopfronts. See Walker Evans: Signs
(Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998).
45. My use of “nearly everyone” here might be a bit hyperbolic, but a journalist wrote
in the New York Times Magazine in 1939 that over 1.6 billion passengers rode the city
subways in the 1930s. Quoted in Sarah Greenough, Walker Evans: Subways and Streets
(Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991), 17.
46. James Agee, “The American Roadside,” in James Agee: Selected Journalism
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 45.
47. Ibid., 47.
48. Ibid., 47, 52.
49. Ibid., 57–58.
50. Ibid., 44.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 59.
53. Agee, “Roadside,” 60–61.
228
NOTES TO PAGES 120–129
54. Ibid., 59.
55. Ibid., 62.
56. Agee’s 1937 grant proposal to the Guggenheim foundation gives a sense of the dizzying range of his interests in popular culture at this time. The list of prospective topics
includes: “‘Glamor’ writing”; “Collections and analyses of faces; of news pictures”; “A
new form of movie short roughly equivalent to the lyric poem”; “A true account of a jazz
band”; “City streets. Hotel Rooms. Cities”; and “A new kind of photographic show.” See
James Agee, “Plans for Work, October 1937,” in The Collected Short Prose of James Agee,
ed. Robert Fitzgerald (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), 131–33.
57. Thanks to Damien Keane for pointing out this fact.
58. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968).
59. For recent work that explores the spiritual dimension of Agee and Evans’s encounter with their rural subjects, see Carton and Bergman-Carton, “Tenants”; John Hilgart,
“Valuable Damage: James Agee’s Aesthetics of Use,” Arizona Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1996).
The Cartons’ essay makes an extended analogy between the Gudgers’ home and the
“house” of art, arguing that Famous Men is valuable for recognizing both the capacity of
art to represent the other in a nonspectacular, ethical way and the melancholy failure of
its attempt to convey a singular presence. The Hilgart piece argues that the text envisions
a counterpractice to commoditization by offering readers “communion” with other people and, especially, things. Both are intelligent and provocative readings of the text, but
both move with the grain of the text by investing value in the authors’ encounter with
their static subjects, and it is this tendency that I work against here.
60. Of the many important books in this tradition, perhaps the most representative is
James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of
Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
61. The epigraph is taken from King Lear, act 3, scene 4.
62. As evidence of Prospero’s penchant for propaganda, see the scene in which he
enraptures his daughter Miranda and prospective son-in-law Ferdinand with “spirits”
summoned by his “art” in The Tempest, act 4, scene 1.
63. Renato Rosaldo observes the omnipresence of a pastoral mode rooted in an “imperialist nostalgia” in twentieth-century narratives organized around contact between metropolitans and “primitives.” See Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” Representations
26 (1989).
64. For Clifford’s arguments about exoticness, space, and time, including his nicely
turned statement that the mass mobility of the twentieth century ushers in a time in
which “the ‘exotic’ is now nearby,” see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1988), 10.
65. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 4. While
Boas’s introduction was undoubtedly sincere and advantageous to Hurston to boot, it
places the author in a peculiar role whereby she is a spy of sorts delivering her inside
NOTES TO PAGES 129–135
229
knowledge to Central Intelligence staffed by Boas and, by proxy, white readers. Boas
claims that Hurston has been able to “penetrate through the affected demeanor” by which
“the Negro” excludes whites from “his true inner life” (xiii). African American life is thus
rendered as an “attraction upon the imagination” of Americans, and Hurston as the
impresario who puts on the spectacle, aided by her “loveable and charming personality.”
I point out this patronizing tone not to take a cheap shot at Boas, whose record as an
advocate for minority cultures is commendable, but to point out that Hurston, to an even
greater extent than the white, male, prep-school educated Agee, depends upon institutional gatekeepers and patrons to authenticate her work in ways that threaten to sabotage
her intentions.
66. Ibid., 1.
67. Ibid., 7.
68. Ibid., 17.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Hazel V. Carby, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (London;
New York: Verso, 1999).
Chapter 4
1. John Ford et al., The Grapes of Wrath (Beverly Hills, CA: 20th Century Fox Home
Entertainment, 2004), DVD.
2. Joel Woller has also linked Wright’s use of the first-person plural to the broader
1930s interest in collectivity, arguing that the “we” of Black Voices is raced and classed,
and that it has thus been poorly received by a critical tradition that is liberal and nationalist in orientation. I share Woller’s broad view regarding Wright’s divergence from New
Deal liberalism, with its consensual and national “we” (as discussed above via Ma Joad)
but diverge from this view insofar as he emphasizes the unity of the black “we.” I read this
“we” as internally split in crucial ways, a split that is mediated, however problematically,
by a pedagogical stance. See Joel Woller, “First-Person Plural: The Voice of the Masses in
Farm Security Administration Documentary,” Journal of Narrative Theory 29, no. 3
(1999).
3. The definitive survey of the “cultural front” is Michael Denning, The Cultural
Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London; New York:
Verso, 1996). For a sample of definitions and examples of the New Southern Studies, see
American Literature 78, no. 4 (December 2006), especially the position statements by
Leigh Anne Duck (711–12) and John T. Matthews (719–22).
4. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), especially 281–328; William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986),
especially 211–37.
230
NOTES TO PAGES 135–142
5. Among the many places Jameson invests value in cultural forms that have collective identity formation as their horizon, his critique of Northrup Frye is most relevant to
my argument; see Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially
Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); 70–74. Also see Barbara Foley,
Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), especially 129–69.
6. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 112.
7. Ibid.
8. Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United
States (New York: Viking, 1941), 11. All subsequent parenthetical citations refer to this
text.
9. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek
(Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 202.
10. Interestingly, in the wake of writing Black Voices, Wright told a number of friends
about his desire (which he never fulfilled) to extend the project, writing a series of novels
that would comprise a “saga” of the black experience from slavery to the present. See
Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun (Urbana;
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 272–74.
11. Walter Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 119.
12. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 247.
13. My use of “we” is deliberately provocative, here and throughout the chapter.
Despite the fact that many readers might not want to be included in the “we” that is interpellated in my discourse as the viewer of these images, I use it to make a point about how
the text’s narrative functions at this moment to summon an implied reader who enjoys
certain privileges. Apropos of my comments at the end of the previous section, Wright’s
move here obscures the position of educated black readers who do not fit within this
“we”: Natanson’s argument seems to me animated by an entirely justified frustration at
this lacuna in the text. I want to point out, however, that his argument neglects the central thrust of Wright’s project, which is to engage a hegemonic readership pedagogically.
14. A note from photographer Jack Delano tells us that the portraits on the wall depict
the couple “twenty years earlier.” Thus the alienation that pertains between the subjects
and their likenesses on the wall operates not only in the gap between the real and the
represented, but in the more pitiful gap between past prosperity and present squalor. See
Jack Delano, “Negro Preacher and His Wife . . . ,” LC-USF34-043918-D, Black-and-White
Photographs from the FSA/OWI 1935–1945, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of
Congress, www.memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html (September 7, 2008).
15. I use the term “redistributionist” in the terms introduced by philosopher Nancy
Fraser, who has written, often in dialogue with Axel Honneth, on the interactions
between the terms “redistribution” and “recognition” as frameworks for progressive
NOTES TO PAGES 142–149
231
politics; for a concise and cogent treatment of the subject, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking
Recognition,” New Left Review 3 (2000): 107–20.
16. The image is captioned in a sense, since the prior page contains a photograph of an
African American couple in court, sitting at the bench opposite a white judge. Eric Cheyfitz
quite rightly pointed out to me that the photograph’s caption—“The law is white”—can be
read as an ironic comment on how ostensibly extralegal lynchings supplement formal legal
institutions and processes in the Jim Crow South (42). Nonetheless, to my eyes the violence
of the lynching image crowds out, at least momentarily, any such interpretive subtleties.
17. The most comprehensive collection of such images is James Allen, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000).
18. Unnamed observer, quoted in ‘‘Lynching: Southern Protests,’’ Crisis, June 1915, 71;
quoted in Leon Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America, ed. James Allen (Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2000), 11.
19. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South,
1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998), 201.
20. Ibid., 203.
21. Ibid., 209. Of course the efficacy of this means is circumscribed severely throughout
the text; the power to tell one’s story in words and images does not in itself ameliorate the
disastrous socioeconomic conditions that most African Americans still suffered under in
1941. Black Voices bears this fact out in many ways, weighing this textual power to
demand recognition within the dominant culture against the social and economic forces
that bedeviled the great majority of African Americans. No one was more aware of these
pressures and limitations on African American cultural production that Wright himself,
who emphasizes throughout his writings the barriers faced by the overwhelming majority
of African Americans in gaining access to cultural institutions.
22. As William Solomon argues, the centripetal force exerted by images of the body in
pain was not felt exclusively by African American consumers during the Depression. He
identifies a widespread populist grotesque mode, evident both in literary works and in
popular entertainments, that bound working-class Americans across lines of race and
gender. See William Solomon, Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great
Depression (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
23. Wright’s text identifies the subjects as tenant farmers from Oklahoma (150).
24. Benedict R. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London; New York: Verso, 1991), 5–7.
25. For analyses of the relationship between technologies of reproduction and the
articulation of “folk” voices, see Jeff Allred, “The Needle and the Damage Done: John A.
Lomax and the Guises of Collecting,” Arizona Quarterly 58, no. 3 (2000) and Michael E.
Staub, Voices of Persuasion: Politics of Representation in 1930s America (Cambridge, U.K.;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), especially 15–23.
26. Frederick Douglass, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American
Slave,” in Frederick Douglass: Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York:
Library of America, 1994), 24.
232
NOTES TO PAGES 149–154
27. See ibid., especially 36–44.
28. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 57.
29. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (New York: Perennial Library, 1990), 1.
30. Another of the folk rhymes Wright cites cuts against this phobic grain, arguably:
“White folks is evil/And niggers are too/So glad I’m a Chinaman/I don’t know what to
do” (47). This bit of signifying would seem to take pleasure in the fluidity of racial positions, looking at oppressed blacks and white masters from the most distant location
imaginable. Behind this playful pose lie obvious utopian stirrings, pointing toward an
identity that has no place within the master/slave dialectic. A significant weakness of 12
Million Black Voices is its relative inattention to moments like this one. Wright ignores
the utopian wish lurking in this rhyme, assuming that it issues from self-hatred, chalking
it up solely to “self-depreciation” that results from “weigh(ing) ourselves and find(ing)
ourselves wanting” (47).
31. Houston A. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1987), xvi.
32. Ibid., 92–93.
33. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great
Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 109–15.
34. Foley, Radical Representations, 170–212, Kelley; Hammer and Hoe, 13–15.
35. Richard Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth:
The Restored Text Established by the Library of America (New York: HarperPerennial,
1998), 335.
36. Stalin’s text itself works similarly, advocating the creation of institutions that will
be staffed by indigenous intellectuals: he moves that “the organs of the national republics
and regions be recruited chiefly from among the local inhabitants acquainted with the
language, life, manners, and customs of the peoples concerned.” The ultimate goal of this
cultivation of Party-aligned indigenous intellectuals is to create a “mass Party literature
in the native languages” but “dealing with fundamental Marxist principles.” See Joseph
Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question: A Collection of Articles and
Speeches, ed. A. Fineberg (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 145–46.
37. Wright also wrote the lyrics to “King Joe,” a blues in honor of boxer Joe Louis,
which was recorded with the Count Basie Orchestra and featured vocals by Paul Robeson.
That the record sold 40,000 advance copies suggests that audiences literally bought
Wright’s facility with the blues idiom. See Fabre, Quest, 237.
38. Interestingly, Jean Toomer’s Cane has a similar structure: the first section takes
place in Georgia and ends with “Blood Burning Moon,” a lynching narrative, such that,
when the second part takes place in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, it seems as if the
racial terror has driven the narrative North.
39. The distinction I am drawing between “itinerary” and “map” comes from Michel
de Certeau. An “itinerary,” de Certeau argues, is rooted in an intersubjective and embodied exchange (e.g., “On your left, you’ll see a gas station”); a “map,” in contrast, “speaks”
from nowhere to everyone, thus relying on readers’ grasp of abstractions such as compass
NOTES TO PAGES 154–157
233
points and lines of latitude. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 120.
40. For a different reading of Wright’s relationship to the Chicago School, see Carla
Cappetti, “Sociology of an Existence: Wright and the Chicago School “ in Richard Wright:
Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah
(New York: Amistad, 1993). Cappetti focuses almost exclusively on Wright’s autobiographical writings, arguing in behalf of a deep homology between the Chicago School’s
focus on the antagonism between individual and society and Wright’s own self-assertion
and self-differentiation vis à vis the gemeinschaftliche world from which he emerged. Had
Cappetti included Black Voices in her frame, she would have had to reckon with Wright’s
implicit critique of Chicago School methodology in ways I make clear below.
41. For an explanation of links between the Chicago School and the documentary
aesthetic of the 1930s, see Stott, Documentary, 160–64. On the politics of the Chicago
School, see Dennis Smith, The Chicago School: A Liberal Critique of Capitalism (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1988), especially chap. 3.
42. For a recent survey of utopian theorizing about the city, see Andy Merrifield,
Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (New York: Routledge, 2002).
43. Louis Wirth, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” Journal of American Sociology 44, no. 1
(1938): 11.
44. Ibid., 15.
45. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt, 2001),
250.
46. Wright’s status as an object of sociological research is no abstraction. Before his
writing career took off, Wright was unemployed in Chicago and was part of the caseload
of Mary Wirth, a social worker and wife of Louis Wirth. In addition to finding Wright
menial employment, she took an interest in him and introduced him to her husband and
other members of the Chicago School. In this way, Wright passed gradually from the
status of pure object of the applied branch of sociological study to subject, as his writing
began to engage social life through the interpretive lens of academic sociology. See Fabre,
Quest, 93, 232.
47. I emphasize Wright’s divergence from or revision of Chicago School sociology in
Black Voices on the basis of race and class; Roderick A. Ferguson, however, has made a
provocative argument in behalf of Wright’s uncritical acceptance of Chicago School views
on gender. For Ferguson, Chicago School theory tends to attribute “social disorganization” to African American niches within the broader ecology of the modern city, a “disorganization” most dramatically manifest in nonheteronormative sexual practices found in
“vice zones.” Wright, like Chicago School theorists and, indeed, much of New Deal social
policy, diagnoses this “disorganization” in gendered terms, as the lack of a rationalizing
and organizing masculine agency. See Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward
a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 31–53.
48. Wright’s treatment of the “kitchenette” bears a family resemblance to two wellknown poems: Langston Hughes’s bitter satire of advertising images and copy, “Come to
234
NOTES TO PAGES 157–167
the Waldorf-Astoria” (1931) and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “kitchenette building” (1945),
both of which shuttle, in a manner reminiscent of Wright’s effort here, between the realm
of “dreams” and the gritty materiality of working-class urban life.
49. As several critics have demonstrated, this tendency to oppose a masculine modernity to feminine others (most prominently, the “feminine” realm of consumption) is not
confined to African American modernism but is ubiquitous in both left- and right-wing
modernisms. See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); Paula Rabinowitz, Labor
and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1991).
50. Houston A. Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s
Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 118.
51. The two most important archival sources for Black Voices (both explicitly acknowledged in Wright’s text) are Chicago-trained African American sociologist Horace
Cayton’s collection of African American materials and the massive trove of documentary photographs in the Library of Congress that Wright’s collaborator Edwin Rosskam
spent the late 1930s collating.
52. Fabre, Quest, 202–6.
53. Wright, Black Boy, 34.
54. Ibid., 34–35.
55. Ibid., 121.
56. Ibid., 136.
57. Ibid., 294.
58. Ibid., 319.
59. Ibid., 320.
60. One cannot be certain that the man is blind, but a close look at an enlargement of
the image suggests damage to the man’s eyes, as does his lack of engagement with the
camera eye despite its obvious closeness. At any rate, Wright’s juxtaposition of the image
with a discussion of readers’ impaired vision strongly suggests that he attributes blindness to the subject. The sense that the two portraits serve as metaphorical bookends for
Wright’s metanarratives of modernization is enhanced, if only for the dedicated reader,
by photographer Jack Delano’s explicit designation of the subject as an “ex-slave” in the
photograph’s record at the Library of Congress: curiously, Wright omitted this fact from
his text, describing him simply as a “sharecropper” from Georgia.
Chapter 5
1. Loudon Wainwright, The Great American Magazine: An Insider History of Life
(New York: Knopf, 1986), 118.
2. Henry Robinson Luce, “The American Century,” in The Ideas of Henry Luce, ed.
John Knox Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 108–9.
NOTES TO PAGES 168–173
235
3. Ibid., 119–20.
4. Ibid., 120.
5. The term “professional-managerial class” (henceforth, PMC) derives from John
and Barbara Ehrenreich’s influential work from the late 1970s and refers to “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the
social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture
and capitalist class relations.” According to the Ehrenreichs, this class began to emerge in
the Progressive era and was consolidating itself in the interwar period, in part through
cultural apparatuses, like Time, that both employed them and addressed them as consumers. See Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,”
in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 12.
6. Richard M. Ohmann, Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of
the Century (New York: Verso, 1996), 29, 200.
7. Dwight Macdonald, “ ‘Time’ and Henry Luce,” Nation, 1 May 1937, 501.
8. Ohmann, Selling Culture, 160.
9. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed. and trans.
John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 53.
10. Quoted in Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, from 1839 to the Present
Day, revised and enlarged ed. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 183.
11. Robert T. Elson, Time Inc.: The Intimate History of a Publishing Enterprise, 3 vols.,
vol. 1 (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 27; Robert E. Herzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political
Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1994), 33–36.
12. Elson, Time Inc., 21–56.
13. Ibid., 9–14. The connections both men had cultivated at Yale played a large role in
the venture’s success: both Hadden and Luce were members of Yale’s exclusive Skull and
Bones society, and most of the original seventy shareholders were Yale graduates. This
pattern persisted through the early development of Time Inc.: at least through the late
1930s, a large majority of the editorial and managerial staff were graduates of Ivy League
institutions. See James L. Baughman, Henry R. Luce and the Rise of the American News
Media (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 34–35, Herzstein, Luce, 72.
14. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 164.
15. Elson, Time Inc., 7.
16. Ibid. Thus the reader of Time receives not so much “all the news that’s fit to print”
as the New York Times promised, but a quick, panoramic summary of the key national
and international developments in politics, economics, society, culture, and leisure.
Time’s rise can also be linked to changes in higher education. Not only was there a sharp
increase in the college-educated population in the interwar period, but that population
was also increasingly educated within the “elective system” by which students specialized
rather than take a set curriculum rooted in the classics. Time thus gratified college graduates’ perceived need for a news source that could quickly and efficiently convey a sense of
236
NOTES TO PAGES 173–174
mastery over a dispersed set of cultural, political, and social fields. See Alice Goldfarb
Marquis, Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times, 1929–1939 (New York: Free Press,
1986), 103–4.
17. Elson, Time Inc., 9.
18. Time thus took up Walter Lippmann’s challenge in Public Opinion, published the
year Time Inc. was founded. Lippmann lamented the failure of newspapers and mass
media to form a coherent representation of reality and proposed the creation of a disinterested elite charged with “inventing, creating, and organizing a machinery of knowledge”
that would remedy the “primary defect of popular government,” to wit, the inadequate
maps of social reality upon which citizens base political decisions. This is not to say that
Lippmann viewed Time as the solution to his dilemma, but that the magazine’s orientation to the PMC and its emphasis on distilling a universe of “facts” into a coherent “picture” are consonant with Lippmann’s influential argument. See Walter Lippmann, Public
Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1997), 230.
19. Marquis, Hopes and Ashes, 101.
20. John William Tebbel and Mary Ellen Zuckerman, The Magazine in America, 1741–
1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 161.
21. High-cultural magazines that suspended publication in the interwar period
include: Literary Digest (1890–1938), Century (1881–1930), The Outlook (1867–1939),
Judge (1881–1932), Delineator (1873–1937), Scribner’s (1870–1939), and Forum (1887–
1940). For more on the relationship of such publications to Time Inc., see Marquis, Hopes
and Ashes, 92–93.
22. The Post is an important reference point because it was the largest-circulation
weekly in the U.S. in the first part of the twentieth century and because its audience was
disproportionately made up of the “business class” male readership Luce sought. To put
things more precisely, the Post does not so much lose readership to Time as it finds itself
on the losing end of two trends that Time Inc. capitalizes on masterfully: the exploitation
of “niche marketing” to create a stable of different publications appealing to different segments of the population under one corporate roof and the broad shift in viewing magazine publication not as a game of maximizing circulation but of maximizing advertising
revenue. By the end of World War II, not only has Time Inc. gained a large share of the
readership the Post had formerly addressed, but it has also expanded into both “higher”
(in economic, if not cultural terms) and “lower” segments of the market through Fortune
and Life, respectively. See Tebbel and Zuckerman, Magazine in America, especially
chapter 12.
23. Elson, Time Inc., 69, 151.
24. Ibid., 123–42.
25. As an index of the relative wealth of Time’s readership, consider that 60 percent of
Time’s readers earned more than $5,000 per year, compared to only 18.8 percent of the
U.S. population; moreover, 70 percent owned homes. See Herzstein, Luce, 54.
26. Marquis, Hopes and Ashes, 116.
27. Ibid., 116–17, Elson, Time Inc., 135.
NOTES TO PAGES 174–175
237
28. My figures are based on U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “CPI
Inflation Calculator,” http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm, accessed 20
August 2008. The only exception to Fortune’s financial success was a brief sag in advertising revenue in the prewar economic boom of 1941, probably due to the industry’s perception that it needed little advertising under such conditions. See Elson, Time Inc., 449.
29. Herzstein, Luce, 47.
30. Or so it seems to many neoconservatives themselves, since the very name of the
most prominent institution associated with the movement, the “Project for a New American Century,” hails Luce, with his vision of an “American Century,” as an intellectual
ancestor.
31. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry
Holt, 1920).
32. Henry Robinson Luce, “Aristocracy and Motives,” in The Ideas of Henry Luce, ed.
John Knox Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 96.
33. Ibid., 99.
34. Time Inc., like all large bureaucracies, was not a monolith, and one must attend to
contradictions and points of resistance within such structures. The company accorded
positions of leadership, for example, to the blatant fascist sympathizer Laird Goldsborough,
Foreign News editor through the mid-1930s, and to liberals like Archibald MacLeish, in
addition to many left-wing writers, researchers, and photographers. There is no question,
however, that the leadership of the company from the 1920s through the early 1940s
reflects an amalgam of the Ivy League WASP conservatism of the interwar period and the
emergent “American century” imperialist project that bears Luce’s distinct stamp.
35. The extent of a media company’s influence is difficult to measure, but by 1939,
Time Inc.’s various publications reached forty million people in the U.S. each month,
approximately one-fourth of the population. Moreover, Gallup and Roper polls of the era
demonstrated that, when the entire organization articulated a uniform message (e.g. support for Wendell Wilkie’s nomination as the Republican Party’s candidate for the presidential elections of 1940), public attitudes moved measurably within four to six weeks.
See Herzstein, Luce, 117–18, 48.
36. Edwin Rosskam, Richard Wright’s photographic editor for Black Voices, outlines
the new prominence of layout in the preface to Edwin Rosskam, Washington: Nerve
Center, ed. Ruby Black (New York: Alliance Book Corporation, Longmans, Green and
Co., 1939), 7.
37. Terry Smith makes a similar argument regarding Fortune’s aesthetics and those
of the Soviet avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. See Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, 343–44.
38. Raymond Williams uses “total flow” to describe the aesthetics of TV programming; this concept emphasizes the capacity of television, as well as photo-based magazines, to render the various fragments of text, sound, and image and the mixture of
advertising and content, as a continuous experience. The argument that Life anticipates
televisual style and fulfills the ideological function television grew into is strengthened,
238
NOTES TO PAGES 175–179
ironically enough, by the magazine’s flagging finances and fading influence from the late
1960s to its demise in 1972, a period in which television news consolidated its dominant
cultural position. See Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New
York: Schocken, 1975), 95.
39. Quoted in Wainwright, Magazine, 93.
40. “Life Begins,” Life, November 23, 1936.
41. Although the company had anticipated sales of 200,000, the entire press run of
466,000 sold out almost instantly, to the dismay of customers and merchants alike. See
Elson, Time Inc., 297.
42. “Life Begins,” 2.
43. The notion of Life as Luce’s baby was part of the office culture: for example, Luce’s
announcement to workers, upon returning from his honeymoon with Clare Booth that
he was “pregnant” with ideas for the new magazine, and an anonymous worker’s claim
that producing Life was “like having quintuplets.” See Baughman, Luce, 89; Elson, Time
Inc., 295.
44. See Wendy Kozol, Life’s America: Family and Nation in Postwar Photojournalism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 30.
45. Baughman, Luce, 81.
46. For a detailed description of the advances in printing, photographic reproduction,
and paper quality that went into the production of Life, see Elson, Time Inc., 283–84,
309–10.
47. Herzstein, Luce, 75.
48. “Pass along” refers to industry estimates of total readership based on surveys that
studied how many times, on average, each copy of a given issue was read: the concept
emerged from the pioneering study of magazine readership that was commissioned by
Life in July 1938 and administered by a group of academics, with help from the pollsters
Gallup and Roper. Life’s pass-along rate was unprecedented, allowing Time Inc. to charge
advertisers higher rates than competitors like the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s,
despite the nominally higher circulation of the latter publications. For a fuller discussion
of Time Inc.’s use of innovations in the technologies of polling and market analysis, see
Elson, Time Inc., 343; Marquis, Hopes and Ashes, 137.
49. Henry Robinson Luce, “Address to the Commissars,” in The Ideas of Henry Luce,
ed. John Knox Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 36–37.
50. Ibid., 40.
51. Ibid., 41.
52. Edmund Burke, “An Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs,” in Edmund Burke:
Selected Writings and Speeches, ed. Peter J. Stanlis (New York: Transition Publishers,
2006), 652.
53. W. A. Swanberg, Luce and His Empire (New York: Scribner, 1972), 105.
54. In language that obviously left its imprint on Luce’s “The American Century,” Ortega y Gasset envisions an ideal state that is a “projection of will” unbound by “language or
territory or consanguinity or history.” Rather, it is “a common purpose offered to dis-
NOTES TO PAGES 179–181
239
persed groups . . . a plan for action, a program for collaboration. . . . It is pure dynamism—
the will to do something in common—and thanks to this feature, the state has no physical
limits.” See Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. Kenneth Moore (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 148.
55. Luce, “Commissars,” 41.
56. Ibid., 42.
57. Ibid.
58. Luce’s plea to advertisers seems to have been well received. In a period of declining
advertising budgets and failing magazines (the total number of U.S. magazines dropped
by thirty-three percent from 1929 to 1933 alone), Time Inc.’s publications prospered. Life
was the most spectacular success, garnering 11 percent of all U.S. advertising revenue by
1940. See Baughman, Luce, 94; David Reed, The Popular Magazine in Britain and the
United States, 1880–1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 161.
59. Photography had been an important part of print journalism since the 1880s in the
U.S., particularly from World War I onward, with the advent of photo-rich weekend supplements, such as the New York Times’ Mid-Week Pictorial, which started in 1914. Other
important precursors include pioneering European photo-essay magazines of the 1920s
and 1930s, like the Muenchner Illustrierte Zeitung; the Parisian Vu, and the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitschrift. In designing Life, Time Inc. relied heavily on European editors and artists, including exiles from Nazi Germany like Kurt Korff, former editor of the Berliner,
and Alfred Eisenstaedt, who became one of Life’s original staff photographers. See Gisele
Freund, Photography and Society, trans. David R. Godine (Boston: D. R. Godine, 1979),
115–39; Christopher Ribbat, “The European Eye: Refugee Photographers from Nazi Germany in the United States,” in Pioneering North America: Mediators of European Culture
and Literature, ed. Klaus Martens (Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen & Neumann, 2000).
60. Elson, Time Inc., 278.
61. Wainwright, Magazine, 35.
62. The team that produced the magazine seems to have itself hesitated between an
emphasis on spectacle and a more sober, informational pose: before they settled upon the
name Life, the magazine was to be named Dime, The Show-Book of the World. See Elson,
Time Inc., 275.
63. Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America, 343–44.
64. Wainwright, Magazine, ibid.
65. Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 182.
66. Baughman, Luce, 46.
67. “Shirley Temple Takes a Trip across the Continent,” Life, July 11, 1938; “Harvard
Professor Records Crickets’ Love Songs,” Life, 1 August 1938.
68. In this way, Life represents an extension of the poetics of advertising that emerges
around the turn of the twentieth century, according to Richard Ohmann. Advertisements
endowed corporations with the subjective “voice” that could address consumers directly
and intimately: “It was a discourse of power, speaking in an amiable voice to those who
had no answering voice, and whose desires and ideas were persuasively conceptualized
240
NOTES TO PAGES 181–186
where the amiable voice originated—in ad agencies.” See Ohmann, Selling Culture, 215–16.
Although there were no bylines in Life articles as such, the first issues of Life did
provide an index, usually in the back of the magazine, that provided credits for photographs.
69. Henry Robinson Luce, “The Photograph and Good News,” in The Ideas of Henry
Luce, ed. John Knox Jessup (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 44.
70. Wainwright, Magazine, 89.
71. Quoted in ibid., 91. From a confidential memo, “Redefinition,” March, 1937.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid., 92.
74. Quoted in Newhall, The History of Photography, from 1839 to the Present Day,
183.
75. One might read the entire history of social documentary work in this way, particularly photographic documentary. The emergence of this aesthetic mode in the muckraking work of the late nineteenth century coincides with the increasing stripping of
professional autonomy from photographers and writers. See Freund, Photography and
Society, 110–14.
76. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan,
(New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 73.
77. One indicator of the “alienation” at work at Time Inc. is the disturbing number of
employees’ suicides and suicide attempts. Agee himself flirted with suicide during his
tenure at Fortune, climbing out of the Chrysler Building and dangling from the windowsill before thinking better of it. The suicide attempts of at least two of Agee’s coworkers
succeeded: Time’s foreign affairs writer, Laird S. Goldsborough, and Fortune’s Managing
Editor, Parker Lloyd-Smith. For an account of Agee’s attempt, see Genevieve Moreau, The
Restless Journey of James Agee (New York: Morrow, 1977), 119–20. For accounts of the
latter suicides, see Elson, Time Inc., 151, 370.
78. Tebbel and Zuckerman, Magazine in America, 166.
79. George Lorimer, the long-time publisher of the Saturday Evening Post and prominent Luce rival, put things more starkly, claiming that publishing is “the business of buying and selling brains; of having ideas and finding men to carry them out.” Quoted in
ibid., 180.
80. For a description of the controversy involving Macdonald’s piece, see Elson, Time
Inc., 253–54.
81. Macdonald, “Time,” 501.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Dwight Macdonald, “Time, Fortune, Life: Pre-Fascist Journalism,” Nation, May 22,
1937, 585.
85. Dwight Macdonald, “ ‘Fortune’ Magazine,” Nation, May 8, 1937, 530.
86. Perhaps surprisingly, given the misogyny of much of the intellectual Left at this time,
Macdonald also emphasizes the role gender plays in this antagonism, pointing out that Time
NOTES TO PAGES 186–190
241
Inc.’s researchers were virtually all women and that they were consequently the worst paid
and most abused class of worker within the organization. See Macdonald, “Pre-Fascist,” 584.
87. Dwight Macdonald, “Fortune,” 528.
88. Dwight Macdonald, “Pre-Fascist,” 585. Macdonald foregrounds Luce’s affinity for Mussolini’s corporatist state by referring to Time Inc. as “pre-fascist” in the title of the
third article and closes it with a rumination of the rightward drift of industry in the mid1930s as a possible manifestation of an American fascism, with Luce as its primary cultural
apparatus.
89. Elson, Time Inc., 389–96; Herzstein, Luce, 80. Michael Denning describes this
struggle within Time Inc. as part of the broader “laboring of American culture” in the
Depression era; I would emphasize, however, the lack of success on the part of left-wing
workers in “laboring” Time Inc., whose control remains firmly in the hands of Luce and
a cadre of high-level editors throughout this period and whose editorial tone remains,
with the exception of the brief period at Fortune that Macdonald cites, extremely conservative throughout the most left-leaning period in twentieth-century American life.
See Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London; New York: Verso, 1996), 93–95.
90. MacLeish to Henry Luce, Conway, MA, May 5, 1937, in R. H. Winnick, ed., Letters
of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 to 1982 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), 288.
91. Ibid.
92. MacLeish to Henry Luce, Conway, MA, July 20,1938, in ibid., 292.
93. Ibid., 293. MacLeish refers at the end of the quotation to his friend Carl Sandberg’s
collection of populist poetry that was first published in 1936.
94. James Agee to Walker Evans, July 27, 1938, Box 11, Folder 12, James Agee Collection, Harry Ransom Center, Austin, TX.
95. Ibid. The other artists include one “Helen,” probably the photographer Helen
Leavitt, and Peter Sekaer, a Danish artist and photographer who worked as Walker Evans’s
assistant.
96. Horkheimer emigrated to the U.S. in 1934, and Adorno followed in 1938. Both relocated to Los Angeles in 1941 and returned to Frankfurt in 1949. See Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research,
1923–1950 (Boston; Toronto: Little Brown and Company, 1973), 39, 88, 172, 282.
97. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:
Continuum, 2002), ix.
98. For a useful survey of the American reception of the strand of “mass culture critique” that stems from Adorno and Horkheimer’s work, see Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996), 158–85, 86–92.
99. Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment, 120.
100. Ibid., 123. Note also that Adorno and Horkheimer invert Luce’s implied relationship of cause and effect. For Luce, the savagery of modern masses is part of a periodic and
“natural” occurrence that requires the supplementary addition of a disciplining aristocracy.
242
NOTES TO PAGES 190–197
Adorno and Horkheimer revise this Hobbsian metanarrative, figuring the “disorder,” such
as it exists, as a product of monopoly capitalism’s power to dislocate and dissociate in the
interests of rendering production more efficient.
101. Ibid., 122.
102. Ibid., 126.
103. Ibid., 162–63.
104. Ibid., 163.
105. Both comments are quoted in Wainwright, Magazine, 42.
106. Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment, 153.
107. Ibid., 121.
108. Ibid., 137.
109. Ibid., 144.
110. Ibid., 126.
111. Ibid., 148.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid., 144–45.
114. Of course, there are differences between the prestige and social standing of the
industrial executive, the tenured academic, and the avant-garde artist. My point is simply
that all enjoy the benefits of cultural and economic capital to varying degrees and that
one thus sees in this essay an ironic recapitulation of the division between the sliver of the
population that has a wide purview and discretion and the masses who are deemed incapable of self-governance and self-management.
115. Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment, 139. Note that here, too, the authors
restrict this freedom severely: the passage continues, “Otherwise, despite its size, this
bloated pleasure apparatus adds no dignity to man’s lives. The idea of ‘fully exploiting’
available technical resources and the facilities for aesthetic mass consumption is part of
the economic system which refuses to exploit resources to abolish hunger.”
116. Rita Barnard argues, in a similar spirit, that the ubiquity of the “wish” in Depression-era mass culture testifies both to the deep impress of mass cultural forms on individual consciousness and the persistence of a utopian impulse that resists mass cultural
formulaic closure. See Rita Barnard, The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance:
Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s (London; New York:
Cambridge, 1995), especially 166–87.
117. Isadore Fox Arbenz, “Lonely Life,” Life, December 21, 1936, 2.
118. Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment, 126.
119. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writing, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken, 1986), 225.
120. Indeed, the “Pictures to the Editor” feature disappeared from Life’s pages in 1944
in what I interpret as a move away from even the modest openness to readers as “producers” one finds in the early volumes of the magazine.
121. “Speaking of Pictures . . .” Life, 26 November 1936.
122. Ibid., 3.
NOTES TO PAGES 199–205
243
Epilogue
1. James Agee and Walker Evans, Three Tenant Families: Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men (Boston; New York: Mariner Books, 2001), 389.
2. August Sander, Antlitz Der Zeit: Sechzig Aufnahmen Deutscher Menschen Des 20.
Jahrhunderts (Munich: K. Wolff, 1929). Sander began work on this project, which he
called “Man of the Twentieth Century,” in 1910. Face of Our Time was the first volume of
photographs that Sander published, but the Nazi regime suppressed the book, labeled
Sander as “decadent,” and subjected him to strict surveillance. For more of the political
context of Sander’s work in the 1930s, see the useful critical and biographical comments
in the “Historical Commentary” by Robert Kramer in August Sander: Photographs of an
Epoch, 1904–1959 (Millerton, N.Y.: Aperture, 1980), 11–38.
3. Walter Benjamin, “A Brief History of Photography,” in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), 210.
4. Ibid., 211.
5. Ibid.
6. Thanks (and apologies) to Eric Cheyfitz.
7. Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” in Melville’s Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall (New
York: Norton, 2002), 35.
8. Ibid., 51.
9. Ibid., 85.
10. Ibid., 63.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid., 64.
14. Ibid., 102.
15. Ibid., 100.
16. Ibid., 101.
17. Ibid., 102.
18. Laurie Robertson-Lorant, Melville: A Biography (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1996),
349.
19. The last clause is a free paraphrase of Walter Benjamin’s well-known “Theses on the
Philosophy of History”: the original text reads, “Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those
who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the
procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with
cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin that he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the
efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil
of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time
a document of barbarism.” See Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 256.
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INDEX
roadside and, 119–20
sedentarist metaphysics and, 117
sentimentalism of, 111
at Time, 118
at Time Inc., 182
agribusiness, centralization of, 109
“Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife” (Evans),
112
Alcove of Angels, 120
Alger, Horatio, 55
aliens, 94
of Arnold, 51
first-person plural and, 193
populism and, 6
Alternating Current (Paz), 59
American Artists’ Congress, 67
“The American Century,” 237n30, 237n34
in Life, 167
Luce on, 167, 189
American Earth (Caldwell), 78
An American Exodus: A Record of
Human Erosion (Taylor and
Lange), 70
American Writers’ Congress (AWC), 48
Burke, K., at, 51
Caldwell and, 78
Anderson, Benedict, 148
absentee owners, in industry, 44
Adams, Ansel, FSA and, 15
Adorno, Theodor, 51, 168, 171, 188–97,
241n96
advertising, 39. See also Madison Avenue
against capitalism, 68
Life and, 239n68
Luce and, 178–79
at Time Inc., 190–91, 239n58
aesthetics of interruption, 15–17, 98,
170, 193
African Americans, 6, 137. See also
black folk
under Jim Crow, 134, 139, 142,
153–54
Marxism and, 55
modernism and, 159
poetics of, 102
roadside and, 125
slavery of, 134
Agee, James, 6, 14–15, 18, 20, 22, 70–71,
93–131, 199
autonomy and, 118
on auto tourism, 96
at Fortune, 25, 118, 187–88
Many Are Called and, 117–18
at Nation, 118
259
260
INDEX
Anderson, Sherwood, 49, 76
in New Masses, 37–38
“And so the fairy godmother turned all
the little white girls into princesses.” (Bourke-White), 73
Arbenz, Isadore Fox, 194, 194–95
“Aristocracy and Motives” (Luce), 174
Arnold, Matthew, 31
aliens of, 51
Asch, Nathan, 66
As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 103–6
“Atoka, Tennessee, ‘And so the fairy
godmother turned all the little
white girls into princesses.’”
(Bourke-White), 71
automobile, 225n26
Agee on, 96
Flink on, 108
folk and, 102, 121–31
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and,
93–131
witness and, 19
migrant laborers and, 109
The Rise of American Civilization on,
107–8
rural life and, 108–9
space-time compression and, 106–7
tourism with, 96, 118, 121
urbanization and, 109
Wilson, W., on, 93
autonomy, 6
Agee and, 118
of craft, 170
Dos Passos and, 48
functional, 55
of imagination, 14
of intellectual labor, 186
in isolation, 49
MacLeish and, 23
power and, 49
Time Inc. and, 51, 191
AWC. See American Writers’ Congress
Baker, Houston, 158–59
Baltimore News, 172
Baroque, Benjamin on, 16
Barron, Hal, 109
Barthes, Roland, 16, 24–25, 69, 167
Barton, Bruce, 179
Baudrillard, Jean, 65
Beard, Charles and Mary, 107–8
technocracy and, 108
Beckett, Samuel, 16
Benito Cereno (Melville), 201–5
Benjamin, Walter, 3, 10, 21, 33,
199–201
on Baroque, 16
on captions, 138–98
Berkeley, Busby, 66
Berman, Marshall, 155
Bernays, Edward, 51
Bezner, Lili Corbus, 18
Biddle, George, 30
“Big News-Story of the Week,” in Life,
181
Billy Budd (Melville), 3
Birmingham Cultural Studies, 54
“The Bitter Drink” (Dos Passos), 51
Black Belt, 152
“Black Belt Nation Thesis,” 152
“The Black Dancer,” 140
black folk, 6, 137
literacy of, 148
print culture and, 148
12 Million Black Voices and, 148
“The Black Maid,” 140
Bloch, Ernst, 3
“Blueprint for Negro Culture” (Wright),
55, 153
blues, 151–52
Boas, Franz, 129
Bourke-White, Margaret, 6, 14, 18, 22,
59–91, 94
Dust Bowl and, 63–64
Fortune and, 62, 67
INDEX
Goodyear Tires and, 64–65
Life and, 62, 67
Madison Avenue and, 25, 65
photographs by, 71, 73, 75, 83, 85, 86,
87, 89
sentimentalism of, 88
Brecht, Bertolt, 21, 33, 171, 212n67
Dos Passos and, 34
on radio, 34
“A Brief History of Photography”
(Benjamin), 3, 199
Brinkley, Alan, 77
Broom, 45
Brown, Sterling, 152
Buhle, Paul, 39
Bundren family (in As I Lay Dying by
Faulkner), 103–6
folk and, 105–6
Burke, Edmund, 179
Burke, Kenneth, 22, 36, 47, 48, 199
at AWC, 51
Dos Passos and, 51–54
by-lines, in Time, 182
cadastration, 43, 217n55
Caldwell, Erskine, 6, 14, 18, 22, 59–91,
94, 225n24
AWC and, 78
Calverton, V.F., 39
camera-guided mind, 171
Camera Lucida (Barthes), 24–25, 167
camera obscura, 24
Cane (Toomer), 149
capitalism, 49
advertising against, 68
expertise and, 44
tourist cabin and, 119
Veblen on, 43–44
wastefulness of, 44
Capra, Frank, 66
captions, 69–75
Benjamin on, 138–98
261
Carby, Hazel, 130
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 188
caves, on roadside, 120
Cayton, Horace, 155
censorship, 148
centralization, 108
of agribusiness, 109
Century, 236n21
Chaplin, Charlie, 158
Chicago School of Urban Sociology,
154–57
civic nationalism, 62
of New Deal, 77
civil rights, 154
civitas (civil), 110
Clifford, James, 220n18
Colliers, 174
“Committee on Technocracy,” 44–45
communism, 152, 168
Communist Party
Dos Passos and, 51
Gold and, 36–37
United States and, 51
concerned photograph, 18, 212n62
“Conferences on the Social Function of
Engineers,” 44
Conroy, Jack, 36
consolidated schools, 108
constructivism, in Russia, 33
Continental Committee on Technocracy,
45
convergence, of documentary and
modernism, 12
Cordt, Anna, 222n30
“Cotton room, formerly prayer meeting
room. Frank Tengle’s farm. Hale
County. Alabama” (Evans), 101
Coughlin, Charles, 77
Counter-Statement (Burke, K.), 199
Cowley, Malcolm, 27–28
Crane, Stephen, 12, 29
Cresswell, Tim, 96
262
INDEX
critics, 11–12
on Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, 96
Croly, Herbert, 42
cultural capital, 36, 144, 177
proletarianism and, 39
cultural front, 30, 62
Wright and, 135
cultural labor, 184
cultural level, 39
cultural work, 22, 27–57
of black folk, 158–62
intellectuals and, 48
politics and, 46
social myths and, 48
Culture and the Crisis: An Open Letter to
the Writers, Artists, Teachers,
Physicians, Engineers, Scientists,
and other Professional Workers of
America, 45–46, 47, 171
culture industry, 168, 171
Adorno on, 171
Gold on, 47
Horkheimer on, 171
ideology of, 192
Life and, 188–97
New Deal and, 170
Sullivan’s Travels and, 60
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception” (Adorno and
Horkheimer), 188–97
Daily News, 172
Da Miano, Andre, 176
dark mirror, 138
nationalism in, 162–66
race in, 162–66
Das Antlitz der Zeit (Sander), 200
A Death in the Family (Agee), 93
decomposition, aesthetics of, 64
Delano, Jack, 140, 143, 164
Delineator, 236n21
De l’organisation sociale (Saint-Simon), 27
Denning, Michael, 30, 62
on American popular culture, 39
Derrida, Jacques, 122
desacralization of culture, 30
Dewey, John, 42
diagesis, 73, 74, 222n29
Dial, 42
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and
Horkheimer), 188
“Dick and Jane,” 222n30
Dickstein, Morris, 66
Ding an sich, 15
docere (to teach), 12
documentary, modernism and, 6–16
Documentary Expression and Thirties
America (Stott), 18
Dos Passos, John, 22, 27–28, 31–32, 36, 48
autonomy and, 48
at AWC, 48
Brecht and, 34
Burke, K., and, 51–54
Communist Party and, 51
Eliot and, 32
Gold and, 37
humanism of, 49
Marxism and, 51
populism of, 49
Veblen and, 51
Young Americans for Freedom, Inc.,
and, 51
Douglass, Frederick, 149
Du Bois, W.E.B., 31, 149
Dust Bowl, Bourke-White and, 63–64
Eatonville, Florida, 129–30
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of 1844 (Marx, K.), 184
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
(Marx, K.), 62
Eisenstaedt, Alfred, 167
electrification, 107–8
INDEX
Eliot, T.S., 12, 14, 31
Dos Passos and, 32
mass culture and, 49
Ellison, Ralph, 55
engineering culture, 41–45
utopia and, 42–43
Veblen and, 42–43
The Engineers and the Price System
(Veblen), 42–43
Enlightenment, 144
Time Inc. and, 189
Entin, Joseph, 15
epics, 102, 138, 212n67
equipment for living, 47
Evans, Walker, 6, 20, 22, 66, 70–71,
93–131
Fortune and, 93–94
FSA and, 113
at Hobe’s Hill, Alabama, 116
in New York City, 116
photographs by, 100, 101, 112, 114, 115,
117
Stott on, 111
Stryker and, 113
evidence, 17–18
Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas
(Cowley), 27
Exminster, South Carolina, 75
Experimental Division, of Time Inc., 173,
175, 184
expertise
capitalism and, 44
Veblen and, 45
Eysteinsson, Astradur, 7, 16
“The Face of Our Time” (Sander), 200
Facts, 172
FAP. See Federal Art Project
“Farmers Around Hung Black Man,” 145
Farm Security Administration (FSA), 4,
207n3
Adams and, 15
263
Evans and, 113
ideology of, 7
Stryker at, 66, 113
Tagg on, 5
fascism, 94, 200–201, 209n23
of Goldsborough, 237n34
Hoover and, 168
of Japan, 165
of Scott, 47
of technology, 45
Faulkner, William, 103–6
“The FB Eye Blues” (Wright), 153
Federal Art Project (FAP), 30
feedback loops, 47, 54
Finnegan, Cara, 5
“Fireplace in Frank Tengle’s home. Hale
County Alabama” (Evans), 100
first-person plural, 193
“Five children of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant
farmer, studying their lessons by
lamplight. Creek County,
Oklahoma” (Lee, R.), 147
Flagg, James Montgomery, 177
Flaherty, Robert, 12
Flink, James, 108
Foley, Barbara, 135, 152
folk, 20, 22, 66, 211n57. See also
black folk
automobile and, 102, 121–31
Bundren family and, 105–6
grotesque and, 154
Gudger family as, 102
Hurston and, 129
Ricketts family as, 102
in subways, 116
Ford, Henry, 225
Ford, John, 133–34
forgotten man, 6, 8, 29, 208n14
Roosevelt and, 134
of South, 68
Fortune, 169
Agee at, 25, 118, 187–88
264
INDEX
Fortune (continued)
Bourke-White and, 62, 67
Evans and, 93–94
Life and, 167–97
Macdonald at, 184–86
MacLeish at, 186–87
Forum, 236n21
Fraser, Nancy, 230n15
Freeman, Joseph, 27–28, 36
at AWC, 48
French, Mary (in The Big Money by Dos
Passos), 49
FSA. See Farm Security Administration
Fugitive poets, 12
functional autonomy, 55
Galbraith, John Kenneth, 57
Gallup, George, 190–91
Garner, Gretchen, 19, 71
Gassett, Ortega y, 179, 189, 238n54
gender, 20, 233n47, 240n86
Gerstle, Gary, 62
“Give Me That Old Communist Spirit,”
152
“Give Me That Old Time Religion,” 152
God’s Little Acre (Caldwell), 62, 225n24
goiter, 88
Gold, Mike, 22, 27–28, 31, 32, 39
at AWC, 48
Communist Party and, 35–37
on culture industry, 47
Dos Passos and, 37
Marxism and, 36–37
proletarianism and, 35, 39–49
on Saturday Evening Post, 47
Goldsborough, Laird, 237n34
“Go Left, Young Writers” (Gold), 37
Goodyear Tires, 64–65
grammatical person, 21
Gramsci, Antonio, 48, 133
The Grapes of Wrath (Ford, J.), 133–34,
137–38
Graves, Robert, 175
“The Great American Roadside” (Agee),
118
Grierson, John, 12, 13
grotesque, 14, 29, 88, 90, 104
Faulkner and, 106
folk and, 154
Gudger, Annie Mae, 110–12, 112, 224n9
Gudger family, 97–102, 109–10
as folk, 102
Hadden, Briton, 172
in Skull and Bones, 235n13
Hale, Grace, 146
Hale County, Alabama, 100, 101
Hanley, Lawrence, 35–36
Harlem, riots in, 165
Harper’s, 173
Heritage of Our Age (Bloch), 3
Herodotus, 10
high modernism, 14
of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 118
Pound and, 102
Hobe’s Hill, Alabama, 97–102, 224n9
Evans at, 116
Hoover, Herbert, 168
fascism and, 168
Hoover Commission on Social Trends, 107
Horkheimer, Max, 168, 171, 188–97,
241n96
hotel civilization, 119
Howells, William Dean, 9, 14, 28
How the Other Half Lives (Riis), 12
Hull, Georgia, 85
humanism, 31
of Dos Passos, 49
of Loeb, 47
of Rautenstrauch, 47
of technocracy, 45
humanity, 113
Hurston, Zora Neale, 129–30, 149, 150
folk and, 129
INDEX
ideology, 36
of culture industry, 192
double-shuffle of, 5
of FSA, 7
photography and, 4
of Scott, 45
of urbanization, 110
of You Have Seen Their Faces, 18
idiocy of rural life, Marx, K. and,
108
idios (private person), 110
idiotic sublime, 110–21
imagination, autonomy of, 14
imagism, 106
Pound on, 98–99
“In A Station of the Metro” (Pound), 99
incorporation, of United States, 42
inheritance, 147
bourgeois, 142
national, 166
racial, 70
Wright on, 144
instinct for workmanship, 53
Institute for Social Research, 188
intellectual labor, 41, 49, 137
autonomy of, 186
intellectuals, 38
cultural work and, 48
proletarianism and, 38
technocracy and, 42
Invisible Man (Ellison), 55–57
Ioganson, Karl, 33
“I reckon I forgot to remember how
old I is.” (Bourke-White), 73
Irish Renaissance, 102
“It ain’t hardly worth the trouble
to go on livin.” (Bourke-White),
87
It Happened One Night (Capra), 66
“I’ve done the best I knew how all my life,
but it didn’t amount to much in
the end.” (Bourke-White), 86
265
Jameson, Frederick, 135
Japan, fascism of, 165
Jews Without Money (Gold), 39
Jim Crow, African Americans under, 134,
139, 142, 153–54
Joyce, James, 12
Judge, 236n21
Juliet’s balcony, 120
Kabnis, Ralph, 149
Kazin, Alfred, 7–11
on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 96
modernism and, 11
Kelley, Robin, 152, 154
kingdom of culture, 31
“King Joe” (Wright), 232m37
King Lear, 125–26
kitchenette, 157, 233n48
Kultur, 31
Laclau, Ernesto, 7
LaHaye, Tim, 84
Land of the Free (MacLeish), 76
Lange, Dorothea, 66, 70, 151
large-format camera, 111
late modernism, 15
layout, 19–20
Lee, Ivy, 51
Lee, Russell, 141, 147
Lefebvre, Henri, 155
“Left Behind” (LaHaye), 84
Leica Camera, 196, 196
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Agee and
Evans), 6, 14–15, 18, 20, 22,
70–71, 199
automobile and, 93–131
critics on, 96
high modernism of, 118
Kazin on, 96
on mass culture, 95, 97
on mass media, 95
narrative in, 122
sedentarist metaphysics and, 97
266
INDEX
Levinas, Emmanuel, 59
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 93
liberty, 49
technicians and, 49–50, 54
Life, 20
advertising and, 239n68
“The American Century” in, 167
beginning of, 176–80
“Big News-Story of the Week”
in, 181
Bourke-White and, 62, 67
Fortune and, 167–97
photography in, 180–83
“Pictures to the Editor” in, 193–94
Time and, 167–97
“We Americans” and, 167–97
“Life Begins.” (Da Miano), 176
Lippmann, Walter, 42, 236n18
literacy, of black folk, 148
Literary Digest, 236n21
Literary Monthly, 172
Locket, Georgia, 86, 87
Loeb, Harold, 45
humanism of, 47
Lomax, John A. and Alan, 149
London, Jack, 28, 29, 34
“Lonely Life” (Arbenz), 194
Long, Huey P., 77
“Look, ‘Now is the day of salvation.”’
(Bourke-White), 85
Lorca, Garcia, 102
Lorentz, Pare, 66, 76
Lorimer, George, 173
Luce, Henry, 23, 51, 167–97
advertising and, 178–79
on “The American Century,” 167, 189
biographical sketch of, 172–75
power of, 94
in Skull and Bones, 184–85, 235n13
urbanization and, 189
luxurious riot, Pound on, 99
lynching, 144–46, 145
Macdonald, Dwight, 23
at Fortune, 184–86
in Nation, 184–86
at Time Inc., 182
MacLeish, Archibald, 23, 76
autonomy and, 23
at AWC, 48
at Fortune, 186–87
at Time Inc., 182, 237n34
Madison Avenue, 20, 67–68
Bourke-White and, 25, 65
modernism of, 82
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 12
manual labor, 41, 47
Many Are Called (Evans), 116
Agee and, 117–18
March of Time (Time Inc.), 76, 169
Marx, Guido, 44
Marx, Karl, 62, 184
idiocy of rural life and, 108
Marxism, 7, 155
African Americans and, 55
Dos Passos and, 51
Gold and, 36–37
Third Period of, 36–37
in U.S., 36
masculinity, 158, 216n50
masochism, 125
Mason, R. Osgood, Mrs., 129
mass culture, 20, 170
control of, 179
Eliot and, 49
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on,
95, 97
phonograph and, 121–22
Pound and, 49
Ricketts family and, 102
rural life and, 62
utopia and, 242n116
mass media, 33
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men on, 95
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 12, 33
INDEX
McClure’s, 169
McNamara, Robert, 57
media conglomerates, 30–31, 33
Melville, Herman, 3, 201–5
metropolitanism, 107
Middle Passage, 14, 139, 142
migrant laborers, automobile and, 109
Miller, Tyrus, 15–16
Mills Hill, Alabama, 95
mind-guided camera, 167–97
mise en scene, 122
Mitchell, W.J.T., 135, 208n21
MLA International Bibliography, 11
Moana (Grierson), 12
modernism, 11, 15
African Americans and, 159
convergence and, 12
documentary and, 6–16
Kazin and, 11
of Madison Avenue, 82
Modern Times (Chaplin), 158
Montaigne, Michel de, 93
Montgomery, Alabama, 83
Moore, Marianne, 13
Moses, Robert, 57
movies, 39
Mules and Men (Hurston), 129, 150
Mumford, Lewis, 36
Munsey’s, 169
Mussolini, Benito, 175
Myth and Meaning (Levi-Strauss), 93
narrative
in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 122
in You Have Seen Their Faces, 76–81
Natanson, George, 139–40
Natchez, Mississippi, 159
Nation, 67, 169
Agee at, 118
Macdonald in, 184–86
nationalism, 25
civic, 62, 77
267
in dark mirror, 162–66
of New Deal, 77
“Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,”
Roosevelt and, 94
Native Son (Wright), 159
natural aristocracy, 179
negative dialectics, 51
Negro farthest down, 8, 208n14
“Negro Maid, Washington, D.C.”
(Delano), 140
“Negro teacher and his wife sitting under
photos taken of them twenty years
ago.” (Delano), 143
“The New Century.” See “We Americans”
New Conservatism, 51
New Deal
civic nationalism of, 77
culture industry and, 170
FAP of, 30
Finnegan on, 5
Roosevelt and, 3–4
technocracy and, 41, 76
New Masses, 27–28, 31–32
Anderson, S. in, 37–38
proletarianism and, 36
The New Path to Reading (Cordt),
222n30
New School for Social Research, 44
New Southern Studies, 135
Newspaperman’s Guild, 186
New York City, Evans in, 116
New Yorker, 173
New York Times, 173
Time and, 235n16
Nichols, Bill, 210n40
nomadic metaphysics, 96–97
Norris, Frank, 29
North of the Danube (Bourke-White and
Caldwell), 94
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 59
Odets, Clifford, 133
268
INDEX
“Of course I wouldn’t let them plaster signs
all over my house, but it’s different
with those shacks the niggers live
in.” (Bourke-White), 83
Office of War Information (OWI), 4,
207n3
Of Grammatology (Derrida), 122
“Of Repentance” (Montaigne), 93
Ohmann, Richard, 169–70
On Native Grounds (Kazin), 7
Operator, in photography, 24
optical unconscious, 210n46
The Outlook, 236n21
OWI. See Office of War Information
Park, Robert, 133, 155, 156–57
Partisan Review, 38
pass along, 178, 238n48
Paz, Octavio, 59
pedagogy, 39
of 12 Million Black Voices, 133–66
people’s culture, 77
Phillips, William, 38–39
phonograph, 225n22
mass culture and, 121–22
photographic essay, 182
photography
captions for, 69–75, 138–98
early journalistic history of, 239n59
ideology and, 4
in Life, 180–83
Operator in, 24
Roosevelt and, 3–4
Smith on, 5
Spectator in, 24
Spectrum in, 24
Picasso, Pablo, 12
“Pictures to the Editor,” in Life, 193–94
planning boards, 42
“Plantation owner. Mississippi Delta, near
Clarksdale, Mississippi” (Lange), 151
plausible fictions of the real, 10, 14–17
PMC. See professional-managerial class
Poem of the Deep Song (Lorca), 102
poetry
Moore on, 13
Pound on, 13
Poirer, Richard, 11
polis (politics), 110
politics, cultural work and, 46
“Poor people get passed by.” (BourkeWhite), 89
popular culture, in United States, 39
Popular Front, 21
populism
aliens and, 6
of Dos Passos, 49
Laclau and, 7
portable camera, 13
postmodernism, 15
Pound, Ezra, 12
high modernism and, 102
on imagism, 98–99
on luxurious riot, 99
mass culture and, 49
on poetry, 13
poverty, of rural life, 4, 62, 90
power, autonomy and, 49
print culture, 25
black folk and, 148
professional-managerial class (PMC), 169,
235n5
Time and, 172
Project for a New American Century,
237n30
projection of will, 238n54
proletarianism, 29, 31, 216n44
cultural capital and, 39
Gold and, 35, 39–49
impossible location of, 34–41
intellectuals and, 38
New Masses and, 36
wild youth and, 53
propaganda, 53–54, 135
INDEX
posters, 33
reception and, 54
for socialism, 68
Public Opinion, 236n18
public relations, 218n84
Rabinowitz, Paula, 20–21, 61–62
race, 23, 72, 134, 137. See also African
Americans
in dark mirror, 162–66
radio, 32–33, 103, 107
Brecht on, 34
Rahv, Philip, 38–39
Rainey, Ma, 152
rationalization, 108
Rautenstrauch, Walter, 44–45
humanism of, 47
“Reality and its Shadow” (Levinas), 59
reception, 39
propaganda and, 54
recomposition, 64
redistributionism, 44, 142–43, 148,
230n15
reductio ad absurdum, 106
Regarding the Pain of Others (Sontag), 133
republic of spirit, 31
Resettlement Authority, 4, 207n3
“Resolution of the Council of Three”
(Vertov), 27
“A Retrospect” (Pound), 98
Revolt of the Masses (Gassett), 179
“Revolutionary Symbolism in America”
(Burke), 48
“Rhetoric of the Image” (Barthes), 69
Ricketts family, 97–102, 109–10, 224n9
as folk, 102
mass culture and, 102
Riis, Jacob, 7, 12
riots, in Harlem, 165
The Rise of American Civilization (Beard
and Beard), 107–8
ritual, 69–70
269
The River (Lorentz), 66
The Road (Asch), 66
roadside, 106
African Americans and, 125
Agee and, 119–20
caves on, 120
“Roadside Stand Near Birmingham”
(Evans), 115
“Roadside View, Alabama Coal Area
Company Town” (Evans), 113, 114
Roosevelt, Franklin
forgotten man and, 134
“Nation’s No. 1 economic problem”
and, 94
New Deal and, 3–4
photography and, 3–4
Wells on, 76
Rosskam, Edwin, 76
Rothstein, Arthur, 14, 163, 210n41
Rural Free Delivery, 108
rural life, 61. See also Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men
automobile and, 108–9
mass culture and, 62
poverty of, 4, 62, 90
Russia, constructivism in, 33
Saab, Joan, 30
sabotage, 217n53
in industry, 43
sadism, 125
Saint-Simon, Henri de, 27
Sander, August, 200
Saturday Evening Post, 173, 174, 236n22
Gold on, 47
Savage, Dick, 49
Say, Is This the U.S.A.? (Bourke-White and
Caldwell), 94
Scott, Howard, 45
fascism of, 47
ideology of, 45
Scotts, Arkansas, 73
270
INDEX
Scribner’s, 236n21
second great transformation, of United
States, 42, 216n47
sedentarist metaphysics, 9–976
Agee and, 117
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and, 97
Selections from the Prison Notebooks
(Gramsci), 133
sentimentalism, 72, 226n39
of Agee, 111
of Bourke-White, 88
of You Have Seen Their Faces, 70
sharecroppers, 74, 94, 142
Shloss, Carol, 18
shooting scripts, 227n43
Skull and Bones, 184–85, 235n13
slavery
of African Americans, 134
in 12 Million Black Voices, 142–48
Smart Set, 173
Smith, Terry, 172, 180–81
on photography, 5
socialism, propaganda for, 68
social myths, cultural work and, 48
Soja, Edward, 110
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 208n8
“Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived on this
place since the world began.”
(Bourke-White), 85
Sontag, Susan, 133
South
forgotten man of, 68
Wright and, 148–54
space-time compression, automobile and,
106–7
Spectator, in photography, 24
Spectrum, in photography, 24
spontaneous witness, 19, 71–72
Stalin, Joseph, 152, 232m36
“Steel worker in Pittsburgh steel mill.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania”
(Rothstein), 163
Stott, William, 6, 18, 135
on Evans, 111
Stover, John, 109
Strychacz, Thomas, 49
Stryker, Roy, 4, 15, 227n43
Evans and, 113
at FSA, 66, 113
studio system, 170
Sturges, Preston, 59–62
“Subway Passenger, New York” (Evans),
117
subways, folk in, 116
suicides, at Time, Inc, 240n77
Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges), 59–62
culture industry and, 60
supercommunities, 107
Sweetfern, Alabama, 89
Szalay, Michael, 30
Tagg, John, 5
Tate, Allen, 12
Taylor, Paul, 70
technicians, 31
liberty and, 49–50, 54
technocracy and, 45–54
technocracy, 41–45
Beards and, 108
humanism of, 45
intellectuals and, 42
New Deal and, 41, 76
technician and, 45–54
Technocracy, Inc., 45
technology, fascism of, 45
technostructure, 57, 219n103
telephone, 103
tenements, 35–40, 55
Tengles, Frank, 100, 101
“That’s Fanny’s boy sitting in the window
watching his Aunt Nell come
through.” (Bourke-White), 75
They Must Be Represented
(Rabinowitz), 20
INDEX
Third Period, of Marxism, 36–37
third-person narration, 76–81
Tichi, Cecilia, 216n50
Time, 169
Agee at, 118
by-lines in, 182
Life and, 167–97
New York Times and, 235n16
PMC and, 172
readership of, 236n25
Time Inc., 23, 62, 76, 167–97. See also
Fortune; Life; Nation
advertising at, 190–91, 239n58
Agee at, 182
autonomy and, 51, 191
Enlightenment and, 189
Experimental Division of, 173, 175, 184
Macdonald at, 182
MacLeish at, 182, 237n34
suicides at, 240n77
Timestyle, 51, 170, 182
Tobacco Road (Caldwell), 62, 225n24
“Tony Thompson, born in slavery. Greene
County, Georgia” (Delano), 164
Toomer, Jean, 149
total flow, 175, 237n38
touchstones, 31
tourism, with automobile, 96, 118, 121
tourist cabin, 118–19
capitalism and, 119
tourist traps, 118
“Towards Proletarian Art” (Gold), 35
“Tradition and the Individual Talent”
(Eliot), 31
translocal rural society and culture, 109
trial, 17–23
Turner, Frederick, 174
12 Million Black Voices (Wright), 5, 6,
22–23, 25
black folk and, 148, 158–62
Chicago School of Urban Sociology
and, 154–57
271
cultural work and, 158–62
dark mirror in, 162–66
pedagogy of, 133–66
slavery in, 142–48
urbanization and, 157
we the people, 135–38
United States
Communist Party and, 51
incorporation of, 42
Marxism in, 36
popular culture in, 39
second great transformation of, 42,
216n47
unity, 70
Untermeyer, Louis, 36
“Urbanism as a Way of Life” (Wirth), 155
urbanization
automobile and, 109
ideology of, 110
Luce and, 189
Soja on, 110
12 Million Black Voices and, 157
utopia
engineering culture and, 42–43
mass culture and, 242n116
Valery, Paul, 16
Veblen, Thorstein, 41–45
on capitalism, 43–44
Dos Passos and, 51
engineering culture and, 42–43
expertise and, 45
Vertov, Dziga, 12, 27
vital center, 56, 219n102
voice-over, 76
Waiting for Lefty (Odets), 133
wall-newspapers, 193
Warner, Michael, 135–36
Washington, Booker T., 153
Washington: Nerve Center (Rosskam), 76
272
INDEX
“We Americans” (Luce), Life and, 167–97
Wells, H.G., 76
we the people, 135–38
Wharton, Edith, 31
wild youth
of Gold, 49
proletarianism and, 53
Williams, William Carlos, 13
Wilson, Christopher, 28
Wilson, Edmund, 76
Wilson, Woodrow, on automobile, 93
Wirth, Louis, 155
witness, 18–20
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and, 19
Woods family, 97–102, 109–10, 224n9
Woolf, Virginia, 12
Wright, Richard, 5–6, 22–23, 25, 55–56,
232m37
cultural front and, 135
South and, 148–54
“The Writer as Technician” (Dos Passos),
48, 49
Yale University, Skull and Bones at,
184–85, 235n13
You Have Seen Their Faces (BourkeWhite and Caldwell), 6, 18, 22,
59–91
commercial success of, 94
ideology of, 18
narrative in, 76–81
sentimentalism of, 70
Young Americans for Freedom, Inc., Dos
Passos and, 51
“The Young Man’s Burden” (Wilson, W.),
93