’s "The Vision Of The Thirties" Essay, Research Paper
THE VISION OF THE THIRTIES
Joseph Freeman
(Talk delivered before The American Studies Majors at
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, May 7, 1958)
The Nineteen Thirties was an important decade, a turning point in contemporary
history and literature.
It was an exciting decade — far more exciting than the Twenties, though in
quite a different way.
It was a terrible decade — a decade of blood and terror; a nightmare Time of
Troubles; an Age of Assassins who coldly and deliberately murdered millions of men, women
and children in scientifically prepared abattoirs; a decade whose full horror we are only
now beginning to comprehend; a decade of show trials, fake accusations, fake confessions,
bloodpurges, secret assassinations, genocide; a decade in which the new Ceasars worked out
the ideology and the techniques of something never before known in history –
totalitarianism: a decade that exploded in the biggest war in all history so far.
It was a progressive decade. In the United States, the New Deal put into effect
social and economic reform which the American people had been demanding since the 1870’s.
These reforms are still with us — social security and all.
The Nineteen Thirties could easily be called the Age of Democracy. Never had the
American dream of the democratic nation and the democratic man been so aflame with
conviction, so vibrant with reality; never before had the groups and classes which used to
feel like step-children, the so-called outgroups, felt so much a part of the nation. They
were heard, they were taken in, they were in and of the American family. In the 1930s our
idea and our realtiy was — Americans all and all Americans for democracy.
And, despite the horrors of the Age of Assassins, the Thirties were also progressive in
other parts of the world — in Russia, for example.
While Stalin was shooting his rivals wholesale and retail, Russia succeeded in building
a type of economy which the world had never seen before. This economy has raised Russia to
second place in the world and many people in this country are now afraid it may raise her
to first place. It is an economy that has made Russia strong, given her the lead so far in
the conquest of outer space and his made her the model of half the world in Asia, Africa
and part of Europe.
This has been a most expensive process — material progress at the cost of life,
freedom and humanity on a gigantic scale. But it is there for better or for worse. And at
this moment it is fascinating people in this country. Not the writers and artists and
actors who were fascinated by Russian economic progress in the Thirties. These are today
totally disillusioned with Russia. The Americans who are today fascinated by Russia’s
economic progress are our big businessmen and financiers.
Finally, the Nineteen Thirties was a decade of great creative power in American
literature and the arts; more creative, in my opinion, that the Nineteen Fifties have been
so far – and this decade has only nineteenth more months to go.
———-
You may be surprised to hear that the Thirties was creative. Legend says different.
That was the age of "social consciousness" in the arts, of political radicalism
among writers and artists, of "proletarian literature." And, the legend goes,
there was a lot of smoke but little fire.
We are too close to the Thirties to see them in proper perspective. We are still
absorbing and re-evaluating the Twenties, which until recently were also considered
sterile. Soon there will be books about the Thirties written with perspective and
we shall see how creative that decade actually was.
Take the novel. True, we did not have with us in those days the new writers who
nowadays make the best-seller lists and crowd the little reviews. But we managed somehow
with Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, James T. Farrell, Josephine
Herbst, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood
Anderson.
In poetry we did not have the San Francisco School. But T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost
were at the height of their powers and so were Edna St. Vincent Millay, Carl
Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Louise
Bogan, Genevieve Taggard, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Kenneth
Fearing, Muriel Rukheyser, W. H. Auden and others.
And what about the San Francisco School? In the Thirties, when the New Masses was
still a literary magazine, we published the poems of Kenneth Rexroth.
In the theatre we did not have the angry young men. We did have Eugene O’Neill,
Clifford Odets, Robert Sherwood, Maxwell Anderson and Lillian Hellman. There is nothing
today that is quite like the Theatre Union, the Group Theatre and the WPA theatre.
Out of the theatre movement of the Thirties came Orson Welles and Clifford Odets, Elia
Kazan and Budd Schulberg, Arthur Miller and Harold Clurman, who began his distinguished
career in the theatre as a drama critic for the New Masses. And out of the Thirties
came dozens of the best actors of stage and screen. And from the literary movement
inspired by "social consciousness" Hollywood acquired some of its best screen
writers: Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, John Howard Lawson, Michael Blankfort. And out of
the Thirties there also came some of our best literary critics: Granville Hicks, Horace
Gregory, Robert Gorham Davis, Yvor Winters, O. F. Mathiessen, Newton Arvin, Alfred Kazin.
That was the decade when many American writers and artists "went Left" as the
phrase was, and there were magazines and groups where these men and women found scope for
their energies, aroused by a passion for democratic justice, a fear of totalitariansim, an
immense hope for the future.
We have no such groups and no such magazines today. Everywhere writers and artists
complain of their isolation. It’s everyone for himself and the publisher or dealer
take the hindmost.
In the Thirties, writers and artists were creative not only individually but together.
They were bound together in comradeship by a common faith, a common basic cause, a vision
which fired their creative powers. That vision was worldwide. When we in the United
States held our writers’ congresses in the Thirties, we had fraternal delegates from
France, and exiled writers from Spain and Germany and Italy. And when President Lazaro
Cardenas called a congress of writers, artists and scientists in Mexico City early in
1937, several Americans were invited to attend as delegates.
An extraordinary number of writers of all kinds wrote for the New Masses in
those days; if you did not write for us, you wrote for New Theatre or for Dynamo,
a poetry magazine we founded; or for Partisan Review, founded as an offshoot of
the New Masses and the John Reed Clubs and edited brilliantly to this day by two
able writers who began their careers in the pages of the New Masses in the early
Thirties.
Let us note this. In those days there were magazines of that kind which
developed ideas and published writers, looked for writers and took particular pains
with unknown writers. Many distinguished novelists, poets, critics, screenwriters
and dramatists got their start in one or more of these magazines.
They were not commercial magazines and never made any profit. They were dedicated to a
dream and when they encouraged young writers it was for the sake of that dream. To find
and develop new writers was to find and develop new champions of the Cause; or as Walt
Whitman put it, echoing England’s Puritan Revolution, The Good Old Cause, The Great Idea.
This idea, this vision of the Thirties gave as all something that is lacking today. We
speak of conformity and non-conformity, but this is a byproduct. What we had in the
Thirties and what is lacking today is the inspiring vision and what it gives people.
One writer has called the Thirties The Red Decade; another, The Angry Decade. Each of
these descriptions is true–in a way. But if I may paraphrase Saint Augustine, all this is
false in a way precisely because it is true in a way.
Many people in the Thirties were angry at injustice, as Steinbeck was in The grapes
of Wrath; and many people became radical. But this was not the focal point of the
decade. The focal point was the vision and around that vision we found cooperation,
community, and communion.
———-
What was the dream, the vision which animated and inspired American writers in the
Thirties; roused their creative powers to the highest pitch; united them in cooperation,
community and communion with each other, with writers the world over and with millions of
men and women everywhere, from every class, race and group, every occupation, every
financial bracket, every social level?
Before I try to define this vision, let us face one other fact about the Thirties. It
is hard to write about any period, until it is far enough behind us for us to view
it with perspective. But the Thirties are a special period. They are a period of trauma
and when people think about the Thirties they encounter an emotional block.
They encounter an emotional block because the Thirties, being the Age of Assassins, was
the Age of Terror.
There is no real literature in Germany about the Thirties. Who is going to set down
today the horrors of the Hitler regime, the terror, the mass murder?
There is no real literature in Russia about the Thirties. Who would dare to tell the
truth about Stalin’s reign of terror, the paranoid murder of millions, the butchery of
rivals and friends, the enslavement of a people by force and fraud?
But it is not only Germany and Russia that went through a terror which has left us a
trauma that needs to be overcome in order that we my be free again in mind and heart to
think courageously and truly about our life in the twentieth century and our destiny in
it.
The great terror took place in Germany and Russia in the Thirties. In the case of
Germany it lasted till the Third Reich went up in flames in the spring of 1945. In Russia
it lasted till Stalin’s death early in 1953, though in some ways it is not over yet.
In the United States the terror came in the Fifties.
True, nobody in this country got shot. Nobody was gassed in a concentration camp.
Nobody was pushed into a bake oven. But do not underestimate the effectiveness or the
consequences of the terror here in the current decade.
Man lives not by bread alone and he dies not by guns alone. The terror in this country,
the so-called "witch-hunt" whose grim symbol was the late, O far too late
Senator McCarthy, ruined many lives, many innocent lives, and many of them remain ruined
to this day.
I do not want to lacerate your feelings with the details of the American Terror. There
is a reaction setting in against it. For our purpose it is important to keep in mind that the
Terror of the Fifties, whatever its connection with Korea and the Cold War, was in
effect an attack on the Thirties.
———-
One thing the terror meant was this: for the first time in the history of the United
States, official power was directed toward thought as such.
O there had been violations of civil liberty before. In the 1850’s — a century ago –
the Abolitionists were given a rough time. During the great industrial wars from 1890 to
1914, labor was given a rough time. During the Deportation Delirium of the early 1920’s
the radicals were given a rough time. But these were primarily economic and political
conflicts. Slave owners lynched people who wanted to abolish slavery. Industrialists
lynched people who wanted to reform the private enterprise system or to abolish it.
In the terror of the Fifties hundreds and hundreds of American writers, artists,
actors, directors, school teachers, college professors and scientists were fired from
their jobs; penalized economically and socially; and jailed for ideas! For
something they had published! For belonging to this or that radical organization. For
writing in this or that radical magazine!
And nine times out of ten, the alleged "crime" had been committed in the
Thirties!
The reaction of the Fifties made war on the vision of the Thirties and a large number
of the victims were intellectuals.
Right or wrong as these people may have been in the Thirties, they were being punished
now — in the Fifties — retroactively for thinking, feeling, talking and writing.
This was war on the mind and spirit of man!
Such was the terror. It is not really over yet. And people ask silly questions.
Why is the present so sterile in ideas? Why are people so conformist? Why are they
afraid to think, to speak up? Why have we no great ideas to inspire our writers? Why is
there so little genuine critical appraisal of current events, current literature, current
leadership?
And why is our youth — youth, the period of dreams, visions and hopes from time
immemorial — why is our youth so scared, so conservative, so timid, so lacking in
vision and hope and daring?
Why indeed!
You use the whole tremendous force of state and society to destroy people for
daring to have vision in the Thirties — and you expect this to inspire our youth to have
vision in the Fifties!
Now you can see one reason why it is hard to get good studies of the Thirties.
That decade was falsified gigantically by Stalin; it was falsified gigantically by
Hitler. And in this country it his been gigantically falsified by the Terror, the Great
Persecution, the Witch Hunt; by the war on the intellectuals, on the vision of the
Thirties.
And, as in every terror, the victims are themselves affected by this falsification.
People who are penalized for their ideas in the Thirties are not inclined to remember
that decade clearly and vividly. Nature takes care of that.
We know what memory is like when it is painful. We all tend to forget — or, as the
Freudians say, to repress — painful memories. And so, many people have written falsely
about the Thirties in books, newspapers and magazines and have spoken falsely about it on
the witness stand, all in good faith.
It was too painful to remember the truth. The Terror made it painful. And
there is that little thing called survival. It is made a crime to have shared the
vision of the Thirties, then you are asked to write about it. O yes, you did share
that vision! But it is dangerous to admit it now. So you write: WHO – ME?
The story now is that we knew all along that communism was a fraud. Communists
were all stupid, inefficient, cruel, crazy for power, corrupt, foreign agents.
We never really believed that insane, bloodthirsty ideology. We got into the Movement
as a kind of joke, by accident. We stayed there for years God knows why — secretly making
fun of the Movement and everybody in it, sabotaging everything and everyone whenever and
wherever we could.
We were always at heart patriotic in the most ultra-conservative sense of the word. We
were patriotic every day of the year, every hour on the hour, true-blue Pegler patriots
who deserved a pat on the back from the American Legion and a kiss from every Daughter of
the American Revolution between twenty and thirty.
What did we do in the Movement all those years — including the years of that frightful
Russian bloodpurge which now so haunts and horrifies us? We really don’t know. But we were
aware all the time how mad and ghoulish the whole thing was and, anyway, we are fighting
those sons-of-bitches today and we hope that our former friends and comrades do lose
their jobs and go to jail and we shall be delighted to help them get there.
———-
This is obviously false. A man is married to a woman for years; he lives with her, has
children with her, makes sacrifices for her and accepts the sacrifices she makes for him.
They say they are in love and everybody believes them and everything points to it.
Then they quarrel and get divorced and the man says: "Look at her. What an ugly
horror! What a lush! What a wicked, immoral dame! You know something? She was always like
that. From the day I met her, I knew she was a combination of Messalina, Fanny Hill, Becky
Sharp, the witch in Hansel and Gretel and the Gorgon Medussa !"
There are wounded lovers and there are wounded idealists who falsify the past that way.
But what they tell us cannot be true and for a simple reason.
In order to be DISenchanted you must first be ENchanted. In order to lose your belief,