MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio City
Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek towards the pastures of
plenty in California? To readers of journalist Eugene Lyons' 1941 best–
seller it was the "Red Decade." Revisionist historians like Warren
Susman and Loren Baritz countered by drawing attention to the conser–
vative heartland of the middle class, with its deep economic fears yet also
its interest in sports, mystery novels, self-improvement, and mass enter–
tainment. Some historians like Daniel Aaron, James B. Gilbert, and
Richard Pells focused on the intellectual history of the thirties, analyzing
the radicalism of the era in terms that reach back to prewar socialism and
progressivism. Other writers in the popular tradition of
Only Yesterday
and
Middletown
concentrate on the social history of everyday life. Still
others like Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. center on the administrative and politi–
cal history of the New Deal and the dramatic figure of Roosevelt him–
self, whose dominating presence became a force of mythic proportions.
Most recently, younger students of the thirties have re-examined the
radical left, especially the unsung role of women like Josephine Herbst,
Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur in bringing gender concerns, family
histories, and deep personal emotions into the fiction and journalism of
the era. Much less convincingly, a few scholars have excavated and de–
fended the proletarian writing of the 1930s, in part because they feel it
has been unjustly neglected but more because they identify with its polit–
ical program.
When I was in college in the late 1950s, the thirties appeared to us
in the hazy distance as a golden age when writers, artists, and intellectuals
developed strong political commitments and enlisted literature on the
side of the poor and the destitute. We were able to mythologize the
thirties because we never read most of what was written then . (Most of
it was long out of print.) We hated the blandness and repressive limits of
the political culture of the fifties, and looked back wistfully at the ex–
cited ideological climate of the thirties, about which we knew next to
nothing.
Years later, when I finally looked into some of the ideological de–
bates of the thirties, whose radical intensity I had admired from afar, I
was horrified by the mean-spirited brutality of many sectarian polemics,
which seemed more concerned with doctrinal purity than with advanc–
ing any real social change. For all their dialectical ingenuity, they were
deaf to the free play of ideas, and breathed an atmosphere of personal
aggression and fundamentalist dogma.
Yet this was also a period when writers as well as photographers
keenly pursued an interest in the backwaters of American life: the travail
