Living Mythically: The Thirties

Author(s): Eric Mottram

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of American Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3 (Dec., 1972), pp. 267-287
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British Association for American Studies
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Amer. Stud. 6, 3, 267-287 Printed in Great Britain
267

Living Mythically: The Thirties

by ERIC MOTTRAM
s London
King College,

I
In May 1932 the Museum of Modern Art opened on 53rd Street in New
York in an old mansion. A number of artists associated with New Masses,
the leftist magazine founded in 1925, showed a collection of political murals
on imbalance and social cruelty of the
the economic
sharply commenting '
times. Hugo Gellert's mural was entitled Us fellas gotta stick together ',
a an between a young
phrase drawn from already notorious conversation
member of the wealthy Vanderbilt who had obtained a
family, reporting job
on a Hearst newspaper, and his equally rich interviewee, Al Capone, then
in gaol. Capone, as usual, knew the score and told the young capitalist
* *
inheritor: Us fellas gotta stick together.' Gellert's mural neatly encapsu
lated the Hearst-gangsterdom axis, since the centre of corruption, then as
now, in America was the interlocking of business and crime. Naturally,
President Hoover, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller found
' '
the exhibition offensive since they were the fellas in the mural with

Capone. Another picture, by the great political artist, Ben Shahn, showed
figures in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and one by William Gropper, another
fine political artist, showed J. P. Morgan a
and Andrew Mellon, couple of
two
notorious millionaires, eating tickertape with pigs, and protected by
militiamen. The Gropper was entitled, with little subtlety, but quite accu
*
on theWall '.
rately, The Writing
Louis Adamic has a nice example of business hypocrisy at the height of
the Depression :

Daniel Willard, president of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (on which began
'
the riots of stated that, to his mind, those who our
bloody 1877), manage large
industries, whatever be the character of their output, should the
recognize impor
tance and of planning their work so as to furnish as
necessity * steady employment
as to those in their service ', for that was an connected with
possible obligation
our economic \
system

As Adamic says, these tycoons spoke as though business, the most important
'
factor in American lives, was not largely dehumanized and . . . indifferent
1 '
Geliert, Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together ', American Dialog (Autumn,
Hugo 1967).

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268 Eric Mottram

to vital human and social questions; that, by its very nature, business could
"
have no spontaneous and direct, no intelligent, Christian ", or benevolent
interest in society \2
The broad poster effects of New
Masses artists may be placed behind the
more Us
detailed analysis of James Agee's study of the southern poor, Let
Now Praise Famous Men a commission from Fortune magazine
(1936),
which turned into one of compassionate the most
indictments of callous
ever written. are wordsthe
degradation Agee's complemented by terrifyingly
beautiful photographs by Walker Evans - immediately effective images of
on its victims.
the conditions capitalism had imposed (The Farm Security
Administration was to use Dorothea
Lange 's photographs for similar effect.)
The minimal entertainment
for alienated workers the
throughout America,
a
movies, played major part in guiding values in the declined state; Holly
wood had emerged as the disseminating centre of consumer manipulations
in the period, controlling not only patterns of family and sexual life, but
and household an action documented in Margaret
clothing properties,
at theMovies The Day
Thorpe's America (1946). But it isNathanael West's
of the Locust which more examines the tension between con
(1939) fully
sumer art and consumer frustrations, and it is striking how West's novels
resist ideological dogmas rife in the 1930s. Neither he nor Agee, with their
shared knowledge of the waste of life in America, was politically committed
to any myth. West's satire, both here and in Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and
A Cool Million (1934), is radical in disillusion and absence of compromise,
short cuts into either communism or conservatism or liberal
untempted by
reformist fence-sitting.
Thirties and artists made
intellectuals too many decisions with Stalinist
communism as their example of vitality. Certainly, it can be argued that
'
the Depression and the Communist example gave focus to the unformulated
radicalism of the 1930s and influenced, directly or indirectly, almost every
American writer of any importance '.3A large part of the intellectual middle
*
class seized a viable point of view, a direction for anger, a code of excited
' '
humanitarianism '.4The idea of being on the Left enabled a man to live

mythically without committing himself to revolutionary change and without

or doctrinaire. A writer obtain a shot
being considered pathological might
of vitality beyond compassion, as Clifford Odets did, resulting in his plays
of 1935-6. When the Left turned inquisitorial, writers were submitted to the
Stalinist pressures of any totalitarianism.
2 Louis : The Violence in America rev.
Adamic, Dynamite Story of Class (New York, 1931;
ed. 1934), pp. 407-8.
3 Daniel
Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961; Avon ed.), p. 403.
4 Lionel Partisan Review
Trilling, (Fall, 1939), quoted Aaron, op. cit., p. 403.

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 Living Mythically 269

Upton Sinclair dragged Sergei Eisenstein into a classic case of bogus left
ism. Stan it the :
Brakhage gives right dimensions
- one ' '
Sinclair of the so-called cocktail communists of American thirties
Upton
. . . these men, in hellish -
contradiction of rich
' ' living being wealthy proletarians
folk ... or some such - . . these men,
poor thus hack idealists. then, proving
more destructive to art or, even, human than the worst
any possible understanding
materialist business man commerce ever ? Sinclair
that dishonest had created

finally
' taking all Sergei's Mexican footage away from him and selling it piecemeal
to Castle Films ', etc., for movies.5
travelogue

Kenneth recalls an episode in which,

Rexroth on a movie star's yacht, he
and others, some of them top Communists, tried to persuade Eisenstein to
remain in America. He feared the Russians would expose his homosexuality.
* ' '
When someone said, Well, so what? Eisenstein It would kill
replied:
my mother.' Caught within the network of stereotypes, he opted for Stalin
ist Russia and his own artistic destruction. Rexroth says he does not under
stand it6; but Hollywood would have destroyed Eisenstein - sooner or later
the situation of The Deer Far\ would have emaciated his
ability to develop
his genius.
But it is untrue simply to claim as Robert Warshow did in Commentary
7 '
in 1947 that the Left influence caused a disastrous of intel
vulgarization
lectual life, in which the character of American liberalism and radicalism
- and - '
was of some
" decisively perhaps
" ' permanently corrupted '.Awareness
larger consideration did not just result in what he calls organized mass
'
disingenuousness which destroyed honesty and meaning, it did
although
cause the over-estimation of a novel like The Grapes of Wrath in 1939.
Intellectuals, writers and critics spaced away from the New Deal. Warshow
puts it straightforwardly :

for most Americans [the atmosphere of the Thirties] was most

expressed clearly
in the of President Roosevelt the
and climate
personality social-intellectual-political
of the New Deal. For the intellectual, however, the Communist movement was the
fact of central the New Deal remained an external
' importance;
' phenomenon, part
of that larger world' of American public life from which he had long
- ' separated
himself he the New Deal . . ., but he never identified himself
might support
with it. One or another, he did with
way identify himself the Communist
movement.

'
It was the middle class intellectual who decided what was and was not
' ' '
pro
letarian literature or art. Mass culture once a set of alibis
became, again,

5 Stan *
Brakhage, Sergei Eisenstein ', Caterpillar, 15/16, 1971, 124.
6 The San Francisco
Poets, ed. David Meltzer (New York, 1971), p. 18.
7 Robert *
The Legacy of the 30s ', The Immediate
Warshow, Experience (1962; Anchor ed.,
1964), pp. 3-5.

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 270 Eric Mottram

through which to
simplify men's lives so that they could be manipulated by
the entertainment, film, book and radio industries. Some poets celebratedly
resorted to paradox and irony, the equivalent of the hypocrisies of these
'
industries ? a new orthodoxy ', to use T. S. Eliot's favourite theological
term. Warshow's indictment of Left literature is not borne out by the work
in both Joseph Freeman's Proletarian Literature in the United States (1935) -
which contains Caldwell, Dos Passos, Farrell, Fearing, Patchen, Rukeyser,
and ? and
Odets, John Wexley Joseph North's New Masses anthology (1969)
- which some of the same writers,
includes together with Ag?e, Lorca,
Saroyan, Hemingway remarkable on the death of worker-veterans
(a piece
in a Florida hurricane in 1935), William Carlos Williams, Dreiser and
Perelman.

II

Eliot is a primary example of the writer of the period who combined formal

ability with social decadence, worked out also through his magazine Criterion
between 1922 and 1939. The context is the use in American literature of
to tackle obvious
techniques of urban and agrarian realism experiences of
social collapse, the thorough weakening of moderate solutions, and the per
towards of and Left as substitutes for discrimina
petual veering myths Right
ting analysis. Communist, Fascist and capitalist-Christian systems such as the
Action Fran?aise turned bourgeois liberalism into an agent of weakening
democratic controls. Capitalism tried to prove it could survive under the

fa?ade of the New Deal and failed. Towards such issues the intelligentsia
were out in his essay on W. B.
notoriously ' careless. George Orwell pointed
Yeats in 1943 : the best writers of our time have been reactionary in tend
ency, and though Fascism does not offer any real return to the past, those
who yearn for the past will accept Fascism sooner than its probable
alternatives '.

In the American South, William Faulkner wrote

up a hostile environment
as an -
and his fiction
archetype of permanence his personal utterances
indicate a sensibility to which even liberal reform was repugnant.8 The Whig
Jeffersonian reaction of the twelve aristocratic southern writers who contri

buted to I'll Ta\e My Stand in 1930 included critics who would influence
American literature for the next three decades ?
university departments
Allen T?te, John Crowe Ransom, Stark Young, and Robert Penn Warren.
* '
Their stand advocated authoritarian disciplines, strong order, hierarchical

8 Cf. *
Eric Mottram, Mississippi Faulkner's Glorious Mosaic of Impotence and Madness ',
Journal of American Studies, 2, 121-9.

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 Laving Mythically 271

religion, scholasticism (that is, knowledge and taste organized as laws), and
and Yeats). It is
the cult of the Byzantine (in part lifted from T. E. Hulme
not surprising that T. S. Eliot's 1934 lectures, later printed as After Strange
Gods : A Primer of Heresy, were
at the University of Virginia.
delivered
Eliot's targets included D. H.
Lawrence, Hardy and Thomas
James Joyce,
and although his criticism has long since become of merely academic interest,
it is worth pointing out that he understood neither those artists' account of
nor their ideologies. Eliot, like many writers of the
personal relationships
time, had been panicked by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West
translation appeared in 1926, although the work had been
(the English
around in German since 1917). Spengler's neo-Hegelian prophecies of inevit
able cycles of civilization and barbarism gave writers and politicians who
needed it a neat alibi for authoritarianism, and not least for the cult of
a
managers and amoral engineering efficiency, veneered with paternalism
out of Carlyle's vitalist destiny tradition, a pattern still strong in American

sociology and academic political thinking.

theMasses (1932) could
Characteristically, Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of
be used as a whip against the masses, blaming them for the thinning and
alienation of culture, as if the rich upper classes really did stand for culture
as well as loot. It was not only Eliot and his friends the southerners and the
Action Fran?aise for whom the model was an unhistorical myth of neo
' '
medieval church and state, and intended to counter bolshevism (a 1930s
word meaning at the of a redistribution of income and
panic slightest thought
power down the social pyramid, rather than the historical party concept).

Hollywood, too, dreamed of a return to feudal structures, and medieval

' '
costume dramas barely concealed the inclinations of us fellas '. Costume
'
dramas enabled producers to indulge. Making Marie Antoinette in 1938
found that the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles was not so
they big enough,
a Norma Shearer to parade in. A fan
they built larger and better palace for
in China sent her a hundred-dollar embroidered handkerchief because Marie
The museum
Antoinette apparently introduced handkerchiefs. of film opened
its doors on Bastille Day, but it was a private affair. The mob were let in free
next
day.9
' '
As Muriel Movie :
Rukeyser's poem (1934) says
screen : look us
We goggle at the they tell
are a nation of similar whores remember the Maine
you
a -
remember have of
you democracy champagne
And slowly the female face kisses the young man,

9 at the Movies
Margaret F. Thorpe, America (London, 1946), pp. 30, 65 and 133.

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 272 Eric Mottram

over his face the twelve-foot female head

the mouth and yawns
yard-long enlarges
The End . . .10

The Idea of a Christian Society appeared the

following year (1939), already
containing those opinions which led the Conservative Party's Political Centre
to issue Eliot's 1955 pamphlet as part of their propaganda, with an introduc
tion by the subsequent hero of Suez, whose name is neatly mythological -

Eden. The former work speaks of schemes to manipulate the masses in their
' '
mediocre sluggishness, and of pastoral units attached to the soil as a norm
' '
for societies. In 1932, his Modern Education and the Classics gave us the
'
uneducated man with an empty mind... as well
equipped to fill his leisure
as is the educated man ', but no programme of economic or class
contentedly
reform.

The division is tidily given by John Tipple in Crisis of the American

Dream :

While national to an assertive individualist such as President Hoover,

* planning,
was national
regimentation ', to socially minded thinkers such as Lewis Mumford
and John it was more than an
emergency measure, it was an inevitable
Dewey
of the advance of Invincible trends, de
consequence technology. technological
clared Dewey, made the social control of economic forces necessary if the of
' ' goals
were to be realized. Those who shouted had failed to
democracy regimentation
see that effective was a function of the social conditions at any
liberty existing
time.11

in Partisan Review sat on

The academic-literary Left tight and ambivalent
Gods. The second issue carried a review
Eliot's After Strange by William
Phillips denouncing attitudes, a combination
its reactionary of Catholicism
'
and feudalism, and stating bluntly : Only the blind would hesitate to call
'
Eliot a fascist.'12 But Partisan Review was stuck with an incomplete under
meant ', and its attitudes were split
standing of what the literary tradition
with contradictions not entirely fruitrui, which caused Dwight Macdonald to
leave the editorial staff in 1943.13When it came to The Idea of a Christian

Society, the centrality of Eliot, the Harvard expatriate American, to the ideo
of the Partisan Review was clear : Trilling absolved him from reac
logies
to intellectual life, to an ?lite of
tionary inhumanity.14 Eliot's commitment
Christian aristos, made him a culture hero for the Columbia University
Partisan Review axis.

Some of the major 1930s writers were content to place their inhumanism
10 New : An the Rebel ed.
Masses Anthology of Thirties, Joseph North (New York, 1969),
p. 47.
11 Crisis of the American Dream
John Tipple, 1020-1040 (New York, 1968), p. 165.
12 and Partisans : A History in America
James B. Gilbert, Writers of Literary Radicalism (New
13 14
York, 1968), p. 125. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 220.

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 Living Mythically 273

within elegant structures, and the cultural aristocrats of politics and the
universities gladly maintained the evasion. Robert Frost placed his extreme
laissez-faire libertarianism even Roosevelt's efforts to prevent total
against
a
capitalist collapse. In Build Soil, pastoral poem delivered, not unnaturally,
at Columbia on 31 1932, at a time when Roosevelt needed
University May
support for election and when a quarter of the entire labour force was un
and the suicide rate even than in 1931, Frost came out for
employed higher
oligarchy, 'monarchic socialism', and: 'I'd let things take their course.
And then I'd claim the credit for the outcome.' Small wonder, therefore,
that John F. Kennedy a
asked Frost to read poem at his inaugural ceremonies
two decades later. Us New gotta stick together.
Englanders
of the writers
the on
Left, however, wrote
Many flabbily; mediocrity
stifled the vitality of socialists in the 1930s. The stronger writing lies in the
urban realism of James T. Farrell's Chicago novels (their accuracy vouched
for by Kenneth Rexroth in his Autobiographical Novel) and Clifford Odets's
work for the Group Theatre in New York. But the finer power lay with the

severity ofWest, the compassion of Agee, and the understanding of careless

ness in
Fitzgerald. Under the tutelage of Edmund Wilson, Scott Fitzgerald
read Henry James and Karl Marx as well as Spengler, and learned something
of the sociology and psychology of money and the historical logic which led
to the Depression. He learned from Freud that psychoanalysis had to be
'
in order to understand why the ability to func
played' into Marx and Lenin
tion had collapsed in the 1930s and the suicidal nature of inter-war societies.
He was too early for Wilhelm Reich's in
diagnosis, already under way
Germany at this time, but he would have understood Reich's rejection of the

rigidities of psychoanalysis, communism and liberal humanism. Put another

'
way, it was a need to resolve the impasse documented Orwell in Inside
by
the Whale ', where, in 1940, he looks back to his argument with Henry
Miller at the end of 1936.15 The collision of Orwell's anarchism and Miller's
affords a hold on the Miller told Orwell that going to
Spenglerism * ' period.
was the act of an idiot :
Spain
He could understand there from selfish motives, out of
anyone going purely
for instance, but to mix oneself up in such from a sense of obliga
curiosity, things
tion was sheer . . .Our civilization was destined to be and
stupidity swept away
- a
so different that we should it as human
replaced by something scarcely regard
prospect that did not bother him, he said. And some such outlook is implicit
his work.
throughout

Orwell recalls a
reply Miller had sent to a questionnaire by the
organized
American Marxist Quarterly :

15 Your England
George Orwell, England (London, 1953), pp. 131-4.

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 274 Eric Mottram

no
Miller replied in terms of extreme pacifism, and individual refusal to fight, with
to convert to the same - a declara
apparent wish others in fact,
opinion practically,
tion of irresponsibility.

But Orwell position between the yea-saying progressives

understood Miller's
and those who immediate :
ignore politics
Miller is neither pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it back,
but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say he believes in
the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the majority
' '
of revolutionary writers; only he does not feel called upon to do anything
about it... he feels no to alter or control the process that he is
impulse undergoing.
He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed,
remaining passive, accepting.

But Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn (1931 and 1939) had a libera
on their readers which would extend and :
ting effect develop into the century
the effect of their criticism of the assumptions that life had to be governed

by labour, and their primacy given to erotic life, not as the centre of sexual
or nor theorized into Freudian schematics, but
productivity anti-puritanism,
as a force which could take energetic forms and, in Georges
Dionysian
Bataille's sense, transgress and break taboos continually. Miller's dense cloud
chambers of language exactly articulated that erotic inescapability, and not
so much a release as an without resort to
immersion, oedipal resistances,

mysticism of blood, and cults of ganglia.

Ill
Intellectuals leapt into Freudian schematics as they leapt into the schema
tics of political and there submitted. West, Agee and Fitzgerald
ideology,
'
did not succumb to the disastrous of intellectual life '. But
vulgarization
the possible effect on a young black American is partly given in Ralph
Ellison's Invisible Man - that
(1952) is, betrayal by both the Communists
and the Garveyites. After the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, blacks could
do little but consolidate their small cultural gains and steady levels of pro
test, acting on the one hand as part of the degradations of the poor in Agee's
terms, and, on the other, exploding into the impotent violences represented
in Richard Wright's novels.
' Chicago '
I have seen Black Hands
Wright's poem (1934) begins with the condi
tions of black exploitation by industry and commerce, and black Americans
'
caught in the revelries of sadism ', yet concludes with the only action which
sustains him ? black and white fists raised in unison :
Some shall be millions
day there and millions of them,
On some red in a burst of fists on a new horizon.16
day
16
Joseph North, ed., op. cit., p. 51.

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 Living Mythically 275

The of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington had yet to

equivalents
emerge in literature, and these two artists had reached the second stage of
their mature performances, a of that ambivalent
only against background '
Prohibition prosperity summarized by the pianist Sammy Price : There was
no for the
Depression gangsters.'17
The music and his orchestra in Chicago
of Earl Hines in 1934 and New
York in 1935 is the sound of art deco, of gangster-owned night clubs. The
size and density of the sound denotes value ? a hard sophistication of earlier

jazz inventions with dehumanized vocals ? a musical commodity which

comes across now almost as pure energy is tightly controlled
style, whose
over elementary dance structure. It at the
surface fitted places itself disposal
of patrons, so the emotion is never subtle or illuminating but modernistic and

predictable.18
Jazz bands was else,
provided popular entertainment; jazz something
since it has never been a popular art. Jazz artists survived by going to Europe
'
or came with the high-pressure tactics of
taking other jobs. Prosperity
'19
modern publicity which sold swing from 1935 onwards; but again, Guy
Lombardo was show-biz to Ellington's creative individualism. One way of

estimating the black cultural condition is through O'Neill's Emperor Jones.

It was written in 1920, and when it was performed at the Lincoln Theatre
on recalled in The Big Sea how
135th Street, in Harlem, Langston Hughes
the black audience took Jones's naked forest panics : '... naturally they
" "
howled with laughter. Them ain't no ghosts, fool ! the spectators cried
"
from the orchestra. Why don't you come on out o' that jungle ? back to
" '20
Harlem where you belong?
But it was only in 1971 that the film of O'Neill's play, made in 1932, was

being distributed. The script had the help of DuBose Heyward, author of

Porgy (which Gershwin adapted from the play of the novel into his opera in
1935). The film did best in Harlem, and, curiously, in the southern states,
'
where the censors only the two murders and a shot of a woman
clipped
smoking '. But the film differed from O'Neill considerably. The members
of court, as Marie Seton out, were more like minstrels, and
Jones's pointed
the underworld was that of the standard movie
gangsterlands in Little
a
Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931). But the film is step away from
the ghetto movies which, since the first all-black movies of 1916, generally
reveal self-contempt, dark and therefore lower caste Negroes marrying upper

17 Marshall
Steams, The Story of Jazz (London, 1957), p. 187.
Coral CP 63, 1970.
19 Marshall
Steams, op. cit., p. 197.
20 The Big Sea (New York,
Langston Hughes, 1945), p. 258.

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276 Eric Mottram

class lighter blacks, heroines killing themselves because black, and the rest
of the degraded life which only began to change significantly in i960. The

Emperor Jones hero does not die because he is black; he deals with blacks
and whites in a power relationship which reduces colour to relative
irrelevance.21

this significant film occurs in a context of the rapid decay of Harlem

But
in the 1930s, and, with it, local employment and faith inNegro autonomy.22
The Harlem Renaissance remained a promise of awakening which gave way
under of proletarian uplift and Leftist rhetoric, alibis for in
the sterilities
action. The Communist Party conned Negroes into believing they were the
spearhead of the American proletarian revolution. Negroes in Moscow said
to match the sound of ? a combination of
so, and poems appeared politics
veneer and absence of of facts. conservatives under
analysis Enlightened
Roosevelt to contribute their abilities. The results can
encouraged Negroes
be instanced in theWorks to document
Progress Administration's project
the history and present conditions of New York Negroes. The reporters
included Ralph Ellison, Claude McKay and Roy Ottley; they completed their
research in 1940 and it is a major work of the 1930s, suggesting the necessity
of radical social changes. It was not, published until 1967 because, according
to Jean Blackwell Hutson, curator of the Schomberg Collection of Negro
'
Literature and History of New York Public Library, information contained
in it was too for conservative taste \23
startling

IV

The base of the essential of the 1930s is clear in comic conservatism

ground
strips. Chester Gould created Dick Tracy in 1931 as a character moving
' '
a
through 1920s gang warfare with profile of young Sherlock Holmes and
costume of the modern G-man: the image of the non-professional profes
sional so beloved of the detection story world. The year 1938 is memorable
-
for other events the arrival of into the American Pan
-among Superman
to
theon of Action join Abe Lincoln, Davy Crocket and Tom Mix.
Comics,
His unlimited supernatural power is only impotent' against Kryptonite, and
his aim is to rid the world of something called evil '.His costume was a
* ' ?
kind of drag of skin-tight blue fleshings with red and gold shield badge

21 Norman ' " "

The Jones ', The Village Voice (24 June and 1
Kagan, Reviving Emperor July
1971). *
22 ' '
Cf. LeRoi Jones, of Harlem and The Myth of Negro Literature ', Home : Social
City
Essays (New York, 1966); Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York,
1968).
23 The in New ed. and W.
Negro Yor\, Roy Ottley J. Weatherby (New York, 1967),
introduction.

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 Living Mythically 277

with a capital S for himself ? scarlet briefs,

golden belt and scarlet cape. This
image of assertive masculinity, with its usual of homoerotic
complement
a
energy, is flight dream of sex energy which channelled America's insurgent
dream of itself as world cop, sex hero and moral terminus. Superman's

daily life disguise, Clark Kent, is an ordinary newspaperman on the

Daily
-
Planet the name seems to have stimulated his cosmic consciousness. He

therefore, a of the hero as maintained in

represents, metamorphosis reporter
the films and fiction
of the inter-war period, beginning with Ben Hecht and
Charles MacArthur's The Front Page in 1920, filmed in 1931 by Lewis Mile
stone. Clark Kent himself wears -
spectacles generally a sign of weakness in
?
popular art cringes before danger, fails with his girlfriend Lois Lane, and
on the whole represents a level of failure to model on the current identifica
tions image of manliness and easy solutions. Marshall McLuhan capsul?tes
him adequately in The Mechanical Bride :
The attitudes of to current social reflect the
Superman problems strong-arm
totalitarian methods of the immature and barbaric mind . . . efficient
ruthlessly
in on a one-man crusade crooks and anti-social forces
carrying against [without]
to the of law. Justice is as an affair of
appeal process represented personal strength
alone. [He therefore that the dream of and adult alike seem
suggests] today youth
to a with the laborious of civilized life and
embody mounting impatience processes
a reckless to embrace violent solutions . . . it must be
eagerness Unconsciously,
assumed, the anonymous our and mechanized has
oppression by impersonal ways
a bitterness that seeks outlets in the flood of fictional violence
piled up fantasy
which is now being gulped in such a variety of forms.24
'
Superman is a necessary angel ', superior to time and space, requiring
neither education nor
experience and possessed with natural flawless intelli
gence. But fallen angels may become devils and the comics are full of such
cases. As Milton Caniff, creator of Steve Canyon, once remarked :
it is art effective - or to basic
Whatever that makes escape, the
' popular '? appeal
or audience-identification the funnies have have more
emotions, it, and they
of it than any of us ever
suspected.25

InWorld War II it was

said that chaplains were alarmed that GIs had more
faith in Superman than Jesus Christ. After Superman came Batman, in 1939,
and then Captain America, Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman; in 1965,

Magicman appeared, in black leotard, the uniform of sexual violence and

mephistophelean body-sheathing.
The funnies access to the word and of Americans in
give image
' ' history
training for world power, maintaining that evil is a formulated conquer

24 Marshall The Mechanical Bride see a^so P* I23>

McLuhan, (New York, 1951), pp. 102-3;
'
The Law of The Jungle ', on business mythology.
25 D. M. White and R. H. Abel, The Funnies : An American Idiom (New York, 1963), p. 3.

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 278 Eric Mottram

able enemy to resist American

unable But this 1930s iconographie
magic.
as
mythology is impotent against local Depression problems as it was to be
against Asians in the 1960s. The interior myth maintains that problems can
be solved without radical change of basic assumptions and social structures.
successors
Superman and his immediate antecedents and appeared in dozens
of daily papers, miles of comic books, endless movies and radio shows - it
was the as Roosevelt well understood ? and to sell
heyday of radio, helped
consumer the consumption of food with myths
goods, being particularly
strong in power cults, as the Christians have long known. Superman is a

fantasy of power, Matthew Arnold's best self become super-self, the epitome
of the liberal secret dream of strength privately and violently employed for
social purpose, without changing social structure. When World War II
came at the end of the 1930s, he did not a time
immediately join the army, at
when his instruments of orgasmic explosion between in-fighting authoritarian
groups had become the general global scene. But in 1940 he did destroy the
West Wall and an article in Das Schwarz Korps branded him ? of all fates
? a
for the Super-American Jew.26 Television reduced much of his original

power by making him visibly an actor. Camera tricks made him ridiculous,
' '
and camp recognitions invaded credibility.
A similar retrieval of information can be obtained, of course, from Blondie,
Mandrake, The Spirit, Dogpatch and the rest - information which can be
correlated for guides to popular presentations of the over-all culture with the
best-seller lists of the 1930s.27 The directions are obvious. The annual leading
best-seller between 1931 and 1938 was either an Ellery Queen detective thriller
or an Erie Stanley Gardner. The close runners-up were or
equally sinister
trashy: Pearl Buck's The Good Earth in 1931; Henry Allen's Anthony
Adverse and James Hilton's Lost Horizon, 1933; Dale Carnegie's How To
Win Friends And People and Margaret Mitchell's
Influence Gone With The
? a ' '-
Wind, 1936; Marco
Page's Fast Company mystery in 1938. The
were The Best of Damon Runyon in 1938 and The Grapes of
exceptions
Wrath in 1939. Steinbeck's work won because, as Robert Warshow says, it
'
had all the surface characteristics of serious literature and it made all the
" "
advanced assumptions \28 But it is confused at basis, does not examine its
social approves of and at its centre
assumptions, capitalist paternalism, places
a form of Emersonian transcendental self-reliance which is both pathetic and
in the context of the Depression.
dangerous

26 White and Abel, op. cit., p. 4.

27 B. and D. M. White, Mass Culture : The Arts in America
Rosenberg Popular (Glencoe,
Illinois, 1957), p. 133.
28 Robert
Warshow, op. cit., p. 147.

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 Living Mythically 279

The is a sociological event, mastered

best-seller partly by the book trade's
need to a structure of and to ensure consumer
instigate flourishing dying
competitiveness, partly by critics writing advertising copy for the trade,
partly by public libraries selecting from lists, criticisms, advertisements and
demand, and partly from the day-to-day changes in society. This list of best
sellers does show clearly that any author who cooks up new ways to murder
becomes rich, while any author who described the act of sex and love could
be jailed. Henry Miller was ostracized while power-mad detectives ravaged
the land. Edmund Wilson on this concluded that
' speculating phenomenon
the 1930s were ridden with an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and fear of
it seemed hopeless to try even to avert because it
impending disaster which
never seemed to the responsibility '.29
conclusively
possible pin down
abetted the helplessness. Nobody ' was
Spengler's destiny programming guilt
less, nobody was safe. The murderer is a villain but caught by an Infallible
Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly where
to fix the guilt in the structure of social controls which
'. It is not fixed
influence but in a villain, a person unlike you or me or
personal psychology,
the detective. Such pure fantasy exerts great power, and it is no wonder that
T. S. Eliot was a detective novel addict, on his own admission.
fiction in the 1930s augments a characteristic
The analysis of magazine
to ?
also be found in the funnies that is, their fulfilment and instigation of
popular requirements and requirements from the populace. Americans meant

English-speaking Wasps, who occupy 90-8 per cent of character distribution

and 80 per cent of the characters offered for approval, and generally have far
'
more roles and values, and much more money : the world to them,
' ' belongs
and they run it and their goals were more frequently pleasant and idealistic
" " ' ' ' -
and not and mundane. The rest
pure pure meaning calculating
of the characters vary only in degree of subservience and villainy. Negroes
are
lazy and/or ignorant, Jews sly, the Irish violent and superstitious,' the
Italians criminal, and so on. The problems of ethnic groups are never
to serious and direct . . . are
exposed presentation Minority representatives
within an which no basis
consistently deprived atmosphere acknowledges
for such deprivation.'30 Stereotypes dominate; the message is the perma
nence of racism and the class structure. The fears of white workers and the
white middle classes are dramatized as endless
strip fantasy.

There is probably even less radical diagnosis dramatized in the commer

cial cinema. The case is properly instanced in Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon
29 30 and White,
Rosenberg and White, op. cit., p. 147. Rosenberg op. cit., pp. 235 ff.

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28o Eric Mottram

- the intersections of finance, faith in the morally educative value of

(1941)
films, personal idealism and the star system. Hollywood is the index of
were
Depression images which Americans afforded of their lives. Repeatedly
the plots turn on the belief in personal within a social
opportunity mobility
a a
tending naturally upward, challenged by catastrophe not admitted as
in textbook historiography. The myth of opportunity, as a sus
possibility
vision for millions of Americans, was once and for all intersected
taining by
opportunism, the Spencerian principle of survival which had for decades

supplied the standard alibis for crude evolutionary economics :meaning that
* '
us fellas govern divine of Nature. The most rhetoric
by right muck-raking
of Hollywood movies falsified social issues, ostensibly presented documen

tarily. Pare Lorentz's The Plow That Brolle The Plains (1936) concerns the
long-term and radical misuse of the Great Plains which led to the Dust
Bowl of the m?daos (it is complementary toWalter Prescott Webb's The
Great Plains which appeared five years earlier in 1931). But it was made
a New Deal agency. The
by the United States Resettlement Administration,
free verse commentary, the fine poetic images, the compassion and the grand
scale cohere to the point where it is clear why government intervention was
necessary; that
but free enterprise at various levels was for
responsible
and ruin, and that the system of America was itself exploitive and
neglect
immoral in its anti-ecological wastefulness of life, is barely even broached.
The New Deal was, after all, an measure.
emergency

Capra is nearer the centre of conservatism. Mr Deeds Goes To

Frank
Town (1936, the year of Lorentz's film) dramatizes the liberal belief that
can win.
personal integrity and class dialogue Gary Cooper plays a man of
innocence, with little intelligence beyond arithmetic, a man
simple-hearted
close to the common people. He gives away his wealth to the
unemployed
whom his wealth created because he
suddenly discovers the immorality of
* '
business. After the beloved
parable, the system remained and us fellas
won
again. Capra consistently employed Cooper and James Stewart in fake
reformist roles of this kind. The equivalent in musicals isMervyn Leroi's
Gold Diggers of 1933- The action is ostensibly reformist: four girls
looking
for work, a for money and a for outlets in
producer playboy songwriter
which to invest money and talent. Money wins and the decor demonstrates

glamorous opportunism, while the words try to suggest the energy wasted.
Busby Berkeley's dance-routine designs parallel Earl Hines's dehumanized
brilliance, using large abstract patterns of light and shade with human bodies
and costumes as the instruments of mechanized lavishness. The world of
Public Enemy (1931) remained. William Wellman offers the rise and fall of a

gangster by inevitable fate, associating virility with James Cagney in saloons

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 Laving Mythically 281

and poolrooms, a life of loot without labour, whose enemy is not the law
and its agents but other gangsters. The direction's on anxiety and
emphasis
excitement, whatever the other aims, produced commonly romantic
script's
audience reactions.31 Gangsters enacted the whole indi
' possessive
society's
vidualism, and at least lived it up before final slaughter. The shame of the
'
cities remained untouched. Epic suggestions inWellman were
grotesquely
extended in Cecil B. DeMille's of American as an
reprogramming ' history
of fists and finance, with the box-office attraction of sensational sin
epic
'32
ning fitted into moral conclusions built from shameless alibis of self

righteousness.
One of the central mythical images of Hollywood in the 1930s is the
- a calculated
Spencer Tracy of twenty-five films between 1931 and 1935
creation of a man of force and integrity who dramatizes tensions between

power, limited
intelligence, personal honour and
social-political
physical
position. If the plot called for dubious or criminal behaviour, redemption
shaped the denouement, however broken the Tracy character must be. His
stoicism, in various forms, became the instance of a man in a depressed,
and the basis of his stardom. was
non-revolutionary society, Tracy Holly
wood's counterpart of the stoically-enduring Hemingway hero and the very
'
of Roosevelt's : This great nation will endure
embodiment inaugural address
as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.'
But Hemingway's endurance ended in nada and Roosevelt's endurance
is not much more than Faulkner's advice toNegroes : endure. The common
centre is impotence. The boy heroes of Odets's Awa\e and Sing ! (1935) and

Kingsley's Dead End (1935), like the boys in Tracy's Captains Courageous
are are
(1937) and Boys' Town (1938) products of capitalist paternalism who
to make out in a social structure. In 1936
cruelly supposed pseudo-reformist
the play (and later John Ford's film) of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road
its decade-long successful run, reducing the original statement on
began
to the that the middle class could tolerate : that the rural poor
poverty myth
were grotesque hicks, sexually bestial and comically drunk. Similarly, the
characters of Capra's You Can't Ta\e It With You (1936) are
querky indi
vidualists fighting for life in a system which is careless of their well-being.
Anarchistic self-reliance, the great curse of the American Dream, pro
all gain and self-respect, hoggish selfishness and unemployment
grammed
into a stoicism near to self-abuse. Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade and the
Thin Man stoically oppose crime where city law and its agencies had broken
to
down, and Humphrey Bogart began shape, with Duke Mantee in The

31 Paul Rotha and Richard The Film Till Now

Griffith, (London, 1949), p. 435.
32 Arthur The Liveliest Art (New York,
Knight, 1957), p. 115.
AM.ST.?4

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 282 Eric Mottram

Petrified Forest (1936), his image of the hipster prior to Mailer's formula
tion of the White Negro in 1957: the wary survival of the cynic without
to resist
ideology, the desire impotence in the face of degrading and recal
citrant conditions, the acceptance of some measure of outlawry if cunning
and chivalry were not to corrupt absolutely or become the smugly self

righteous figure John Wayne stereotyped from Stagecoach (1939) onwards.

Meanwhile, existed as it was in Kenneth
Hollywood exposed Anger's Holly
wood Babylon (1965): the scene of sensual corruption and cruel tyranny
'
as moralism and the world of the fanzines '. The truth lies
masquerading
with the mob hysteria and lynching-urge of Fritz Lang's Fury (1936) and
the Los Angeles riot which concludes West's The Day of the Locust (1939).

VI

point of impingement
The for the majority
'
of the middle class is given
an anonymous writer in 1932 : the citizen is in no
by ordinary, peaceful
to - ... he is rarely thrown into contact
danger speak of with the criminals,
and when he is, his life is in no grave peril. They use their weapons chiefly
upon each other.'33 But, of course, he was indebted to criminals for beer,
cocktails and whisky. The ambiguous anxieties of the urban middle class
are the sphere of James Thurber's fiction and cartoons. His fairy tales may

manipulate solutions from good wizards, but his probes into domestic life
a no could dis
reveal despair within law-abiding family life which magic
solve. Happiness recedes before the threat of economic disaster and sexual
ill-health, stoically endured, while the margins of the New Yorker, where
so much of Thurber's work appeared, advertised fantasies of escalating
'
But as the moral conclusion to one of his stories : There
expense. proclaims
is no or in narrator of A Box To
safety in numbers' anything else.' The
Hide In endures : I still have this overpowering urge to hide in a box.
Maybe it will go away, maybe I'll be all right. Maybe it will get worse. It's
'
hard to say.' The hero of The Private Life ofMr Bid well is last seen walk
iacountry road with the a man : he
ing along halting, uncertain gait of blind
was to see how many steps he could take without opening his eyes '.
trying
The protagonist of The Remarkable Case of Mr Bruhl gradually identifies
'
a gangster he resembles physically and is down
totally with gunned by silent
men, overcoats and what to be cases for musical
wearing carrying appeared
instruments \34 Lying in his hospital bed he snarls his replies to the commis
sioner of police like any gangster; he knows his role from inside. Thurber's

33 *Crime as Americans See It (New York,

and Racketeering ', Fred J. Ringel, ed., America

I932)
34 The Thurber Carnival
James Thurber, (London, 1945), p. 148.

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 Living Mythically 283

in a desperation
heroes repeatedly separate themselves from their routine life
which is neither social protest nor social adjustment.
* ' * '
In What Are the Leftists Saying ? and to Say Thurber
Something
ever
exposed the middle class bohemianism of the 1930s leftists, without
their to the class. He
understanding profound irresponsibility working
retained his popularity, while Edward Dahlberg, a far more complex writer
and a major stylist, has never had a considerable
following,
at least partly
because his targets include both bourgeois behaviour
satirical and Leftist
a
ideological games, treated with vehemence beyond Thurber's faintly comic
poses. Those Who Perish (1934) nails the well-heeled and their carelessness
for ever: their use of public events as subjects for fashionable competitive
conversation; Hitler and the Nazi Youth Movement reduced to a game of
Freudian Mrs Cortlandt Dinwiddie ? ' related to the Astors and
analysis;
'-
Bismarck using Jack London and his wife and World War I as part of
her autobiography, called / Have to Blame?5 As
tentatively Only Myself
Rexroth reports, Bohemianism was a way of in New
* evading the political
York circles : in those days the way
People talked about communism people
talk about acid or smack . . . they didn't know anything about it . . .
" People
"
were the masses
running around talking about and there wasn't really
contact with the masses.'36 On the west coast, the IWW and an
any
anarchistic tradition dominated the intellectual and Bohemian world and to
some extent relieved it from that outrageous tedium of the pseudo-ideological
which Dahlberg in The Flea of Sodom (1951), as he dramatizes
delineates
his recollections of the irresponsible Left in the 1930s, the stultifying desire
to live
mythically which reduced so many to the grotesque. The central
character, Golem, only reads about the hunger of West Virginia coal miners.
'
a
Andromache places his sculpture of lynched Negro share-cropper upon
a shelf above their a protest marcher
nuptial couch ', and dresses the part of
in May-day parades
to play out her leftist alibis :
was and wanted to Etna cement. . .
Everybody living mythically escape boiling
A free-thinker, was banished from the island the
advocating contraceptives, by
water-front faction that was an Irish-Catholic This
proselytizing longshoreman.
was denied because he was already in the party; besides he had a
triptych in his
cellar apartment at Red Hook, the middle panel being Karl Marx, with the Virgin
on one side and on the other.
Mary Shirley Temple
'
an
Dahlberg's proletarian poet, ' Ephraim Bedlam, writes appalling
* Aeschy
lean coal miner's tragedy and recites a poem beginning : O
pellagra,
'
company towns, diphtheria creeks, and burial funds! Pilate Agenda is

35 The Anxious
Years, ed. Louis Filler (New York, 1962; Capricorn ed., 1964), pp. 197-8*
36 David
Meltzer, ed., op. cit., pp. 10-12.

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 284 Eric Mottram
'
expelled from the Party : The mother of the Passaic mills trade union
movement, and the grandmother of American communism had made a sex
complaint against him. The rank and file at once denounced him as a petty
harlot and an enemy of the But
bourgeois people.' although Dahlberg's
satire of those who live is his position, like
by myth ideology exhilarating,
that of Miller and Frost in different ways, gave no immediate direct aid to
the collapsed structure of labour and finance.
The clearest example of a work which area of
actually leapt out of the
catastrophe and carried with it' American myths into a euphoric future, was
Hart Crane's poem-sequence The Bridge ', in 1930. Written with an urge
to counter Eliot's as a
reactionary pessimism major impulse in its extended
the poem - subsidized by a - celebrates the
composition, friendly capitalist
3T
mystic possibilities of American : it is an
capitalism epic of Manifest Des
tiny, expansion and evolutionary perfectibility. Crane refuses the pastoral
'
aristocraticism of the writers of Til Take My Stand and takes up the psy
'38
as
chological impact of mechanization anything but the disaster the
medievalists and agrarians believed it to be. In a letter to his backer, Otto
Kahn, referred to his images of Brooklyn Bridge,
Crane the New York
*
as on humanity,
subway and the airplane the encroachment of machinery
a kind of purgatory '. But machine to be a Promethean
technology is finally
agent towards an expansive and optimistic American future. The curve of
the bridge is the soaring upward and outward curve of recovery, and not
the site of personal and national suicide.

Prophetic ecstasy of this kind, however magnificently composed, could

hardly extend beyond the lyric present. The New York of Dos Passos's
fictional epic, USA, written between 1930 and 1936, is an environment of
a dehumanization
deteriorating living. His trilogy traces of city life from
1900 to the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Depression. He is the
novelist of alienation in the 1930s, and, at least at that time, took a
major
stance which was non-ideological and secular. Malcolm Cowley recalls him
'
over to a table full of writers New Masses : Intellectual
calling planning
workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your brains \39
With on trial, Dos Passos at least articulated the economic, per
capitalism * '
sonal and political intersections whose catastrophic centre was us fellas ?
J. P. Morgan, in particular. The waste and sacrifice of life which
private
wealth and laissez-faire policies necessarily imply, isDos Passos's theme. His
characters are with little warmth, a collective who
stereotypes people repre

37 Marius
Bewley, The Eccentric Design (London, 1959), p. 10.
38 Peter
Viereck, Dream and Responsibility (Washington, 1953), p. 61.
39 Malcolm
Cowley, Exiles Return (New York, 1934; rev. ed., 1951), p. 223.

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 Living Mythically 285
- the readership of the
sent how human lives can be socially determined
funnies, the audience for Marie Antoinette. Even his radicals have stony
lives; this, in the cases of Eugene Debs, Haywood and John Reed, was not
*
true of their actual lives. His insistence on psychic numbness in a beaten
'
nation is best taken as another Spenglerian cultural pessimism.40 One major
- the
significance of the huge plot is the survival of the fittest public relations
man, the in the soldier-worker-consumer of coercion.
arch-parasite society
His is deeply related, therefore, to the dissolution
action of the family and
*
community in the 1930s, since, as
Christopher Lasch points out, the dis

appearance of the community destroyed that family authority ',41 and not
the other way round, as so often it is reported to be.
One of the most
endearing facts of the 1930s, however, is the responsibility
'
at least some artists felt for their function in society, conceiving the very
'
act of creation as one of affirmation of the value of human life and relent

lessly pursuing American experience and the truth about themselves.42 The
a
essential search for mutuality a structure
without ideological rigidity, for
of life firmly founded in particularities of person and place, is to be found
inWilliam novel trilogy, the first volume of which, White
Carlos Williams's
Mule, appeared in 1937. The working- and middle-class lives recorded by
Williams correct the mythological' simplifications of the Andy Hardy film
'
series perpetrated by W. S. Woody Van Dyke II {Andy Hardy Gets

Spring Fever dates from 1939). But in Boston, the school committee and the
*
Chamber of Commerce were in a letter on the
judges competition Why
Hardys should live in Boston ',43 and the Hardys themselves were the product
of research into family norms of behaviour and consumption. These whites
were as
quite stereotypical as Ralph Ellison's
'
blacks and quite as manipu
lated. In 1923Williams had written how the pure products of America go
'? '
crazy and later said : That's the trouble with us all. We're not half used

up. And that unused portion drives us crazy.' Living as closed, partial and
a man into a grotesque part of
mythicized stereotype mythicizes dogma. He
is then by definition a mad inmate of the institution of society. Hollywood's

Andy Hardy series deliberately imposed myth. Illusion infected the decade.
reduced ? whether in the
Actuality mythicization considerably fighting
war in or in the veterans' Bonus
ideological Spain44 taking part Army
massing at Washington in 1932 to demand what Congress had promised,

40 No Voice is Wholly Lost (London,

Harry Slochower, 1946), p. 71.
41 The New Radicalism in America
Christopher Lasch, (New York, 1965), pp. 110-11.
42 The American Writer and the Great ed. Harvey Swados (New York,
Depression, 1968).
43
Margaret F. Thorpe, op. cit., pp. 44 and 84.
44 Frederick R. Benson, Writers in Arms : The Literary War
Impact of the Spanish Civil
(New York, 1968).

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286 Eric Mottram

only to be dubbed and dispersed with tanks, machine

criminal Communists
'
guns, tear-gas and bayonets by a grateful nation, led on by us fellas '.
Causes in the 1930s were repeatedly raised to the intensity of mythical appeal
to into victimization within the international power game
only degenerate ' '
Mantis :
of Left and Right. Louis Zukofsky's (1934) focused the operation
'
Our world will not stand it,/the implication of a too regular form ', espe
'
a form which does not include the most pertinent our
cially ' ' * subject of
? the '. The facts are not a and No human wishes
day poor symbol being
to become . . .An insect for the sake of a for the
symbol.' Consequently,
committed writer in the 1930s, asMuriel Rukeyser expressed it in A Turning
'
act seemed a moment of proof - that climax
Wind (1939), each creative
when the brain acknowledges the world; /all values extended into the blood
awake '. Fromthe memoirs of 1930s men, which began to appear in the

1960s, arises a combination of nostalgia for the euphorias of the

' heady '
moment of proof and a sense of waste in depression. Living symbolically
or had its even if itwas finally sacrificial. Looking
mythically compensations,
back to the 1930s writers, Seymour Krim, an essentially 1950s man, recog
nizes with awe their ability to dramatize personally the country's myths.
were only just beginning to encroach on the func
Sociology and psychology
tion of fiction and films to make a statement and diagnosis of
panoramic
men's lives.45 The 1930s had a sense of scale and futurity, within their sacri
ficialbitterness, which became impossible in the era of what Jeff Nuttall
comes
calls Bomb Culture. The full irony of the 1930s through as Daniel
Aaron summarizes his own study of the decade :

and after the war the thirties came to be looked men

During years, upon by many '
*
and women who had lived through them as a time of smelly orthodoxies when
the intellectuals took refuge in closed systems of belief. ..With the Cold War
and the crusade of Senator the books and issues of the thirties were
McCarthy,
considered as well as dated.46
dangerous

In 1934, Lewis Corey's The Decline of American Capitalism stated the

actualities: is forced against progress, the bourgeois revolution,
capitalism
the dream of improvement in the conditions of the masses ? a set of ideals
unobtainable without a new social order. But the old socialist dream of a
' '
which has broken the ideological fetters of the old order and
proletariat
* '
replaced the old faith with its own consciousness and ideals was finally
eroded by the conditions of the New Deal itself.47

By the 1940s, the liberal attitudes of the previous decade, generated under

45 the World, Smart Ass

Seymour Krim, Sha\e It for (New York, 1971), pp. 3-25.
46 Daniel
Aaron, op. cit., pp. 406-7.
47
John Tipple, op. cit., pp. 273-4.

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 Living Mythically 287

the shame of both capitalist and leftist catastrophes, shifted into conservatism

generated under pressures of cold war international politics. What Julien

' '?
Benda, in 1927, termed le trahison des clercs the betrayal of the intel
'
lectuals - their desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values
of action ',48 had become a steady sequence of toadying to ideology and the
security of power schematics : Fascism in the 1920s, Stalinism and Fascism
in the 1930s, the CIA and associated organizations in the 1950s
Washington,
and 1960s. The tensions of intellectuals register
equally with those less articu
late in American On 1November 1971, Americans were once again
society.
scared by a production of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds as they
were in - in
1938 fact the Buffalo radio station put out a modified version
of Orson Welles's 1930s performance reissued as a
(recently gramophone
'
record), warning citizens that the realism remained art : Radio stations in
cities as far away as Boston, Washington and New York received enquiries
from listeners not 49
asking why they had reported the landings.' As William
Burroughs, the major writer of the 1960s who lived his boyhood through the
'
1930s, says of his work : None of the characters in my mythology are free.
If they were free they would not still be in the system, that is,
mythological
the cycle of conditioned action.'50 To counter the fashionable mythicization
of the 1930s which took place during the 1960s, we have
only to recognize
the institutionalized civil warfare in the United States and the increased
number of outlaws and their necessity :

the simple
fact is, this isn't
the thirties either,
anymore
the outlaws are different,
there came a in the
point
when morgan
empire henry
stopped being pirate and
was made the governor
of Jamaica, but you were
born years
thirty early.51

48 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society : The Reorientation of European Social

Thought 1890-1930 (London, 1959), pp. 414 ft.
49 The 2 November
Times, London, 1971.
50 Eric William : The
Mottram, Burroughs Algebra of Need (Buffalo, 1971), p. 26.
51 '
Joel Oppenheimer, Poem for Bonnie or Clyde ', In Time : Poems 1962-1 g68 (New York,
1969).

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