Shannan Clark responds to Chapter 6—Roots and Rootlessness (1920-45) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
On Familiar Grounds
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen deserves to be commended for crafting a succinct yet comprehensive survey of United States intellectual and cultural history. It takes considerable ambition and resolve to try to take in the full sweep of Americans’ literary, scholarly, and artistic endeavors over the course of nearly three centuries in just two hundred snappy pages. As someone who regularly teaches a course on the intellectual and cultural history of the US since approximately 1880 at a state comprehensive university, I very much appreciate what she has done. For all its accomplishments, however, such a slender survey invariably omits key intellectual and cultural developments, so, expanding on her account by turning to the story of intellectuals working in the culture industries of the mid-twentieth century, I offer another way of understanding the period from the aftermath of the First World War through the end of the Second World War—and, in fact, redrawing the periodization to flow into the subsequent Cold War. Shifting from the typical narrative of a so-called “Lost Generation” in the 1920s followed by the Popular Front of the 1930s, I focus instead on the emergence of a new generation of culture industry intellectuals between the wars. Their appearance alters our understanding of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s main thematic contrast between roots and rootlessness in her effective but incomplete introduction to the era.
In her chapter, Ratner-Rosenhagen touches upon most of the major themes that for decades have been staples of traditional courses on US intellectual and cultural history of the interwar time period. Not only have they shaped our sense of that moment in the American past, they have long influenced its historiography as well. When I took a course on US intellectual and cultural history since the Civil War as a graduate student in 1997, the key developments that she explores were precisely what appeared in the course. So too in both of the courses on twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history for which I was a teaching assistant in 2000, as well as in an American Studies course focused on the interwar period for which I was a teaching assistant in 2003. Ratner-Rosenhagen has got the standard narrative down.
These courses were taught by historians from various ideological perspectives, from conservative to liberal centrist to radical democratic, indicating the extent to which a certain common-sense understanding of US intellectual history in the years from 1920 to 1945 has become deeply ensconced in the curriculum and the canon. The title of the chapter itself evokes one of the standard binaries conventionally utilized to structure the narrative of the interwar period: roots and rootlessness. Certain writers, artists, and thinkers vigorously asserted national, racial, or ethnic identities, or roots. Juxtaposed against them are those who embraced a detached individualism, a rootlessness, epitomized by the “Lost Generation” expatriates or those who expressed a contempt for the mainstream Americans whom the critic H.L. Mencken derided as the “booboisie.”
Since one of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s objectives is to reach a pool of potential readers, especially new students, whose knowledge of US intellectual and cultural history may be somewhat limited, it is of course desirable that Ratner-Rosenhagen covers familiar ground. So too, in my own course, I trace a path not so dissimilar from Ratner-Rosenhagen in my first class on the 1920s. I address the multifaceted tensions that flared between cultural modernists and conservatives throughout the decade, the troubling resurgence of nativism in its various forms, the experience of disenchantment shared by many well-known writers and artists, and the rising prominence of African-American arts and letters.
Although her commitment to brevity constrains her opportunities for explication, she nonetheless astutely complicates the various binaries in her presentation. The preoccupation with nativist roots, for instance, influenced eugenicist currents that could appeal to individuals often associated with progressive causes, as Ratner-Rosenhagen indicates through the example of Margaret Sanger’s Woman and the New Race (1920). It was also an uncomfortably short distance to the reactionary white supremacist figures such as Lothrop Stoddard.[1] Having used a selection from Sanger’s text in my course, I can attest to its effectiveness at demonstrating to students how the intellectual and cultural affinities of significant thinkers, artists, and authors can defy easy characterizations of liberal or conservative by today’s—or even back then’s—standards. A seemingly radical side of a particular intellectual’s thought suddenly takes a reactionary turn; a liberal from the center tilts leftward; an idea put forward by a conservative has radical implications.
Ratner-Rosenhagen carries the binary of roots and rootlessness forward into the 1930s to configure her exploration of American cultural and intellectual responses to the Great Depression. She contends that much of the culture of the New Deal expressed nationalistic tendencies, continuing the preoccupation with naming and claiming one’s roots, even as pluralism aspired to celebrations of pan-ethnic or occasionally even to pan-racial “American” roots in which ethnic and racial identities could be embraced democratically without necessarily imposing oppressive hierarchies. A kind of synthesis could appear at times.
Ratner-Rosenhagen rightly centers the unprecedented cultural projects of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other public programs in her account. She frames them, however, primarily as responses to the supposedly atypical traumas inflicted by the Great Depression, implying that these endeavors were anomalous within the broader sweep of modern American cultural and intellectual history. New Deal cultural initiatives, in her words, “exhibited an appreciation for what writers and artists could do to bind up the country’s wounds,” as “unemployed art critics, teachers, librarians, folklorists, novelists, and playwrights” went “into the American ‘field’ and retrieve people’s way of life, all in an effort to draw out the grit and goodness of the American ‘folk,’ even in times of great distress”.[2]
The counterpoint in her narrative to this rehabilitated quest for roots during the 1930s was the influx of a wave of European writers, artists, and thinkers who were refugees from fascism. To a greater extent than those who participated in New Deal programs, Ratner-Rosenhagen maintains, they influenced the next chapters in American cultural and intellectual history. “In the ensuing years,” she concludes, “the émigrés’ theories of mass society became widely read and popularized as Americans sought to comprehend the dynamics of Cold War geopolitics abroad and observed dangerous mass tendencies hiding behind atomistic individualism at home.”[3] Following their expatriate lead in the wake of World War II’s horrors, we students of US intellectual history now leave the interwar period, having arrived at the Atomic Age, which was also an atomized era in which feelings of rootlessness intensified despite, or perhaps because of, growing pressures of conformity and homogeneity.
The Culture Industry Arrives
The conventional representation of the years between 1920 and 1945 is not wrong, but it largely elides what I would argue was the most vital development in American thought and culture during the time period: the rising predominance of larger-scale enterprises and institutions as the principal sites for modern mental labor. Jobs in the commercial mass media, in universities and colleges, and in government bureaus and agencies had become increasingly important for sustaining writers, artists, and thinkers since the late-nineteenth century, but it was between 1920 and 1945 that labor in the culture and knowledge industries became the defining condition of literary, artistic, and scholarly life in the US. In this twenty-five-year span, total white-collar employment in these industries, broadly construed, more than doubled. While Ratner-Rosenhagen notes that the “the phonograph, the radio, and the ‘talkies’ kept people entertained,” she casts them merely as novel vectors of cultural modernization without considering how the new experiences of creativity–coordinated, collaborative, rationalized–made possible so much of the nation’s cultural and intellectual output.[4]
…the emergence of a new generation of culture industry intellectuals between the wars…alters our understanding of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s main thematic contrast between roots and rootlessness….
This is not an example of the ideas that made America, but rather of the America that made ideas. New media conglomerates such as Time, Inc., founded in 1923, transformed news reporting into innovative models of what publisher Henry Luce described as “group journalism.” As it grew, Time, Inc. attracted an impressive roster of creative talent: literary figures such as Archibald MacLeish and James Agee; photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans; designers such as George Nelson; and social critics such as Dwight Macdonald, William Whyte, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Their efforts combined with those of numerous others to produce the articles, images, and narratives about the world that filled the pages of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, along with the March of Time newsreels and radio programs. So too, scholarly and scientific endeavors grew more collective in nature. Even before the advent of the New Deal’s much-noted “Brains Trust,” which advised Franklin Delano Roosevelt, many of the nation’s top social scientists came together under the direction of William Ogburn to make Recent Social Trends (1932), an anthology that in many regards represented the application of Herbert Hoover’s “associational” ideal to the generation of new knowledge workers.
Autocracy and Democracy
Rather than individual and idiosyncratic genius, collaborative and interdependent efforts shaped cultural and intellectual history more and more. The writers, artists, and thinkers of the culture industries and knowledge work engaged in modern mental labor developed a new consciousness of their work, and of the culture and knowledge they helped to produce. Increasingly, many of them came to see organized solidarity as a way not only to secure an adequate living, but also to try to maintain their creative autonomy. Following the onset of the Great Depression, tens of thousands of workers throughout the culture industries organized new unions to make the conditions of modern mental labor subject to collective bargaining with employers.
Reflecting both their relative autonomy, or at least their aspiration to it, as well as their own perception of their emerging and indeterminate class position, quite a few of the founders of these unions chose the appellation “guild.” This included not just Hollywood’s Screen Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild, with their aura of glamor, but also the Radio Writers Guild along with many other unions that affiliated with the upstart Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), including the American Newspaper Guild (which also counted the editorial employees of Time, Inc. as members) and the smaller groups of artists and workers in publishing, broadcasting, and motion pictures who joined the United Office and Professional Workers of America.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, organizing by writers, artists, and other workers whose consciousness had been transformed by their experiences of modern mental labor often made the offices of newspapers, magazines, presses, designers, broadcasters, advertising agencies, and motion picture studios into sites of conflict with employers. In the courts, the American Newspaper Guild, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union, successfully refuted arguments by publishers and other media employers that the First Amendment gave them a special exemption from the National Labor Relations Act. In doing so, this union of culture workers affirmed freedom of expression as a positive liberty within a democratic society.
The rights of culture workers became one and the same with the public’s right to knowledge and culture. And while the vicissitudes of New Deal labor law were not favorable to collective bargaining in higher education, nonetheless, professors, librarians, and other campus workers formed chapters of the American Federation of Teachers or organized in other ways. Engineers, technicians, and scientists also joined unions during this era, most notably the nuclear physicists working on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War who became members of the CIO-affiliated Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians.
Roots and rootlessness are less the key binary here than autocracy compared to democracy, or a more socialized mass society brought together around worker control of all sorts in contrast to corporate managerial hierarchies.
Even as writers, artists, and others engaged in various forms of modern mental labor organized unions throughout commercial media and entertainment, many also wondered whether American consumer capitalism could produce the quantity and quality of culture and knowledge necessary to provide adequate employment for the creative class, let alone to sustain a truly democratic society. Consequently, they also sought to establish alternative sites of cultural production with public, labor, or cooperative backing. Examining the WPA cultural projects in this context offers a different perspective on their meaning and significance than the one that Ratner-Rosenhagen offers. Rather than standing out as eccentric deviations from the main currents of modern US cultural and intellectual history, the Federal Art Project, Federal Writers Project, Federal Theater Project, and Federal Music Project in fact epitomized the general trend toward industrial production of culture and knowledge. Moreover, as public employment programs formed largely in response to the demands of organized artists, performers, and writers, the cultural projects were frequently sites of labor unrest and creative controversy.
“Soil Erosion,” from The March of Time newsreel, March 1937. Source: Indiana University Media Collections Online.
Although some of the projects’ output undoubtedly could be categorized as a treacly, if pluralistic, nationalism or a therapeutic balm, much of it, such as the Federal Theater’s experimental multimedia Living Newspaper productions, was intended to further the antifascist, antiracist, and prounion ambitions of a broad Popular Front social movement that aspired not only to unite liberals and radicals, but also blue-collar workers with the emerging creative class. Proponents of the Popular Front viewed the WPA cultural projects as prefiguring a broader democratic control over the making of culture and knowledge, and they pressed hard for their continuation on a permanent, non-relief basis. Roots and rootlessness are less the key binary here than autocracy compared to democracy, or a more socialized mass society brought together around worker control of all sorts in contrast to corporate managerial hierarchies.
Popular Front Into Cold War
Nearly all historical periodizations impose constraints on our comprehension even as they provide us with necessary parameters for our inquiries into the past. One crucial drawback of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s decision to draw a line at the conclusion of the Second World War demarcating a hard border across US cultural and intellectual history is that it misses the persistence of the Popular Front structure of feeling into the culture of the early postwar years. The years-long campaign of blacklisting that effectively purged the writers, artists, and thinkers who backed the late Popular Front from the entertainment fields, the media, and higher education in fact attested to the continued appeal of the radical vision.
Another, more fundamental drawback is that Ratner-Rosenhagen’s periodization evades the extent to which the experiences of various cultural and intellectual figures during the 1930s and 1940s came to be reconstructed during the early Cold War into a commonly accepted historical record. Frequently, those who claimed to have once been sympathetic with the aims of Depression-era radicals before subsequently renouncing them out of their concern with individual liberty ended up as the arbiters of the Popular Front’s legacy. Their emphasis on the ideal of the independent writer or artist as the cultural avatar of the “free world” not only erased the partisans of the Popular Front and their contributions, but also with it a critical appreciation of the new modes of producing culture and knowledge on an industrial scale that had become hegemonic between 1920 and 1945.
Subsequently, for decades much of the practice of the US cultural and intellectual history has involved refracting the experiences and consciousness of the period’s writers, artists, and thinkers through the lens of Cold War anticommunist liberalism, imposing an individualistic subjectivity on persons who did not necessarily understand their own lives or creativity on those terms. All too often, the result has been histories that furnish a distorted interpretation of the literature, art, media, and scholarship produced within the nation’s culture and knowledge industries. This is particularly true for the years from 1920 to 1945, when the new America that made ideas first became the dominant paradigm for creativity, but to a less conspicuous degree this tendency has inflected the liberal historiography of US cultural and intellectual life in more recent eras as well.[5]
The tendency of many practitioners of intellectual history to remain committed to the primacy of the individual author or artist as subject, of course, also reflects the most prevalent mode in which our own scholarly endeavors have been defined within the ideology of the historical profession. Long after the prospects of securing a tenure-track academic position have become akin to winning the lottery, the professional ideology still maintains that scholarly achievement is the result of a meritocracy of genius. Outstanding works of historical scholarship are still represented as largely the result of individual brilliance and drive, rather than of time, funding, and institutional infrastructures. Even as the crisis of the American system of higher education threatens to become terminal, this view persists. The American Historical Association might claim to advocate for the historical profession in the abstract, but it has done practically nothing to stem the destruction of the conditions under which people can actually earn a living as historians.
Running Backwards Through the Projector
Recovering a critical awareness of the emergence of the conditions of modern mental labor as a historical phenomenon, and the varieties of subjectivity and consciousness predicated on those conditions of labor, is vital for accurately appreciating and analyzing the works of so many of the writers, artists, and thinkers of the era. Yet it is arguably even more important today as those of us engaged in researching, writing, and teaching the cultural and intellectual history of the modern United States are ourselves laboring in the midst of the accelerating deindustrialization of higher education and the media. To work in the 2020s as an academic, a journalist, a screenwriter, a designer, a museum curator, or a book editor is to be like a figure in a March of Time newsreel that is running backwards through the projector, as over a century of the accumulated institutions and infrastructure of the nation’s culture and knowledge industries disintegrates around us.
The America that made ideas has been unmade by decades of austerity and disinvestment, as newsrooms shut down, colleges close their doors, and even new digital media industries have started to contract. We are losing the material conditions that made the sheer volume of our cultural and intellectual productivity possible. Whether we can salvage some of what remains, or whether we ultimately establish entirely new sites of creativity, we will need to draw upon the experiences of those writers, artists, and thinkers of the period from 1920 to 1945 as they encountered the industrialized production of words, images, and ideas when these systems were still emergent.
About the Author
Shannan Clark is an associate professor of history at Montclair State University. He is the author of The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism, published by Oxford University Press in 2021. He is also a proud member of American Federation of Teachers Local 1904 and is one of its delegates to the Council of New Jersey State College Locals.
Notes
[1] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas that Made America: A Brief History (Oxford University Press, 2019), 120.
[2] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 128.
[3] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 131.
[4] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 118.
[5] After 40-50 years, much of the liberal historiography still follows the interpretative framework set by Richard Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973); and Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: HarperCollins, 1985).