Victoria W. Wolcott responds to Chapter 6—Roots and Rootlessness (1920-45) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
From Individual to Communal, Pragmatic to Prefigurative
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s overview of American intellectual history, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History, offers us a masterclass in clear and succinct writing. She deftly covers three centuries, centering a democratic mix of individuals and ideas that allow us to “eavesdrop on the past.” Ratner-Rosenhagen organizes her capacious history with the generative concept of a variety of “crossings,” across time, space, and subcultures. Yet, for the most part, her analyses hinge on individual historical actors who produced and communicated ideas. Ideas, however, are not always produced by individuals; they are also created by communities.
Alongside a history of individual achievement and competition in American history runs a counterhistory of communalism and cooperation. At certain key moments, experimental groups push society towards political, social, and cultural transformations. They do so through processes of both imitation and innovation, drawing from the past and moving toward the future. This was particularly true during the twentieth-century interwar period, the subject of chapter six of The Ideas That Made America.
On balance, the interwar period contained more innovation than imitation. In the 1920s and 1930s, Americans challenged the order that Progressive reformers sought to impose on society during the early twentieth century. Rapid economic growth and vibrant subcultures fueled these challenges during the 1920s. Then, during the Great Depression, working Americans refused to succumb passively to the devastation of the economic crisis and created new institutions. These women and men experimented with novel forms of protest to form unions and collective communities that were, at times, prefigurative and even utopian, modeling in the present the society they hoped would appear in the future.
Ratner-Rosenhagen begins her chapter with a list of notable American intellectuals, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret Mead, Langston Hughes, and Walter Lippman. She ends the chapter with European refugees who made profound contributions to American thought, including Albert Einstein and Bertolt Brecht. Intellectual histories, such as The Ideas that Made America, are often made up of individual or, at best, collective biographies. A number of historians, such as Ratner-Rosenhagen, also incorporate media or popular cultural sources to demonstrate how these ideas were transmitted across society.
…On balance, the interwar period contained more innovation than imitation….
This focus on discrete individuals, however, only tells us part of the story. For example, while Ratner-Rosenhagen notes that by the 1930s intellectuals and policy makers were denouncing the American tradition of “rugged individualism,” she does not highlight how communalism and cooperation drove both the ideas and reform movements of the interwar period. What might an intellectual history that places collective and communal efforts at the forefront of the narrative look like? And what role have utopian ideas about the creation of a more just society played in intellectual history?
An EPIC History of Leftwing Communal Thinking and Action
For all its innovation, the communalism of the Great Depression drew from deeper traditions in American society that sought to prefigure a more egalitarian nation. One of the most dramatic and consequential communal political movements with a distinctly utopian foundation was Upton Sinclair’s 1934 End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign. Sinclair launched his bid for governor by releasing a utopian tract, I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty. His plan was based on socialist principles of cooperation and communalism that dated back to Robert Owen’s New Harmony community in the early nineteenth century. Sinclair proposed a production-for-use plan, allowing the unemployed to work in closed factories and farms and provide pensions to the elderly and disabled. Both inspired by and fueling Sinclair’s political career, Californians formed EPIC clubs, reminiscent of the Nationalist Clubs formed after the publication of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward in 1888. Indeed, Bellamy’s utopian socialism and Sinclair’s EPIC plan had much in common. One of the major groups supporting the campaign was the aptly named Utopian Society of America. Sinclair lost the election, undercut by Hollywood and the conservative elite, but EPIC supporters with their communal actions directly influenced Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security Act.
The Utopian Society of America disintegrated in the wake of Sinclair’s loss. However, some members of the group migrated to the most successful utopian community in twentieth-century America, Father Divine’s Peace Mission. The charismatic African American religious leader, Father Divine, drew thousands of followers nationwide, including many white members of the Utopian Society. Amidst the economic deprivation of the Great Depression, Father Divine preached prosperity and abundance. His lavish banquets provided free meals for hundreds daily in Harlem and other cities. The Peace Mission’s cooperative businesses and farms thrived while private businesses failed.
Moreover, the Peace Mission was a fully interracial utopian community, which blurred boundaries of race and gender. And through their work integrating public accommodations, including the early use of Gandhian nonviolent direct-action tactics, they presaged the growing civil rights movement to come. While looking toward a future of racial equality, the Peace Mission extended a long legacy of past utopian communalism. Father Divine felt a particular affinity for Ann Lee and the Shakers, adapting her teachings on celibacy. Cooperative economic systems had also flourished in post-emancipation African American communities, another model for the Peace Mission’s businesses. Finally, although Father Divine was the leader, it was his collective movement that created a model for an egalitarian and racially just society. This utopian vision help propel the social movements to follow.
Thinking Labor
The Great Depression also provided a political and social context for the most visible collective movement of the interwar period: the labor movement. The absence of the more collective labor movement from Ratner-Rosenhagen’s short chapter is telling, although she does effectively discuss the intellectual contributions of the New Deal and she gives a brief overview of the Works Progress Administration, perhaps the most collective arts and literature endeavor in our nation’s history. Yet more attention to workers as thinkers would shift the story from Ratyner-Rosenhagen’s focus on individuals grappling with roots and rootlessness to collectives striving to innovate in the face of limitations.
Take the laboring Americans in fields such as theater and film production. These are inherently communal, requiring large casts of artistic workers. During the interwar period there was a direct overlap between theater and labor. In workers’ education institutions such as the Brookwood Labor College and Highlander Folk School, instructors and students developed music and theater specifically for the collective needs of the labor movement. Organizers from the Brookwood Labor School, for example, gave lyric sheets of labor songs to striking workers during the 1936 Flint, Michigan sit-down strike. The Brookwood Players also wrote a highly popular and influential labor play, “Sit-Down,” to bring the story of the strike to hopeful workers nationwide. Similarly, at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee groups of musicians adapted old folk songs and spirituals for the labor and civil rights movements. “We Shall Overcome,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “We Shall Not be Moved” all emerged from collective interwar experiments that centered the lives of ordinary people in social and cultural change. The music itself—soon to be thought of as “folk” music—was marked by communal, not individual, authorship: songs that shifted and changed based on the contributions of many authors responding to many different situations and needs.
Radical movements, inherently communal, also transmitted ideas through actions. Indeed, rethinking the relationship between actions and ideas—considering actions as expressing ideas in addition to ideas as modes of action—might add to intellectual history’s analytic repertoire. During the Flint strike supporters organized flying squadrons, two dozen cars that brought picketers to the site and blocked the roads when police threatened the strikers. Unemployed councils in major cities organized another form of flying squadrons, crowds who would return evicted families’ belonging to their homes and help them obtain electricity and other utilities. Such brazen actions articulated the ways in which competitive capitalism devalued workers’ lives and modeled a different, more cooperative world. These forms of mutual aid were in conversation with a world of ideas, both those articulated in public discourse, such as debates over New Deal legislation, and those that were emergent, such as civil rights.
Conservative Collectivities
Collective action was not just the purview of the left, however; conservative and reactionary forces sought to counter progressive, prefigurative action through communal means. Importantly, Ratner-Rosenhagen is careful to include right-wing populists in her narrative. Most significantly, the radio personality Father Coughlin was responsible for a rise in antisemitism and fascist ideology during the 1930s. Yet his sentiments were often expressed communally. So too, the Black Legion was a white supremacist group that emerged during the Great Depression. It grew out of the Ku Klux Klan, which flourished during the 1920s, but experienced a decline by the 1930s.
Led by former Klansman William Sheppard, the Black Legion expanded quickly among the white working class in the Midwest. The more than 100,000 members targeted minority groups, including African Americans and immigrants, with violence and intimidation. The Black Legion was visible enough that even Hollywood took note, producing a 1937 film starring Humphrey Bogart about a notorious Black Legion kidnapping and murder plot in Detroit. Thus, the communal actions of the flying squadrons were not alone in challenging the status quo. The rising tide of fascism in the United States and abroad was the result of communal action as well. Both suggest a broader canvas for considering the ideas, and what Ratner-Rosenhagen calls the “crossings,” between different areas of social life in the interwar period.
Innovation Against Limitation
Ratner-Rosenhagen frames her discussion of interwar intellectuals as a story of roots and rootlessness, but when one extends the framework to communities and organizations, a different dynamic emerges: innovations arose against the limitations and constraints placed upon groups of people agitating for justice and social change. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), for example, drew on older practices of the rural evangelical church and carried out secretive rituals that drew from Freemasonry. Union members learned secret handshakes and how to write coded messages, creating a culture that drew from decades of struggle. These radical roots found new expression in the political turmoil of the Great Depression, encompassing the roots of an interracial rural southern culture even as they marked the rootlessness of displaced sharecroppers seeking to create a new world out of the old.
In this case, the ideas generated by the STFU, interracialism and solidarity, bolstered the importance of community in the interwar period. The severity of the economic crisis called for group action. The context, in turn, shaped individual lives, such as Upton Sinclair’s decision to run for governor of California, but it was the movement behind Sinclair that generated the ideas which helped create a safety net for working Americans through the Social Security Act. Individuals helped to generate these movements, but the ideologies driving them forward were formed from the bottom up.
Ratner-Rosenhagen’s metaphor of intellectual histories as a series of “crossings” across national, temporal, and cultural borders is an effective one. However, I would add another form of crossing: individuals in the interwar period crossed among groups, joining utopian communities, union picket lines, and theatrical communities. These crossings built on older traditions, both reactionary and progressive, but also allowed for the development of new forms of protest and ways of living. A Dust Bowl migrant traveling to California may have encountered newly formed cooperatives, lived in migrant camps, and embraced the EPIC campaign. Figures such as this both helped shape these groups and were shaped by them.
Let’s “Eavesdrop” on Collective As Well As Individual Voices
I come to intellectual history as an outsider. I was trained in the 1990s as a social and cultural historian, whose primary theoretical orientation was anthropological. I embraced the ethnographic approach of Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas, among others. Perhaps it is for this reason that I’ve been drawn to the communal, rather than the individual. From this outsider perspective I would argue that reading against the grain of individualism to uncover collective and communal production of ideas is an important corrective to American history more generally.
Reading against the grain is particularly important for intellectual historians, who often fail to place charismatic individuals alongside those who were only heard when they acted collectively: displaced sharecroppers in the rural South, for example, formed the STFU and helped shape New Deal policies; housewives struggling during the Great Depression formed cooperatives and consumer leagues to demand better and cheaper goods. These were not simply social movements. They were groups that, as collectives, generated new ideas about rights and responsibilities that profoundly influenced American society. We should “eavesdrop” on them too, to use Ratner-Rosenhagen’s term. A fuller accounting of their histories would amplify the voices—and the intellectual history—of all Americans.
About the Author
Victoria W. Wolcott is Professor of History and Director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. She has published four books: Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (2001), Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America (2012), Living in the Future: The Utopian Strain in the Long Civil Rights Movement (2022), and the edited collection Utopian Imaginings: Saving the Future in the Present (2024). In addition, she has published articles in The Journal of American History, The Journal of African American History, The Radical History Review, and the Journal of Women’s History among others.