From Agee to Astaire, Steinbeck to Ellington, the creative energies of the Depression against a backdrop of poverty and economic disaster. In this timely and long-awaited cultural history of the 1930s, Morris Dickstein, whom Norman Mailer called “one of our best and most distinguished critics of American literature,” explores the anxiety and hope, the despair and surprising optimism of distressed Americans at a time of dire economic dislocation. Bringing together a staggering range of materials—from epic Dust Bowl migrations and sharecropper photographs to zany screwball comedies, wildly popular swing bands, and streamlined Deco designs—this eloquent work highlights the pivotal role of culture and government intervention in hard times. Exploding the myth that Depression culture was merely escapist, it concentrates instead on the dynamic energy and insight the arts could provide and the enormous lift they gave to the nation’s morale. Dancing in the Dark shows how our worst economic crisis, as it eroded American individualism and punctured the American dream, produced some of the greatest writing, photography, and mass entertainment ever seen in this country. 24 illustrations.
Over twenty years ago, Morris Dickstein began gathering reference material for _Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression_ (Norton). He did not realize at the time that his book would be coming out in the worst financial crisis since the Depression. It might be that our own crisis is being tamed, and if so, it will never be the subject of a book like this one, which details the cultural forces at work in America in the 1930s. Dickstein admits that it seems a daunting task: "How can one era have produced both Woody Guthrie and Rudy Vallee, both the Rockettes high-stepping at the Radio Center Music Hall and the Okies on their desperate trek toward the pastures of plenty in California?" I think he would admit that he hasn't been able to untangle all the artistic efforts and influences of the time, but he has made a big and inclusive book on an important theme. "My subject here," he tells us, "is at once concrete--the books, the films of an era: the stories they told, the fears and hopes they expressed--and yet intangible, the look, the mood, the feel of the historical moment." A reader comes away from this book with awe at how much has gotten included. Dickstein is very good at analyzing popular culture; when he considers films and songs, for instance, or popular novels, he scores one hit after another. Much of his book, however, has to do with novels that, well, few people read anymore. Dickstein has read them, and admired them, but literature has been the focus of his life of scholarship. Anyway, the books of the period are not as much fun as the songs or movies. He himself writes, "As serious writers began to emphasize the limitations and distortions of the American Dream, popular artists became obsessed with fantastic, even magical images of success."
Dickstein rightly discusses most at length the work of Steinbeck, especially _The Grapes of Wrath_. Dickstein shows how the book was a sensation followed by a movie version that was far more faithful to its source novel than most Hollywood films were. F. Scott Fitzgerald everyone remembers for _The Great Gatsby_, but that was a 1920s story. Dickstein shows that Fitzgerald came into his own with his confessional "Crack-Up" essays of the next decade, and _Tender Is the Night_, works in which he "... tried to build a new career by exploring the ways in which he had been overextended, self-destructive, like America itself during the boom years." Dickstein's descriptions and analyses of movies are much more fun. After describing the Fascist films of Leni Riefenstahl, Dickstein compares her "appalling choreography of human masses" to that of Busby Berkeley. In _Gold Diggers of 1933_ Ginger Rogers may have opened by singing "We're in the Money", but the show closed with the phantasmagorical "Remember My Forgotten Man", about the veterans who were now neglected and destitute. The movies of the time are famous for their escapism, but Dickstein sees the situation differently; the "let's put on a show" crowd of the movie is hard pressed by financial worries, and before the "We're in the Money" number ends, the chorus girls are thrown out when the sheriff closes the show because the producer can't pay his bills. The torch song of the final number is not uplifting. Rather than escapism, this film like many others Dickstein writes about here reflects the anxieties of poverty, solitude, and loss of hope. The films of the depression were famous for their dance numbers, as in the Astaire / Rogers film _Shall We Dance_, and Dickstein stresses the importance of their physical energy, with dance countermanding the Depression: "It offers a lift to those who feel `down in the dumps,' a sense of movement and relationship to those who feel hemmed in and isolated, a democratic kind of classiness, available in fantasy if not in fact, to replace stiffly hierarchical notions of class." Depression movies might have shown people striving to get ahead, but in line with a darker theme, the people getting ahead were often gangsters; Edward G. Robinson's Rico in _Little Caesar_ has even been analyzed as a proponent of the success principles promoted by Andrew Carnegie. Another movie that shows the darkness of success is _Citizen Kane_. Dickstein's descriptions of the movies, and his acute summations of relevant scenes, are not only penetrating but will make readers want to go back to the originals again (something that will probably not happen with the frankly pessimistic books he describes).
There is a glow of nostalgia for the 1930s as a time when we may not all have been happy, but we were serious and united. As the current economy has its own troubles and individual Americans are helpless to do much about it, it is genuinely inspiring to learn from Dickstein how highbrow and popular art reflected the understanding of that last depression. He has a superb description of screwball comedies, including of course _My Man Godfrey_, wherein William Powell plays a forgotten man himself, restored to high society but only as a butler. He gets a chance to rescue some of the outcasts he used to tent with, realizing that "the only difference between a derelict and a man is a job." He provides the jobs in the movie, and he resists the implication that the men are not his responsibility. It may be just a screwball comedy, but the big question of how we can extend opportunities to the needy remains with us.
