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MAKE POLITICAL ART
Attacks on the arts have recently escalated. In his final year in office, Trump’s proposed 2021 budget, entitled “Stopping Wasteful and Unnecessary Spending,” aimed to cut $33 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities.1 The COVID pandemic devastated culture in 2020 to the tune of a $15 billion loss. Museums shut down, plays were canceled, film festivals went virtual, and popular music venues shuttered their doors. Is it worth saving the arts? Good question, especially given so much upheaval over the past several years: Rising white supremacy. Ascendant nativism. Massive floods in the Midwest. Catastrophic wildfires in California. In light of all of this, you might wonder, What’s the point of spending your time reading books or watching films when melancholy saturates the air we breathe? Actually, art is indispensable to political progress. Because art knows no rules, it expands them for you. What’s familiar is gone. Your imagination is liberated. Art resonates emotionally. It stimulates your moral sensibility. A temporary refuge from the world isn’t an escape. It sharpens your consciousness. It opens up your heart. It refreshes your spirit. Disaster is the best time for art. And art is at its best when confronting disaster.
This was the guiding belief of early-twentieth-century artists who confronted the Great Depression of the 1930s. To many, art must have seemed like an irrelevant distraction. Political corruption was rampant, and crowded cities and abandoned rural towns were characterized by obscene poverty and atrocious working conditions. Inequality was out of control. By the late 1920s, the tax rate on the rich, which, before World War I was 77 percent, fell to 25 percent. When the great speculative financial crash came to Wall Street in September 1929, the sitting president, Republican Herbert Hoover, dug deep into his boundless faith in rugged individualism. Preaching patience, Hoover wouldn’t support any federal anti-poverty programs, believing that the Roaring Twenties would boom again soon.
But few writers, like workers in general, could wait for relief. They could barely afford to eat. For those who found work, it was easier to write melodramas that lacked dramatic punch and pulp romances divorced from the pressing issues of the day. But not all artists sold out. Turns out, provocative art is what the masses wanted.
The novelist Michael Gold, known as the dean of what became known as “proletariat literature,” never saw writing as a realistic vocation when he was a kid. But he made his life—surrounded by Jewish Eastern European immigrants in the Lower East Side, where he grew up—the stuff of art. Gold never forgot his roots, even though he studied briefly at Harvard and then fled to Mexico to escape conscription in the First World War. His novel Jews Without Money (1930), part reverie, part autobiography, mostly a tale of lost dreams and frustrated expectations, became a surprise bestseller for the very reason critics thought it failed. The characters are flat, the plot is didactic, and the language is hard-boiled. Gold describes “mounds of pale stricken flesh tossing against an unreal city”2 and offers thinly veiled metaphors like this one: “One steaming hot night I couldn’t sleep for the bedbugs. They have a peculiar nauseating smell of their own; it is the smell of poverty. They crawl slowly and pompously, bloated with blood, and the touch and smell of these parasites wakens every nerve to disgust.”
Irreverence is fashionable today, but Gold’s fierce commitment to the possibility of revolutionary change is what readers admired back then and what we need more of today. The last lines of Jews Without Money don’t treat hope in revolution with disdain but with a zeal that makes you feel like the end of misery is within reach: “O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy. . . . You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.”3
Gold didn’t care about literary style. When he did, he preferred to be blunt. And why not? Getting readers to act might not happen through impeccably constructed sentences, but through inducing in them emotional responses. Gold must have learned this from Upton Sinclair, who encouraged him to begin his magazine, New Masses (1926–1948). By the time they met, Sinclair was an aspiring socialist politician running unsuccessfully for Congress. But in 1906, he was a muckraking journalist turned novelist on a lark. This, when the editor of a socialist magazine edited by midwestern populists, Appeal to Reason, which had over five hundred thousand subscribers, gave Sinclair five hundred dollars to expose the horrors of the US meatpacking industry. The novel that emerged after seven weeks of intensive interviews, The Jungle (1906), depicted the conditions endured by Chicago’s immigrant meat workers, who made food that mixed human and rodent remains in unimaginably filthy factories.
As a child, Sinclair found that his sense of humor saved him. The son of a traveling salesman, he escaped the poorhouse in New York by financing his own education at City College through joke books he wrote as a teen. But nothing was funny about The Jungle. That’s why it had an impact Sinclair never anticipated. “I aimed for the public’s heart and hit it in the stomach,” he remarked.4 Sinclair left an indelible mark. On first reading it, the sitting president, Teddy Roosevelt, thought the book was sensational fiction. But after dispatching secret investigators to observe labor practices at meatpacking plants, he realized that Sinclair’s depiction was tame compared to the real thing. After the ensuing public outcry, Congress regulated the production of food through the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
The new regulatory regime was only an incremental step toward reforming capitalism. But its lesson is clear: art can change politics. This is what the photographer Dorothea Lange set out to do when she was given a job photographing migrant farmworkers in California through FDR’s Works Progress Administration. The WPA, established in 1936, employed thousands of out-of-work painters, writers, and musicians. Lange, born in 1895, began as an out-of-touch portrait photographer of the well-to-do in San Francisco. But as the Depression lengthened, her first marriage crumbled, and the art market disintegrated, Lange left her comfortable private studio and was reborn in the streets. This is where she first took snapshots of people sleeping on sidewalks and of labor uprisings at the barricade. She left her first husband and remarried the University of California, Berkeley, economist Paul Taylor, who was researching Mexican immigration. Together, they chronicled the wreckage of the Dust Bowl.
When she and Taylor set foot in the California fields, Lange was shocked to find laborers, after a long day of digging potatoes and picking cotton, “camped in an open field, without shelter of any kind. Mother pregnant, with 5 starving children . . . eating green onions, raw, and that was all they had.”5 She resolved to give flesh to the abstraction of poverty through what still remains the iconic image of the era, the unforgettable Migrant Mother (1936). The photo is of a thirty-two-year-old mother, looking pensively into the distance, with two of her seven children burying their faces in her neck. Here and elsewhere, Lange stressed the human will against the dehumanized system that crushes it. In her photographs, images of laborers’ improvised homes, tents made of cardboard and linoleum, are juxtaposed against a highly organized agricultural system, of fields plowed by depersonalizing tractors.
Beyond helping to pay the bills, Lange’s photographs had a profound cultural legacy. They were the biggest influence on a writer born in Salinas Valley, California, who would eventually win the Nobel Prize in 1962. His best-selling novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which became a popular film, would shape American consciousness: John Steinbeck. While in the Mexican countryside on set for a film he wrote, The Forgotten Village (1941), he was accompanied by a rising Black novelist, Richard Wright, whose book Native Son (1940) had caused a national stir a year earlier. Wright created an antihero, Bigger Thomas, a young Black man who is ensnared in a racist-capitalist system in the South Side of Chicago, which enrages and then destroys him. Though the story of Bigger shocked white liberals, Wright’s greatest achievement was to inspire a new crop of Black artists. What struck young writers like James Baldwin, Margaret Walker, and Ralph Ellison when they first encountered Wright’s fiction, and who were supported by his generosity, was that Wright’s unfiltered depiction of Bigger’s rage felt authentic. Wright drew from his own life—his childhood in Mississippi, where lynching was part of the landscape, and his experience in Illinois, where he was among the first Black writers to work for the WPA, in 1935.
Wright’s Bigger Thomas didn’t fit the caricature of Black forgiveness, made famous in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), or that of Black passivity in Gone with the Wind (1939). Wright wouldn’t stand for polite white liberalism that was toothless in its desire for moderation, if not racist behind its veneer, because he was a radical. Wright was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and a book reviewer for the political journal that Gold edited, New Masses. But the goal of Wright’s art, more so than anything else, was to radicalize readers’ perceptions. You see this in the remarkable 12 Million Black Voices (1941), an extended lyric essay on Black life during the Great Depression, accompanied by ninety Farm Security Administration photos curated by Edwin Rosskam.
Lange let her images speak for themselves. But Wright’s words describing the gazes, movements, and expressions of Black sharecroppers, maids, dancers, and waiters reorient the reader’s perspective of the US: “What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what is,” Wright writes. “If we black folk perish, America will perish.”6 Black resistance in the face of catastrophic white racism is what Wright calls a “mirror” that he forces the nation to confront directly.
Art is, and has always been, a tool for disorientation. Good. Disorientation is what’s demanded in times of crisis. The right kind. Find art that makes you feel solidarity with those you’d least expect. To find courage yourself. To see anew. To be rejuvenated. In one of the darkest periods in American history, artists were adamant about art’s revolutionary potential. We have every reason to believe too.