Proletarian Paperbacks: The Little Blue Books and Working-Class Culture
2002; Volume: 29; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1542-4286
Autores Tópico(s)Anarchism and Radical Politics
ResumoIn December of 1934, Louis Adamic published an article in Saturday Review of Literature entitled: What Proletariat Reads: Conclusions Based on a Year's Study Among Hundreds of Workers Throughout United States. Responding to Left's ardent interest in Proletarian Literature, Adamic rather cynically concluded that the overwhelming majority of American working class does not read books and serious, magazines. In fact, American working class hardly reads anything apart from local daily and Sunday newspaper and an occasional copy of Liberty, True Stories, Wild West Tales, or Screen Romances (Adamic 1934, 321-22). The article received a number of responses, most pointed of which came from Robert Cantwell, who had published his proletarian novel, The Land of Plenty, earlier that year. Writing in The New Republic, he argued that recent figures from public libraries show an active working-class readership who cannot afford cost of literature (1935, 274-76). Nevertheless, he conceded Adamic's point: Mass market publishers do not provide serious and purposeful reading matter to working class. As argument in East Coast magazines continued, Haldeman-- Julius publishing house in Girard, Kansas, celebrated printing and sale of its two hundred millionth Little Blue Book (Herder 1975, 199). Although these five-cent pamphlet editions of literary classics, socialist treatises, and original essays were a ubiquitous presence in working-class homes and farms during 1920s and early 1930s, they have long suffered from scholarly neglect. Adamic's own omission of Haldeman-julius Company might be explained by failure of his first literary venture, a Little Blue Book entitled Yugoslav Proverbs that sold badly enough to be removed from catalogue of titles (Bushnell 1986, 178).1 Yet more contemporary labor and cultural historians who lack his personal involvement have often been of like mind in their considerations of relationship between working classes and mass culture. Faced with a dearth of class-conscious cultural articulations, scholars often echo a variant of American Exceptionalism, and declaim quietistic and homogenizing forces of industry on American working class.Yet in doing so, they tend to discount multivalent ways in which working class has used mass in their struggles to maintain agency even as they adapted to normative influences of a mass production society. A recent and notable exception to this scholarly trend is Michael Denning's work on nineteenth-century dime novel, in which he argues for a contested terrain of working-class mass culture, somewhere between forms of deception and expressions of a genuine people's (Denning 1987, 3). This useful paradigm is equally applicable to Little Blue Books, which share with their predecessors a complex and shifting relationship to working-class social and political formations.There is little doubt that Emanuel Haldeman-Julius's project of education for masses rode wave of that great inter-war mania for self-improvement, a phenomenon Warren Susman has correctly seen as part of shift from working-class republicanism to a much more amalgamous culture of abundance (Susman 1984, xix-xxx).Yet equally important is particular way in which Little Blue Books negotiated that shift. Through broad scope of their subject matter, they brought a heterogeneous mixture of literary culture, self-help, indigenous socialism, and freethought into homes and lives of farmers and workers who as often as not found themselves on margins of modernity, held rapt by glow of electric light towns, but left out of economic boom of post-war years.2 The history, content, and even format of Little Blue Books provide a valuable sense of cultural desires of a generation on borders between production and consumption, tradition and technology, poverty and abundance. …
Referência(s)