The Emotional Life of the Great Depression
2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/steinbeckreview.17.2.0235
ISSN1754-6087
Autores ResumoWhat two things do John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the films of Shirley Temple, the board game Monopoly, the Empire State Building, and the Isaac Asimov Robot series all have in common? They all had their origins in the years of the Great Depression, and they play a role in John Marsh's analysis in The Emotional Life of the Great Depression. In his introduction, Marsh explains his motives for writing the book. Chiefly, his interest is in more fully describing the suffering experienced by Americans during the period he defines as between the stock market crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Previous books about the Great Depression, he complains, only quantified this suffering. By focusing on data such as numbers of those unemployed, dollars lost, and businesses bankrupt, such books, he judges, “only vaguely represent the experience of people who lived out those economic indicators” (9). His determination, then, is threefold. First, to describe that experience of suffering by closely examining and analyzing the emotions that resulted from it. Second, to ask the right response to that suffering, for in his view “feelings are where social change is born” (16). And third, to more fully understand ourselves by understanding this pivotal period, because “to understand it is to understand us” (12). He will accomplish these goals, he promises in the introduction, by examining the period from the viewpoint of politics, economics, popular culture, and literature—as well as social sciences, I would add. Without too much overstatement, I hope, Marsh achieves all his goals with impressive breadth and depth.Marsh's book would be of interest to Steinbeck scholars if for no other reason than its portrayal of the historical and cultural context of Steinbeck's works. Even if he had never mentioned the author or his works, Marsh's book lays a foundation that places Steinbeck's works squarely in place at the center of the American experience. But Marsh goes much further by holding up Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as in many ways the epitome of human suffering and the response to it during the Great Depression. His deep analysis of the Joad family in his chapter on the sublime should enrich any reader's appreciation of the American classic. Marsh also gives a place to Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in his discussion of friendship in his chapter on love. For all these reasons, I strongly refer Steinbeck scholars to the book.In his introduction, Marsh goes to great lengths to explain and justify his choice of the six emotions he examines in the central six chapters of his book. He identifies what he describes as the canonical emotions of the Great Depression typically discussed by historians: despair, fear, anger, and—after the 1932 election of Roosevelt—hope. He sees fear and despair, further, as “hyper-canonical” in the sense that they are most commonly the focus of examinations of the period (9). Marsh cautions readers, however, against this narrow view that, he argues, is in some ways superficial and incomplete. As a result, he refines and modifies the list to include three negative and three relatively more positive emotions. The resulting six he labels the “quintessential” emotions of the Great Depression: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. His plan is to examine the political and cultural origins and effects of these emotions, rather than taking strictly a psychological or biological view. And that explains why we see in his book the elements named in my riddle above—Shirley Temple, Monopoly, the Empire State Building, and the Robot series. But readers will quickly see that for Marsh the literature of the period plays a particularly important role because he believes that poets and storytellers, like Steinbeck, present evidence not just of their own views but also the views—and emotions—of others of the period of which they write.Of the six “quintessential” emotions that Marsh has chosen to examine, each in its own chapter, the first three are essentially negative emotions: righteousness, panic, and fear. In Chapter 2 on righteousness, titled “Purging the Rottenness from the System: The Blessed and the Damned in the Great Depression,” he identifies those who see the Great Depression as a morality tale, that is, that all its suffering is a punishment for past excesses. These include classical economists such as Mellon and Schumpeter, who saw the economic collapse as necessary corrections for widespread financial mistakes, and religious fundamentalists, who felt the world was in the Last Days before the reward of the righteous and the punishment of sinners. In their righteousness, both groups felt that the suffering being experienced was necessary, that sympathy was not helpful, and that intervention—governmental or otherwise—would only prolong the suffering. Marsh explains how such self-righteous societal attitudes delayed actions that could have reduced much of the resulting damage and suffering.In Chapter 3, “I Saw One Woman Faint: Toward a Sociology of Panic,” Marsh addresses the panic that traditionally is blamed for the economic collapse of the stock market that led to the Great Depression. In a fascinating examination of economic factors and collective behavior, Marsh shows persuasively that the so-called panic resulting in the sale of stock and the run on banks was not the result of stupidity, irrationality, baseless fears, or mob psychology. Instead, it resulted from financial structures and practices—such as margin trading—beyond the control of those individuals forced to watch helplessly as their fortunes and life savings disappeared. He further examines racial panic in an insightful discussion of Richard Wright's novel Native Son, showing that economics was not the only source of fear and panic during the Great Depression.In Chapter 4, “Fear Itself: Polio, Unemployment, and Other Things on the Doorstep,” Marsh looks into various types of fear that plagued Americans during the Great Depression, concentrating specifically on dread, which he describes as prospective fear of future horrors that might befall one or one's family. The two horrors that he identifies in this regard are the fear of the polio epidemic that was rampant, particularly in New York City, in 1931 and the fear of unemployment rampant throughout the country in the early years of the decade. While polio caused a horrifying fear of degeneration of the body through its paralysis, unemployment threatened devastation of one's personal identity and one's place in society. Interestingly, Marsh chooses to focus on the suffering of middle-class workers, portrayed as more pitiful and empathetic because their pride often kept them from applying for relief as they tried desperately but impossibly to maintain their lifestyle. Marsh wisely uses a story in the weird fiction genre by H. P. Lovecraft, “The Thing at the Doorstep,” to illustrate the twin horrors of degeneration of body and loss of identity.In Chapter 5, “Awe: Toward a Depression Sublime,” Marsh finally begins to turn toward positive emotions in the Great Depression. He begins by examining elements of the sublime that made humans feel insignificant, observing even the terror experienced, including vastness, magnitude, wonder, and awe. As an example, Marsh describes the amazement of the public at the new scientific evidence in the early 1930s of the size and continuing expansion of the universe. Turning to human endeavors, he focuses on the awe felt at viewing the Empire State Building, amazingly completed in only slightly more than one year in 1931. But Marsh's real contribution to the study of the sublime in the Great Depression lies in his examination of “the feeling of the ineluctable dignity and worth of human beings that arose during the decade” (125). To illustrate this new application of the sublime, he points to athletes such as Jesse Owens, workers on the Empire State Building in the photographs of Lewis Hine, migrant workers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers. Here again he holds up Steinbeck's impoverished Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath and the sacrifice, courage, and devotion they show to one another and even strangers in need. He shows further in Agee and Evans's study of cotton sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that awe and even worship rather than sympathy are the appropriate emotions owed such unique and worthy human beings—with a side criticism of reformers who look down, rather than up, at their unique worth.In Chapter 6, “A Sordid, Future Mess: Love in Hard Times,” Marsh shows how the role of love, marriage, and even childbirth paralleled the economy. As the economy plummeted, so did marriage and birth rates. And both rose toward the end of the decade as economic fortunes improved. He illustrates this phenomenon with film and literature of the decade that showed love as a sordid unromantic mess, where sex was used for personal gain, and true love could not survive. Toward the end of the decade, however, romantic attitudes toward love rise again, as shown in the 1936 abdication of the throne of Great Britain by King Edward VIII so that he could marry the love of his life, American divorcée Wallis Simpson. Marsh concludes that love did not die during the Great Depression. It only went dormant.In Chapter 7, “What You Want to Hear: Hope in the Great Depression,” Marsh presents a fascinating analysis of hope by focusing on three self-help books of the decade: Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich, and Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How More Than One Hundred Men Have Recovered from Alcoholism. Only the last of these does Marsh seem to consider authentic and useful, seeing the first two as only preying on the hopelessness of those made desperate by the misfortunes of the Great Depression. Marsh also looks briefly at Isaac Asimov's short story “Liar!” about a lying robot, which shows how easily humans succumb to hope, even if unfounded.Marsh's concluding Chapter 8, “The Hazards and Vicissitudes of Life: The Emotional Life of the Social Security Act,” describes the fascinating history of the Social Security Act beginning with the activism of one man, Francis Townsend, who proposed a national pension program. Townsend became the leader of a national movement that stirred the anxiety of officeholders through millions of letters and signatures on petitions presented to Congress. Marsh shows how the emotions of the Great Depression came together, creating a wave of sentiment among the voters and their elected officials that something had to be done. This unstoppable wave defeated all criticism, including the criticism that such a program would damage individual motivation and self-reliance. In Roosevelt's words, such a program would offer security against “the hazards and vicissitudes of life” (225). Marsh convinces his readers that the Social Security Act was in many ways the direct result of and response to the emotions of the Great Depression—emotions made palpable and visible by the many elements he describes throughout the book—thus proving his belief that feelings are indeed “where social change is born” (16).As a kind of epilogue, I feel compelled to share my own emotions while reading Marsh's book and writing this review in the summer of 2020. Many of the events he describes share an uncanny resemblance to what we Americans are today experiencing. We have our own epidemic in COVID-19, in many ways much worse than the polio epidemic of 1931. We have our own economic crisis, with debates about the proper role of governmental intervention. We have record unemployment, approaching but not yet reaching that in the Great Depression. We have anxieties about aliens taking much-needed jobs from citizens. We have race issues approaching critical levels and anti-lynching laws again being discussed. In today's Black Lives Matter movement, we even have a reflection of Marsh's discussion of whose emotions mattered the most. During the Great Depression, he explains, it seemed clear to policy makers that the emotions (and presumably also the suffering) of white men mattered more than those of white women, which mattered more than those of black men, which mattered more than those of black women (24). Sadly, many things haven't changed that much since the Great Depression. Our present situation makes it all the more poignant and meaningful to read The Emotional Life of the Great Depression.Marsh accomplishes much in this book. By tying literature and film to the cultural and political realities of the Great Depression, he raises the humanities to the level of the political and social sciences in their ability to portray historical truth. And to the interest of Steinbeck scholars, his discussion of the novels, particularly The Grapes of Wrath, gives Steinbeck a foundational place in our American history. Marsh makes a serious and significant contribution by painting a real and vivid picture of emotions of the Great Depression. Not just describing and analyzing the emotions of this decade, he re-creates the fabric and texture of the time for readers to experience it themselves. His work reminds me of the painting of Jackson Pollock, who although not mentioned by Marsh, got his start in the WPA Federal Art Project. Just as Pollock laid paint—“spattering” is probably a more accurate term—layer after layer on mammoth canvases, Marsh lays the emotions of the Great Depression, layer after layer, on his own canvass to create a picture rich in its depth and fullness. The picture he paints accomplishes yet another of the goals he set for himself: it truly helps us understand ourselves better. Perhaps it achieves that goal even more than Marsh could have ever anticipated because of the place where we find ourselves in the year 2020. In describing the emotions of the Great Depression, Marsh also describes many of the emotions we are feeling today. By so doing, he offers an unexpected gift to today's readers. By showing so vividly what our country survived during the Great Depression, Marsh gives us hope.
Referência(s)