The 1930s Arts and Entertainment: Topics in the News

THE GREAT DEBATE ABOUT ART

During the 1930s many debated whether quality art had to follow the trends set by European modernism or if it could be realistic and follow regional traditions. Modernist painting tended to be abstract, portraying feelings rather than scenes. Modernists saw people as alienated from each other and from the world. Many modernist painters tried to capture this feeling by representing the world as if through a distorting lens. Realistic painters depicted everyday scenes and people. Their works were certainly more popular with the public. Under the financial pressure of the Depression, artists were forced to engage in the debate about these artistic styles.

The most popular painters of the 1930s were the regionalists, who produced nostalgic scenes of traditional American life. Importantly, the regionalists were interested in painting scenes from particular local areas of the United States. They saw the tendency toward a national, or even international, style in art as damaging to local traditions and values. Painter Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) won many admirers when he said he would rid America of the "dirt" of European influence. Led by Benton, the regionalists argued that European modernism was obscure and elitist. Art, they believed, should be understandable by all. Grant Wood's (1891–1942) haunting American Gothic (1930) is a classic of regionalist painting. Showing a stern couple standing guard over their farmstead, American Gothic links the couple's moral values and beliefs with their sense of place. Regionalist painters like Benton were conservative in their work and their politics. However, other painters used realistic scenes to take a more radical approach. The social realists used their art to expose the suffering of people on farms and in factories during the Depression. They hoped their art would have a positive political effect, and they worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to produce "public art for the public good." Members of this group include Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Reginald Marsh (1898–1954), and Philip Evergood (1901–1973).

Although there was a strong demand in the art world for art that was distinctively American in its subject matter, Europeans did start to influence American art. The worsening economic and political situation in Europe brought many artists, and their abstract styles of painting, to the United States. By the end of the decade, modernist and abstract art was beginning to find an audience in this country, and they became more popular in the following decades.

Some painters mixed the two approaches. Edward Hopper's (1882–1967) work falls somewhere between realism and abstraction. Although he is sometimes

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described as a "scene" painter, Hopper's near-deserted realistic urban landscapes have an abstract feel to them. In a Hopper painting, reality itself is strange and "unreal." Because he bridges the gap between realism and a modernist view of life as alienating and lonely, Hopper is among the most important artists of the decade. He has become known as the "Painter of Loneliness."

FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR ARTS

The Federal Arts Project (FAP) tried to encourage all kinds of art and sculpture. It wanted to preserve American traditions, but it also wanted to create distinctive American art for the future. The FAP paid artists a small wage each month and demanded roughly one picture every eight weeks in return. In many cases, artists were paid to create murals and sculptures for public buildings. Abstract artists needed—and received—the most help. This was largely because there was very little market for abstract paintings at the beginning of the decade. So even as realistic "figure" painting was dominating the art world, a small group of artists were hard at work in New York, creating a distinctively American abstract tradition. In 1936 the American Abstract Artists (AAA) group formed, and by the late 1930s, museums, such as the Guggenheim Museum of Non-objective Art and the Museum of Living Art, began to show abstract art exhibitions. Even so, the work of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and others would not become well known until the 1940s.

THE MACHINE AGE

The new industrial landscapes and machines proved a rich source of inspiration for artists. Social realist artists often tried to illustrate the effects of industrialization on human workers. But approaches to machines and factories differed. Charles Sheeler (1883–1965) and Mexican artist Diego Rivera (1886–1957) both painted Henry Ford's auto plants in Michigan. Sheeler's paintings of the River Rouge plant portray the industrial landscape as a bleak but pure and empty space. His work is far from realistic. It gives no sense of work being done, showing no workers and no production line. In contrast, Rivera's Ford-sponsored murals celebrate the industrial process. They show men and machines working together with furious energy.

Industry also influenced sculpture. Constructivist sculpture was a direct product of the machine age. It involved welding together pieces of metal rather than carving shapes from a single lump of material. Sculptors such as David Smith (1906–1965) learned their welding skills while working in factories. Alexander Calder (1898–1976) made sculptures that moved, using motors and pulleys, which he called "mobiles." His static works were known as "stabiles." Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) used sculptural techniques in city planning and design, although he was most famous for his portrait sculptures. Although traditional figure sculpting remained popular, the most enduring American sculpture of the 1930s was abstract and designed for urban or industrial settings.

READING FOR THE MASSES: COMICS, SUPERHEROES, AND BIG LITTLE BOOKS

A new breed of comic strips offered relief from the grind of Depression-hit America. Set in strange places and featuring weird creatures

or aliens, they appealed to adults as well as children. One of the first of the new breed was Harold Foster's (1892–1982) Tarzan. Based on Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1914 novel Tarzan of the Apes, Foster's strip was a big hit from its debut in 1929. Readers enjoyed its exotic setting, dramatic story lines, and its message of racial purity. The Tarzan strip was part of a craze that inspired the series of movies starring Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller (1904–1984) in the title role.

But there were many more popular comic strips during the decade. Prince Valiant (created in 1937) was set in medieval England. Science fiction series such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon took readers into space. Debuting in 1934, Flash Gordon told of the hero's adventures on the planet Mongo with the lovely Dale Arden. Their efforts to escape Ming the Merciless transferred well to book format and to a series of movies. Chester Gould's (1900–1985) Dick Tracy comic strip first appeared in 1931. The square-jawed hero chased and gunned down gangsters, driven by a sense of justice and revenge. The Dick Tracy strip took off on the popularity of gangster movies and stories at the time. Although gangster movies tended to tell their stories from the gangster's point of view, even if they were usually also shown to be bad people, Dick Tracy offered the detective's point of view. In a clever sales gimmick, Quaker Oats sponsored a Dick Tracy radio show. By sending in cereal box tops, children could join Dick Tracy's Secret Service Patrol. Kids moved up through the ranks as their box top collection grew.

The Superman series began in 1939, published by Action Comics. Other action superheroes appeared over the following decade, but Superman remained the perfect American hero. An immigrant (from the planet Krypton), Superman was an ordinary man capable of amazing feats of strength, endurance, and even flying. He became a symbol of American values and power as World War II began.

The first of the Whitman Company's Big Little Books appeared in 1932. They were four hundred-page books alternating text and pictures on facing pages. Selling for ten cents, they adapted stories and characters from the comic strips. Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, and Little Orphan Annie all appeared in Big Little Books. The first comic book was a collection of strips called Funnies on Parade (1933), given away free with Proctor and Gamble products. Published until the 1970s, the books were the most popular with school-age children during the 1930s and 1940s.

WRITING AND SOCIAL CHANGE: TOUGH GUYS, WORKERS, AND SOUTHERNERS

American writers responded to the Depression in several ways. Some thought writing could bring about social change. Literary journalists documented the suffering of American people, modernists tried to understand the American self, and "tough-guy" writers offered a bleak view of the country in crisis. But what all these writers had in common was an urge to describe the American experience, and to make fiction relevant to the modern world.

Spurred by a sense that something was wrong, many writers went on the road in the 1930s. Sherwood Anderson's Puzzled America (1935), Theodore Dreiser's Tragic America (1931), and John Dos Passos's In All Countries (1934) are all based on the desperate stories these writers heard while traveling. Writers also challenged old ideas of literary value by trying to describe the "unexceptional American." What they came up with was an America that included homeless people, immigrants, and ethnic groups. These people had always been there, of course. But now for the first time fiction writers made them central characters in the American novel. This new focus on outsiders, misfits, and the misunderstood became a distinctive feature of American literature throughout the rest of the twentieth century.

Nobel Prizes for Literature

1930
Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was the first American to win the literary world's most prestigious prize. He accepted the cash award of $48,000 stating: "I should be just as glad if Eugene O'Neill had received it."

1936
Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) actually did win the Nobel Prize six years after Lewis. At the time of the award, however, he was ill with appendicitis, kidney, and prostate conditions and couldn't travel to Sweden to attend the ceremony. He accepted the $40,000 award in his bed at Merritt Hospital, San Francisco. The five-minute ceremony was witnessed by his physician and a nurse.

1938
Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) became, at 46, the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Prize (Rudyard Kipling was forty-two when he won in 1907). Buck had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her novel The Good Earth, but the critics didn't think she was worthy of the Nobel Prize. Buck agreed. Believing she was the victim of a hoax, she had her secretary call the Nobel Academy in Sweden to check that the reports were true.

Because they are about the lives of working people, also known as the "proletariat," such novels became known as "proletarian novels." Among others, Nelson Algren's Somebody in Boots (1935), Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1935), and Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children (1938) are all important because they discuss everyday experiences. In his U.S.A. trilogy (1938), Dos Passos deepened the description of "ordinary" America by using newsreel scripts, short biographies, and advertising pitches to recreate the feel of American life. Other writers became linked with particular places or events, especially for the way they describe their "ordinariness." A group of "California" novelists included Nathanael West (1903–1940) and Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961), while William Faulkner (1897–1962) was linked with the rural South. Other radical writers, such as Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966), wrote about strikes and labor struggles.

Most writers of the time embraced modern life and hoped to use their skills to improve the economic and social situation. The conservative Agrarian Movement hoped to recreate a rural and distinctively "Southern" way of life to balance the modern "American" way. In 1930, poets John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren along with eight others wrote I'll Take My Stand, a pamphlet attacking modern values. The book became known as the "Southern Manifesto," and was listed as being by "Twelve Southerners," since that was the number of people in the group. The twelve had a similar approach to that of the regionalist painters, in that they believed modern life was responsible for poverty, crime, and social disorder. They favored a return to "traditional" moral values, based on local needs and traditions. The Agrarian Movement more or less ignored the racism, poverty, and injustice that still gripped much of the South.

Popular fiction also focused on American life in the 1930s. Writers such as Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler first worked on pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective. From those early short stories they developed the hard-boiled detective novel into one of the most popular and enduring types of fiction from the 1930s and 1940s. Usually written from the point of view of the cynical main character, hard-boiled novels often involve crime, corruption, and violence. Their bleak take on the world is similar to the proletarian novel, but hard-boiled fiction tends not to be openly political or to offer solutions. Instead the tough main character finds that the best way of dealing with modern life is to confront it with courage, honesty, and a loaded gun. The best tough-guy novels of the period include Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930), Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), and Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939).

HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN AGE

The Depression era is thought to be the most important in the history of film. This golden age of Hollywood was fed by technological advances and, surprisingly, large amounts of money. While many independent studios closed down in the 1930s, the major studios looked like a safe bet for nervous investors. It was also a period when talented writers, directors, and technicians migrated to Hollywood from New York and overseas. But while Hollywood flourished in some ways, in others it was unchanged. As the eye-rolling slaves in the box-office smash Gone With the Wind (1939) demonstrate, African American roles in the movies were very limited. Hollywood also came under fire for showing sexual images on screen. In July 1934, the Production Code laid down rules about what could and could not be shown in movies. Former postmaster general Will H. Hays (1879–1954) was hired to administer the code. The "Hays Office" regulated everything, from the hemlines of dresses to making sure the bad guys were always punished.

In what was known as the "studio system," each movie studio developed its own style. Warner Brothers made socially conscious movies, such as Heroes for Sale (1932) and the anti-lynching movie They Won't Forget (1937). Paramount was known for stylish, witty projects, such as Cecil B. DeMille's Cleopatra (1934) and Ernst Lubitsh's Angel (1937), starring Marlene Dietrich. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (M-G-M) specialized in screwball comedies and light thrillers, such as the Thin Man series. Universal made horror movies, including James Whale's famous Frankenstein (1931), with Boris Karloff (1887–1969) in the lead role. Under the studio system, studios made and distributed films to their own chains of theaters. Groups of actors, directors, and others were made employees and had little choice in the projects they worked on. Studios divided their features into "A" and "B" movies. The A-movies were big-budget, star-studded features, but the "cheapie" B-movies were cranked out at a rate of one a week and ran alongside the main feature. Very occasionally a B-movie would be a hit, but they were often used for stylistic experiment or were aimed at smaller audiences.

Perhaps because Prohibition (the legal ban on the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages) made real-life gangsters into famous outlaws, the 1930s were the golden age of gangster movies. Warner Brothers made Doorway to Hell (1930), Little Caesar (1930), and G-Men (1935). James Cagney was the Warner Brothers' big star, but the other studios also had their stable of leading men. The 1930s gangster movie craze made stars of Humphrey Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, and Gary Cooper.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science Awards (The Oscars)

Hollywood in the 1930s was also famous for the "screwball" comedy. Known for their witty dialogue, films like The Thin Man (1934) pair strong female characters with their male equals. Another example is Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), which matches Clark Gable (1901–1960) and Claudette Colbert (1903–1996). The Marx Brothers' series of films were in a comedy class of their own. With their sharp dialogue and madcap stunts, movies such as Duck Soup (1933) and A Night at the Opera (1935) are among the best comic films ever made.

Audiences in the 1930s also delighted in animated films. Mickey Mouse had first appeared in 1928 and remained a firm favorite throughout the 1930s. Disney won a special Oscar in 1932 for a Mickey cartoon featuring Donald Duck. Warner Brothers' character Popeye the Sailor was Disney's main competitor. But short movies such as "The Three Little Pigs" (1933) kept Disney ahead. One of the "Silly Symphonies" shorts, called Flowers and Trees (1933), was the first film made in full Technicolor. Disney set a new standard for animated movies in 1937 with the feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

In the depths of the Depression, the lavish musicals of choreographer Busby Berkeley (1895–1976) at M-G-M offered spectacular entertainment based on dance numbers. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), Stars Over Broadway (1934), and Stage Struck (1936) are all presented like stage shows. The cinematic view of dancers taken from above, known as the "Berkeley top shot," is a hallmark of these films. The ten movies made by Fred Astaire (1899–1987) and Ginger Rogers (1911–1995) were more elegant and graceful. Top Hat (1935), Shall We Dance? (1937), and the rest are distinctly more refined in comparison with the Berkeley extravaganzas.

MUSIC IN THE 1930s

Throughout the 1930s, various American musical styles were invented or recorded in the United States. From wandering bluesmen to classical composers, archivists, and radio producers, there was a drive to record American music for the future. Many producers went in search of new, "unspoiled" talent. They recorded their discoveries on wax cylinders, the latest in recording technology. Sponsored by colleges and federal programs, such collections helped turn folk music from the South into a national art form. The jukebox and the home phonograph helped spread traditional music around the country. But most important of all was the radio. The Depression boosted radio listenership at the same time as it dented record sales and audiences for live concerts. In 1935 the Metropolitan Opera Company made the first of its popular broadcasts from New York City, while Nashville radio station WSM's "Grand Ole Opry" programs helped bring hillbilly music to a national audience. After Prohibition ended in 1933, the new bars and taverns bought jukeboxes to attract customers. Within five years there were around 250,000 "juke joints" nationwide.

The Carter Family was the most important hillbilly act of the decade. Based on a traditional brand of Southeastern guitar-based folk music, the Carters' style was a major influence on musicians who followed. A more popular brand of hillbilly music was represented by "Singing Brakeman" Jimmie Rodgers (1897–1933). Rodgers was famous for his distinctive "blue yodel" sound and became known as the "father of country music." "Singing Cowboys," such as Roy Rogers (1911–1998) and Gene Autry (1907–1998), sang sentimental songs about the days of the frontier. "Western music," as it became known, came to include almost all of what was categorized by the twenty-first century as "Country." Beyond the mainstream, folklorist Robert W. Gordon (1888–1961) used more than a thousand recording cylinders to create the Archive of American Folk Song. Sponsored by the Federal Music Project (FMP) and several universities, the archive made southern folk music popular with northern intellectuals. The most important folk singer of the period was Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter (1885–1949), who was "discovered" in jail in Louisiana. In 1934 Leadbelly became the darling of the northern academic elite when he debuted at the Modern Languages Association conference in Philadelphia.

Because they were cheaper than hiring a whole band, lone bluesmen such as Robert Johnson (1911–1938) and Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897–1929) were popular in the Depression. Many black bluesmen migrated to Chicago to escape segregation and racism in the South. Although "the blues" came from the rural South, by the end of the decade the blues had become urban music. Jazz in the 1930s gradually became an interracial music, played by big bands and marketed as "new jazz" or swing. Count Basie (1904–1984), Lester Young (1909–1959), and others began to turn jazz into what would eventually become "bop" in the 1940s. Band leaders such as Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller made jazz respectable to the white middle classes. Gospel music was the church-going cousin of the blues and jazz. As the Depression turned churches into social centers, Thomas (not Tommy) Dorsey (1899–1993) brought in music. Gospel entered its golden age in the 1940s. But its first superstar, Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972), made her first recording in 1937.

American classical composers such as Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Elliott Carter, Marc Blitzstein, and David Diamond trained with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1920s. Copland in particular searched for an American style, and wrote a book, What to Listen for in Music (1938), to make classical music more popular. Other composers who matured in the 1930s include Roy Harris (First Symphony, 1933) and Samuel Barber (Adagio for Strings, 1936). George Gershwin, one of the most famous of all American composers, produced Of Thee I Sing and the opera Porgy and Bess in 1935. Toward the end of the decade, European modernist composers came to the United States. Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, and others would influence American music for years to come. Many of the immigrants earned their living writing film scores for Hollywood.

THE FLOWERING OF AMERICAN THEATER

As in the other arts, drama and dance in the 1930s were experimental, engaged with social problems such as unemployment, and focused on American themes. Probably the most influential theater company was the Group Theatre, founded by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasburg in 1931. Strasburg promoted method acting, through which an actor tries to "become" a character, adopting his or her hair style and other traits even when off-stage. Method acting later became the standard technique for American actors and it remained popular into the twenty-first century. Notable actors such as Morris Carnovsky, John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb, and J. Edgar Bromberg all performed in the Group Theatre's gritty and political productions. They had several Broadway hits, including Clifford Odets's (1906–1963) story of a New York City cab drivers' strike, Waiting for Lefty (1934). Just three nights in the writing, the play made theater history when the audience made itself part of the drama and began chanting "Strike! Strike!" as it ended.

The Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was established in 1935 to create a theater that was accessible to all. Headed by Hallie Flanagan, the FTP produced farces (comic drama), marionette shows, children's plays, and modern dramas in cities and towns across the United States. Sinclair Lewis and John C. Moffitt's It Can't Happen Here opened in 1935 in eighteen cities at the same time. Spin-offs such as the Negro Theatre Project, run by John Houseman (1902–1988) and Orson Welles (1915–1985), provided training for black theater artists. The Swing Mikado, a black version of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, was seen by 250,000 people in Chicago alone. Living Newspapers were the most acclaimed of the federal projects. They dramatized and interpreted current events, blending fact and fiction to inform and educate the audience. But conservative congressmen saw the FTP as a hotbed of left wing rebellion, and the FTP lost its funding in 1939.

Houseman and Welles founded the Mercury Theatre to present Marc Blitzstein's (1905–1964) pro-union political opera The Cradle Will Rock in 1937. The play began as an FTP production but had its funding withdrawn. Houseman and Welles went ahead anyway and later used the Mercury Theatre to produce several other plays, including a popular version of Julius Caesar in modern dress. The last production was Richard Wright and Paul Green's Native Son (1940). But the most notorious of the Mercury Theatre's projects was its radio version of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1938). Directed by the 24-year-old Welles, The War of the Worlds was broadcast on CBS radio on October 30. Because the play was presented as a news broadcast, thousands of listeners believed Martians had actually invaded. Panic spread as people called police stations and jumped in their cars to escape. In New York, sailors on shore leave were ordered back to their ships. Despite the fact that the broadcast was announced as a drama, it was so convincing that CBS had to promise not to air any more fictional news events.

Theater incomes fell throughout the 1930s as radio gained ground. But on Broadway the comedies of Moss Kaufman (1904–1961) and George S. Hart (1889–1961) and musicals like Hellzapoppin' (1938) managed to find success. The drama Life With Father (1939) ran for eight years. Depression themes were also popular, but perhaps the most surprising hit of the time was Pins and Needles (1937), a show about life in a textiles factory. Put on by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the comic revue ran for 1,100 performances. The performers had to take time off from their regular work to be in the show.

DANCE AND OPERA

Martha Graham, Helen Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weldman founded the Dance Repertory Theatre in 1930. Their aim was to create an American style of dance to express the nation's energy and drive. Modern dance, as it was called, dealt with themes of American life. Dance Repertory Theatre productions used a bare stage and plain costumes to force audiences to concentrate on the dance itself. They also borrowed from American legends and literary classics. Graham's (1894–1991) most famous piece, American Document (1938), even draws on the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Tamiris (1905–1966) headed the Federal Theatre Project's New York-based Dance Project, and her work had a strong political edge. Her most famous piece is the pro-civil rights How Long Brethren (1937), but Tamiris was also influential in making dance central to the Broadway musical. A more popular kind of dance theater was produced by the American Ballet Company, founded by Lincoln Kirstein (1907–1996) in 1934, and the American Ballet Caravan. Both companies specialized in dances set to American popular music, such as ragtime and swing.

The big opera houses in New York and Chicago were hit hard by the stock market crash. But with help from the WPA and radio appeals for funds, New York's Metropolitan Opera Company managed to survive. American opera was a rare but consistent feature on the Met's stage. Joseph Deems Taylor's Peter Ibbetson premiered in 1931, while Virgil Thomson's Four Saints in Three Acts (with a libretto, or script, by Gertrude Stein) spent six weeks in New York in 1934. The most famous American opera of all is George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935). Set in the black slum Catfish Row, Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy's love for Bess and his murder of her lover, Crown. It premiered in Boston to mixed critical response, before moving to New York. Gershwin's opera was the first major American operatic work to gain international recognition.