Great Depression

Starting in 1929 and ending with America's entry into World War II in 1941, the Great Depression marked a turning point in American history by establishing the enlarged federal bureaucracy associated with the post-WWII state. While first and foremost an economic event, the Great Depression affected every aspect of American political, social, and cultural life. It was during the depression that the radio and film industries, along with developments in documentary photography, reportage, and literature, helped to develop a national culture based in uniquely American practices, environments, experiences, and ideals.

While the stock market crash of October 1929 is often viewed as the start of the Great Depression, it was by no means the cause of the depression. The crash, and its aftermath of unemployment, bank closures, bankruptcies, and homelessness, were caused by fundamental flaws in the prosperity of the 1920s. The availability and widespread use of credit, the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth, the problems of falling farm prices, and the corporate consolidation of American industry all contributed to the overproduction of farm and industrial goods and the overexertion of credit and speculation. In the wake of the crash, American industrial output decreased rapidly, reaching in 1932 the same level of production as in 1913. Employment reached an all-time low, with 13 million people out of work, roughly 25 percent of the population. For farmers, crop prices had fallen drastically; a bushel of wheat that sold for three dollars in 1920 brought only thirty cents in 1932.

The effect of the depression on American culture was felt in both the public and private sectors. The federal government, through its New Deal programs, subsidized writers, composers, musicians, performers, painters, sculptors, and other artists, and it developed and encouraged cultural programs which focused attention on the United States, its history, traditions, and native arts and crafts. The Federal Writers Project employed writers, editors, and researchers to not only produce works of fiction, usually with American themes, but also to create several series of books such as the State Guide Series, consisting of all-purpose guide books for each state of the union. The Federal Arts Project hired painters and sculptors to create public art for post offices and other public buildings, and developed a network of community art centers in cities and towns across the country. The Federal Theater Project sought to bring the dramatic arts to the general public through local programs such as the Living Newspaper, in which local news stories were acted out in community theaters. Additional programs employed musicians, composers, architects, and other artists. Preservation programs such as the Index of American Design and the Library of Congress' Archive of Folk Song sought to preserve the inherently American character of folk arts. In all, the cultural programs of the New Deal focused attention on the unique aspects of American culture, not only in past arts and crafts, but also in the creation of new works of art.

The mass-media industries of broadcasting and motion pictures responded to the economic realities of the depression and the government sponsored trend towards reinforcing traditional American values. In the 1930s, radio dominated Americans' leisure time. Nearly one third of all Americans owned at least one radio, and even those who did not own a radio usually had access to one through family, friends, or neighbors. The potential radio audience for any program was estimated at sixty million people. As a result of these vast audiences and the huge profits to be made, the radio industry became big business with production companies selling "pre-packaged" shows to sponsors and stations, along with syndicates and networks developing and growing. During the 1930s, comedians were the most popular radio personalities. Jack Benny, Fanny Brice, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Milton Berle, and Jimmy Durante all had popular radio shows. Musical shows were also a favorite of audiences as almost every station presented remote broadcasts from hotel ballrooms featuring dance orchestras and jazz bands such as Paul Whiteman ("The King of Jazz"), Ralph Ginsberg and the Palmer House Ensemble, and Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra, featuring Evelyn and her Magic Violin. Daytime programing was dominated by the soap opera, so named because most were sponsored by soap manufacturers. Writer James Thurber described soap operas as "a kind of sandwich, whose recipe is simple enough… Between thick slices of advertising, spread twelve minutes of dialogue, add predicament, villainy, and female suffering in equal measure, throw in a dash of nobility, sprinkle with tears, season with organ music, cover with a rich announcer sauce, and serve five times a week." As opposed to daytime serial dramas, evening dramas contained much better production values and more sophisticated material featuring famous actors. The Texaco Theater, The Philip Morris Playhouse, Grand Central Station, and other hour-long programs presented serious dramatic fare, but the most popular shows were the half-hour long crime-suspense-adventure shows, including Sam Spade, Jack Armstrong: the All-American Boy, The Thin Man, Sargent Preston of the Yukon, The Green Hornet, The Shadow, and The Lone Ranger. Even news reporting took on a more entertaining flavor as radio newsmen became celebrities, such as Lowell Thomas, Edward R. Murrow, and Floyd Gibbons, who introduced himself as "the fastest talking man in radio." Forty percent of all Americans preferred to get their news and information from radio, more than any other single source.

Radio took on a whole new importance in the wake of the Depression, primarily through the use of the medium by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his "fireside chats," Roosevelt addressed the country directly from the White House. This mediated communication, due to the intimacy associated with radio broadcasting, developed a more personal relationship between the president and the public than ever before, reinforcing the expansion of federal, especially executive, authority. Radio became much more than a source of local information and entertainment; it became a vital tool of the government to promote and support its programs. Roosevelt's first "fireside chat," explaining the purpose of the bank holiday and subsequent banking legislation, produced enough confidence in Roosevelt and the government that the following day bank deposits outnumbered withdrawals for the first time since the stock market crash almost four years earlier. Radio not only informed people, but also brought them under the influence of a centralized medium which homogenized the information it was disseminating. As Warren Susman argues in his essay "The Culture of the Thirties," radio "helped mold uniform national responses; it helped create or reinforce uniform national values and beliefs in a way that no previous medium had ever been able to do." Illustrating one such uniform national response was the euphoria witnessed in communities, both black and white, over Joe Louis' heavyweight title fights in 1937 and 1938. Informing the public became such a vital part of the radio industry, and so accepted by the public, that a fake "emergency bulletin" as part of Orson Welles' 1937 radio production of H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds created pandemonium in towns and cities across America.

As a result of the depression, Hollywood experienced a decline in movie attendance, and it compensated by using the latest technology to its fullest impact to produce movies which would appeal to adult males, the segment of the movie audience that had declined the most. War films such as All Quite on the Western Front (1930) and The Dawn Patrol (1930); horror films such as Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and King Kong (1933); gangster movies such as Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) all took advantage of sound technology to enhance the filmgoing experience. Movies such as Marlene Dietrich's Blonde Venus (1932), Jean Harlow's Red Dust (1932), and Irene Dunn's Back Street (1932) all challenged the prevailing notions of respectable women's roles. Even the glamorous Greta Garbo, in her sound film debut, did not play a socialite, but rather a prostitute. The long awaited moment when Garbo first spoke on film was in Anne Christie (1930) as she addressed a waiter in a waterfront dive: "Gimme a viskey. Ginger ale on the side. And don't be stingy, ba-bee." Even a film as superficial as Gold Diggers of 1933 implied that for women there were limited career paths. In the film's most memorable song, "We're in the Money," chorus girls joke that if they had to give up performing they would have to enter into the world's oldest profession: "We're in the money. We're in the money. We've got a lot of what it takes to get along." Even comedies emphasized this tendency towards anarchy and sex. The most popular film comedians, the Marx Brothers and Mae West, relied heavily on sound to convey their primarily verbal humor, yet both also depended on visuals for the strong physical presence necessary in both slapstick comedy and body enhancing sexual innuendo.

This "golden age of turbulence," according to film historian Robert Sklar in Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, lasted from 1930 to 1934 when Hollywood, under pressure from civic organizations like the Catholic Church's League of Decency, discovered there was as much, if not more, profit to be made on supporting traditional American values as there was in challenging them. With the 1934 introduction of the Breen Office (officially the Production Code Administration, but popularly named after Joseph Breen, the film industry's self-imposed censor who had absolute power), the movie industry stopped challenging traditional values by becoming one of their most staunch supporters.

The Breen Office brought about the "golden age of order" in which the social order was restored in films that reinforced traditional notions about social roles and American ideals. Screwball comedies set among the upper classes, such as Bringing Up Baby (1938) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) replaced the anarchic vision of the Marx Brothers and the brazen sexuality of Mae West. Gangster movies focused not on the lawless, but on the government agent, the G-man. And Hollywood began producing socially conscious films such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and the films of Frank Capra.

Frank Capra best exemplifies the "age of order" with his morality plays set among the common people of America. Capra produced films which encouraged Americans to reaffirm their beliefs in democracy, community, and humanity. In his "American trilogy," of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and Meet John Doe (1941), Capra presented American democracy at its best with each protagonist (Deeds, Smith, and Doe) overcoming the challenges to honesty and decency through perseverance. In Mr. Deeds, Gary Cooper stars as Longfellow Deeds, who plans to use his inherited millions on establishing farmers on their own small plots of land in an attempt to recreate the Jeffersonian vision of the democratic yeoman farmer. In Mr. Smith, James Stewart stars as Jefferson Smith, a junior senator who envisions a boys' camp in the western wilderness to teach boys the virtues of independence, self-sufficiency, and frontier democracy. And in John Doe, Gary Cooper once again stars, this time as Long John Willoughby, a down-and-out baseball player recruited by a big city newspaper to play the role of John Doe, a "common" man who has threatened to end his life as a protest against modern society. John Doe not only becomes a circulation booster, but his simple ideas about neighborly consideration and the "little guys" watching out for each other is readily picked up by an eager public searching for solutions to the depression. The John Doe Movement, with the establishment of John Doe clubs, is manipulated by the tyrannical newspaper owner D. B. Norton, who aspires to political office. Norton and Willoughby come into conflict when Norton's machinations are revealed and Willoughby seeks to stop him. Norton exposes the "fake" John Doe and the movement crumbles. In the end, Willoughby seeks to follow through on "John Doe's" original promise to jump off the city hall tower on Christmas Eve. Like all Capra movies, the honest and decent hero survives the attacks against him through the faith of a loving woman and the eventual realization of "the people." Capra reaffirms traditional ideas about self-help and the private function of charity in the face of adversity, as opposed to more modern ideas in which the federal government assumes responsibility for the health and welfare of individual citizens. Despite the revolutionary medium of motion pictures, late 1930s movies overwhelmingly reinforced traditional values.

In general, the reaction to the Great Depression, by the federal government and the mass media industries, served to maintain traditional American values in the face of economic, political, and social change.

—Charles J. Shindo

Further Reading:

Hilmes, Michelle. Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922-1952. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

McElvaine, Robert S. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York, Times Books, 1984.

Sklar, Robert. Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York, Vintage Books, 1975.

Shindo, Charles J. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 1997.

Susman, Warren I. Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York, Pantheon Books, 1985.