Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1930s

Voices, Documents, New Interpretations

Anne Fletcher

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350215481
• eBook ISBN: 9781350153592
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include:
* Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935) and Golden Boy (1937);
* Lillian Hellman: The Children's Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), and Days to Come (1936);
* Langston Hughes: Mulatto (1935), Mule Bone (1930, with Zora Neale Hurston) and Little Ham (1936);
* Gertrude Stein: Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), Four Saints in Three Acts (written in 1927, published in 1932) and Listen to Me (1936).

1

Introduction to the 1930s

Anne Fletcher

Life in the 1930s

The American lived experience belied the homogeneity with which the Great Depression era is generally viewed. While historians and lay people alike find convenience in contrast as an organizing principle – rich versus poor, left versus right, etcetera – the decade of the 1930s reveals itself as both dichotomous and diverse.

Contrasts, coincidences and incongruities abound in the areas of domestic life, education, consumerism, popular entertainment, art, culture, virtually every aspect of daily life. On the one hand, pastimes like the Sunday drive (car ownership was surprisingly widespread then), listening to the radio and going to the movies transcend social class and offer a classless experience, a ‘level playing field’. On the other hand, soup kitchens in major cities and the black rollers (moving topsoil), black rain comprised of water and dust, and dustbowls in the Midwest illustrate how very differently life was experienced across the country. In Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, historian William H. Leuchtenberg speaks of ‘the savage irony of want amidst plenty’ that characterized the Depression, with breadlines assembled in agricultural America beneath full silos.¹

The ‘roaring’ twenties concluded² and the decade of the 1930s opened in the wake of the Stock Market Crash in October 1929; at its close, the United States found itself poised to enter the Second World War. Between autumn 1929 and spring 1933, more than 5,000 banks failed, crippling the American banking system, and some 600,000 homeowners faced foreclosure, half of all home mortgages technically in default.³ With the building industry at a grinding halt, construction at a standstill, workers in lumber and steel, carpenters, plumbers, electricians – all connected with the industry – faced unemployment. National income fell by 50 per cent.⁴ Some 10–15 million people, between one-fifth to one-fourth of the US population, were unemployed by 1933.⁵ The numbers of unemployed workers skyrocketed to almost 50 per cent in industrial centres like Chicago and Detroit.⁶ In rural America, agricultural income fell by 50 per cent, and farm owners abandoned their properties in favour of sharecropping and tenant farming.⁷ Others, like the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, piled their worldly possessions into their automobiles and drove west to California in hope of better prospects there.

Despite this dire picture, the unemployed actually remained in the minority, and two-thirds of Midwestern farmers maintained their homesteads. The unemployment crisis consisted more of drastic cutbacks in hours, reductions from full-time to part-time employment, wage reductions and temporary lay-offs, a socio-economic situation repeated to a lesser degree following the 2008 US banking crisis.⁸

Surprisingly, despite horrific living conditions, overall life expectancy in the United States in the 1930s actually rose.⁹ As might be expected, however, the fortunes of black Americans were bleak: death from tuberculosis, a major killer of the decade, and infant mortality rates were twice as great for African-Americans in New York City as for whites.¹⁰ Black workers’ wages fell precipitously. Strangely, a racist radio programme, Amos ’n’ Andy, gained in popularity, providing Louisiana governor, senator and presidential candidate Huey Long with his epithet, the Kingfish.

The lower and middle class were hit hardest – not only minority workers, but the extremes in age, young and old.¹¹ Those between sixteen and twenty-five years old, and those over 60 faced lay-offs and cutbacks first.¹² Widowhood presented economic challenges, as the elderly – especially women – were less employable and often remained reliant on children and other family members for financial support, at least until the social security system was established.

The results – and debate – of social reform like the initiation of social security legislation in 1935, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose presidency dominated the decade, resonate today. Likewise, the political monikers of ‘left’ versus ‘right’ continue to characterize American political contests. Immigration issues and the idea of deporting Mexican-Americans were as much a source of contention then as in the twenty-first century.¹³ At the same time, Communist Party leader Earl Browder’s mid-decade slogan ‘Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism’ was evoked alternatively by both those who supported social service programmes and those who did not.

Notions of patriotism and citizenship were variously defined: radical writers and artists used their work (and their constitutional rights) to question and critique the world in which they lived, both materially and ideologically. In 1932, a group of leftist writers including Malcolm Cowley, Langston Hughes and Edmund Wilson published a manifesto that supported the Communist presidential candidate William Z. Foster, Culture in Crisis. To some degree, the Communist Party offered literati and working class alike a feeling of solidarity, and societies like the John Reed Clubs provided a voice for writers and artists. While the left found itself somewhat invigorated, as Peter Conn points out in The American 1930s: A Literary History, ‘to see the thirties exclusively as “the red decade” is to reduce a complex palette to a monotone [sic]’.¹⁴

A year-by-year perusal of current events reveals ironies such as congressional approval of the national anthem (March 1931) in the very same month as the erroneous arrest of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’. Just before Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first election in 1932, destitute First World War veterans seeking their bonuses were gassed and bayoneted in the nation’s capital. Adolf Hitler was installed as Germany’s chancellor (January 1933) within months of FDR’s inauguration as US president (March 1933), and the signing of the Rome–Berlin Axis agreement (October 1936) coincided with FDR’s re-election (November 1936). W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking study, Black Reconstruction (1935), found itself sandwiched between Ruth Benedict’s seminal Patterns of Culture (1934) and Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder (1936). Dale Carnegie’s famous self-help guide How to Win Friends and Influence People was also published in 1936.

The decade of the 1930s was ironically a time of celebratory fairs and expositions. Chicago boasted the 1933–4 World’s Fair, or the Century of Progress, with its ‘crystal house’ and house of tomorrow. Audiences were wowed by the German airship Graf Zeppelin’s fly-by. The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry first opened at the Century of Progress Exposition. The California–Pacific International Exposition took place in 1935, the Great Lakes Exposition in Cleveland in 1936, as well as the Texas Centennial Exposition in Dallas in the same year. The 1939 New York World’s Fair was not alone as on the West Coast, in San Diego, the Golden Gate International Exposition was mounted in the same year. By far the largest and most impressive, the New York World’s Fair symbolically rose like a phoenix (its foundation was Flushing, New York’s ash-dump) and exhibited an optimism and ‘can do’ American spirit. Like all world’s fairs, the one at the decade’s close pointed to the future – in many ways to the real lived experience of future attendees at the extraordinary 1964 World’s Fair, also mounted in New York City. Designer Norman Bel Geddes’s 1939 main exhibit, Futurama, predicted a nation of vast highways (begun under President Eisenhower later, although never ‘automated’ as Geddes suggested they might someday be) and suburban sprawl, an American fact of life after the Korean War.

And so, as perhaps with any decade, the 1930s may be viewed as pointing to the future at the same time looking to the past, with both nostalgia and disdain. And, as with any era, the decade of the Great Depression offers valuable lessons for the future.

The Great Depression and the New Deal

The ‘New Day’ promised by President Herbert Hoover in his 1928 campaign for the presidency was not to be. The Stock Market crashed on 24 October 1929, ending almost a decade of exceptional economic growth, speculation and spending. Many factors contributed to the collapse of the US economy, among them overuse of credit, lack of regulations on Wall Street, a slow-down in industrial production, a decrease in credit for farmers (additionally across the Depression, overproduction of produce) and, perhaps most important, the disproportionate distribution of wealth. The nation’s richest 3 per cent held one-third of the country’s purse, a phenomenon that would become, in the 2010s, the ‘One Per Cent’.

In his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged to the American people a ‘new deal’. This catchphrase would become symbolic of a host of federal programmes executed under his administration to combat the effects of the Great Depression on the unemployed and working poor. After a campaign in which the future president appeared at times to ‘waffle’ regarding potential solutions to the nation’s socio-economic crisis, by 1933, when he took office, armed with an inner circle of experts from a variety of fields (his ‘Brain Trust’), FDR was ready to take action. The ‘3 R’s’ – Relief, Recovery and Reform – became his mantra.

During his first 100 days in office, fifteen crucial bills were passed (following a four-day bank ‘holiday’), effecting:

•the establishment of the FDIC (the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission that guaranteed individual savings);

•the Federal Securities Act that regulated the Stock Market;

•the first Agricultural Adjustment Act that provided farmers with relief by paying them to produce less; the National Industrial Recovery Act that attempted to stimulate the economy by raising prices was later ruled unconstitutional;

•the Civilian Conservation Corps (discussed below under ‘Education’);

•the Tennessee Valley Authority that addressed electrical power in the South;

•the Federal Emergency Relief Act that provided direct relief to the unemployed,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Note and Notes on Contributors
• General Preface
• 1. Introduction to the 1930s Anne Fletcher
• 2. American Theatre in the 1930s Anne Fletcher
• 3. Gertrude Stein: Four Saints in Three Acts (written in 1927, published in 1932), Doctor Faustus Lights the Lights (1938), Listen To Me (1936) Laura Schultz
• 4. Langston Hughes: Mulatto (1935), The Mule Bone (1930) (with Zora Neale Hurston), Little Ham (1936) Adrienne Macki
• 5. Clifford Odets: Waiting for Lefty (1935), Awake and Sing! (1935), Paradise Lost (1935), Golden Boy (1937), Rocket to the Moon (1938), Night Music (1940) Christopher J. Herr
• 6. Lillian Hellman: The Children’s Hour (1934), Days to Come (1936), The Little Foxes (1939) Anne Fletcher
• Afterword Anne Fletcher
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright