188 ChaPter^4
Artists of all kinds helped create an oppositional culture, one that led
people to think about American life in different, and more critical, ways. Marc
Blitzstein, a composer, wrote an opera about working-class struggles called
The Cradle Will Rock, directed by another famous artist, Orson Welles, and
gained national attention when the Roosevelt administration, which had given
him a grant for the work, pulled funding because it was too left-wing, forcing
the cast to find an empty theater to put on the show themselves. Another
playwright, Clifford Odets, wrote Waiting for Lefty [“Lefty” signifying social-
ism], which showed the struggles of workers and a strike against the taxi
company where they worked. The best-known author of the time was John
Steinbeck, especially famous for his Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Grapes
of Wrath, the story of “Tom Joad” and his family, who left Oklahoma during
the depression looking for a better life. Tom, as he’s about to leave a worker’s
camp to avoid police who have implicated him in a murder, offers one of the
more famous speeches in movie history, telling his mother that all people
[especially in the horrors of the depression] are linked together and, even
though he’ll be far away, his spirit will be with them: “I’ll be all around in the
dark - I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there’s a fight,
so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a
guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the
way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when
the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build -
I’ll be there, too.” While most famous for his fiction, Steinbeck was a politi-
cal activist as well and particularly forlorn that most Americans were liberals
and few went beyond that. “Socialism never took root in America,” he lament-
ed, “because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as
temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Will Rogers was a popular critic too,
a political humorist–sort of a Jon Stewart or Colbert of his day. Rogers made
movies, wrote a newspaper column, traveled the country doing rope tricks,
and taking jabs at political leaders. Rogers was particularly biting when it
came to world affairs. “Our foreign policy is an open book - a checkbook,”
he joked as a way to criticize the economic motives behind the U.S. role
abroad. He added that he was “shocked” one day when he “saw a Marine on
U.S. soil,” a reference to the frequent military interventions the U.S. conducted
into other countries. But the most important cultural critic, maybe of the
entire century, was Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, better known as just Woody.