Making It New: 1900–1945 317the desire to reinvent past times. Other ways, many of them, were offered by writers
of this era as they sought sure anchorage, moral and perhaps formal.
The cultural history of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century
is not of course simply the story of the encounter between different Americas – and
the conflict or tension between optimism and nostalgia, the pull toward the future
and the backward glance toward the past, the urge to experiment and the search for
more traditionalist norms. Other forces were at work. And Americans were inevitably
and profoundly affected, in particular, by what seemed to be the crisis of capitalism
when, on one Friday in 1929, the Wall Street Crash occurred. Within four years after
the Crash, per capita income had dropped 100 percent and unemployment, which
had been remarkably low in the 1920s, had risen from 500,000 to 13 million. Many
of those who were unemployed had no economic assistance of any kind, and were
forced to wander the country in search of work. They rode freight trains from one
state to another, risking injury or even death, and erected shanty towns, ironically
called “Hoovervilles” after then-President Hoover. Farmers unable to meet mortgage
payments were evicted from their holdings; beggars, street-corner orators demanding
revolution, bread-lines, and soup kitchens all became commonplace. Those in
employment fared little better: in 1932 the average wage in several major industries
ranged between 20–30 cents an hour and the average income of Americans in
general dropped back to what it had been at the beginning of three decades of
technological revolution. Over all this chaos, Hoover presided with little sense of
what to do: the measures he offered to alleviate or alter things were too little, too late.
Farm relief, federal loans for business, public works – all these measures were tried
half-heartedly because they went against Hoover’s own cherished philosophy of
“rugged individualism.” He believed that the slump was a short-term affair that
would gradually correct itself. Others, including the vast majority of the American
public, tended to disagree. Hoover had been elected as “the Great Engineer” in 1928;
in 1932 he was defeated by Franklin Roosevelt in a landslide. Even in his own home
state of Iowa, Hoover was picketed during the election by two thousand men holding
placards that said it all: “In Hoover We Trusted, Now We Are Busted.”
If the Crash and the Depression that followed it was a significant economic event,
it was an even more significant cultural and psychological one, as those placards
carried in Iowa indicated. For what it generated was a crisis in confidence: the
ingrained American belief in the rewards due to hard work, the central importance
of self-help, the inevitability of progress – all were called into question by an
occurrence for which the word “panic” seemed precisely right because it was at once
devastating in terms of the human suffering it caused and unpredictable, more or
less totally unexpected. When the Crash came, most bankers and financiers were not
only unprepared for it, they tried at first to deny its implications and seemed
oblivious to the sheer scale of the collapse. And, as it worsened, many were inclined
to treat it not as a cultural event, susceptible to analysis and explanation, but as a
natural one: a natural disaster, like an earthquake or typhoon, for which little
preparation was possible and which had to be endured for a while. The simple and
terrible fact was that a failure of language occurred: Americans, to begin with, lackedGGray_c04.indd 317ray_c 04 .indd 317 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM