318 Making It New: 1900–1945the vocabulary – political, economic, or imaginative – adequately to confront and
possibly to deal with what had happened. Even the most realistic of the popular
cinematic forms at this time, the gangster movie, was concerned as much with
compensatory fantasy as it was with hard facts. For while it acknowledged that the
urban-industrial surroundings, the cities of America, had become oppressive,
bewildering, and even terrifying places, it offered a series of dynamic, rebellious, and
above all individualistic protagonists who seemed to have achieved mastery over the
urban jungle. Morally, these heroes might be subject to a disapproval that required
them to be killed in the final reel. On another, subliminal level, however, they offered
their audiences another version of the dream of freedom, the independence and
mobility of the outsider – suitably darkened to reflect the darker times.
“I like the Americans because they are healthy and optimistic,” the novelist Franz
Kafka once remarked, adding, when he was asked what he knew about America, “I
always admired Walt Whitman.” The Crash and Depression may have provoked
people in the United States to bewilderment and anger and compensatory fantasies
of power, but it could never quite extinguish that belief in possibility, in reinventing
the self and society however shattered, of which Kafka was thinking – and for which,
as Kafka realized, one of the most memorable spokesmen in earlier writing had been
the author of Leaves of Grass. The presidential election of 1932 foregrounded this
belief: insisting that Americans had nothing to fear but fear itself, the newly elected
president helped to restore popular confidence at least a little. In the first hundred
days of the administration – the first hundred days of what he called the New Deal –
Roosevelt pushed Congress into passing a mass of legislation designed to restore
some health to a radically sick economy. In the following years came other measures.
The three Agricultural Adjustment Acts of 1933, 1936, and 1938 were attempts to
maintain farm prices by artificially created scarcity; the Social Security Act of 1935
was an important welfare-state measure, providing for a system of old-age retirement
payments and unemployment pay; the Works Progress Administration was established
to implement relief work on a vast scale and by 1939 had provided work for 8,500,000
people in a whole variety of occupations. It is possible to argue over the practical
efficacy of all this legislation – and to suggest, for instance, that it took the demand
created by World War II to restore the economy and full employment. What is
unarguable, though, is that Roosevelt helped restore Americans’ belief in their power
to manage things, the solubility of the problems with which they were confronted.
In an ideological sense, this meant that most Americans never completely lost
confidence in the system, the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise. And in a more
specifically moral sense, this involved a recovery of the “can do” philosophy, the
conviction that everything is manageable, given hard work, pluck and luck, and the
exercise of the independent, individual will.
In the arts, this crisis of confidence and gradual recovery was reflected in many
forms. There was, for instance, a renewed sense of the social responsibility of the
artist, a sense that tempted both modernists and traditionalists along many differ-
ent, cunning corridors of history and inspired a renewed interest in the possibilities
of literary realism and Naturalism. Ezra Pound, for instance, was to see a solution toGGray_c04.indd 318ray_c 04 .indd 318 8 8/1/2011 7:53:45 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 45 AM