320 Making It New: 1900–1945Hemingway in For Whom the Bell Tolls – turned, with an equal sense of urgency, to
writing about the fight against fascism. The American Writers’ Congress of 1935
supplied a platform to debate such issues. So did a number of journals whose titles
express their commitments and the urgencies of the times: on the right, periodicals
like American Review, on the left, Partisan Review and New Masses. And, in a radical
departure from the traditional American belief that the artist, like every good citizen,
should be self-reliant, even the government intervened in the debate, to the extent
that government agencies were actually established to employ people in the creative
arts. Among the most notable of these agencies was the Federal Theater Project,
sponsored by the Works Progress Administration, which was a national organiza-
tion of theater groups that reemployed thousands of theatrical workers – by 1937, it
was playing to weekly audiences of 350,000. Other projects included the financing of
photographic accounts of the rural working class, popular America, and American
folk customs; the employment of painters under the Federal Arts Project to decorate
banks, post offices, and schools with murals developing themes of labor, agriculture,
and history; and federal support of books and films intended to reveal the essential
nature of the United States, its human and natural resources, to its people. Impossible
as it is to summarize, perhaps something of all this can be caught by saying that, in
reaction to crisis, American writers rediscovered their social and prophetic function;
they were reawakened to their responsibility as citizens, members of a multiple
community. It was a responsibility that few of them had ever really forgotten, least
of all those who came from and wrote about peoples who had been dispossessed
long before that Friday in October 1929. But it was one that they took on with
renewed enthusiasm, as they delved into that most fundamental and frequent of
themes in American writing: the relation between promise and performance,
America as an idea and America as a complex, changing, and conflicted society – the
dream of one America and the fact that there are many.Between Victorianism and Modernism
The problem of race
As the twentieth century began, many Americans saw race as the most pressing
problem they faced. Certainly, this was true of those African-American writers who
initiated debate about the “color line” as W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) termed it: Du
Bois himself, Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), and James Weldon Johnson
(1871–1938). Washington was born in Virginia, the son of a slave mother and a
white father. “My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate,
and discouraging surroundings,” he was later to say in his autobiography, Up From
Slavery (1901). His early years, he recalled, “were not very different from those of
thousands of other slaves.” He lived in a “little cabin,” had no schooling whatever
while he remained in bondage, and what information he received “by what was
termed the grape-vine telegraph.” Of his ancestry, he knew “almost nothing,” heGGray_c04.indd 320ray_c 04 .indd 320 8 8/1/2011 7:53:46 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 46 AM