692 Chapter 26 The New Deal: 1933–1941
The president also hesitated to undertake projects that
might compete with private enterprises. Yet his caution
did him no good politically; the business interests he
sought to placate were becoming increasingly hostile to
the New Deal.
Literature During the Depression
Some American novelists found Soviet communism
attractive and wrote “proletarian” novels in which ordi-
nary workers were the heroes, and stylistic niceties gave
way to the rough language of the street and the factory.
Most of these books are of little artistic merit, and none
achieved great commercial success. The best of the
Depression writers avoided the party line, although
they were critical of many aspects of American life.
One was John Dos Passos, author of the trilogy
U.S.A.(1930–1936), a massive, intricately constructed
work with an anti-capitalist and deeply pessimistic point
of view. It portrayed American society between 1900
and 1930 in broad perspective, interweaving the stories
of five major characters and a galaxy of lesser figures.
Dos Passos’s method was relentless, cold, and
methodical—utterly realistic. He displayed no sympa-
thy for his characters or their world.U.S.A.was a mon-
ument to the despair and anger of liberals confronted
with the Depression. After the Depression, however,
Dos Passos rapidly abandoned his radical views.
The novel that best portrayed the desperate plight
of the millions impoverished by the Depression was
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath(1939), which
described the fate of the Joads, an Oklahoma farm fam-
ily driven by drought and bad times to abandon their
land and become migratory laborers in California.
Steinbeck captured the patient bewilderment of the
downtrodden, the brutality bred of fear that character-
ized their exploiters, and the furious resentments of the
radicals of the 1930s. He depicted the parching black-
ness of the Oklahoma dust bowl, the grandeur of
California, the backbreaking toil of the migrant fruit
pickers, and the ultimate indignation of a people repeat-
edly degraded: “In the eyes of the hungry there is a
growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of
wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for
the vintage.”
Like so many other writers of the 1930s,
Steinbeck was an angry man. “There is a crime here
that goes beyond denunciation,” he wrote. He had
the compassion that Dos Passos lacked, and this qual-
ity raisedThe Grapes of Wrathto the level of great
tragedy. In other works, such asTortilla Flat(1935)
andThe Long Valley(1938), Steinbeck described the
life of California cannery workers and ranchers with
moving warmth without becoming overly sentimental.
William Faulkner, probably the finest American
novelist of the era, responded in still another way. Born
in 1897, within a year of Fitzgerald and Hemingway,
he attained literary maturity only in the 1930s.
Suddenly, between 1929 and 1932, he burst into
prominence with four major novels:The Sound and the
Fury,As I Lay Dying,Sanctuary, andLight in August.
No contemporary excelled him as a commentator
on the multiple dilemmas of life. His characters are
possessed, driven to pursue high ideals yet weighted
down with awareness of their inadequacies and their
sinfulness. They are imprisoned in their surroundings
however they may strive to escape them.
Faulkner was essentially a pessimist. His characters
continually experience emotions too intense to be bear-
able, often too profound and too subtle for the natures
he had given them. Nevertheless his stature was beyond
question, and unlike so many other novelists of the
period he maintained a high level in his later years.Three Extremists: Long, Coughlin, and Townsend
Roosevelt’s moderation and the desperation of the poor
roused extremists both on the left and on the right. The
most formidable was Louisiana’s Senator Huey Long,
the “Kingfish.” Raised on a farm in northern Louisiana,
Long was successively a traveling salesman, a lawyer,
state railroad commissioner, governor, and, after 1930,
U.S. senator. By 1933 his rule in Louisiana was
absolute. Long was certainly a demagogue—yet the
plight of all poor people concerned him deeply. More
important, he tried to do something about it.
Long did not question segregation or white
supremacy, nor did he suggest that Louisiana blacks
should be allowed to vote. He used the word nigger
with total unselfconsciousness, even when addressing
northern black leaders. But he treated black-baiters
with scathing contempt.
As a reformer, Long stood in the populist tradition;
he hated bankers and “the interests.” He believed that
poor people, regardless of color, should have a chance
to earn a decent living and get an education. His argu-
ments were simplistic, patronizing, possibly insincere,
but effective. “Don’t say I’m working for niggers,” he
told one northern journalist. “I’m for the poor man—
all poor men. Black and white, they all gotta have a
chance....‘Every Man a King’—that’s my slogan.”
Raffish, totally unrestrained, yet shrewd—a fel-
low southern politician called him “the smartest
lunatic I ever saw”—Long had supported the New
Deal at the start. But partly because he thought
Roosevelt too conservative and partly because of his
own ambition, he soon broke with the administra-
tion. While Roosevelt was probably more hostile to
the big financiers than to any other interest, Long
denounced him as “a phoney” and a stooge of Wall
Street. “I can take him,” he boasted in a typical sally.