Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 32

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Popular Culture Review

Interpretations of Depression-Era America
After thousands of miles of travel, extensive use of firsthand
observation, and countless conversations with the common people of
the Thirties, the documentary writers encountered a wide range of
reactions to the Depression. They found bitterness, pride, loneliness,
desperation, determination, and a large amount of guilt. Throughout
it all, however, the writers found the will to survive to be the
common denominator of the Depression experience. Little energy was
spent on complaining or fatalistic emotions; it took all of one's energy
simply to stay alive. Many of the people interviewed by the
documentarians appeared emotionally calloused to the degradation
of their poor living conditions. But apathy was far from the case;
instead, survival was a day-to-day proposition, with people living
from meal to meal rather than concerning themselves with the
possibilities of upward mobility.
Wilson, Anderson, Dreiser, and Agee encountered this
American propensity for survival, but their interpretations of the
Depression experience ran much deeper. In their travels, they
employed similar documentary techniques in recording the physical,
emotional, and economic impact of the Depression on the average
person. However, upon analyzing the information they found, their
sense of America in the Thirties took one of two turns: a Marxist,
structural perspective or a triumph-of-individualism approach.
For Wilson, his travels revealed an America crumbling
beneath the weight of capitalist contradictions. The problem to him
did not result from moral or spiritual laziness in the people, but was
the inevitable result of a flawed social and economic structure.
Utilizing a Marxist, structural analysis of the Depression experience,
Wilson cited overproduction, underconsumption, and rampant
unemployment as the price that was paid for extolling the virtues of
excessive competition. For Wilson, a laissez-faire, capitalist system
placed the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a very
few people. He added: "And we have the final supreme contradiction
of a system which can no longer be run at all except in a strongly
centralized fashion and for the benefit of everybody, in the
possession of private individuals who try to use it for their own
enrichment. Competition produced the great organism and now the
organism cannot survive without killing competition" (Wilson, 1932,
p. 298).