Brief review of 'American Culture in the 1930s' by David Eldridge (2008)

This review first appeared in American Studies Today, vol.19 (September, 2010).

David Eldridge, American Culture in the 1930s, Twentieth-Century American Culture series (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008).

David Eldridge's book is one volume in Edinburgh's decade-by-decade Twentieth-Century American Culture series, which completed publication in 2010. Edited by Martin Halliwell, the series 'reframes the notion of "decade studies" through the prism of cultural production and rethinks the ways in which decades are usually periodised.' Each volume contains five chapters focussing on various areas of cultural production, with an opening chapter on the intellectual context of the decade, and a conclusion that explores the decade's cultural legacy. Each also contains a useful, albeit confusingly formatted, chronology of the decade, three case studies per chapter focussing on key works or individuals, and extensive chapter-by-chapter bibliographies.
 
Early on in this admirable volume, Eldridge observes that ‘the notion of the years 1930-9 as the ‘Red Decade’ does not stand up to scrutiny.’ Pursuing this line throughout the book, Eldridge nonetheless shows how, with such an expansion of federal influence, politics inevitably pervaded every area of cultural production, and with it, the concept of “accessible” and “democratic” art. At the heart of this was a contemporary debate about the value of art as opposed to documentary, with the work of artists like Thornton Wilder and Ansel Adams criticised for not addressing social problems. And yet, as so often in the book, Eldridge explains how such criticism was misguided, showing how Wilder’s play Our Town provides fertile ground for complicating this argument, and how the crafting of so-called documentary photographic images led Adams to express dismay that such works of art were being described in terms of social criticism.

In terms of movies, Eldridge shows how the introduction of the Hollywood Production Code resulted in films that were escapist, but he also describes how, with increasing box office success, realistic storytelling gained a foothold. Nevertheless, whilst some films contained powerful criticisms of social problems, Eldridge argues that these too frequently ended in strange affirmations, which may or may not have diminished the effect of whatever harsh reality had been presented.

Aural culture served to shape perceptions of African-Americans, and Eldridge provides a valuable reassessment of the popular blackface radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy. He argues that post-war critiques of the show which thought it damaged interracial relationships do not tell the whole story, and he provides a fuller picture of a programme which reached an audience of 40 million in 1930, with many of the listeners black families.

Throughout Roosevelt’s New Deal there was a tension between what might be considered national culture, and what derived from the regions. ‘The cultural nationalism for which New Deal officials strove was,’ says Eldridge, ‘one that constructed America as a “nation of communities.”’ Although he sees cultural regionalism as frequently a construct of the media, by the end of the decade he concludes that it was possible in music to discern a turn: away from the heavily European model of radio programming, and towards composers like Copland who in the mid-1930s looked inward, towards native folksong for inspiration. 

In Eldridge’s book the 1930s emerge as a fluid decade, sometimes appropriated later in the century for the purposes of propaganda, but in fact genuinely difficult to classify. The book might have said more about different areas of literature – poetry gets particularly short shrift – and the proof-editing of the volume is below par, but the book’s main strength is in its balanced analysis, strongest in the fine chapters on film and photography, music and radio, and New Deal culture. As a result of this nuanced approach, American Culture in the 1930s can act as more than a wonderful primer for sixth formers and undergraduates – Eldridge suggests room for the critical reassessment of areas of cultural production, inviting further academic research and discussion, and thereby a deepening understanding of this astonishing decade.