Category: Issue #47

The New Deal marked a fundamental recognition by the United States government that farmers were unable to earn a living without significant regulatory changes to commodity markets. Rural poverty and the threat of social unrest compelled federal intervention into agricultural capitalism. Agrarian reform during the Great Depression sought to address the impoverishment of farmlands and farmworkers. New Deal policies from the 1930s aimed to influence commodity markets by curbing crop surplus.

For Agee and Evans, the task would be to render into art the dialectical oppositions I have argued were central to their enterprises: between the boots as things and the boots as elements of a productive enterprise or between money as the power to effect the crossing between producer and consumer and money as the obverse face of obdurate debt.

Literary works imagined houses that were tied to small-scaled, personally directed labor. In fictional works of the twenties and thirties, a distinctive idealism emerged amid the archaic house, which would be linked with the self-determination the homesteader, factory owner, and the creative writer. If much of the New Deal entailed a “demand for organization, administration, and management from a central focus,” the personal labors characteristic of the little house appear as focused, discretionary, and most of all pleasurable, in part because this work was invisible as labor.

That disaster followed in 1947 when Republicans, who won majorities in both houses of Congress in the 1946 election, passed the Taft-Hartley amendment to the Wagner Act, which placed a raft of restrictions on labor unions, opened the door for right-to-work laws, and required all union officers to sign affidavits confirming that they were not members of the Communist Party. The latter caused the biggest problem for FTA since all its national officers were Communists. This opened the door for more conservative unions in the AFL and the CIO to launch membership raids on FTA locals, often with the support of employers.

As opposed to prevailing accounts of the New Deal farm programs as serving big farmers, this article argues that they were rooted in long standing traditions of farm organizing and agricultural state building, benefitting many farming households and the public good. It was the defeat of New Dealers’ efforts to develop programs that would promote the well-being of people who worked the land and the land itself that underwrote the corporatization of American agriculture.

And the same chapter doubles down on the lure of the incomprehensible by following the transcription of Benny’s speech with long stretches of David himself producing sounds that are not just difficult for him to understand but impossible—his own recitation in Hebrew of verses from the Torah. That’s how Hebrew was taught; what the sounds mean comes later, and in fact, Roth would always compare his own “praiseworthy” performance producing “the sound of the language” to his abysmal one producing its meaning. But what’s striking in Call It Sleep is Roth’s reproducing these sounds spoken by someone who can’t understand them and written by someone who can’t understand them for readers who also can’t understand them, while at the same time making the meaning of what we can’t understand central to the novel’s action.

But this language is an ideological trick that hides the fact that intentionally discriminatory social forces produced the urban landscapes of racialized inequality that we inhabit today. The new discursive emphasis on flexibility and choice effectively shifts the responsibility of segregation and poverty onto impoverished people of color who—now unincumbered by discriminatory laws, policies, regulations, or individuals—have the “freedom” to “choose” to live wherever they want.

Considered together, these essays draw upon historical, political, and artistic reflections on the New Deal era in ways that both offer a richer understanding of the New Deal historical moment and provide a fuller basis for reflecting on our current crossroads in American life. Standing at another moment of crisis, facing once again economic hardship and political division, seeking ways to understand the political meaning of our artistic and literary culture, the importance of this historically themed exchange was palpable.