Awe

By awe, philosophers and psychologists mean the sensation that overcomes someone in the presence of something simultaneously vast, powerful, and, when compared to humans, strangely humbling. The chapter begins with a review of amazing discoveries such as island universes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang that altered the understanding of the universe and made the solar system “seem but a speck of dust in infinite space.” It then turns to other sources of awe, or the Depression sublime: the Empire State Building; Jesse Owens’s record-setting long jump at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; the moral heroism of the Joads in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; and James Agee and Walker Evans’s deification of tenant farmers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Whereas most accounts of the sublime involve the vastness of nature overwhelming human beings, during the Depression human beings themselves became a source of the sublime.

A Sordid, Futureless Mess?

The first part of the chapter surveys how love fared in the film and literary fiction of the period, including the scandalous pre-Code film Baby Face, John O’Hara’s BUtterfield 8, and Mary McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps. In those works, love is a lost cause, mired in a cauldron of selfishness, venereal disease, and general tawdriness that reflected the hard times love had fallen on during the decade. After this survey of 1930s sordidness and lovelessness, the chapter offers a theory as to why so many writers and, for a time, the culture at large may have suddenly lost faith in love. (In short, the economy did it.) Its final take on the decade is that heterosexual love, like the economy with which its fate so closely intertwined, eventually recovered from the Depression that it, too, had been thrown into.

Introduction

The introduction follows Lorena Hickok, a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Agency, as she circulated about the country during the Great Depression, reporting back to Washington, D.C. what she discovered about how Americans felt during the decade. They felt, to judge by her reports, despair, anger, and pity. The introduction argues, however, that the emotional life of the period exceeded these admittedly widespread responses, and it lays out what a fuller account of the emotional life of the Great Depression would look like. It also describes and defends the study of emotions against recent challenges—made most forcefully by Walter Benn Michaels—that feelings only distract from a properly structural understanding of capitalism. It discusses, too, the continuing presence of the Great Depression, why it matters, and what an emotional history offers to a renewed understanding of it.

What You Want to Hear

This chapter discusses hope, how it works, and what people in the 1930s hoped for. It begins with a late science fiction story (Isaac Asimov’s “Liar!”) that reveals how hope works or, at least, how those who do not think much of hope think hope works. It then returns to one particularly ambiguous archive of Great Depression hope: the largely unprecedented genre of self-help books and success manuals. Many of these books reflect the tempered hopes of the decade, nowhere more so than in the pages of Alcoholics Anonymous, published in 1939. The skepticism about hope is also reflected in the politics of the decade. Chastened by the blasted hopes of the Depression, the greatest contribution policymakers made during the 1930s was to develop safety net provisions—unemployment insurance, social security—founded on the belief not that everything would turn out well but could turn out badly.

Fear Itself

The chapter begins with perhaps the most famous quotation to emerge from the Great Depression: Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself, which sounds good in theory but may not have reflected reality. To test that reading, the chapter examines various sources of fear in the Great Depression: a serial murderer in Cleveland; the polio epidemic that broke out in New York City in the summer of 1931; and the nearly constant fear of unemployment that characterized life during the Great Depression and made its way into the fiction of the period, including Helen Hunt’s Hardy Perennial. The chapter argues that what these sources have in common is a concern for the purity and autonomy of being, the nature or essence of a person, and the dread that such being might be violated and despoiled by impersonal but malevolent forces.

Purging the Rottenness from the System

When the Great Depression descended on America, many people had no idea why and no idea about how long it would last. Others, however, experienced no such doubts. For them, the Depression reinforced their understanding of how the world worked and confirmed their most sacred beliefs. This chapter examines their righteous response to the Great Depression. It locates that righteousness in three admittedly far-flung spheres: the laissez-faire fundamentalism of classical economics like Joseph Schumpeter and then secretary of the treasury Andrew Mellon; the apocalyptic interpretations of the Great Depression on the part of many Christians, who believed the Depression signaled the beginning of the end times and the Second Coming of Christ; and one famous Depression short story, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Babylon Revisited.” As far apart as these sources are, each nevertheless conveyed a sense that the Depression was a punishment for past misdeeds, whether economic, spiritual, or moral, and, therefore, was a punishment that had to be endured, even embraced, for the good life to resume.

“The Hazards and Vicissitudes of Life”

Social Security provides a fitting conclusion to the book. Its passage was shaped not just by the emotions of those who drafted the bill, debated it, denounced it, revised it, made it law, and then four years later amended it. Its passage was also shaped by the feelings of ordinary Americans. The chapter focuses on three sets of actors: Dr. Frances Townsend and his followers, who provided much of the urgency for Social Security; Franklin Roosevelt and the planners of Social Security, who tried to steer the sudden and clamorous demand for pensions into a more pragmatic piece of legislation; and critics of Social Security, whose misgivings would guide the 1939 amendment to the bill. The upshot is a history of Social Security that clusters around the emotions previously discussed in the book: righteousness, panic, and fear, but also awe, love, and hope.

“I Saw One Woman Faint”

The chapter on panic begins—as it must—with Orson Welles’s 1938 War of the Worlds, the panic it inspired, and the scholarly debate about panic that it also began. With War of the Worlds as a touchstone, the chapter turns to other supposed instances of panic in the decade: the stock market crash in 1929, the bank runs of 1933, and Richard Wright’s Native Son, which begins with Bigger Thomas’s panicked murder of Mary Dalton and ends with Wright’s depiction of the hysterical response to that crime on the part of white Chicagoans. Putting these texts together, the chapter argues that for as much as we remember the decade of the 1930s for its populism, it was also a decade in which people felt real fear about what individuals and crowds of people might be capable of when they panicked or otherwise lost control of their emotions.