Democracy as Struggle and Commitment: Revisiting Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century
Susan Curtis
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, Michael Denning published The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. It appeared at a moment when scholars were crafting major reinterpretations of American history—efforts that represented more than the addition of previously untold tales, but wholesale rethinking of how that history unfolded. Ronald Takaki held up a “different mirror” to America’s past; John Demos told a different “family story” about the United States’ colonial and early national history; and Ann Douglas insisted that cultural output in the 1920s best can be understood as “Aframerican” culture.[1] In each of these cases and many others, scholars grappled with the nation’s multicultural reality and sought to decenter powerful European-descended figures (mostly men) in favor of a broader cast of characters whose actions drove the narrative. Denning’s masterful study of a social movement in the 1930s and the scholarly agenda of which it was an important part deserve our attention in a current moment of national and cultural crisis.
The Cultural Front explores a powerful social movement in the 1930s that generated what writer Michael Gold called a “second American Renaissance.” Denning challenged the widely held view that the turn to the left in the depression decade was both brief and of no lasting importance. He demonstrates how the cultural front “proletarianized” American culture, and his portrayal of Thirties culture places working people, emigres, and racial minorities at the center of this renaissance. Franklin Roosevelt has a bit part, not the “Superman”/savior imagined by other scholars of the period. Perhaps most helpfully, Denning’s subtitle introduces the concept of a “laboring of American culture,” signifying a process that was “painstaking and difficult” and ultimately incomplete. His is not a book about a “failed revolution,” but rather a necessary reminder of the slow and uneven pace of change.
Scholarly focus on the decade of the 1930s has been trained on Roosevelt’s New Deal, the heyday of Hollywood’s “silver screen,” and the coming of war in Europe and Asia. No wonder most Americans forget the ubiquity of left culture. Denning reminds us that Clifford Odets’s play, Waiting for Lefty, was the most widely performed (and most widely banned) play of 1935. Writers like Meridel Le Sueur and Carlos Bulosan identified labor strikes as the source of their art and commitment. Opposition to war, fascism, and racism characterized the ideology of many artists who made up the “cultural front.” Filmmakers, musicians, playwrights, novelists, and others involved in the culture industry used their talents and positions to draw attention to the plight of working people struggling to survive a devastating economic depression.
Artists and thinkers who contributed to the cultural front did not walk in lock step. Denning identifies a variety of formations that emphasized different aspects of the struggle to proletarianize American culture. He explores literary class war in the rise of proletarian literature and its lasting impact on American letters long after the last manifesto of its early adherents had turned to dust. Denning shows in a section on the Grapes of Wrath how migrants and their narratives engrossed an America witnessing the dispossession of victims of the Dust Bowl and predatory banks. Popular front musical theater put working people—men and women, black and white—on center stage. Another section of the book examines Orson Welles’s anti-fascist film aesthetic, and another takes readers inside the cartoonists’ strike against Walt Disney.
Perhaps the most revealing of the formations is what Denning calls “the decline and fall of the Lincoln Republic.” The America that had given rise to myths of rugged individualism and self-making could not survive the onslaught of large-scale industrial capitalist production, urban growth, racial and ethnic discrimination, imperial adventures, and the decadent ballyhoo of the Roaring Twenties. Denning attributes the emergence of the cultural front to massive changes taking place in American society and culture. The large organizations that disseminated forms of diversion, information, values, and art had grown exponentially since the dawn of the twentieth century, and that expansive growth created opportunities for men and women previously on the margins of cultural production. This “new class” challenged the familiar structures of capitalism because its members did not own the means of production nor were they exclusively wage earners. The class consisted of emigres, children of working-class families, and people of color, all of whom brought an outsider’s perspective to the production of American culture. They were not apologists for the cultural shibboleths of the nineteenth century. Indeed, they brought new energy, commitment, sounds, and images to American life.
Denning uses John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. Trilogy to chart the fall of the Lincoln Republic. For Dos Passos, the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927 marked the beginning of the end of the U.S. as a republic, and he wrote The 42nd Parallel so that Americans would never forget that they had called for the death of innocent men. In 1919, Dos Passos offered a biting critique of the wicked alliance between warmongers in government, opportunists and profiteers in business, and the advertising class to make a war to protect big business palatable to the masses called upon to give their lives on the battlefield. In The Big Money, the radical modernist went on to follow the protagonists after the war as they instantiated consumer culture at the expense of democracy. Dos Passos and many of his contemporaries in the cultural front recognized that the world of small-scale production, ethnic homogeneity, striving individuals, and the agrarian pastoral was gone (if it ever existed), and they used their talents to make sense of lived experience in urban, industrial America at a moment not of glory but of failure.
Three aspects of Denning’s masterful recuperation of a movement and a cultural moment stand out. The first has to do with those who brought the cultural front into existence, and the second involves the demise of the movement. The alpha and the omega of the 1930s cultural front remind us that reform, r/evolutionary change, and social movements arise in historical circumstances for specific reasons—historical change is neither unidirectional nor continuous. Agents of change lurch from one moment to the next, not knowing what the outcome of their actions will be, fired by a social vision and dreams of justice, making progress and missteps in turn. Movements like these rarely die out on their own. To dream of a different (better) world means that what currently exists must be dismantled and rebuilt, and that can be frightening to those who have huge stakes in the world as it is. Denning offers an explanation for the demise of the cultural front that is as compelling as his explanation for its rise; it is worth dwelling on both. The third dimension of Denning’s project that demands our attention in the second decade of the twenty-first century is his commitment to writing about past radical moments to keep alive the memory of ancestors who dared to challenge the status quo and who give change agents in the present moment the reassurance that they are not the first, nor will they be the last, to demand social justice.
The creators of this cultural renaissance in the 1930s came from backgrounds other than the privileged white elite typically associated with cultural production. “The heart of this cultural front was a new generation of plebeian artists and intellectual who had grown up in the immigrant and black working-class neighborhoods of the modernist metropolis,” writes Denning. As children of migrants and immigrants, “they were caught between the memories and stories of their parents and the realities of urban streets and shops.”[2] They grappled with the dissonance between their parents’ past and their present. As outsiders, they took the lofty ideals of freedom and equality seriously and demanded that they apply to their lives. Democracy was not an inert condition; rather it was a dynamic process that demanded action and commitment.[3]
Across the centuries, outsiders have always been the source of energy and renewal in America. The “giddy multitude” of the seventeenth century challenged the cultural and religious strictures of Christians in British North America and engaged in interracial relationships, explored each other’s’ belief systems, and identified shared grievances.[4] Nineteenth-century popular music depended on music and dance innovations arising from free and enslaved African-descended people.[5] At the end of the century, another cultural reorientation occurred thanks to the millions of immigrants arriving on America’s shores, urban wageworkers, and African Americans who began escaping oppression in the South after 1877.[6] Elsewhere I have argued that Americans’ embrace of ragtime music and cakewalk dancing, both introduced by African American artists and performers, signaled and hastened the demise of Victorian culture in the U.S.[7]
In each of these instances, Americans found themselves at a crisis point involving conflicts over land, wealth, and power. The truism that America is a “Christian nation” ignores the fact that most inhabitants of North America held unorthodox or heterodox ideas that were dismissed in a campaign to sacralize the landscape and to demonize, then trivialize folk beliefs.[8] The popular myth of the self-made man in antebellum America papers over the social reality of an emergent market capitalist system that reduced all workers to some form of slavery. In the absence of interracial solidarity, white workers could be mollified by the pitiful “wages of whiteness.”[9] After the Civil War, as new modes of production tied workers to machines, anger and resentment exploded in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Scattered across the country, one could find budding interracial cooperation. In Wilmington, North Carolina, blacks and whites owned businesses and won election to a bi-racial municipal government, which was overthrown in an armed coup in 1898.[10] In other parts of the South, they collaborated in Farmers’ Alliances, which were determined to cut out the middlemen to retain greater profits for agricultural producers.[11] Those with a vested interest in commercial agriculture took whatever measures necessary—from election shenanigans to terror and arson—to break the alliance. After the stock market crash of 1893, desperate working people went on strike only to be met time and again with armed force.
Even as vibrant forms of cultural expression from men and women on the margins found a warm reception in the popular culture, the moneyed powers and their allies in and out of government crushed the hopes of workers of all races and ethnic backgrounds for a different order, a decent life, and access to rights guaranteed in the nation’s founding documents. Even the cultural contributions were up for grabs in what Eric Lott has called a matter of “love and theft.”[12] Astonishingly, the grim decade of the 1890s, marked by class warfare, economic depression, imperial expansion, and widespread homelessness, became in relatively short order “The Gay Nineties.” Richard V. Culter’s cartoon series by that name drained the anger, class conflict, and racial difference out of the decade, and nostalgia for the era took the form of Gay Nineties contests and hard times parties in the 1920s and 1930s.[13] Historians in the 1910s and 1920s rendered leaders of oppositional movements as crackpots and charlatans, and popular writers like Jack London, Josiah Flynt, and Richard Harding Davis turned homeless people into objects of humor and prurient disdain as tramps, hoboes, “gay cats,” “prushuns,” and bums.[14] And so the fog of amnesia settled over a period of vast class and racial inequality, vibrant social movements to change the nation, and cultural change wrought largely by immigrants, workers, and racial minorities.
Denning shows how the cultural front of the 1930s met a similar fate as the nation geared up for war. How better to dispatch with an influential social movement than to tar it with the brush of one’s international foes. The writers, playwrights, musicians, cartoonists, intellectuals, filmmakers, poets, and actors who imagined a different order in the ruins of capitalism and whose flashpoints included general strikes, the needless execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, and the railroading of the Scottsboro Boys—these participants in the cultural front only wanted to push the nation to live up to its founding ideals and to create a social and cultural system designed to deliver on the nation’s promises. By the end of World War II, they had been demonized as dangerous enemies of the state and were hounded for supposed “un-American” activity. But Denning refused to end this book on a note of failure. For in truth, the influences of the Popular Front lived on. The world they envisioned did not materialize, but the old world was not unfazed by their social movement and cultural experimentation. Their ideals and work inspired another generation who reignited the call for justice. And he ends his book with a sentence addressed to anyone wishing to create a world they would like to inhabit: “The failure of their laboring of American culture remains our starting point.”[15]
Denning’s work remains as relevant today as when it first appeared. The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021 has exposed once again the deep divisions in American life along both race and class lines. Front-line workers were heroes in the early weeks of 2020, but their heroics did not merit better pay or protection against the virus. Poor and minority communities have been more susceptible to the virus and are vastly overrepresented among the deaths caused by Covid-19, but their plight has not resulted in support for expanded access to decent healthcare. Black Lives Matter activists, who took to the streets peacefully and forcefully to demand justice for the victims of the U.S. police state, found support for their proposed solutions, but they also faced a ferocious backlash by opponents who demonized them as dangerous radicals.
The Cultural Front reminds us that change is not easy and it takes succeeding generations to change laws, modify beliefs and practices, and get even a modicum of justice. The project redirects our attention from government or presidential administration as the source of social change to the rightful focus on people committed to social justice and engaged in solidarity movements. Whenever the United States has taken steps to make the founding ideals more real, organized groups of people usually have been responsible. Each generation must learn that democracy is action; it demands commitment; and people must claim it.
In the end, the stories we tell ourselves and our children and the memories we cherish matter. In the years that Denning was conducting the research for this masterpiece, scholars across the country were debating how to rewrite the tired old narratives of the past in ways that were more accurate, more inclusive, and reflective of all the incidents—uplifting and deplorable—that set historical processes in motion. They were trying to figure out how to tell both a “whole” story as well as vital “parts” of the story.[16] Theirs was an ambitious undertaking. They wanted to integrate findings from the new social history, African American history, ethnic studies, women’s history, gender studies, and cultural history into the “common sense” of American thought. Work by Denning and other scholars who rethought American history in the 1990s remains a valuable antidote to simple-minded curricular initiatives like Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission to instill “patriotic education” and to textbooks filled with elisions and half-truths that later have to be unlearned. Thanks to Denning, we can think about 1930s America and remember how people once on the margins stormed to the center as a cultural front demanding something better in a moment of crisis. As today’s activists on the left confront such challenges as environmental devastation, historic social inequalities, and injustice toward people of color, their struggles align them with the men and women who have made the best of America.
[1]Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London, New York: Verso, 1997); Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993); John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); and Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1995).
[2] Denning, Cultural Front, xv.
[3] A superb example of marginalized people fighting for democracy and the guarantee of equality, see Courtney Thompson, “Capturing Democracy: Black Women Activists and the Struggle for Equal Rights, 1920s-1970s.” (Ph.D. diss., Purdue University, 2011).
[4] For an excellent study of this oppositional activity from the underclass and the response to their actions, see Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).
[5] For an excellent study of the impact of African American on early nineteenth-century popular culture, see Kevin M. Scott, “Rituals of Race: Mount, Melville, and Antebellum America.” (Ph. D. diss., Purdue University, 2004).
[6] John Higham, “The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s,” in Writing American History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972).
[7] Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994).
[8] Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith.
[9] David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, New York: Verso, 1991).
[10] For much of the twentieth century, the coup was misnamed a “race riot.” For a contemporary view, see Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901).
[11] Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
[12] Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
[13] Richard V. Culter published a series of ink drawings entitled “The Gay Nineties” in Life Magazine in the mid-1920s. They were later compiled and published as The Gay Nineties: An Album of Reminiscent Drawings (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1927. After his untimely death in 1929, his wife tried to copyright the term “Gay Nineties” because of its popularity among advertisers. See Henry Richter to Joseph Schreiber, May 15, 1931, Life Magazine Incorporated, (Mss Col 1758) Box 5, Folder Root, Clark, Buckner & Ballantine, New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts. For examples of the popular nostalgia for the 1890s, see GRG to HR, November 30, 1935, Life Magazine Incorporated (Mss Col 1758) Box 3, Folder “Gay Nineties,” New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts.
[14] For historians trivializing Coxey’s Army, see Donald McMurry, Coxey’s Army: A Study of the Industrial Army Movement of 1894 (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1929); and John D. Hicks’s review of the volume in American Historical Review 35.3 (April 1930O: 641-642. Jack London, The Road (New York: MacMillan, 1907); Josiah Flynt, “The Tramp and the Railroads,” The Century Magazine 58 (June 1899): 258-266; Josiah Flynt, “Homosexuality among Tramps,” in Havelock Ellis, , Studies in the Psyuchology of Sex: Sexual Inversion (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Company, 1915), Appendix A; and Richard Harding Davis, “The Hungry Man Was Fed,” in Van Bibber and Others (New York, London: Harper & Bros, 1892).
[15] Denning, The Cultural Front, 472.
[16] Thomas Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73.1 (June 1986): 120-136.