No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Living Mythically: The Thirties
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
In May 1932 the Museum of Modern Art opened on 53rd Street in New York in an old mansion. A number of artists associated widi New Masses, the leftist magazine founded in 1925, showed a collection of political murals sharply commenting on die economic imbalance and social cruelty of the times. Hugo Gellert's mural was entided ‘Us fellas gotta stick together’, a phrase drawn from an already notorious conversation between a young member of die wealthy Vanderbilt family, who had obtained a reporting job on a Hearst newspaper, and his equally rich interviewee, Al Capone, then in gaol. Capone, as usual, knew die score and told die young capitalist inheritor: ‘Us fellas gotta stick togedier.‘ Gellert's mural neatly encapsulated the Hearst-gangsterdom axis, since the centre of corruption, then as now, in America was die interlocking of business and crime. Naturally, President Hoover, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller found die exhibition offensive since diey were die ‘fellas’ in die mural with Capone. Another picture, by the great political artist, Ben Shahn, showed figures in the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and one by William Gropper, another fine political artist, showed J. P. Morgan and Andrew Mellon, a couple of notorious millionaires, eating tickertape with two pigs, and protected by militiamen. The Gropper was entitled, with little subdety, but quite accurately, ‘The Writing on the Wall’.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972
References
1 Gellert, Hugo, ‘Us Fellas Gotta Stick Together’, American Dialog (Autumn, 1967).Google Scholar
2 Adamic, Louis, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York, 1931; rev. ed. 1934), pp. 407–8.Google Scholar
3 Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961; Avon ed.), p. 403.Google Scholar
4 Trilling, Lionel, Partisan Review (Fall, 1939)Google Scholar, quoted Aaron, op. cit., p. 403.
5 Brakhage, Stan, ‘Sergei Eisenstein’, Caterpillar, 15/16, 1971, 124.Google Scholar
6 The San Francisco Poets, ed. Meltzer, David (New York, 1971), p. 18.Google Scholar
7 Warshow, Robert, ‘The Legacy of the 30s’, The Immediate Experience (1962; Anchor, ed., 1964). Pp. 3–5.Google Scholar
8 Cf. Mottram, Eric, ‘Mississippi Faulkner's Glorious Mosaic of Impotence and Madness’, Journal of American Studies, 2, 121–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 Thorpe, Margaret F., America at the Movies (London, 1946), pp. 30, 65 and 133.Google Scholar
10 New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties, ed. North, Joseph (New York, 1969), p. 47.Google Scholar
11 Tipple, John, Crisis of the American Dream 1920–1940 (New York, 1968), p. 165.Google Scholar
12 Gilbert, James B., Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America (New York, 1968), p. 125.Google Scholar
13 Ibid., p. 204.
14 Ibid., p. 220.
15 Orwell, George, England Your England (London, 1953), pp. 131–4.Google Scholar
16 Joseph North, ed., op. cit., p. 51.
17 Stearns, Marshall, The Story of Jazz (London, 1957), p. 187.Google Scholar
18 Coral CP 63, 1970.
19 Marshall Stearns, op. cit., p. 197.
20 Hughes, Langston, The Big Sea (New York, 1945), p. 258.Google Scholar
21 Kagan, Norman, ‘Reviving “The Emperor Jones”’, The Village Voice (24 06 and 1 07 1971).Google Scholar
22 Cf. Jones, LeRoi, ‘City of Harlem’ and ‘The Myth of Negro Literature’, Home: Social Essays (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1968).Google Scholar
23 The Negro in New York, ed. Ottley, Roy and Weatherby, W. J. (New York, 1967), introduction.Google Scholar
24 McLuhan, Marshall, The Mechanical Bride (New York, 1951), pp. 102–3Google Scholar; see also p. 123, ‘The Law of The Jungle’, on business mythology.
25 White, D. M. and Abel, R. H., The Funnies: An American Idiom (New York, 1963), p. 3.Google Scholar
26 White and Abel, op. cit., p. 4.
27 Rosenberg, B. and White, D. M., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America (Glencoe, Illinois, 1957), p. 133.Google Scholar
28 Robert Warshow, op. cit., p. 147.
29 Rosenberg and White, op. cit., p. 147.
30 Rosenberg and White, op. cit., pp. 235 ff.
31 Rotha, Paul and Griffith, Richard, The Film Till Now (London, 1949), p. 435.Google Scholar
32 Knight, Arthur, The Liveliest Art (New York, 1957), p. 115.Google Scholar
33 ‘Crime and Racketeering’, Ringel, Fred J., ed., America as Americans See It (New York, 1932).Google Scholar
34 Thurber, James, The Thurber Carnival (London, 1945), p. 148.Google Scholar
35 The Anxious Years, ed. Filler, Louis (New York, 1962; Capricorn ed., 1964), pp. 197–8.Google Scholar
36 David Meltzer, ed., op. cit., pp. 10–12.
37 Bewley, Marius, The Eccentric Design (London, 1959), p. 10.Google Scholar
38 Viereck, Peter, Dream and Responsibility (Washington, 1953), p. 61.Google Scholar
39 Cowley, Malcolm, Exiles Return (New York, 1934; rev. ed., 1951), p. 223.Google Scholar
40 Slochower, Harry, No Voice is Wholly Lost (London, 1946), p. 71.Google Scholar
41 Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America (New York, 1965), pp. 110–11.Google Scholar
42 The American Writer and the Great Depression, ed. Swados, Harvey (New York, 1968).Google Scholar
43 Margaret F. Thorpe, op. cit., pp. 44 and 84.
44 Benson, Frederick R., Writers in Arms: The Literary Impact of the Spanish Civil War (New York, 1968).Google Scholar
45 Krim, Seymour, Shake It for the World, Smart Ass (New York, 1971), pp. 3–25.Google Scholar
46 Daniel Aaron, op. cit., pp. 406–7.
47 John Tipple, op. cit., pp. 273–4.
48 Hughes, H. Stuart, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought 1890–1930 (London, 1959), pp. 414 ff.Google Scholar
49 The Times, London, 2 November 1971.Google Scholar
50 Mottram, Eric, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need (Buffalo, 1971), p. 26.Google Scholar
51 Oppenheimer, Joel, ‘Poem for Bonnie or Clyde’, In Time: Poems 1962–1968 (New York, 1969).Google Scholar