Book Review of "And a Time for Hope: Americans in the Great Depression" by James R. McGovern.

Book Review

And a Time for Hope: Americans in the Great Depression. By James R. McGovern. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2001, pp. 368. $35.00.

          James McGovern's book shows that the way we view the lives of Americans during the Depression is far from how they saw themselves. There is a well-understood narrative about the Great Depression built from photography, literature, and collective memories, which places the American people in the role of the victim, helplessly hobbled by economic forces they could do nothing about.¹ The Farm Security Administration's Historical Section produced photographs documenting small town life and the plight of the poor to demonstrate to the American people the problems the New Deal was meant to fix.² John Steinbeck's 1939 Grapes of Wrath and the 1940 film adaptation by John Ford adds to the FSA's photographs a story of poor Oklahoma farmers that migrated to California, but the characters' overwhelming victimization never allows them to become clear representations of the real “Okies”.³

          McGovern's attempt to break the reader away from the culturally approved narrative of the story was far from easy. The feelings images and stories create are notoriously difficult to shift. Dorothea Lange's iconic photograph, “Migrant Mother,” which shows Florence Thompson, deep worry lines etched into her face and three of her children clutching at her, produces an immediate emotional reaction.⁴ The effects of her photographs were intentionally aimed at lawmakers, according to Lange's private correspondence with another FSA photographer.⁵ To break the spell of the powerfully emotive pictures, McGovern had to turn away from them, and look at the photographers and the FSA to find their motivations and aims.

The Fog Of The Mind

     On the blank canvas of imagination I sat myself down in a comfortable antique wicker chair next to a large metal and wooden trunk, relics of my own family's past. The chair, my great grandmother's, restored time and again; the trunk her mother used to cross the Great Plains, and then left to collect dust, forgotten in an attic for generations. Although the poor condition of the wood leaves it little more than a display piece, carefully opening the lid shows it to be filled with treasures unbounded. It holds memories. Here it is a place where, from time to time, new old books, musty with age, are sorted, arranged, and conscientiously stored for some future time. Here, in a place of quite reflection, a cabin of the mind, a cozy crackling fire, a warm drink, and tomes enough to occupy a lifetime surrounds. Here is a space for all things to live again.

Through the frosty window a low bank of fog made its long procession across the valley, consuming each tree, building, and feature of the landscape. It was the time of year when this kind of weather was not uncommon. The echoes of long-distant actions roll along in the bank making it harder to distinguish just how far off they were. As I watched the last of trees slipping from view, the distance of here now, and there then was pulled behind the icy blanket. The wicker and the wood take their place in history, living in the past only to be shown in the present.

     Turning to family album, I leafed through the pages of dead-eyed portraits, slices of time without the slightest bit of context. Here a sailor, his white-hat cocked to the side, there a babe in the arms of a mother. They have no names, only the slightest hint of lives that were once theirs. The family album, long ago divided in two—one book of sepia photographs, and one of ink and pencil—separated from one another. The fog had reached the door.