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.

           While not the first historian to question the FSA's photos, McGovern does not merely call attention to the nearly hyperbolic portrayal of poverty, but he seeks to explain why the pictures were taken as they were.⁶ The photographers not only snapped their photos, but in the process they spoke with their subjects and came to know them as proud and courageous people.⁷ The images were not unmotivated, the photographers themselves seemed to know that the pictures were more depressed than the people in them. They had a job to do, to produce images that could sway Congress, but they gained an appreciation for the people they were sent to document.

          McGovern's book has a similar, but opposite effect. Instead of producing evidence of how bad things were, his goal was to show what had not previously been pictured, and to flesh out the character of the average American in the Depression. The chapters independently deal with a specific slice of American life, starting with the familiar political histories, replete with analysis of major movements and big men. Dedicating an entire chapter to Franklin Roosevelt, McGovern shows the unique character of the author of the New Deal. McGovern's depiction of the deep connection the American people had with Roosevelt comes across as Rockwellian, if it were not for the evidence that he cited; a collection of excerpts from letters written as responses to one Fireside Chat. When not read with a nostalgic lens, they show FDR to be an excellent public speaker and his audience naive of radio performance tricks.⁸ However, taking FDR as a symbol of hope needed by the people, McGovern departs the normal fare of top-down political history in favor of a narrative social history.

           Each chapter can be seen as a reasonably supported essay on a particular topic, nearly in isolation from the rest of the book. Some chapters seemed lacking or overly nostalgic. In his treatment of the Okie migration to California, he is critical of Steinbeck's exclusion of those that moved into the cities, but only spends a paragraph on that group. By the end of it he chooses to turn away from them to focus only on the demographics represented in Grapes of Wrath.⁹ He seems to gloss over the negative Californian reaction to the makeshift towns the Okies were building on the outskirts of other communities. He mentions that 49% of college students that wrote essays about “Little Oklahoma” ran a range between disapproving to downright hostile (wishing harm upon them) and discriminatory, but he immediately moves past that point and finishes that same paragraph by showing that some Okies came to see themselves as Californians.¹⁰ While it is good that the negative reaction was mentioned, he did not develop it any further or show any evidence of how else that might have impacted the Okies' lives. The preference is to talk about how they adapted instead of dwelling on the challenges they faced. Perhaps they need only be mentioned, but the effect is jarring and seems to downplay the hardships a minority faced.

          This is better seen in chapter 7, where he talks about African Americans in the South. There is something deeply disturbing about lauding a mistreated minority for exploiting the exploitation. McGovern relates how some Southern blacks were using the white-imposed caste system, white prejudices, and low-to-negative expectations to their “advantage.” I have to admit that I am hard pressed to see cooks taking a little food, petty theft, and hucksterism as at all remotely close to an “advantage” when one is expected to act like, and is treated like one is unworthy of basic human dignity.¹¹ Supported by social scientists that studied race relations in the 1930s, McGovern goes one step further and claims that blacks enjoyed the caste system because segregation allowed them to live apart from whites.¹² It seems to me ridiculously obvious that one possible explanation is that oppressed people are not likely to prefer living with their oppressors. McGovern's move here is to go directly and explicitly to “nostalgia” and focus on the happy memories of the African American community.¹³

          By downplaying the hardships of a mistreated minority in favor of highlighting only the happiest and the best aspects, this approaches symbolic annihilation of those that did suffer and succumb to those hardships. They are written out. While there are plenty of other sources that cover the hardships, it is clear they might not tell the whole story, but reaching in the opposite direction and ignoring unpleasantness does not seem to be a good response. The problem with this book is that in places it is a history of the happy. It would be unfair to say that it is a Rockwellian look back, but only because it is well-sourced.

          In the end, I recommend this book, but only to those that already have an understanding about the Depression, and race issues in the South. I fear that if this was the only book on those topics that someone reads, the view would be overly optimistic. Like the FSA's photographs, this book is not without its uses, but it was written for a purpose. The picture it presents is carefully framed and exquisitely composed specifically to turn the lens away from the known hardships of the Depression, to focus on the character of the people, and to show how government responses complemented and supported the hopes and dreams of the American people.¹⁴ Nonetheless, McGovern succeeds in showing there is reason to doubt that everyone experienced the Depression in the way that Florence Thompson was shown.

1 James McGovern, And a Time for Hope: Americans in the Great Depression (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2001), 267.

2 McGovern, 70.

3 Ibid., 105-6.

4 Ibid., 71.

5 Ibid., 70.

6 Ibid., 72.

7 Ibid., 74.

8 Ibid., 40.

9 Ibid., 107-8.

10 Ibid., 109.

11 Ibid., 127.

12 Ibid., 128.

13 Ibid., 128.

14 Ibid., 267 and 279-80.