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.

Forgetting The Dead

(A note to the reader: this paper was written from sources that were made available in class, and as such, not all of the sources are publicly accessible, and I did not have full information to construct a proper bibliography.  Where possible, I've tried to include links to comparable sources.)

fallen autumn leaves 
memories of days that passed 
wait for winter snow 
(Lindsay Zike, personal collection, 2013)

While no event at any point in history is so fully documented as to know every possible fact, the twentieth century introduced several key innovations that changed the way people interact with memory and history. Photo albums, rolls of film, video collections, and scrapbooks around the world hold a greater number of clues to personal and collective memories than at any previous age. Using those kinds of primary sources, a group of University of Illinois Historians and students spent a year “explor[ing] 'the fate of the twentieth century'” by casting a wide-net that pulled in the perspective of the famous victors and the defeated poor with no special regard for race or political associations, which culminated in Imagining the Twentieth Century, a “frankly unauthoritative history” (Charles C. Stewart and Peter Fritzsche, pg. viii). Despite the broad scope of the project, the photographs and essays that dug deep into likely forgotten collective memories still missed several major events.