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.

Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Art

          Early Greek artwork lacks the refinement that is seen in the formal styles found in the later Classical Greek period, but themes begin to emerge that can be used to draw some conclusion about the daily lives of those that created it. The oldest pieces often employ an extremely stylized form to represent the world, and the simplistic figures are barely above the status of symbols, like one might expect to see in pictographs. In many ways, they can be viewed in linguistic terms and they can almost be read like a page.

          For example, the geometric krater from the Diphlon cemetery shows, in two horizontal registers not altogether different from Egyptian hieroglyphs, the story of the internment of a figure, starting in the lower register with a procession of soldiers and chariots.¹ The soldiers in the procession, traveling from left to right, are recognizable by the figure-of-eight shields and weapons. The upper register focuses to a central image of a frontal figure horizontally displayed above what is likely a bier.² The form of the figures are nearly identical, except that on the second register females a denoted by having two small dots on one side of their bodies, believed to be breasts, and the central horizontal figure, a thin line from his upper thigh that represented his penis.³ From this depiction, it may be concluded that the Athenians placed an importance on the death of this individual, but also that death was dealt with using what appears to be a fair amount of public ritual, having such a procession of soldiers in addition to the attending mourners. The most important cultural clue from this piece is that the artist took the time to individuate the sex of each figure even though the primitive style otherwise depicted them as identical. The roles that the sexes are shown in seem to be exclusive, women in morning, and men in procession. This is not the first work to display both sexes nearly identically, but separated by artistic convention and role.

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.