Real Folks

Front matter

REAL FOLKS race and genre in the great depression

Real Folks

REAL FOLKS

Part I: The Folklore Of Racial Capitalism

1. “A Combination Madhouse, Burlesque Show and Coney Island”: The Color Question in George Schuyler’s Black No More 33

2. “Inanimate Hideosities”: The Burlesque of Racial Capitalism in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million 72

Part Ii: Performing The Folk

3. “The Last American Frontier”: Mapping the Folk in the Federal Writers’ Project’s Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State 113

4. “Ah Gives Myself de Privilege to Go”: Navigating the Field and the Folk in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men 152

Part Iii: Populist Masquerade

5. “Am I Laughing?”: Burlesque Incongruities of Genre, Gender, and Audience in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels 191

Afterpiece: The Coen Brothers’ Ol-Timey Blues in O Brother, Where Art Thou? 241

Notes 251 Bibliography 287

Acknowledgments

As I reflect on this book’s numerous iterations, I am grateful to the many people who offered me mentorship, counsel, friendship, and support. The foundations of this project were really laid at Princeton University, where I had the good fortune of encountering Valerie Smith, who, with her brilliance, grace, calm, encouragement, and humor, has opened up the world to me, far beyond the realm of academia. She has read every word of this book. One of the great joys of my life is counting Val as a mentor and friend for over two decades now. Officially, this project began when I was a graduate student at ucLa in the English Department and had the opportunity to study with an extraordinary group of professors, including Kathryn Hayles, Arthur Little, Ken Reinhard, Valerie Smith, Eric Sundquist, and Richard Yarborough. Ken Reinhard and Richard Yarborough, in particular, illuminated the political possibilities of documentary and satire with great insight and wit. Thank you for introducing me to Sullivan’s Travels and Black No More: these texts haunted my dissertation and they now occupy much of this book’s focus.

The research for this book was funded early on by a Greenfield Research Fellowship at the Roosevelt Presidential Library during the summer of 1997 and by a University of California Humanities Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship in conjunction with the “Microcosms of Knowledge” Research Group (1997-98). I am grateful to the intellectual vision of Microcosm’s organizers, Mark Meadows and Bruce E. Robertson, and the scholarly engagement of fellow participants, Ken Arnold, Rosemary Joyce, and especially Rebecca Lemov. More recently, I have benefited from a faculty fellowship with the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, which provided me with time for writing and an opportunity to circulate work in progress among a terrific group of fellows. The director, Kathleen Woodward, and the associate director, Miriam Bartha, have created an exemplary interdisciplinary scholarly community to which I and many others are indebted. A Woodrow Wilson Junior Faculty Career Enhancex Acknowledgments ment Fellowship during the year 2006-7 couldnt have come at a more crucial stage; that fellowship made it possible for me to complete the book under the formal mentorship of Valerie Smith.

At the University of Washington, I have found a home for my work in several locales both on and beyond campus. My home department, American Ethnic Studies, and the departments to which I am adjunct, Women’s Studies and English, have each provided me with the intellectual and emotional sustenance of good colleagues and administrators. Thanks to Angelica Hernandez-Cordero, Dalia Correa, Lauro Flores, Erasmo Gamboa, Tetsuden Kashima, Seyed Maulana, Ellen Palms, Devon Pena, Elizabeth Salas, Connie So, and especially, Rick Bonus, Gail Nomura, Tyina Steptoe, and Steve Sumida in aEs. Thanks also to many other scholars and friends at the University of Washington: Francisco Benitez, Marisol Berrios-Miranda, Stephanie Camp, Zahid Chaudury, Eva Cherniavsky, Laura Chrisman, Shannon Dudley, Juan Guerra, Mae Henderson, Moon-Ho Jung, Tom Lockwood, Joycelyn Moody, Chandan Reddy, Caroline Chung Simpson, Nikhil Singh, and Stephanie Smallwood. I am indebted to the forward vision, expert advice, and institutional support of Ana Maria Cauce, Luis Fraga, and Judith Howard. I am grateful to the three-campus interdisciplinary working group, Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity and Difference (w1RED), the brilliant brain child of Habiba Ibrahim, Ralina Joseph, and Janine Jones. Thank you Julia Aguirre, Rachel Chapman, Frances Contreras, Michelle Habell- Pallan, Alexes Harris, Trista Huckleberry, Suhanthie Motha, Naomi Murakawa, Leilani Nishime, Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, Manka Varghese, Wadiya Udell, Sasha Welland, Beth West, and Joy Williamson-Lott. Every aspect of my scholarship, including this book, has profited from the always astute and generous commentary of a writing collective that includes Rachel Chapman, Susan Friedman, Susan Glenn, Angela Ginorio, Michelle Habell-Pallan, and Shirley Yee. I am particularly indebted to Michelle for her mentorship even before I arrived on campus. A more informal, yet no less vibrant, writing group with Gillian Harkins and Alys Weinbaum pushed the manuscript into its final form. Several graduate students at the University of Washington have made this project’s stakes clearer to me: Zakiya Adair, Melanie Hernandez, and Andrea Opitz, as well as the students in the courses “African American Satire,” “The Literature of the Harlem Renaissance,” and “Exhibiting Culture, Performing Race.” From a more oblique angle, the Experience Music

Acknowledgments xi

Project Pop Conference has served as a community of inquiry focused on some of this book’s central concerns—authenticity, racial masking, and satire among them—and I thank Eric Weisbard and Ann Powers for their commitment to the pop project and their enduring friendship, as well as all of the conference regulars, especially Daphne Brooks, Michelle Habell-Pallan, Maureen Mahon, R. J. Smith, Gayle Wald, and Oliver Wang. Michael Mann’s “Ali” gave me the chance to work with Lydia Cedrone, Sean IInseher, Kathy Shea, and Mann himself, introducing me to aspects of film production that later informed my research.

A number of brilliant interlocutors have given me feedback and opportunities that shaped the intellectual trajectory of this book: Herman Beavers, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Adam Green, Brian Johnson, George Hutchinson, Jon Lohman, and Jean Wyatt. Several people, whom I am lucky enough to also count as dear friends, read the manuscript or portions of it and offered key critiques, suggestions, and clarifications: Mary Pat Brady, Daphne Brooks, Nico Israel, Gillian Harkins, Rebecca Lemov, Heather Lukes, Kate McCullough, Raphael Simon, Valerie Smith, and Alys Weinbaum. I radically revised and expanded the manuscript with the incisive guidance of the developmental editor Edward J. Blum. I am indebted to PMLA Journal for publishing an earlier version of chapter 1 in its special issue on Comparative Racialization, edited by Patricia Yaeger ([October 2008]: 1448—64); it appears here in revised and extended form. My editor at Duke University Press, Ken Wissoker, has been a model of patience and encouragement, helping me pull the book’s argument more sharply into focus. My copy editor Maura High made this book far more lucid and my managing editor Neal McTighe seamlessly steered it through production. Priscilla Wald and my other anonymous reader at Duke University Press were extraordinary, giving my manuscript the kind of close reading that one can only dream of: I am ever indebted to them for their scrutiny and care.

I have been sustained during the writing of this book by friends and family who generously discussed its central questions and many others over dinner, runs, dog walks, and just about every other social occasion. Los Angeles will always hold me in its thrall because of a most amazing group of friends, more like family: Philip De Leon, Ken Ehrlich, Carla Eisenberg, Heather Lukes, Molly McGarry, Rita Rothman, Shirley Rothman, Rafi Simon, Janet Sarbanes, Bill Stavru, and Michael Udesky. I thank you all not least for your exquisite senses of irony and always xii Acknowledgments knowing the place where politics enters. In the Los Angeles diaspora, Mary Pat Brady, Daphne Brooks, and Lisa Thompson continue to keep me lifted, through humor and critical insight, each in her own way. I am indebted to my earliest group of friends, Jennifer Emerich, Anne Forester, Lesley James, and Jennifer Nelson for informing this book’s very sensibilities. I am thankful to those who made Seattle feel like home again: Matt Aalfs, Amal Al Faiz, Faye Bathurst, Roberta Carlson, Tami Fairweather, Melissa Finch, Rachel Flotard, Sarah Flotard, Lucretia Granger, Michelle Habell-Pallan, Shelly Halstead, Gillian Harkins, Rich Jensen, Matt Johnson, Ralina Joseph, Julia Kellison, Alan Pruzan, Steve Retz, Nick Straley, Manka Varghese, Juliet Waller-Pruzan, Alys Weinbaum, Emily White, and David Williams.

For obvious and less obvious reasons, there would be no book without my family, particularly my parents. What might not be overtly apparent in its pages is the degree to which my blended family has shaped its content and direction as well as providing me with childcare, meals, and other crucial forms of support that enabled its writing. My siblings’ curiosity about the project made me feel like it was worthwhile. And, at least to my knowledge, in the spirit of Schuyler, West, Hurston, and Sturges, they’ve never yet let the occasion for an outrageous joke or performance slip them by. Thank you, Alex Higgins, Eva McGough, Natasha, Nicole, and Zoe; Zach Jones; Mischa Retman and Jyothi Rao; Melissa, Jimmy, Jake, and Sam Standish; and Jenny, Drew, Noah, and Eli Zavatsky. For last-minute help in capturing the book’s artwork and for getting the visuals and their humor instantaneously—like everything else—I am indebted to Mischa. My aunt Mary Beth Kelsey showed me that a doctorate was possible, along with many other things, and my uncle Todd Kelsey and my aunt Jill Levy always asked great questions. I thank my in-laws, Anne and Kent Bonney, Laurie Bonney, John Bonney and Erica Bonney-Smith, for welcoming me into their family so completely and for tolerating my basement writings during our visits with them at Cape Cod. I also thank the Bradys, Gareys, Gordons, Haxbys, and Smiths who have made those trips so much fun. My mother, Martha, has been there for me at every turn, offering me love, encouragement, knowledge, and financial help when I needed it. She practices a progressive everyday ethics of care that is kind and deliberate and we are its beneficiaries. Her partner, Eben Carlson, tempered his book lust and voracious appetite for questions of human consciousness with a wry sensibility that continues to inspire me. By way of her insight,

Acknowledgments xiii confidence, and love, my step-mother, Rosselle Pekelis, has shown me the stakes of this book, always asking me that not-so-simple question, “What’s it mean for the Jews?” My father, Frank, has been an anchor for me, helping me to stay focused on the bigger questions and let go of the rest. He demonstrates the possibility of a balanced life that keeps humor, love, pragmatism, social justice—and dogs—at its very center. (On that note, Jasper was integral to the daily life of the book, as was Stella, in spite of herself.) Each of my parents have helped me learn how to think, write, and speak about culture and politics more effectively and this book reflects their efforts as much as my own.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my daughters, Ava and Sylvie, and to Curtis. Ava and Sylvie have not brought me sanity but something better, a sense of the present in its rich absurdity, beauty, and promise. Though they are both tired of hearing me say “one more minute” at the computer, they have given new shape to my priorities. Curtis has lived with this book as long as I have. He has read its many drafts and debated with me about more than one of its claims. He opens up new ways of perceiving what is in front of us. With his wit, intelligence, tenacity, and love, Curtis makes everything possible.

Introduction

O honored folk, do not begrudge the sight / and rumor of reality. —A. T. ROSEN, Federal Writers’ Project, American Stuff (1937)

Here, in the vast granary of facts on life in America put away by the wpa writers, the documentary reporters, the folklorists preparing an American mythology, the explorers who went hunting through darkest America with a notebook and a camera, the new army of biographers and historians—here, stocked away like a reserve against bad times, is the raw stuff of that contemporary mass record which so many imaginative spirits tried to depict and failed to master.— ALFRED KAZIN, On Native Grounds (1942)

This book chronicles the search for authenticity in the United States during the Great Depression, which lasted from 1929 to 1941. Amid skyrocketing unemployment and spiraling deflation, in the wake of the stock market’s collapse, various writers, ethnographers, documentarists, filmmakers, and reformers sought out something real, something genuine, with which to ground an increasingly tenuous sense of national identity. They found it in the folk. The folk’s rural, artisanal know-how seemed to comprise the “raw stuff” with which to remake American identity. While the search for the folk did not begin with the 1930s, its urgency, direction, and shape altered considerably with the onset of the Depression.! The folk and their premodern authenticity were represented with an immediacy borne of the era’s most modern technologies: documentary photographs and books, sound recordings, films, and newsreels. They emerged as an incongruous amalgam, providing, in the famous words of Van Wyck Brooks, a “usable past” for an uncertain present (“On Creating,” 219). Featured as stalwart protagonists in much of the period’s documentary, the folk took center stage in various narratives of recovery across the political spectrum. In some of these stories, this folk embodied a purportedly precapitalist way of life, an enduring stoicism in the face of the marketplace’s erratic excesses. In other accounts, they represented an embattled group in need of government intervention— “pseudo-peasants” on the verge of vanishing due to the ravages of capitalism and unpredictable forces of nature (Smith, Making the Modern, 298). Viewed either as relics worthy of preservation or as victims deserving of aid, the folk were perceived as a pastoral resource integral to the nation’s healing and crucial to the brokering of new deals.

Bearing the weight of so much consequence, the rhetoric of the folk not unexpectedly became “folksy.” Many of the eras documentary endeavors transformed the folk into populist, regional clichés of “real” Americans and “real” America. In protest, a hybrid genre formed: documentary and satire merged in various ways to critique the fabrication of folk authenticity and expose its patriotic and corporate exploitation in the popular cultural narratives of the period. While many studies of realism in the 1930s simply assume the folksiness of the folk, this book is concerned with the “invention” of the folk in Depression-era politics and culture. From this angle, the folk constitute a powerful “fiction” in both senses of the term—as a falsehood and as a literary creation. Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression, then, is about a search for folk authenticity and also about hybrid forms of documentary and satire that told a different kind of story about the folk in the most uncertain of times.

With the specter of a second Great Depression haunting nearly every discussion of a faltering global economy, it comes as little surprise that the thirties hold the antecedents to our own cultural moment. As politicians attempt to speak plainly, their pronouncements often take on a folksy quality. Some, like the former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, talk of “real America,’ while others, such as President Barack Obama, suggest “we dust ourselves off and get back to work.” Former president George W. Bush is famous for his appeal to “gut feeling” in lieu of facts to explain his administration’s flawed decision making, so much so that the parodic conservative political pundit Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness”—“not quite fact, not quite fiction” —to describe his rhetoric. As in the thirties, weve seen a powerful response to the folksy articulations of the last decade in the documentary of Frontline and, as Colbert’s coinage suggests, in our own hybrid form of satire and documentary, the mock news of The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and the Dave Chappelle Show. Indeed, when the satirist Jon Stewart was asked by Bill Moyers, who specializes in documentary, if the work of satire and documentary feeds into people’s sense of helplessness, Stewart replied, “No. .. . this is how we fight back.” Stewart’s reply acknowledges the shared aims of these modes of address. In this dialogue and in shows like Stewart’s, we glimpse the makings of a hybrid genre: satire and documentary coming together to expose the deployment of folksiness and its familiar appeal in the twenty-first century. By exploring the manufacture of the folk in conjunction with commercial capitalism and populist discourses of nation building, I hope in this book to shed light on our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity and consumer culture, and our grappling with the “real” and the “authentic” in narratives of self, community, and nation.

It is no accident that the term “folksiness, the state or quality of being ‘folksy’ ” originated in the United States in or around 1931, at the tail end of the Hoover administration (Oxford English Dictionary). Or that we've come to remember the tumultuous thirties through near-iconic iterations of the folk and the folksy: Walker Evans’s black-and-white photographs of dispossessed tenant farmworkers; the Joad family in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and the movie of the same name; Franklin D. Roosevelt’s homey radio Fireside Chats; Alan Lomax’s recordings of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie housed in the national Archive of American Folk-Song; “Native” roadside attractions in the form of Wigwam motel courts, pay-to-visit tribal villages and Indian pageants, and totem poles commissioned by the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps, Indian Division; and regional folkways collected in the travel guides of the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide Series (Veitch, American Superrealism, xvi). In such a list, we see how the populist ideal of the folk was disseminated through modern mass media. And no form would deliver the folk more convincingly than documentary, its seemingly straightforward language of facts and its emphasis on the quotidian compounding the realness of its subject.

The United States was not alone in seizing upon mythical figures of authenticity and realist forms of representation to fortify its citizenry in the havoc of the global Depression. In the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin advocated art that explicitly celebrated the life of the worker—the protagonist of a classless society presumed to be already in existence in the ussR—by institutionalizing socialist realism as the official artistic doctrine of the state in 1934 (Foley, Radical Representations, 162).” From another ideological platform, National Socialist German Workers’ Party grounded its Nazism in “decontextualized ideas about folklore culled from Romanticism to the 1930s,” conceiving der Volk as a figure of spiritual unity and racial purity, a gauge for state policies of racial cleansing (Bendix, In Search, 166). American conceptions of the folk would encounter and negotiate these distinct but contiguous cultural formations from Europe. As each of these iterations of the people show, such categories of authentic national personhood were invented, unstable, and shifting, and they served a range of political agendas on the left and the right. To what ends the folk and their pastness would be used—and abused—is part of the story I aim to tell.

Departing from a conventional literary history of the 1930s that couples nonfiction and social realism, this book traces the decade’s convergent satirical and documentary genres in a set of unruly texts that bring to light alternative forms of cultural production and social critique around the figure of the folk: George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931), Nathanael West’s A Cool Million (1934), the Federal Writers’ Project’s Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State (1939), Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men (1935), and Preston Sturges’s film Sullivan’s Travels (1941). As I argue, the satirical energies of the thirties have been largely overlooked in the steady focus on realism, an omission that has rendered the writings of Schuyler, West, and others at best anomalous and at worst inscrutable. In fact, these writings were by no means anomalies, but instead responses to the Depression era’s representational crisis and its corresponding recourse to icons of working-class and rural authenticity. Through these novels, ethnographies, guidebooks, and films, I trace the foundations of the folk in a fraught, triangular racial formation of white, black, and native. As I show, a hybrid genre of satire and documentary formed a site of theorizing in which conventional epistemologies of the folk were both staged and queried (Lamothe, Inventing the New Negro, 11). This hybrid genre created a common discourse of moral truth-telling aimed at the patriotic and economic production of the folk in populist narratives promoted by the New Deal nation-state and corporate capitalism.

Real Folks is organized around two variations of this hybrid genre; the first I call modernist burlesque and the second, signifying ethnography. These terms are meant to suggest the text’s ascendant genre and its interplay with apparently unrelated modes of representation. Both modernist burlesque and signifying ethnography theorize the construction of the folk by way of the literary and the visual. Both forms inhabit that which they mean to critique, using exaggeration, irony, and reversal to reveal the performative dimensions of the object of their scrutiny. Each form makes its readers aware of their own press for the authentic. By way of their complicity critiques, modernist burlesque and signifying ethnography offer their readers a resistant reading practice.

When Schuyler and West deploy the folk, it is always a parodic citation. This gesture helps define their modernist burlesque, a kind of satire that occupies its subject from the outside in by pushing its most theatrical and technological elements to spectacular excess.? Both Schuyler and West deploy modernist burlesque to dismantle the authentic aura that surrounds the folk and the “self-made man,” an aura derived from these figures’ central role in capitalism’s story of limitless opportunity. In their burlesques, they illumine how the clichéd story of American class ascension—the bootstrap myth—depends upon impersonation, a performative making of the self into the upwardly mobile, white, and male rugged individual. Each character enacts this transformation on stage in front of large audiences. The reader witnesses how the audience who consumes the performance wholesale becomes reified, incorporated as white supremacist or fascist cogs in a mass-produced nationalist script. In this way, Schuyler and West disturb the dynamics of identification central to the rags-to-riches plot. By providing examples of all-consuming spectatorship and their violent outcomes in the voice of documentary, the actual audience is asked to distance itself from the textual audience. As readers distance themselves from these narratives of authentic personhood and nation, other progressive political configurations and possibilities emerge to fill the void.

The second variation of this hybrid genre, signifying ethnography, follows a structural logic similar to modernist burlesque, citing and inhabiting that which it means to question in order to instill in its readers a self-conscious critical reading practice. Whereas modernist burlesque implicates the performing protagonist and his multiple audiences in the perpetuation of insidious nationalist dramas, signifying ethnography implicates the ethnographer and the reader in the activity of searching for “the authentic.” In so doing, it shows the folk to be fluid, ephemeral, and impure. I draw upon Hurston’s definition of signifying found in Mules and Men, one of the first definitions of the term in the study of linguistics, “to show off” (124n4)—and, I would add, “to show up.” As Henry Louis Gates describes it, signifying deploys the “use of repetition and reversal” to launch “an implicit parody of a subject’s own complicity in illusion” (Figures in Black, 240). In regard to the popular nonfiction of the Depression, this illusion encompasses the desire for unmediated transcriptions of reality and a steadfast belief in their authenticity.> Within the signifying ethnographies this book treats, the reader is made aware of her own investment in the fiction of nonfiction’s unmediated status.

The texts in Real Folks emerge within a particular juncture of racial capitalism, a term I use, following Cedric Robinson, to emphasize the ways race is always a foundational structure within the operation of capitalism in the United States (Black Marxism, 2).° In the first half of the twentieth century, Jim Crow, the federally mandated system of racial segregation, permeated capitalism’s economic and social structures, resulting in unequal wages for workers as well as the segregation of places of consumption. These divisions also facilitated the growth of niche and crossover markets that cashed in on gendered, racial difference, such as Madame C. J. Walker’s beauty products, designed primarily for an African American female clientele; and the race records of the 1920s, produced initially for African American consumers and then for a crossover market. Paradoxically, just as these niche markets grew, Fordist technologies of mass production ushered in the promise of standardized goods and a homogeneous “democracy of consumers” (Cross, All-Consuming Century, 2). As a consequence, singularity and homogeneity became mutually perpetuating market values. In this economy, the folk were positioned as unique artifacts, their difference made “real” through modernized media—the radio, records, concerts, newspapers, and movie newsreels—and its new ways of hearing, seeing, perceiving, and mediating (Filene, Romancing the Folk, 57). These technologies worked in tandem with commercial culture’s commodification of the folk on a national scale. In this way, the folk were capitalized on as a tonic against American standardization and against the crisis tendencies of advanced capitalism as evidenced by the Depression. Through their variations of the hybrid genre of documentary and satire, each of the texts in this book expose the ways the folk were both called upon to evoke a precapitalist past and exploited in the form of nostalgic folk authenticity. In the end, the folk are revealed to be an anxious product of commercial modernity—not an antidote to it. By examining the ways that satire and documentary hybridize each other in this period, we see at once the means by which the folk were constituted within a nostalgic story of corporate capitalism and also the vigorous critique of that constitution made so powerfully in the cultural expression of the time.

OH HONORED FOLK!

What is the story of the thirties without voice-of-God narration, the booming male voiceover that introduced such classic documentary films as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937)? An omnipotent narratorial device invented in that era, it self-consciously projects a sense of its story’s importance for posterity, in part, by imposing coherence on its subject. The loud, commanding tones of voice-of-God narration attempted to make order of the Depression’s chaotic devastation. Many parties across the political spectrum vied for this powerful omniscient voice. The din of these voices then, and the symbolic place of the thirties in the national imagination now, make it all the more difficult to grasp that decade’s texture, complexities, and contradictions (Veitch xvi). The artists included in this book grappled with these didactic representations as they spoke to the many conundrums of a nation racked by economic crisis. At the forefront of their efforts lay the thorny problem of how to represent “the people” (Veitch xvii; Denning, The Cultural Front, 125). The folk provided one possible answer.

The economic free-fall of the early thirties destabilized prevailing notions of personal, communal, and national character. Fiscal chaos raised serious questions about what was “real” or “authentic.” Banks failed by the hundreds; businesses cut back on production and payrolls; wages went down and unemployment went up. The so-called American Way of life was frequently revealed to be an American Dream.’ All the while, President Herbert Hoover and his administration denied that there was any depression at all, insisting instead that the “downturn” was only temporary. In 1930, when a delegation came to Hoover seeking the immediate expansion of federally sponsored public works, he informed them: “Gentlemen, you have come sixty days too late. The Depression is over” (Levine, “Historian,” 18). In spite of Hoover’s denial, the plight of those who had long constituted and haunted the borders of the nation’s economic order—the “ill-housed, ill-clothed, ill-fed” as Franklin D. Roosevelt later put it—now took center stage.

Populist and regionalist formulations of American identity reverberated in the shock waves of the crash of 1929. As a skeptical public grew increasingly more cynical, politicians, social reformers, journalists, and artists invoked various images of “the people” to render coherent the badly splintered imagined community of the nation. Yet, in the cautionary words of Michael Denning, “If language were politics, we would all be populists” (125). One of the more infamous debates within the communist-leaning Left occurred in 1935 at the American Writers’ Congress, when the literary theorist Kenneth Burke, in his speech “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” argued for the use of the term “the people” instead of “the worker,” for its more “basic” address and mobilization (Burke 89).° Though Burke received a less than enthusiastic response for this suggestion, his speech augured a shift toward a more populist appeal: “If ‘Third Period’ communism talked incessantly of ‘the proletariat} the Popular Front tended to speak of ‘the people’ ” (Alpers, Dictators, 11). Burke’s semantic suggestion is but one instance of the period’s populist turn. The ideological battles over “the people” were fought vociferously on the right and the left by demagogues such as Louisiana’s crooked populist Huey Long and the fascist Father Coughlin, liberal centrists such as the New Dealers, and radical antiracist labor activists such as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (c1o) and the larger Popular Front—in Denning’s useful terminology, the “cultural front”—the affiliation of leftists and radicals who aligned themselves with New Deal liberals against fascism (xiii—xx).

Within these competing expressions of the people, the folk were often posited as racialized relics of American authenticity and purity, the ballast from the past that anchored present imaginings of the national collective. Such usages were indebted to earlier iterations of the folk that emerged within the growing field of ethnographic folklore in the 1890s, and it is worth tracing that history briefly here for its relevance. Though its own distinct discipline, American folklore studies was built upon a European model originating in the counter-Enlightenment romantic nationalism that began to flourish in late eighteenth-century Germany. Folklore’s most famous early interlocutor, the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried Herder, espoused the centrality of der Volk, “the people,” and their language and customs in the organic, authentic development of the folk-nation (Herder, Another Philosophy of History, xxv). Articulating a vision of the nation-state that was patriotic but also culturally relativistic, Herder argued that folklore and other expressive forms best represented the “spirit of the times” (Geist der Zeiten) and the shape of national character in its particular historical moment (Bunzl, “Franz Boas,” 20; Bendix, In Search, 41).!° Herder’s philosophy concretized “the modern invention of the ‘folk category” at the naissance of industrial modernity (Bendix 35).