|
|
|
|
Writing From the Left: American
Proletarian Fiction
James
Kelley
“There never was a prior
moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit,”
Stuart Hall contends in a 1992 essay titled “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical
Legacies.” Yet the shared points of departure for much of cultural studies–among
these, the movement beyond the confines of individual disciplines and the refusal to make
deliberate and lasting distinctions between cultural processes and social
relations–attest to the enduring connections between cultural studies and Marxist
inquiry. The book exhibit for the American Cultural Studies Conference held at the
University of Tulsa (February 25-27, 1999) seeks to document these connections by
showcasing selections from the Proletarian Collection housed in the Special Collections
Department in the University of Tulsa's McFarlin Library.
The Proletarian Collection is
organized around Walter Rideout’s seminal study The
Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954 (1956) and includes first editions of
all but a handful of the 164 titles featured in Rideout's survey. Also present in the
collection are many, and in some cases, all of the other books written by authors
mentioned by Rideout. Thus, extensive collections exist of writers such as James T.
Farrell, Upton Sinclair, and Richard Wright. A wide range of materials on Jewish
immigrants of the early twentieth century and Black militants of the 1950s through the
1970s also comprise the collection. The Proletarian collection as a whole includes over
2,000 items including plays, poetry anthologies, song books, sheet music, and many other
ephemeral documents and items of proletarian writing and culture.
From this wide range of materials,
the book exhibit concentrates on three themes organized in three display cases. Case One contains an exhibit of dust jacket artwork from
strike novels of the 1930s as well as a brief treatment of the cultural and historical
contexts in which these novels were written. Case Two displays
children’s literature from the first half of the twentieth century that engages
proletarian issues as well as literature intended for working adults that makes use of
themes drawn from the children’s literature. Case Three gives
a glimpse of the conventions of socialist literary utopias and related fantasy literature
from the turn of the century to the 1960s, documenting the changing trends within the
genre as well as noteworthy experiments in publishing.
Anne Stavney, professor of English
at The University of Tulsa, and the Special Collections staff, both past and
present–Sidney Huttner, Lori Curtis, Milissa Burkart–have all been helpful in
the conceptualization and preparation of this exhibit.
Marked by the rise of capitalism,
intensified labor strife, and a realignment of radical groups, the beginning of the
twentieth century also saw the first sign of a new literary development. In 1901, the same
year in which Judge Elbert Gary, Andrew Carnegie, Charles M. Schwab, and J. P. Morgan
created the United States Steel Corporation, the first “supertrust,” Isaac K.
Friedman’s By Bread Alone appeared,
inaugurating the history of the radical novel in the twentieth century. This book imagines
no utopia, no fantasy of the far away or distant future; rather, it deals with the here
and now of a steel strike in a northern American city in realistic detail.
The six early strike novels shown
here–from Mary Heaton Vorse’s Strike!
(1930) to William Rollins’s The Shadow
Before (1934)–are among those written in response to a protracted labor conflict
in Gastonia, one of the leading textile cities in the South. These novels trace the
migration of workers to the cotton textile mills of North Carolina and culminate in the
violent events in the spring and summer of 1929. Rideout explains:
Soon after the strike broke out, the union headquarters and the strikers’ relief store were demolished by a masked mob. A second headquarters was erected on the union-owned land along with a tent colony to shelter the strikers evicted from company houses. When police attempted to enter the new union hall without a warrant, a fight ensued in which Police Chief Aderholt was fatally shot and four of his men wounded. Thereupon the tent colony was terrorized by the “Committee of One Hundred,” a vigilante group. After a trial noted for anti-communist histrionics on the part of the prosecution lawyers, [several] strike leaders were sentenced to long terms in state prison.
Robert Cantwell notes in a review
essay titled “A Town and Its Novels” that of the three proletarian novels based
on labor disputes in Aberdeen, Washington–Louis Colman’s Lumber (1930), Cantwell’s own The Land of Plenty (1934), and Clara
Weatherwax’s Marching! Marching! (1935)–all
describe strikes that were lost. However, Cantwell notes, in actuality there was a general
lumber strike in that city in 1935 which labor won “hands down.” He concludes:
The novelists insensibly patronized the workers they wrote about. They knew the masses were on the move, but they did not know where they were going; and in their hearts they feared that the militant working class, its ranks solid and its morale high, was marching, marching! smack against a stone wall.
Arna Bontemp’s books for
children—Sad-Faced Boy (1937), The Fast Sooner Hound (1942), and Slappy Hooper: The Wonderful Sign Painter
(1946)—feature working-class heroes.
Had the Moronians not looked into the golden eyes of the Serpent and been mesmerized, and been made to believe the humbug of profit, then might they have won control over the Robot of the Machine, and made him labor for the good of all, and men be freed from burdensome toil, and from fear of starvation.
The utopian novel allows authors
both to entertain their audiences by speculating on the future and to educate them about
perceived necessities of social reform. The publication of Edward Bellamy’s utopian
novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 (1887) and
Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column: A
Story of the Twentieth Century (1890) coincided in the United States with the
beginning of a period of strikes and increasingly open conflict between capital and labor.
Bellamy’s novel was tremendously popular and prompted a wide range of literary
responses and sequels.
The “Publisher’s
Notice” in Soloman Schindler’s Young West:
A Sequel to Looking Backward (1894) calls attention to the book’s unique colored
margins. This “novel feature in bookmaking,” the publisher proudly announces,
“will become universal in the near future”
(). The colored margins are meant to reduce
eyestrain from reading. The “Publisher’s Notice” goes on to inform us that
the book we are about to read is available in three colors: “The purchaser can choose
either ‘blue’ or ‘green’ or ‘yellow’ colors, as he thinks
either of these colors best fitting to the condition of his eyes,” thus foregrounding
the idea that the text itself is a tailor-made commodity.
The bed shown opposite the title
page of William Morris’s News From Nowhere
(1890) points to a common opening strategy in utopian novels: the narrator wakes to find
himself catapulted far into the future. In Morris’s novel, he awakens in the
twenty-first century and records his experiences with people who dress in classical and
medieval garments and who live comfortably without the pollution, poverty, and other ills
of his own industrial age.
“Utopias based on
‘Bellamy Socialism’ occasionally appeared after 1900,” Rideout observes,
“but the newer novelists began increasingly to shift from projection of the future
Cooperative Commonwealth to descriptions of the present conditions which made such a
future inevitable and to analyses of the revolutionary dynamics whereby it might be
hastened.” Simply having the narrator wake up in an already-transformed future
was no longer enough for most authors or readers. Thus, from a simple contrast, the genre
developed into a complex inquiry into the mechanism of a society constantly in flux.
The revolutions depicted in these
books, and the scientific innovations that accompany or enable these changes, are not
always in the interest of the environment or of oppressed classes, as noted in the dust
jacket summary of John S. Martin’s novel General
Manpower (1938):
After [J. Orestes] Jones had built
up his own puny body into that of a superman and thereupon discovered his unique ability
of making husky, well-disciplined soldiers out of thin, spineless, run-of-the-mill sort of
men, and when he found he could make a business of this ability, he figured somewhat as
follows:
“These men of mine can clear forests, they can break strikes, they can do construction jobs. General Motors sells cars, General Foods sells things to eat. General Electric sells the force of electricity. I, J. Orestes Jones will sell manpower, organize my men into the greatest corporation that ever existed—General Manpower.”
Whether writing at the end of the
nineteenth century or in the middle of the twentieth, whether painting a bleak or
promising picture, the authors of utopian novels look into the past as much as into the
future in order to identify the strengths and diagnose the illnesses of their own society.
Bontemps, Anna Wendell. The Fast Sooner Hound. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1942.
---. Sad-faced Boy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937.
---. Slappy Hooper, The Wonderful Sign Painter.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946.
Cantwell, Robert. The Land of Plenty. New York: Farrar &
Rinehart, 1934.
---. “A Town and Its Novels.” New Republic 86 (February 19, 1936): 51-52.
Colman, Louis. Lumber. Boston: Little Brown, 1931.
Donnelly, Ignatius. Caesar's Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century.
Ed. Walter B. Rideout. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1960.
Friedman, I. K. By Bread Alone, A Novel. New York: McClure,
Phillips, 1901.
Gropper, William. The Little Tailor. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955.
Holdridge, Herbert C. The Fables of Moronia. Sherman Oaks, Calif.:
Holdridge Foundation for the Advancement of Social Sciences, 1953.
Kirkpatrick, Ken and Sidney F.
Huttner. “Women Writers in the Proletarian Literature
Collection, McFarlin Library.” Tulsa Studies in
Women’s Literature. 8:1 (Spring 1989): 143-53.
Martin, Ben. John Black's Body: A Story in Pictures. New York:
Vanguard Press, 1939.
Martin, John S. General Manpower. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1938.
Morris, William. News From Nowhere or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some
Chapters From a Utopian
Romance. Boston:
Roberts Brothers, 1894.
Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-1954.
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1956.
Rollins, William. The Shadow Before. New York: R.M. McBride,
1934.
Vorse, Mary Heaton. Strike! New York: Horace Liveright, 1930.
Weatherwax, Clara. Marching! Marching! New York: J. Day, 1935.
The University of Tulsa’s Special
Collections Department in McFarlin Library
Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature
