Working through close rhetorical analysis of everything from
fiction and journalism to documents and documentaries, this book
looks at how popular memory favors the country Depression over the
economic crisis in the nation 's cities and factories. Over eighty
years after it happened, the Depression still lives on in iconic
images of country poor whites in the novels of John Steinbeck, the
photographs of Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein, the documentary
films of Pare Lorenz and the thousands of share-croppers life
histories as taken down by the workers of the Federal Writers
Project.
Like the politicians and bureaucrats who accomplished the New
Deal 's radical reforms in banking, social security and labor union
law, the artists, novelists and other writers who supported or even
worked for the New Deal were idealists, well to the left of center
in their politics. Yet when it came to hard times on the American
farm, something turned them into unwitting reactionaries. Though
they brought these broken lives of the country poor to the notice
and sympathy of the public, they also worked unconsciously to
undermine their condition.
How and why? Fender shows how the answer lies in clues
overlooked until now, hidden in their writing -- their journalism
and novels, the "life histories" they ghost wrote for their poor
white clients, the bureaucratic communications through which they
administered these cultural programs, even in the documentary
photographs and movies, with their insistent captions and
voice-overs. This book is a study of literary examples from in and
around the country Depression, and the myths on which they
drew.
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