5
In 1930, astronomers discovered the planet Pluto. With apologies to Pluto, a mere planet would prove the least of the wonders astronomers would discover during the years leading up to and following the stock market crash in October 1929.
Possibly the most wondrous came in 1925, when Edwin Hubble, working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, showed that many of the stars visible from earth with a telescope were not in fact stars within our galaxy, the Milky Way, but, rather, were self-contained nebula—so-called “island universes”—lying outside our galaxy. In other words, they were other Milky Ways. The discovery changed everything. Instead of living in a universe with one galaxy and hundreds of billions of stars, we lived in a universe with countless galaxies, each of which had its own hundreds of billions of stars.
That meant that the universe, instead of being hundreds of thousands of light years in diameter, as astronomers had previously thought, was millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of light years in diameter. Indeed, no one could say for sure, because as the power of telescopes increased, so did the size of the universe. In a 1932 article in Scientific American, the astronomer Henry Norris Russell guessed that based on what astronomers could then see, the universe must be at least 250 million light years across. Yet the universe almost certainly kept going past what telescopes could reveal. “The material universe,” Russell wrote, “extends beyond the utmost limits of observation. We have sounded its depths with the longest line that human skill has yet devised—perhaps with the longest that human means can supply—and our final report is ‘No Bottom.’ ”1
As news of what Hubble had found trickled into the mainstream press, journalists and scientists struggled to convey his astounding findings. On December 15, 1930 the New York Times reported that Hubble and his partner, Milton L. Humason, had estimated “the limits of Creation to be equal to 10 followed by 33 ciphers light-years from the Earth.” The headline read, “Limits of Creation, in Light Years, Estimated at 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.”2 But not even all those ciphers could make plain the overwhelming size of the universe. They just looked like a bunch of zeroes on a column of newsprint. In another 1932 article from Scientific American, Sir James Jeans, former secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society and, at the time, a research associate at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, offered the following illustration to describe the size and population of the universe as Hubble and other astronomers then understood it. Imagine a sphere about a mile in diameter. Then take 300 tons of apples, or about 1,800,000 individual apples, and dump them into the sphere so that each apple is about ten yards apart from each other. “This sphere,” Jeans wrote, “is the range of vision of the 100-inch telescope; each apple is a nebula containing matter enough for the creation of several thousand million stars like our sun; and each atom in each apple is the size of a solar system with a diameter equal to, or slightly larger, than that of the earth’s orbit.”3 As a journalist for the New York Times would write in 1939, these discoveries established a new, outsized, and slightly terrifying cosmic order: “the great spiral nebulae with their billions upon billions of giant and supergiant stars and suns, alongside each of which our solar system is but a speck of dust in infinite space.”4
More sobering news waited. In 1929, a few years after he had confirmed that the universe was substantially larger and inestimably more populated by stars than all but a handful of people had suspected, Hubble showed that those stars did not stay in place but, rather, raced away from the earth (and each other) at tremendous speeds (see Figure 5.1). Our own galaxy, Hubble estimated, moved through space at a velocity of approximately 100 miles per second. That insight buttressed a hypothesis offered in 1927—and more widely publicized in 1931—by the Belgian priest and astronomer George Lemaître, who, working from insights gleaned from Albert Einstein’s recently confirmed theory of general relativity, posited that the universe must constantly expand outward. That is, “space itself,” as Henry Norris Russell wrote in 1932, “is expanding and carrying the nebula with it.”5
Figure 5.1. Albert Einstein (left) and Edwin Hubble (back row, between Einstein and Walter Sydney Adams, the man in the hat) at the Mount Wilson Observatory circa 1931.
Source: PictureLux/Hollywood Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
To illustrate that counterintuitive idea, the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington famously likened the universe to a rubber balloon. “Imagine the galaxies to be embedded in the rubber,” he told a Cambridge, Massachusetts audience in 1932. “Now let the balloon be steadily inflated; that’s the expanding universe.” “As the balloon dilates,” he added, “the rubber stretches, and the galaxies embedded in it recede from one another.”6 In other words, although in 1929 Hubble had hesitated to assert it, by 1931 it seemed certain that the universe, already bigger than anyone thought, was getting bigger, much bigger, by the second.
Astronomers had yet more in store. The expanding universe suggested still another incredible possibility. If the universe steadily inflated like a balloon, it followed that in the past it must have begun from something much smaller, which is precisely what Lemaître proposed in a letter sent to the journal Nature in 1931. “At the origin,” Lemaître wrote, “all the mass of the universe would exist in the form of a unique atom; the radius of the universe, although not strictly zero, being relatively very small. The whole universe would be produced by the disintegration of this primeval atom.”7 Or, as the Times reported in its coverage of Lemaître’s letter, “Le Maitre [sic] Suggests One, Single, Great Atom, Embracing All Energy, Started the Universe.”8 If Lemaître was right, then the universe did not start with a whimper but with a big bang.
In The World as Will and Representation, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that human beings experience the sublime when in “sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, and threatening him with annihilation.”9 In addition, Schopenhauer offered “magnitude in space and time” as the quintessential, highest form of the sublime. He wrote:
If we lose ourselves in contemplation of the infinite greatness of the universe in space and time, meditate on the past millennia and those to come; or if the heavens at night actually bring innumerable worlds before our eyes, and so impress on our consciousness the immensity of the universe, we feel ourselves reduced to nothing; we feel ourselves as individuals, as living bodies, as transient phenomena of will, like drops in the ocean, dwindling and dissolving into nothing.10
If the universe inspired feelings of annihilation, nothingness, and, thus, the sublime in 1818, when Schopenhauer wrote, how much more must it have done so by the middle years of the 1930s? Within a decade, the universe had grown infinitely bigger; had become infinitely more populated by stars; had been shown to grow bigger, literally, by the second; and had developed an origin story to rival all other origin stories. Ten billion or so years ago, the universe and everything in it—stars, planets, people—emerged from a single, unstable, indescribably powerful atom. That story implied another one, even more horrible to contemplate. If the universe had a beginning, it could have an ending, too. Perhaps, also like an expanding balloon, it would eventually pop.
At the time, observers seemed to recognize these startling changes to the universe, this encounter with a sublime made still more sublime. In 1934, the influential American magazine the Literary Digest reported that Lemaître had received a prize for his contributions to science. In describing his vision of the universe, the editors took a page straight out of Schopenhauer. “Abbe. Lemaître’s theory of the universe,” the Literary Digest reported, “is breath-taking in its magnitude and grandeur, and terrifying in its implications.”11
Of course, as Schopenhauer and other theorists observed, the sublime involved more than just feelings of annihilation and nothingness. Indeed, if the feelings stopped at annihilation and nothingness, they arguably did not count as the sublime. Rather, for Schopenhauer at least, the sublime involved reconciling with the alien powers of the world. Eventually, Schopenhauer observed, we recognize that “we are one with the world, and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity.”12 Nevertheless, that sense of oneness did not come easily, especially in the face of the infinite—the annihilating—greatness of the universe, and especially as the greatness of that universe grew even greater in the 1930s. Simply put, if our solar system “was but a speck of dust in infinite space,” as the New York Times asserted, what did that make us?
In this chapter, I explore what, in addition to a radically new vision of the universe, struck people as sublime during the Great Depression. In doing so, I tend to speak of the sublime interchangeably with its allied emotions: terror, wonder, and, especially, awe. Understandably, awe is not an emotion one associates with the Great Depression. Individuals may have been brought low by the vastness of a malfunctioning economy, but they did not tend to characterize the economy as sublime or their experience as awesome. Yet as the example of the bigger, faster, expanding universe suggests, the Depression nevertheless had its examples of the sublime. To be sure, as the Romantic poets knew, most of those examples—the ocean, a mountain, the universe—came from nature, and they remained sublime regardless of what happened to the economy during the 1930s.13 Yet the Depression also had instances of the sublime that did not come from nature, and in retrospect it is those instances, I believe, that reveal the most about both the sublime and the decade itself. To put it another way, in this chapter I look at new sources of awe in the 1930s, ones that individuals did not have—or, as in the case of the expanding universe, did not quite have—before.
I start by offering a brief—very brief—discussion of the sublime and its related emotions, and then turn to examples from the period. I work downwards, from the universe to skyscrapers to presidents to Olympic athletes to steel workers to migrant workers to sharecroppers, and what these examples suggest is that the Great Depression established a distinctive source for the sublime. Whereas most accounts of the sublime involve the vastness of nature—or, as I show, skyscrapers—overwhelming human beings, during the Depression, the sublime also worked from the bottom up. That is, during the 1930s human beings themselves became a source, perhaps the source, of the sublime. Throughout the decade, individuals continued to stand in awe of the universe and skyscrapers, but they eventually learned to stand in awe of each other as well.
Before we leave it behind, consider, as but one example of this human sublime, the bigger, faster, expanding universe. It may have inspired feelings of terror and awe in human beings during the 1930s, but so too did knowing that human beings, using nothing more than telescopes, photographs, and mathematics, and sometimes just mathematics, could figure out for themselves the birth and subsequent life of the all but infinite universe. In other words, the new cosmic order could overwhelm human beings, but human beings could take comfort in the fact that they had discovered just how overwhelming the new cosmic order truly was. If the universe were sublime, so were the people it purportedly diminished.
My examples of the human sources for the sublime tend to be deliberately more prosaic than trailblazing astronomers, but the point remains the same. During the Great Depression, human beings joined the ranks of things that could inspire awe, which is very much in keeping with a decade defined by and perhaps unmatched in its populism. Unlike with other emotions in the Great Depression, however, where you can watch feelings turning into actions before your eyes—can watch as emotions change people and then the nation—awe rarely produces such momentous changes, which is perhaps slightly ironic since it emerges, by definition, out of the momentous. If the Depression sublime I observe in this chapter accomplished anything, it may have added, as I have suggested by associating it with populism, to the feeling of the ineluctable dignity and worth of human beings that arose during the decade, the sense that virtue lies in forgotten men—and, for many of the writers in this chapter, forgotten women—and that they deserved neither their oblivion nor their neglect.
The Last and Most Magnificent of Towers
Each year, nearly 4 million people visit the Empire State Building. Most of them do not come for the offices of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation on the twelfth and thirteenth floors or the Walgreens on the first. They come for the view, and it has always been thus. When the building opened in 1931, its owners made more money from the observation decks on the 86th and 102nd floor than they did from rents on the office space below.14 At a certain point, of course, the Empire State Building, like all great destinations, acquired its own tourist momentum. People visited it less because of anything inherent to it and more because—like the most photographed barn in America in Don DeLillo’s White Noise—others had come before them. Be that as it may, they also came for the view or, more accurately, I think, for the sublime, and not just to witness it but to become, however briefly, part of it themselves.
When it comes to the sublime, most philosophers, as I have suggested, have offered examples from nature, though many have acknowledged the potential sublimity of architecture, too. In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1790), Edmund Burke argues that buildings can be—and certain buildings should be—sublime, and in Seven Lamps of Architecture, which the builders of the Empire State Building evidently knew, John Ruskin devotes an entire chapter to the sublime. What makes buildings sublime, Burke and Ruskin agree, is size. “To the sublime in building,” Burke writes, “greatness of dimension seems requisite.”15 For his part, Ruskin observed that if an architect aims to design a building that is “markedly sublime,” he “should not be withheld by respect to smaller parts from reaching largeness of scale; provided only, that it be evidently in the architect’s power to reach at least that degree of magnitude which is the lowest at which sublimity begins, rudely definable as that which will make a living figure look less than life beside it.”16
Buildings in general, and skyscrapers in particular, thus offer one of the defining characteristics of the sublime, which is magnitude, particularly, as the Ruskin quotation reminds us, magnitude compared to human figures. That definition keeps with the one offered by Schopenhauer, previously discussed, who observed that the sublime “is caused by the sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual.” In short, the sublime, including but not limited to the sublime in architecture, is that which overwhelms us. As the psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt argue in a more recent account of the emotion of awe, the sublime requires vastness. “Vastness,” they write, echoing Burke and Ruskin, “refers to anything that is experienced as being much larger than the self, or the self’s ordinary level of experience or frame of reference.”17
If buildings could achieve the sublime through vastness, then New Yorkers in the 1920s could experience the sublime nearly every day. By some counts, forty skyscrapers appeared on the skyline during the decade. Few buildings, however, could approach the vastness and, thus, the sublimity of the Empire State Building (see Figure 5.2). Conceived in 1929 at the height of the economic boom and completed in 1931 as the United States economy peered into the abyss, the Empire State Building offered a matchless example of the sublime. To be sure, other structures during the 1930s offered vastness and, thus, the sublime. Journalists, for example, using the same device of printing zeroes across a headline that they previously used to render the size of the universe, liked to enumerate the millions of cubic yards of concrete used in Boulder Dam, which was begun in 1931 and completed in 1935. But no structure seemed quite as vast as the Empire State Building, the only building that could properly convey the size of King Kong in the 1933 movie of the same name. Or consider this image of its vastness and, thus, sublimity. As Paul Starrett, one of the three men in charge of construction of the building, wrote in his 1938 autobiography, Changing the Skyline, the Empire State Building is six inches shorter than its architects planned; its massive weight squashes the steel girders holding it up.18
Figure 5.2. Lewis W. Hine, Empire State Building, New York, 1931.
Source: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of Mickey Pallas, 95.82.20
Unsurprisingly, then, given its vastness, when the building opened in 1931, an article in the New York Times reported, thousands of visitors swarmed to its observation platform, and crowds gathered on the north side of 34th street to gaze upward at the completed building. That same article noted that astronomers in nearby Bryant Park “abandoned the sun, the moon and the stars to train their bronzed telescopes upon the observatory.”19 That is, they shifted their gaze from one manifestation of the sublime (the universe) to another (the Empire State Building).
In addition to vastness, though, the sublime—or so Keltner and Haidt convincingly argue—is accompanied by another response, what they call the need for accommodation. “We propose,” they write, “that prototypical awe involves a challenge to or negation of mental structures when they fail to make sense of an experience of something vast.”20 In other words, you cannot impassively observe the sublime. It must alter your perception of the world, for better or for worse. “The success of one’s attempts at accommodation,” Keltner and Haidt observe, “may partially explain why awe can be both terrifying (when one fails to understand) and enlightening (when one succeeds).”21 For example, the passage from Schopenhauer quoted above does not stop with the realization of our nothingness next to the vastness of the universe—though that, of course, constitutes one sort of accommodation, albeit a failed one, to this instance of the sublime. Rather, Schopenhauer goes on to observe that in and of itself the universe is not vast. The universe is nothing, or, rather, it is simply the universe, neither vast nor little. Only our mind represents it as vast. As a result, its vastness depends, ironically enough, on us. By realizing our nothingness, then, we become, strange to say, something again. The vast universe would not be vast without us. “All this, however, does not come into reflection at once,” Schopenhauer writes, “but shows itself as a consciousness, merely felt, that in some sense or other (made clear only by philosophy) we are one with the world and are therefore not oppressed but exalted by its immensity.”22
Whether you accept Schopenhauer’s attempt at accommodation to the vastness of the universe depends on how you feel about his philosophical system of will and representation that makes it possible. Yet accommodate one must and, I would argue, ascending to the top of the Empire State Building represents its own form of accommodation to the sublime vastness of the building. Looking up at the Empire State Building, you can feel literally and figuratively overshadowed. Looking down from it, you can assume its vastness; you can share, however small a part, in the shadow it casts. Or, in the vistas it opens up.
The latter is the impression F. Scott Fitzgerald leaves in a wonderful description of his visit to the top of the Empire State Building shortly after it opened in 1931. In his essay, “My Lost City,” from 1932, he writes:
From the ruins, lonely and inexplicable as the sphinx, rose the Empire State Building and, just as it had been a tradition of mine to climb to the Plaza Roof to take leave of the beautiful city, extending as far as eyes could reach, so now I went to the roof of the last and most magnificent of towers. Then I understood—everything was explained: I had discovered the crowning error of the city, its Pandora’s box. Full of vaunting pride the New Yorker had climbed here and seen with dismay what he had never suspected, that the city was not the endless succession of canyons that he had supposed but that it had limits—from the tallest structure he saw for the first time that it faded out into the country on all sides, into an expanse of green and blue that alone was limitless. And with the awful realization that New York was a city after all and not a universe, the whole shining edifice that he had reared in his imagination came crashing to the ground. That was the rash gift of Alfred W. Smith to the citizens of New York.23
The “ruins” that Fitzgerald speaks of in the first sentence is the city but, in particular, the city after the crash of 1929. Throughout the essay, Fitzgerald builds the city up into its own instance of the sublime, describing it, variously, as a thundercloud, a glacier, a king, and, as here, canyons, a universe, even a skyscraper, a “shining edifice.” By contrast, the view from atop the Empire State Building reveals the “crowning error” of that perspective. The city is none of these things. It has limits. It “was a city after all and not a universe,” as Fitzgerald writes. The evil—that which is released from Pandora’s box—is to think that the world starts and stops with New York City. From the street, the Empire State Building, “the tallest structure” in the city, may overwhelm, like the other buildings that make New York City streets into canyons. Instead of submitting to that place in the metropolitan universe, however, Fitzgerald, from the roof of the Empire State Building, can transcend it. Like other visitors to the observation deck of the Empire State Building, he can look down upon and become bigger than the sublime city itself. Fitzgerald accommodates the vastness of the Empire State Building by becoming one with its vastness, by using it to dispel the vastness of another, not quite as sublime object—the city.24
Men at Work
Those who have thought about the sublime—Burke, Kant, Schopenhauer—have disagreed about whether human beings can achieve that status or, perhaps less ambitiously, whether they can inspire awe. On first glance, it would not seem so. Recall that for, say, Schopenhauer and Ruskin, the sublime is that which comes from the “sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual,” or that which “will make a living figure look less than life.” In both definitions, the sublime transcends the individual. That explains why the only indisputably sublime being is God, whose omnipotence is both vast—he creates all of creation—and life changing. It would seem unlikely, by contrast, that a mere human could diminish another to the extent that the latter feels “less than life.”
Yet clearly people feel something akin to awe when in the presence of other people. Indeed, Keltner and Haidt argue—not entirely convincingly—that the origins of awe lie in “the emotional reaction of a subordinate to a powerful leader,” and “these responses to powerful social entities solidify social hierarchies, which are important to human survival.”25 Although awe may or may not emerge from the worship of powerful leaders, few would deny that powerful leaders could inspire admiration and, at times, that that admiration could pass into awe. Americans flocked to see Franklin Roosevelt in person, for example, and beginning in the 1930s, many a home, shop, and bar had a framed portrait of the president hanging on the wall.26 Their awe seemed to emerge from the fact that Roosevelt, unlike previous presidents, took a special interest in the wellbeing of ordinary people. Americans struggled—and thrilled—to accommodate this unprecedented development. “All of the working men are for you,” a correspondent from Oliver Springs, Tennessee wrote the president in 1936. “for you sure have been good to the Poor and help us out, and we sure do aprishate [sic] your kindness.”27 Roosevelt received millions of such letters.28
Keltner and Haidt argue, though, that this awe in the face of powerful leaders extends to non-powerful people as well, including the famous, the exceptionally skilled, and the morally admirable. They hesitate to label that emotion awe, however, since they do not consider these non-powerful people “vast” enough to merit the term. (They opt for the more diminutive label “admiration.”) To a certain extent, that approach makes sense, but it overlooks those non-powerful individuals, real and fictional, who inspired a genuine sense of awe—and thus achieved a state of the sublime—in the 1930s.
Take those with exceptional ability. At the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics, Jesse Owens set the record for the long jump. (It was then called the broad jump.) Try to guess how long he jumped. If it helps, here are some reference points. In basketball, the distance from the free throw line to the basket is 15 feet. In high school basketball, the distance from the three-point line to the basket is 19 feet 9 inches, and in the college game it is 20 feet 9 inches. If it helps you guess, Figure 5.3 shows Jesse Owens midflight at the 1936 Olympics.
Figure 5.3. Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
Source: IOC Olympic Museum/Contributor/Getty Images
On his third try, Owens jumped 26 feet 5 and 5/16 inches. To keep measuring in terms of the basketball court, that is three feet farther than the three-point line in the NBA. With his jump, Owens broke the existing Olympic record by more than a foot.29 Owens’s long jump, I would argue, has the quality of vastness, and just as other instances of the sublime or awe do, it leaves us with the need to accommodate ourselves to it, to make sense of it. A human being really jumped that far.
So perhaps, with due respect to Keltner and Haidt, powerful and non-powerful people alike can inspire awe and qualify as sublime. Yet presidents and Olympic athletes seem by definition extraordinary. In the 1930s, however, artists and writers set out to make relatively ordinary people seem sublime as well.
Here too the Empire State Building offers an example. As construction of the skyscraper proceeded, observers on the ground could not help but notice the workers—especially the derrick men who maneuvered the steel girders of the building into place—moving about in the sky. “Like little spiders they toiled,” the Literary Digest wrote in 1931, “spinning a fabric of steel against the sky. Crawling, climbing, swinging, swooping—weaving a web that was to stretch farther heavenward than the ancient Tower of Babylon.”30 A journalist with the Times offered this description of the derrick men: “A man rides into the air on top of a steel beam that he maneuvers into place as a crosspiece by hanging to the cable rope with his hands and steering the beam with his feet. There is a good deal of strolling on the thin edge of nothingness.”31 This tremendous show, however, would not last for long. (The Empire State Building went up in a little over a year.) Nor would many people outside of New York see it. Except, that is, for the efforts of one photographer, Lewis Hine.
In 1930, the publicists of the Empire State Building offered Hine, then best known for his photographs documenting child labor in the 1910s, a commission to record the construction of the building. He accepted, but the photographs he produced may not have been what the publicists had in mind. For example, nowhere in his 1932 collection, Men at Work, which included his Empire State Building photographs, does Hine show the entire Empire State Building. In fact, one such photograph, taken peering up at the Empire State from what must be the 34th Street-Herald Square subway entrance stairwell, and which shows the building in all its sublime, skyscraping glory, must have been deliberately excluded from the book. These exclusions seem less curious, though, in light of what Hine evidently did set out to capture: not the sublimity of the building but the sublimity of the workers who built it. He doted on the “sky boys” who made the building, capturing for posterity their stroll on the thin edge of nothingness, and in the process surrounded them with an unlikely patina of the sublime.
One of the last photographs Hine did include in the Empire State section of Men at Work illustrates his approach. It shows what its caption calls an “old bolter” perched vertiginously on the edge of a steel girder that ends in nothingness, with midtown Manhattan and the spire of the Chrysler Building in the background (see Figure 5.4). You can read the photograph in one of two ways. On the one hand, the man looks small against the background of the city and dangerously exposed to the nothingness below. On the other hand, and because of the perspective and framing of the photograph, he looks roughly the same size as the Chrysler Building over his left shoulder. If he stood up—God forbid—he would be taller than that building. In some ways, that is, Hine has made the old bolter seem the equal of the skyscraper in the background and, by implication, the unfinished skyscraper upon which he sits. Whether we fully register it or not, we conclude that he has a similar status relative to the building he straddles, and which, from almost any other angle, would dwarf him.
Figure 5.4. An Old Bolter.
Source: National Archives (518290)
The photograph and others like it suggest that Hine sought to transfer the sublimity of the Empire State Building to the workers who built it. On the acknowledgments page of his thin book of photographs, Hine reprints a passage from William James’s essay “What Makes a Life Significant.” (He mistakenly credits the quotation to James’s 1910 essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.”) In that essay, as in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James proposes various substitutes for what he considers the destructive but nevertheless healthful virtues of battle. Among these substitutes, James writes, is work. “Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for,” James writes, “but on every bridge and building that is going up today, on freight trains, on vessels and lumber-rafts, in mines, among firemen and policemen, the demand for courage is incessant and the supply never fails.” For James, what unites soldiers and workers is “courage,” one of the classic Aristotelian virtues and, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it comes to discussions of virtue and the sublime, one of the most common sources of the sublime.
As with great skill and ability, Keltner and Haidt doubt that great virtue—in this case courage—can inspire awe per se. (Here they prefer the term “elevation.”) Others, however, have found something ineluctably sublime about heroism and displays of virtue, specifically courage. In Critique of the Power of Judgment, for example, Immanuel Kant often uses words like “strength,” “courage,” “and “resistance” to characterize our response to the sublime, which makes sense since for Kant the sublime requires overcoming the initial fear of whatever object inspires the feeling of terror that accompanies the sublime. Nature, Kant writes, “is judged sublime not insofar as it arouses fear, but rather because it calls forth our power (which is not part of nature) to regard those things about which we are concerned (goods, health and life) as trivial.”32 In other words, nature is not sublime. We are. And we are sublime because we can put at naught those things (goods, health, life) that the terrifying object in nature initially threatens. “What is it that is the object of the highest admiration even to the savage?” Kant asks. “Someone who is not frightened, who has no fear, thus does not shrink before danger but energetically sets to work with full deliberation.”33
For Kant, nowhere is the contempt for the petty things about which we are concerned as obvious as in war. War, Kant writes, “has something sublime about it, and at the same time makes the mentality of the people who conduct it in this way [with order and reverence for the rights of civilians] all the more sublime, the more dangers it has been exposed to and before which it has been able to assert its courage.”34 By contrast, Kant writes, in withering scorn for bourgeois life, “a long peace causes the spirit of mere commerce to predominate, along with base selfishness, cowardice, and weakness, and usually debases the mentality of a populace.”35 For Kant, soldiers achieve a state of the sublime because, as the critic Robert Doran puts it, they display “courage in the face of danger” and, most of all, transcend an “attachment to life,” which can make our own desperate attachment to life seem petty.36
Hine, who photographed relief efforts in Europe after the First World War, shared with William James a pacifist streak. Unlike Kant, he could not glorify war or soldiers; like James, however, he could glorify workers who resembled soldiers in their courage and the sublime casualness with which they treated their own attachment to life. Indeed, Hine repeatedly shows the risk these men took in their work, and the lightheartedness with which they took it. In the caption to the picture of the old bolter, Hine writes: “Young and old, they all say it is not as dangerous as it looks.” That may be so. After all, though five workers died during construction of the Empire State Building, only one did so from falling. Nevertheless, these workers risked their lives every day in order to make something sublime. In Hine’s mind, that qualifies them for the sublime. Call it, if you like, a labor theory of the sublime. For Hine, workers atop the Empire State Building epitomize the courage required of workers everywhere, and, thus, like President Roosevelt and Jesse Owens, they inspire awe and achieve their own form of the sublime.
Of Migrants and Grandmothers
One might argue that workers on the Empire State Building have more in common with presidents and Olympic athletes than they do with ordinary people. After all, like presidents and Jesse Owens, these workers have something vast (the skyscraper) associated with them. In addition, they have more of an opportunity to practice strength, courage, and resistance—and, thus, to achieve the sublime—than most people do in the course of their workday lives. (Consider me, writing this.) Not for nothing, then, does Hine start with workers on the Empire State Building before proceeding to less obviously sublime workers in the remainder of his book of photographs. By themselves, the machinists pictured at the back of Men at Work would not seem to achieve the sublime. Although the gears of their machines occasionally tower over them, and they show strength, courage, and resistance by not cowering in front of them, their feet nevertheless never leave the ground. Just as the workers atop the Empire State Building borrow their sublimity from the sublimity of the Empire State Building, machinists borrow their sublimity from the sublime workers atop the Empire State Building.
Still, one of the curious features of the Depression sublime is how far—or, to speak hierarchically, how low—some writers sought to extend it, which is all the way down to what, in the 1930s, passed for the lowest of low, the most ordinary of ordinary: migrant workers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers. Indeed, a similar preoccupation with courage in the face of danger—except this time on the part of the most lowly and exploited—may explain the popularity of one of the most famous works of Depression-era fiction, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. In the first half of the novel, the Joads are anything but sublime. Evicted from their land in Oklahoma, taken advantage of by salesmen, and pushed around by the police, the Joads suffer from the invisible hand of a capitalism that, with its cryptic mortgages and nefarious banks, its vastness and capacity to reduce individuals to nothing, itself begins to seem sublime. In the second half of the novel, however, the Joads, though still pushed around, begin to act more like heroes than victims, and in doing so achieve a sort of sublimity themselves.
For example, before they arrive in California proper, the family has to cross a burning desert. On their way to California, Granma Joad sickens. Camped with other migrants near a river on the outskirts of a town, the Joads hope to rest and let her recover before making the crossing. But with their money running low, and driven out of camp by deputies from the town, the family has little choice but to cross the desert immediately. They load Granma onto the back of the truck, where Ma spends the night with her. In the night, Granma dies, and Ma, who knows that the family cannot stop in the middle of the desert, comforts her during her death and spends the rest of the night lying with her rigid corpse. When the family arrives in a town on the other side of the desert, and Ma announces that Granma is not sick but dead, no one can quite believe what she has done for them. “The family looked at Ma with a little terror at her strength,” Steinbeck writes, and Tom Joad, her son, exclaims, “Jesus Christ! You layin’ there with her all night long!” (see Figure 5.5). Similarly, Jim Casy, the populist preacher who tags along with the family, says “in wonder” to another member of the family: “‘There’s a woman,’ ” he continues, “‘so great with love—she scares me. Makes me afraid an’ mean.’ ”37 (That Casy, whose initials—and fate—evoke Christ, should nevertheless stand in awe before Ma is telling.)
Figure 5.5. Rose of Sharon, Ma, and Tom Joad from John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).
Source: Sunset Boulevard/Getty Images
Later in the novel, Tom Joad makes a similar sacrifice of himself, though not to his family but to his fellow workers. Tom and the rest of the Joads get separated from Casy when the latter takes the blame for an attack on a deputy in a migrant camp and is hauled away to jail. Tom and he are reunited outside the peach fields where the Joads have found work and, unknowingly, scabbed on a strike of fellow migrant workers led by Casy. Tom and Casy are not reunited for long, however, before hired vigilantes set upon their camp and one of them kills Casy. Tom, enraged, kills the man and spends the rest of the novel hiding out. When he must leave the family, Tom tells Ma of his plan to do “what Casy done,” to do something about “our people livin’ like pigs, an’ the good rich lan’ layin’ fallow, or maybe one fellow with a million acres, while a hunderd thousan’ good farmers is starving.” When Ma warns him that they will “cut you down,” and worries that she will never know what happens to him, Tom makes the most famous speech of the novel, the one that Henry Fonda delivers so earnestly and unforgettably in the 1940 film:
Tom laughed uneasily, “Well, maybe like Casy says, a fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but on’y a piece of a big one—an’ then——”
“Then what, Tom?”
“Then it don’ matter. Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look. Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.”38
Like workers strolling on top of the Empire State Building, Tom transcends his attachment to life and achieves a similar form of sublimity. Unlike those workers, he does not just risk his life but knowingly surrenders it. He achieves an added sublimity, too, in that he joins the virtue of courage to another, arguably even more sublime virtue, care. Tom imagines dying for a cause and, like Walt Whitman at the end of “Song of Myself,” being reborn into the collective, into the shared soul of an oppressed people fighting for justice and, ultimately, enjoying the fruits of that justice.
That commitment to others is embodied in the final scene of the novel, when the Joads—or what remains of them after their incredible travails—stumble during a thunderstorm upon a barn in which a man lies ill, too sick to eat solid food but also dying of starvation. The eldest daughter of the Joad family, Rose of Sharon, has just given birth to a stillborn baby. Overcoming a powerful combination of embarrassment and taboo, she nurses the starving, dying man at her breast. The last lines of the novel read:
For a moment Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously.39
Throughout the novel, Steinbeck cannot decide on the emotional keynote of his book. From the title to the inter-chapters, he flirts with rage as the proper emotional response on the part of migrants to their oppression and, indirectly, on the part of those who read of their exploitation. Yet throughout—in Ma, in Tom, and at the end with Rose of Sharon—Steinbeck seems to opt for an emotion that he struggles to label but that is nonetheless powerful. Call it sympathy, care, or, in the language of the 1930s, solidarity. Whatever one calls it, Steinbeck, as in this last scene, extends its domain beyond the realm of the family to the realm of class. In their discussion of awe, Keltner and Haidt suggest that “the breadth and scope of a grand theory” like psychoanalysis, feminism, or evolutionary theory can elicit awe, and that certainly seems to be the case here.40 Like her brother and her mother, Rose of Sharon displays courage in the face of, if not quite danger, then at least hardship. Even more important, in her majestic act of solidarity, and in the mysterious smile that accompanies it, she offers readers a glimpse of a transcendent ethic of care that seems equally if not more sublime than the courageous, sacrificial acts of Tom and Ma.
In showing ordinary people devoted to each other, literally nursing each other, Steinbeck turns the lowliest—the people—into the highest, into a repository of virtue and an instance of the sublime. As Ma puts it in the final lines of the film, a passage cobbled together from lines spoken midway through the novel: “Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good an’ they die out. But we keep a’comin’. We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out; they can’t lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, ’cause we’re the people.”41
To illustrate how much purchase this notion of “the people” had on the decade, consider a superficially very different work from The Grapes of Wrath, Margaret Walker’s poem “Lineage.” The poem, like Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” celebrates the strength and the wisdom of past generations of Africans and African Americans. Unlike the mostly ungendered “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” though, “Lineage” reconstructs a specifically female genealogy. Yet, and thus also unlike Hughes’s persona poem, where simply belonging to the Negro race makes one’s soul grow “deep as rivers,” Walker’s speaker finally doubts how much she shares in the lineage the poem celebrates.
My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?42
By “grandmothers,” the speaker refers to the parents of her parents but also, more generally, to all grandmothers, to an entire generation of women. And you can imagine a very different poem about these figures than the one Walker writes. Walker could have, for example, described the conditions that forced African-American women, whether during slavery or afterwards, to plant and harvest crops that did not belong to them. (Think of some of the sharecropper poems that Sterling Brown was writing at this time, or the songs and poems that John Handcox was writing and publishing in the Sharecropper’s Voice, the newspaper of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union.)43 “Lineage,” though, does not take that route. It ignores the economic and political conditions that frame the work the women do to focus tightly on the work itself, on the strength such work reveals about those who did it. It does not condemn but celebrate. Or, if it does condemn, it condemns the current generation over against past ones, a dynamic that emerges in the shifting verb tenses of the poem. In the first stanza, the speaker describes what her grandmothers did—past tense—to display their strength. In the second stanza, the tense changes. Now the grandmothers, presumably the same ones who were strong in the first stanza, are strong in the second, and not because of what they did but because of what they remember doing and the “clean words” they have to say as a result. (The clean words emerging from their dirty labor.) Action in the past—bringing food out of the earth—leads to wisdom in the present. The penultimate line, however, which returns to the past tense (“were strong”), sounds elegiac, as though the speaker realizes that these grandmothers, who were strong and are full of memories, will not live forever, and when they go they will take their strength and memories with them. That makes the shift to the present tense in the last line all the more powerful. The speaker asks why she is “not as they,” that is neither strong nor full of memories.
At first glance, the poem may seem like an exercise in nostalgia or like the romancing of the laboring folk on the part of the urban intellectual. The rural grandmothers were strong; the poetic granddaughters are not. Yet the poem hints that its speaker may resemble the grandmothers in more ways than it lets on. The second stanza, unlike the first, begins to rhyme. Specifically, “they” of the last line joins with the “wet clay” and “say” of previous lines, which offers an audible connection to the husbandry of the first stanza and the wisdom of the second. The speaker may not feel like the grandmothers, but she does begin to connect to them through sound. Moreover, though we learn nothing of her laboring past except, perhaps, that she does not touch earth and make grain grow, the speaker, like the grandmothers, is in her own way full of memories—of the grandmothers. And like them, she has clean words to say as a result—the poem itself.
Regardless of how connected or disconnected the speaker feels from the grandmothers, though, the poem, like countless such works in the Great Depression, looks upon the people—the folk—with awe. As these very different texts suggest, in its vastness and capacity to inspire awe, “the people” would prove a quintessential form of the Depression sublime. Still, one might argue that the Joads, for example, achieve sublimity because of their heroic commitment to others—a heroism not available to most, and that this heroism makes them, strange to say, more akin to presidents and Olympic athletes than ordinary people. As Ma’s paean to the people suggest, though, Steinbeck and others sought to make ordinary people the object of awe not just because of their actions but because of their very being. Not just, that is, because of what they did but because of who they are. (The same might be said of Walker’s grandmothers.) Nowhere can you see this effort to celebrate not what the people do but what they are more clearly than in James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which turned an equally lowly people—sharecroppers—into figures of the sublime, into, for all practical purposes, gods. Before Agee and Evans could make readers stand in awe of their godlike tenant farmers, however, they had to do away with another, by far more conventional emotional response to sharecroppers, one that actually stood in the way of awe, namely, sympathy.
Famous Men (and Women)
When Agee and Evans took up the assignment of writing about tenant farmers, they did not enter an open field. On November 16, 1936, just two weeks after winning re-election, and perhaps feeling pressure from an ongoing strike among tenant farmers in the South, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt convened a committee on what he called “farm tenancy.” It was not just, as Roosevelt noted in his letter of instruction to then secretary of agriculture, Henry A. Wallace, that “the rapid increase of tenant farmers over the last half century” had violated, as Roosevelt put it, “the American ideal of owner-operated farms.” It was also that the increase in tenant farmers brought with it “soil depletion and declining living standards,” which, Roosevelt warned, somewhat vaguely, “presents a challenge to national action.”44 Despite this initial vagueness, the document that the committee produced—Farm Tenancy¬¬—is one of the more useful summaries of what its authors (and Roosevelt) called “farm insecurity,” which those not in thrall to New Deal jargon would simply call rural poverty.
By farm tenancy, Roosevelt and others meant the tenants and sharecroppers who farmed a piece of land but did not own it. Instead, they contracted with a landlord who did. Although the distinctions could blur and change from place to place, tenants differed from sharecroppers. The former usually paid rent on the land in advance and had most if not all of the tools and livestock needed to raise a crop. At the end of the season, tenants kept what they could get for the crops they had raised. Like tenants, sharecroppers farmed land they did not own, but as a rule they had neither the cash to pay rent nor the tools or livestock to raise a crop. Instead, at the beginning of the season, the owner of the land or a nearby merchant would loan them—at exorbitant interest rates—everything they needed to raise a crop, not just tools, livestock, seed, and fertilizer but food to live on as well. At the end of the season, by way of rent, sharecroppers would turn over a portion of the crops they had raised to the landowner, usually half. In addition, they would surrender still more of the crop they had raised to the owner or merchant to repay the initial loan (plus interest) of everything (tools, livestock, seed, fertilizer, food) they had used to raise the crop. Although few envied the lot of tenants, next to sharecroppers tenants at least had a chance. If they had a good harvest, they could turn a profit. Sharecroppers, by contrast, no matter how good the harvest, did well to end the season simply out of debt to their landlord or furnishing merchant.
Whether tenants or sharecroppers, the number of farmers who did not own their land was on the rise. In the late nineteenth century, the authors of the government report calculated, one out of every four farmers was a tenant. By 1935, two out of every five were. In total, nearly 3 million farmers did not own the land they farmed, with 40,000 more added to their number every year.45
The problem was not just that tenancy had increased and continued to increase but the appalling poverty and problems—disease, illiteracy—that accompanied it. In a section entitled “The Erosion of Our Society,” the authors of Farm Tenancy got as close to outright anger as they would in the otherwise rhetorically muted document. “The extreme poverty of one-fifth to one-fourth of the farm population,” the authors wrote, “reflects itself in a standard of living below any level of decency.” They continued:
Large families of tenants or croppers, or hired farm laborers, are living in houses of two or three rooms. The buildings are frequently of poor construction, out of alinement [sic], weather-beaten, and unsightly. The doors and windows are rarely screened. Often the roofs are leaky. The surroundings of such houses are bleak and unattractive. Many have no outside toilet, or, if one is available, it is highly unsanitary.
Many of these families are chronically undernourished. They are readily subject to diseases. Pellagra, malaria, and the hookworm and other parasites exact heavy tolls in life and energy. Suitable provision for maintaining health and treating disease among these families is lacking or inadequate in many localities.
Clothing is often scarcely sufficient to afford protection to the body, much less to help maintain self-respect.46
Just to be clear, when the authors of the report note that many families have no outside toilet, they do not mean that families do not have indoor plumbing, but that they do not have an outhouse. They use the bushes.
Unlike the problem of unemployment, which would decrease as economic prosperity returned, farm tenancy and its accompanying poverty, while made worse by the Depression, had also predated it and, in all likelihood, would outlast it. In other words, when it came to farm insecurity, especially in the South, something must be done, something beyond the ordinary New Deal measures to restore the national economy to prosperity and something beyond earlier New Deal efforts, like the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, to raise crop prices by limiting supply, which harmed as much as it helped farmers who did not own land. (Paid by the government to not raise crops, landowners no longer needed those who actually raised crops.)47
In order to lend urgency to the cause of farm tenancy, the authors turned to a rhetorical strategy—documentary photography—that in the coming years would assume more and more of a place in efforts to influence American attitudes toward poverty. That is, the authors of Farm Tenancy sought to put a face to the problem of rural poverty. After the section reprinting official documents, they included eight black-and-white photographs depicting the areas and people discussed in the report. One photograph, titled “The Home and Family of a Cropper in the Cotton Belt,” showed three shoeless children, one smiling winsomely, standing in front of two grown women. One of the women has her eyes closed, and the other stares forcefully into the camera. All stand before a rotting cabin, though this one has screens on the window.
In all likelihood, this and the other photographs came from the files of the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency that had already begun, in limited form, to institute the reforms recommended by Farm Tenancy. In the Resettlement Administration, soon renamed the Farm Security Administration, the head of the Information Division, Roy Stryker, employed a handful of photographers—initially, Dorothea Lange, Walter Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn—to produce, in Stryker’s words, “a pictorial documentation of our rural areas and rural problems.”48 Such photographs, distributed to newspapers and magazines, would win public and congressional support for New Deal programs in general and the sort of reforms proposed by the authors of Farm Tenancy in particular.49
The photographs taken by those employed by the Farm Security Administration embody the emotional contract that sought to shape American attitudes toward poverty during the Great Depression. Through words and, increasingly, through photographs, Americans could witness an injustice—rural poverty—that would otherwise have remained hidden from them. Informed of such injustices, they would sympathize with those subject to them and support the efforts of those institutions—in the case of rural poverty, the federal government or the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union—that sought to do something about them. In short, exposure—somewhat literally in the case of photographs—would equal sympathy, and this would equal reform. It is such a familiar rhetorical strategy—and emotional contract—that we risk taking it for granted.
Agee and Evans, however, sought to accomplish something far different. Instead of cultivating sympathy for sharecroppers, they sought to inspire awe for them, to create out of a most unlikely source an overwhelming, transformative instance of the sublime.
In the middle years of the 1930s, Fortune magazine had a mostly frivolous “Life and Circumstances” series devoted to documenting the lives of ordinary Americans. (One entry in the series offered a condescending portrait of a house painter.) In the summer of 1936, Agee, then a staff writer for Fortune, accepted an assignment to produce an entry in the series on cotton tenant farmers. He and Evans, on loan from the Resettlement Administration, traveled to rural Alabama, found a suitably representative family—and two nearby ones—and spent four weeks living with them. Afterwards, Agee wrote an unwieldy article—the recently rediscovered “Cotton Tenants: Three Families”—which the editors of Fortune asked him to revise and, when he refused, eventually returned to him to do with as he pleased. In the year that followed, Agee turned a long but manageable article distinguished by its touches of poetic language and moral outrage into a 400-page meditation on the political, philosophical, and cosmological significance of three families of tenant farmers. Drafting off the success of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White’s book of documentary photographs and primer on sharecropping, You Have Seen Their Faces, Agee and Evans eventually found a publisher for their book. Despite positive reviews—including one from Lionel Trilling calling it “the most realistic and most important moral effort of our generation”—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold poorly and quickly went out of print.50
As Trilling recognized, the book was nominally about the lives of three Alabama tenant families. But its moral importance arose from another question: “How may we—‘we’ being the relatively fortunate middle class that reads books and experiences emotions—how may we feel about the—and the word itself proclaims the difficulty—underprivileged?”51 In the course of the book, Agee tries out a number of possible answers to that question, rejecting none, really, except the one we might expect. From the start of the book, and renewed throughout, Agee attacks not just those who would sympathize with his cotton tenant families but the concept of sympathy itself. Indeed, the word shows up on his—admittedly lengthy—list of suspect “anglosaxon monosyllables” that appears at the end of the book.52
That is not to say, of course, that Agee does not sympathize with his subjects or, through his sympathy, occasionally lead readers to a similar emotion. Early in the book, for example, Agee movingly describes the plight of Emma, daughter of one of the tenant farmers and sister of another, as she reluctantly prepares to leave her family to join a husband who treats her badly and whom she does not love. (Agee’s speech to her, which begins “nobody has a right to be unhappy, or to live in a way that makes them unhappy,” is one of the most affecting passages in the book.)53 Moreover, in the second and third parts of that section, Agee speaks in the voice of Annie Mae, the wife in the tenant family whom he knows and likes the best, whose refrain—“How was it we were caught?”—suggests the depths of her despair and hopelessness.54 In addition, Agee tenderly describes the literally crippling work the families perform, and the humiliations the children absorb at school because of their poverty, and these too break your heart.
Yet before, during, and after nearly every incident or description in the book that might invite sympathy, Agee warns against it. He sets the keynote in the Preamble, when he offers this ironic précis of the book and its audience:
[T]his is a book about “sharecroppers,” and is written for all those who have a soft place in their hearts for the laughter and tears inherent in poverty viewed at a distance, and especially those who can afford the retail price; in the hope that the reader will be edified, and may feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-out liberal effort to rectify the unpleasant situation down South, and will somewhat better and more guiltily appreciate the next good meal he eats; and in the hope, too, that he will recommend this little book to really sympathetic friends, in order that our publishers may at least cover their investment and that just the merest perhaps) some kindly thought may be turned our way, and a little of your money fall to poor little us.55
The passage suggests a number of reasons why Agee has come to distrust sympathy as much as he does. To start, he fears that sympathy may oversimplify why people feel sorry for others. That is, sympathy may arise as much out of self-interest as it does out of genuine interest in the wellbeing of others. Obviously, this fear accounts for his own, recurring concern that he might in any way profit—whether in terms of money or reputation—from his “parading the nakedness, disadvantage, and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings.”56 But Agee also fears that not just writers but readers might profit from the parade too. By reading of human suffering, they get to feel like the sort of person who sympathizes with others, has soft places in their hearts, or who, as a result of reading of the suffering of others, appreciate what they have all the more. That is not to say one should not feel these things, only that they complicate what many would prefer to think of as a simple, purely altruistic emotion, and Agee has set himself the task of complicating all such simplicities. Another way to think about it is that sympathy makes us think more of the self, or at least poses no challenge to it. By contrast, awe, what Agee ultimately aims for in his representation of sharecroppers, usually makes us think less.
In addition, Agee worries about the political implications of sympathy. A carelessly written book, he fears, may lead people to “feel kindly disposed toward any well-thought-out liberal effort to rectify the unpleasant situation down South.” That may not sound sinister, but what if the situation down south resists or exceeds those liberal efforts? In that case, sympathy, by seeking easy answers, may do more harm than good.57
Finally, in addition to oversimplifying motives and solutions, Agee fears sympathy may oversimplify poverty or, at least, those who live in it. In the first passage quoted above, Agee puts sharecroppers in quotation marks, not just because by the time he writes the Preamble they have become a familiar cause, but because thanks to You Have Seen Their Faces and other works, the mere mention of sharecroppers sets off a whole preexisting, prepackaged version of the poor best captured in the phrase “the laughter and tears inherent in poverty.” As Agee shows, his families do occasionally laugh and cry, but from his view nothing inheres about poverty, no essence precedes its individual existences. Only poverty “viewed at a distance,” which viewing it through the lens of sympathy may encourage, allows one to believe that there is anything permanent, essential, or even characteristic about it.
Elsewhere, Agee refers to sympathy as one of the “various possible reflexes” that readers may have for and while reading the book, and once sympathy becomes a reflex, it ceases to respond adequately to its object, other human beings.58
That skepticism about reform and the sympathy that gives rise to it explains a number of other elements in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Agee’s self-confessed but deeply qualified communism, which would, unlike well-thought-out liberal efforts, begin to confront what he calls “the whole world-system” responsible for the indignities of tenant farming; his repeated attacks on reformers; his obsession with education as at least the beginnings of an honest and self-directed inquiry into the sources of poverty; and his vague but moving invocation of the revolution or, anyway, the deliverance from human suffering that he promises near the end of the book, which would also deliver humanity from the curse of sympathy.
In addition, his skepticism about sympathy and reform explains his very different approach to documenting the lives of tenant farmers. In contrast to those who would merely sympathize with the poor, Agee devotes the better part of his book to expanding on those who suffer from poverty, not in observing what they do not have but dilating on what they do. Agee emphasizes over and over again not what makes the members of his tenant families representative but what makes them specific. Early in the book, he speaks of their “irreparable, unrepeatable existences,” meaning both that they will not get to repeat their lives but also that no other human being will repeat them.59 They are unique. Not “one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated,” Agee writes later in the book, “nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent.”60 “Each of you,” he addresses the members of the tenant families directly, “is a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again and which is not quite like any other.”61 Moreover, to withhold those “specifications,” to treat them as exclusively the manifestations of their poverty, Agee believes, “I could but betray you still worse.”62
Indeed, much of the book is given over to Agee struggling to convey the plain but specific existence of his tenant farmers. “George Gudger is a human being,” Agee writes, discussing the difference between invention and documentary, “a man, not like any other human being so much as he is like himself.” Agee could, he writes, “invent incidents, appearances, additions to his character, background, surroundings, future” that would fill out and possibly even reveal the truth about George Gudger. “But somehow a much more important, and dignified, and true fact about him,” Agee concludes, “than I could conceivably invent, though I were an illimitably better artist than I am, is that fact that he is exactly, down to the last inch and instant, who, what, when, where, and why he is. He is in those terms living, right now, in flesh and blood and breathing, in an actual part of the world in which also, quite as irrelevant to imagination, you and I are living.”63 This emphasis on human specificity, on bare human existence, leads to the emotion Agee offers readers in place of the now discredited sympathy. To rephrase Trilling, how should we feel about the underprivileged? Not love, exactly, as William Stott, in his influential study of documentary expression in the 1930s describes it, though Agee does insist how much he loves the tenant families, and how much he desires their love in turn. Rather, as Hine wants us to feel toward old bolters, and Steinbeck wants us to feel toward the Joads, Agee wants us to feel awe toward his sharecroppers. Awe that all the forces of the universe have gathered to make this world, and awe that they have further gathered to make these unprecedented people in it, however abject their outward economic lives. George Gudger is living, right now, and that fact ought to stop you in your tracks.
Why? Because ordinary as he is, worthless as he is, in fact, he is nonetheless a miracle. Earlier, in a section of the book titled “Colon,” Agee asks, apropos of one human looking “into the eyes of a human life”: “what is it he there beholds that so freezes and abashes his ambitious heart?” He beholds, Agee writes,
the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or however else one may faintly designate the human “soul,” that which is angry, that which is wild, that which is untameable, that which is healthy and holy, that which is competent of all advantaging within hope of human dream, that which most marvelous and most precious to our knowledge and most extremely advanced upon futurity of all flowerings within the scope of creation is of all these the least destructible, the least corruptible.64
Later still, in wondering how to write the history of each sharecropper and his soul, Agee connects them to the “magnitude in space and time” that Schopenhauer spoke of; that is, he links their existence to the existence of the universe and, thus, renders them equally vast and thus equally sublime. An individual human life, even a sharecropper, Agee writes, “is a child of the substance and bowels of the stars and of all space.”65 (As Agee well knew, this statement is not simply metaphorical. All matter, including the elements that compose human beings, come from exploded stars.) So too, Agee continues, is the earth, which he calls an “aberration” because it is the one planet in the whole universe that supports life, upon which this child is born. And finally, Agee observes how on this earth this individual human life is “born … into its future growth,” “blossomed forth upon that branch most sportive, most precarious, most propitious, potential and most frightful in known creation, of human existence, of human consciousness, of human possibility to build itself ruin or wonder.”66 In short, as Agee writes in the closing pages of the book, borrowing a proverb from William Blake, “Everything that is is holy,” including and especially sharecroppers. Their holiness derives from their miraculous, irreproducible existence. And we do not pity or feel sympathy for holy things.67 We worship them.
This emphasis on the interstellar origins and holiness of life explains the phrase that Agee offers early on to describe the true subject of his book: “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”68 The phrase suggests that we should conceive of human beings, in this case sharecroppers, as we do gods, and our encounter with these sharecropper-gods should be as awe inspiring—and transformative—as Saul’s encounter with his actual God on the road to Damascus. To be sure, Agee’s sentence suggests that we should also feel sorrow at the predicaments that habitually afflict these human gods—what Agee calls the “world’s bombardment”—but mostly awe that these people exist at all.69 Indeed, the world’s bombardment matters only because the existence of these human gods is so unlikely, unprecedented, and awesome to begin with.
That sense of human divinity, of awe and the sublime, is what makes Walker Evans’s photographs, especially his portraits, so thrilling (see Figure 5.6). They force viewers to confront the unprecedented, divine souls that throughout the book Agee struggles to describe in prose. They capture images of gods. Thus, with Evans’s help, Agee surrounds the Gudgers with an aura of the sublime that not even steel workers or the Joads, to say nothing of presidents and Olympic athletes, can match. And he creates this sublimity despite and perhaps because the Gudgers start from such humble origins. Anonymous men become famous men, and finally more gods than men, and in so doing become sublime.
Figure 5.6. Annie Mae Burroughs.
Source: © Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Downward to the Sublime
In a continued search for the Depression sublime, one could keep traveling downward, away from the low but exalted sharecropper and toward the smaller and more anonymous still, below, even, the human. In the 1930s, for example, Louis Leakey and his wife Mary confirmed Charles Darwin’s hunch that humans must have first evolved from apes while living in Africa and, millions of years later, migrated outward from there. (Leakey told the story in his 1934 book Adam’s Ancestors.) Their discoveries revealed much about the Stone Age culture of early man and reminded contemporaries of the nearly infinite prehistory and the suddenness—and the fragility—of modern human history.
Around the same time, in the field of evolutionary biology, Sewall Wright did pioneering work in population genetics, discovering the role that probability could play in determining genetic variation, which sounds dry but has profound consequences for the shape of biological life on earth. In his 1937 book Genetics and the Origin of Species, the Ukrainian-born biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, then at the California Institute of Technology, completed the synthesis of Mendel and Darwin that Wright had begun. ( Julian Huxley popularized Wright and Dobzhansky ‘s work in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.) After this work, the evolution of different species began to seem like a sublime contest among genetic variation, environment, and the process of natural selection playing out over millennia.
Even farther down, in 1928 the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin. By the late 1930s, scientists understood its capacity to fight infections of all sorts, and by the early 1940s it had gone into mass production—for the war effort—and soon enough for public use. Individuals had to accommodate themselves to the fact that a humble mold, discovered more or less by chance, could cure infectious diseases like tuberculosis and pneumonia that had slaughtered humans for millions of years. Still farther down the latter of life and the sublime, in 1932 the English physicist James Chadwick discovered the neutron, which radically altered our understanding of the atom and thus the structure of matter.70
In traveling downward, however, one gradually loses the quality of vastness necessary to the sublime. Moreover, with the exception of the Leakeys, one loses the tight focus on people, which, I have argued, is what distinguishes the Depression sublime from other moments in its history.
Of course, there is an irony in speaking of a Depression sublime, especially in the form of a populist sublime. At few points in American history have individuals felt more powerless and more buffeted about by the storms of economics and, in the case of the Dust Bowl, by literal storms, as they did during the 1930s. Perhaps, though, as with other confrontations with the sublime, it takes a radical humbling of humanity in order to reassert its ultimate power.
Like many accounts of the Great Depression, thus far mine has focused on the destructive, the negative emotions of fear, panic, and, though less negative than just plain ugly, righteousness and self-righteousness. That focus obviously has merit—the Depression, by definition, destroyed lives and livelihoods—but it ignores what contemporary psychologists would call the positive emotions: joy, gratitude, love, and hope. A focus on the sublime and awe begins to correct that bias toward the negative. In the next chapter, I turn to another positive emotion, love, which, though embattled during the Great Depression, nevertheless, in its own way, thrived.