Socorro New Mexico Wild Man, August 2011-photograph by Bruce Berman

Then there is another road on Russell Lee’s Road. It is the road not often described, the road that is deeply there and I suspect always was. It is the road less traveled and it is the underbelly of, not only New Mexico, but America today. Looking at the road of Lee and the other FSA photographers of the 1930s, one would imagine that the grind of the never-ending depression was something that people were waiting out, that the “hard times,” were something that  was being endured until better times arrived.

But, after awhile, hard times dig down deep into the soul of a country and leave scars and damage and incapacity.

The role of the FSA was to uplift. The images and words of the FSA were meant to show that the government had come to the rescue and that, given enough time and money, the government would fix things, was fixing things.

But, as previously stated in on this web site, for all the millions of dollars spent in the 1930s on programs to uplift the society from the Great Depression, unemployment never went down significantly. It remained hovering around 20% throughout the 1930s. Like now.

Our times have seen boom and bust and boom again and bust again. But another form of depression has been gaining steam: the loss of mission and the loss of belief. Throughout the history of the country we have lived the conceit that we were one -The One, so to speak- and that we were special and that we were the best of nations and people.

Some of us still believe this to be the case but many don’t. Can’t.

The massive use of drugs (of all kinds), the divide between those that need assistance and those who don’t -or won’t- has grown. The deep wounds of Jim Crow didn’t go away as the generations passed. The scars turned into permanent wounds. The inequalities of the border and the West, constantly whittled away, nonetheless have led to long memories, hard memories of the way it was and instead of becoming “one,” we have become many and many separate ones..

Hard times accelerate this. Whether Good Times deaccelerate this remains to be seen. The last time we went from deep hard times to good times (1930s through the 1960s) we went through a massive war, a total social upheaval, a brief moment of prosperity (actually a generation) and then a new world order where we remain today.

One could argue that these are good times. No starvation in America -except 47 million Americans are on Food Stamps. No lack of consumer goods -mobile devices, flat screen TVs, electronics of every stripe and variety, clothes available at Walmart, ad nausea. Jobs? Have you seen soup lines? Have you seen major human migrations seeking work, manual work (there is manual work to be done. Isn’t that the reason for inter-America migration?). Then, perhaps, it is that there is no good work? But don’t ask if that is true of the kids at the brain mills in Silicon Valley.

This is a weird Depression we are experiencing and perhaps it’s a Depression Of Lowered Expectations, or, put another way, a Depression Of Inflated Expectations. If one tries to find an answer, one inevitably is confronted by the wagging finger of political correctness. No matter what solutions one offers, the newly minted political opinion culture, available 24/7 at the tip of one’s mobile device (and if it’s there, in a hundred places, it must be true, right?), reacts, dams, a sharpens its knife. This is our new dialogue: how to humiliate and destroy anyone stupid enough to suggest a solution.

How did we get here? How did we wake up one day and discover -I’m shocked absolutely shocked- that things weren’t fair, that not everyone had the same things, that there were economic down times, that somewhere in your past you had been crapped on (dooming you to be crapped on forever more?)?

How did we get so stupid?

What I know is this: right now there is the beginning of huge new fortunes being made because people are buying property that they can flip, from bargain dollar to over priced. Right now if one is looking to explain why there are no jobs out there there is a kid somewhere that is working three. Right now, out there, there is a kid, a Whitney Houston-esque kid, who is driving to L.A. with a dream and omen (or two or fifty) of those kids will be glommed onto by the Clive Davis’ of the world. Right now, in this country, there are cars being designed, houses being planned, gizmos being invented, vacation packages being number-crunched (probably to the beaches of the Straits of Hormuz), and those of us sitting here bitching about it -shocked, absolutely shocked at the unfairness of it all- are screwed.

I don’t want it this way. It is this way.

No wonder the so-called “Man In The Gray Flannel Suit” of the 1950s shut down, grabbed his proverbial martini, turned on the TV, took it out to the backyard and built the barbecue pit! Dangling at the end of a yo yo is hard. Thinking enough to not be screwed by all this is even harder.

And the alternative is what? Surrender?

Here’s a secret: there’s a bunch of crap out there. There is addiction, there is craziness, there is inequity, there is a daily reminder that the youth were fed fairy tales of the quality of the Tooth Fairy. Yep. The streets of gold have cracked in the imagination of the believer.

Would Russell Lee believe that, out there, on the road to Pie Town, there is a Cocaine problem of fairly large proportions? Would Russell Lee understand how many young people are addicted, have been convicted of various felonies and who are either incarcerated or under court control? Spousal abuse cases are on every docket of the small town courts. Violence befitting anger and hopelessness.

As all previous work on Russell Lee’s Road was done as a comparative study of the America of the 1930s and the America of today, the 21st Century America, these new images are also a comparative study, research done but not displayed, until now.

Research has to be thorough before it can be valid.

This part of Russell Lee’s Road is not the feel good road of the propaganda-driven Farm Security Administration, but rather, the road that could not be shown when the first “Morning In America” was being promulgated in the 1930s. Perhaps that is part of our communal angst: we were fed pablum. We needed beans and an accessional steak (sorry vegans). U.S. 60 in New Mexico runs through one of the most beautiful and vast valleys of the world, the high plains valley that goes from Magdalena to the Arizona border to the west. Along this road is another story which this site will be exploring from now until next August as the research progresses through stage two. It appears to be a metaphor, a narrow road through beauty with danger lurking at every side road.

Along this road is the old road of Lee and then there is the new road, along which the marginalized marginalize themselves further. It’s not all bad. But there is a decline on our back roads, an element of madness. The documentation of today must incorporate what is there with what we would like it to be before a path can be chosen. Do we continue to believe that a nation that has diminished opportunity for the common worker, diminished ability -or will- to suppress the poisons that have become the booming industry of  self medication (these are different medicines, these cause disease not eliminate it), the robust incarceration establishment, the underground mega-industry culture of “gangsta.”

Or must we believe the time has come to really have a revolution, one that upsets the world order, a revolution of “The best revenge is to lead a good life?’

Has it come down to Ayn Rand versus FDR?

The above photograph, done on the edge of the town of Socorro, New Mexico before ascending into the mountains and the plains of the high country of western New Mexico, is a version of “Welcome To New Mexico.” It is, literally, this man’s version. We stopped. He greeted me. He was crazed. He was not dangerous, just beyond caring what anyone thought about him. He is not alone.

He danced, he sang, and he mumbled, “Welcome to New Mexico, check it out check out my world, vato,” he said.

I did, I do, I will. His too. And Russell Lee’s.

As W. Eugene Smith, the father of modern photojournalism once said, “Let truth be the prejudice.”

Thank you, ‘mano, you Wild Man. You have reminded me that I don’t work for the propagandist FSA, as well intentioned as it was. There’s a lot out there. Let the research land where it drops.

That is exactly what Part II/Russell Lee’s Road intends to do.

Passing through a storm, U.S. 60,

Torrance County, NewMexico

by Bruce Berman©2011/RLR Project

Second Amendment Kid with plastic rifle, Magdalena, NM by Bruce Berman ©2011

Clyde Barrow with two Browning Automatic Rifles (BAR), a shotgun, and lots of attitude, photographer unknown (probably Bonnie)

They used guns, but it seemed, they loved their guns as much as photographers love their cameras.  Unlike the gangsters of today, their brief flash of fame was built upon the need for money in a Depression era that saw little of it. Today’s gangster’s feed off of the tastes of a drug culture. Barrow’s America was poor, downtrodden and wounded. Today’s America is worried about becoming poor, but highly wired -and unwired-  and by the standards of the 1930′s, still well off.

Guns collected from the ambushed vehicle of Bonnie and Clyde

The National Firearms Act of 1934 was brought about by the glorification of outlaws like Bonnie and Clyde and the general lawlessness and rise of gangster culture during prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelthoped this act would eliminate automatic-fire weapons like machine guns from America’s streets and the large caliber automatic fire of the BAR that Barrow used (ironically, a weapon manufactured by Browning for the U.S. government during WW I). Other firearms such as short-barreled shotguns and rifles, parts of guns like silencers, as well as other “gadget-type” firearms hidden in canes and such were also targeted. All gun sales and gun manufacturers were slapped with a $200 tax (no small amount for Americans mired in the Great Depression; that would be like a tax of $2,525 today) on each firearm, and all buyers were required to fill out paperwork subject to Treasury Dept. approval.

Bonnie Parker with cigar and pistol, East Texas, 1934, Photographer unknown (probably Clyde)

Dorothea Lange, her Graflex camera and her 1934 Ford Station Wagon "Woody"

Lee and the other FSAers hoped that they would make photographs that would change and motivate and exonerate.

Whether you were shooting pictures or shooting your way out of a bank heist, the 1930′s was a time of uncertainty and possibility and the highway was a metaphor of that conflict.

Photo By Jack Delano- Library of Congress/OWI, Dec. 1942

Article by Bruce Berman

This image is of a General view of one of the yards of the Chicago and Northwestern railroad, Chicago, Ill.

Notice the film’s edges, indicating it was shot with a “4X5″ camera, probably a Speed Graphic which was the “Go To” press camera of the era.

Also, notice, it was shot in color, a rarity in this era. Since it was a “positive,” meaning that the image was not reversed (a “negative”) but positive (the image showed correctly) , it was, undoubtedly shot on Kodak’s  Kodachrome film.

This was not as easy a photograph to make as it first appears.

Kodachrome is appreciated for its archival quality, and for its rich color saturation. For this reason it was preferred by professional photographers all during its 74 years of existence. Kodak discontinued manufacturing the film in 2009.

In Jack Delano’s era this film had a speed of ASA 8 (now it would be expressed as ISO 8), a film considered to be “slow,” meaning it was difficult to work in low light. Interpreting the light in this image (northern Midwestern winter light) and the time of day, it is estimated that this photograph was taken at a setting of 1/60 @ f:4 (that would be called “wide open” on a Speed Graphic), meaning the photographer had very little latitude and would have very little depth-of-field if he were closer to his subject.

It is entirely possible the photographer used a tripod, although the “freeze action (no pun intended because of the snow scene)” indicates he would have used as fast a shutter speed as he possibly could.

Jack Delano was a Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer from the last era of the FSA (1938-43). The FSA was eliminated as “budget waste” and subsumed into the Office of War Information (OWI).This image was shot after the Depression had abated and the country was “back at work” again(War Work). It was shot by Delano  for the Office of War Information.

Delano was born as Jacob Ovcharov in Voroshilovka, 120 miles southwest of Kiev, Ukraine, a rural area. Undoubtedly the power of the locomotive in this image and in American industry in general, impressed Delano who was 36 years old when this image was taken. Delano was hired by the FSA’s Roy Stryker on the condition that he have his own car and driver’s license, both of which he acquired before moving to Washington, D.C.  in 1937.

He travelled to Puerto Rico in 1941 as a part of the FSA project. This trip had such a profound influence on him that he settled there permanently in 1946. After the War he returned to Puerto Rico to do a book of photographs on the island after he won a Guggenheim fellowship. It took him several decades to complete the project, titled ”Puerto Rico Mio,” which was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in 1990.

Delano died at a hospital in Puerto Rico in 1997. He was 83.

by Ben Shahn American (b. Lithuania, 1898-1969)

1938 One Page Beginning

Article by Bruce Berman

When Russell Lee and the other Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographers set out on the American Highway of the 1930′s, the country was stuck between a deep and intractable Depression and distant rumblings of a growing doom coming from Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Unemployment hovered around 20% for most of the decade. The “have’s” were recovering, but the “Common Man,” still often found himself (or herself) living a subsistence lifestyle. By 1938, the roiling anger of the decade had turned to dejection. The Depression, it seemed, would go on forever.

The beginning of FDR’s New Deal was based on the belief that changing America for the better was possible and that by informing the general public of the plight of the average American, things could change, justice could be found, that all could end well.
The FSA and its photographers had set out with this belief and undertook the task of informing the general public of the plight of the average American.

But the Depression ground on.

By 1938, the country was still nowhere near out of the Great Depression. Officially begun at the end of the last decade, America had not yet begun it’s industrial expansion -and, thus, its rise from the ashes- and the cumulative effect of devaluation, dislocation and uncertainty had demoralized the national soul.

America was looking for a hero.

Someone super.

Someone who could do anything and who was not corrupt and who, in fact, would fight corruption and wrong-doing and criminals high and low. It was looking for common heroes. Arguably, the nation, by 1938, was a nation of heroes, having survived the deep malfeasance of its leaders, the environment gone bad, and the seemingly intractable economy that had no direction or hope.

The nation turned to the sole survivor of the planet Krypton: Kal-El, later renamed, by his Kansas adoptive parents, Clark Kent and, eventually, also known as Superman, a moniker given to him by Metropolis Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane.

Russell Lee's town/Pie Town relic ©Bruce Berman

Here was a hero for the bad times, one who was devoted to promoting  “truth, justice, and the American way.”

The comic hero was created by American writer Jerry Siegel and Canadian-born American artist Joe Shuster in 1932. Both artists were living in Cleveland, Ohio, and sold their creation to Detective Comics, Inc. (later DC Comics) in 1938. The character first appeared in Action Comics #1 (June 1938) and subsequently appeared in various radio serials (in a later era the super hero appeared in television programs, films, newspaper strips, and video games).

First Appearance of Superman

Indeed, Superman inspired the nation to think, “Yes we can (monolingually),” seventy one years before the same phrase helped propel an unknown Senator from Illinois into the United States Presidency. Superman seems to have fared better than the current purveyor of “Change.” He became a craze and uplifted the nation with the idea, that, possibly, there was relief in sight, and, in the colorful pages of Action Comics, he delivered more than “Hope.” He delivered the goods: justice. His fame and inspiration helped to lift people out of a spiritual depression that helped relieve the economic one.

Superman’s influence and amelioration of the The Depression was short-lived, however, because as the darkness of the coming war came, Superman began to retro-fit himself to prepare for the battle with human evil in the form of the Fascism of Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito.

Nonetheless, Superman was a timely hero, transcending his mere existence in ink and paper and he brought courage to depression era America. The fictional/mythical Clark Kent led people to think that not only could there be justice but that things could be changed.

And they did.

In a small way the efforts of the FSA photographers were in the the mode of Superman, the idea that one person (in this case with a camera), “out there,” could influence and change wrong-doing, lift people out of a morass, beat back the intractable forces of nature and all this could be done by a “common man,” with the magic heart of a super hero.

America went forward to its next great challenge and “The Man of Steel,” as a precursor of fighting against evil for the good, became a role model to a generation, a permanent warrior for the nation’s best instincts.

AMERICA WAS “GAGA” FOR SUPERMAN!

SEE THIS 1930′s VIDEO OF A REAL “COMMON MAN” SUPERHERO:

(photographer unknown)

Article by Bruce Berman

What did Russell Lee do when he was on the road? His notes indicate that he did a lot of thinking about what he had shot at the last stop and what he needed to shoot at the next stop. However, in the thousands of miles that he logged in for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) he must have found “blank spaces” in his travels, times when he was bored with the road, even the job and its mission.

Did he have a radio in his old Ford? He was an innovator and, as a photographer, he was up on the latest technology, being one of the first photojournalists of his day to use the Rollieflex Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) camera (which had a 2 1/4inch square negative and, thus, was small and mobile). This would lead one to speculate that, perhaps Lee was also interested in other technologies and, when he “hit the road” for the FSA, radios and radio networks were a fairly recent innovation.

There were 599 radio stations in 1936.

Broadcasting of the 599 broadcasting stations in the United States, approximately 500 were licensed to different individuals or corporations. There were two major network organizations–the National Broadcasting Company, operating two national networks linking in whole or part a total of about eighty stations, and the Columbia Broadcasting System, also linking about eighty stations but in a single network in whole or part. Most of these stations were individually owned by private enterprises.

News to people along Russell Lee’s Road, and other rural locations, could get there news more rapidly from radio than they could from print media and, once the radio had been purchased, the news was free if you were anywhere near a broadcasting tower or had a radio in your car.

Philco Model 600C, Original selling price:$25

The cost of a good desktop radio in 1936 was, on average, about $25.00. In 1936 that was the same buying power as $397.06 is in 2011.

Not cheap, but affordable, if you had a job or resources. Does this sound familiar?

When Motorola, which was the first radio for automobiles, went on sale in 1930, it cost about $110 uninstalled, at a time when you could buy a brand-new car for $650, and the country was sliding deeply into the Great Depression. A radio for a new car would cost about $3,000 today adjusting for 2011 dollars.

If you had an automobile and it came with a radio -most did not- you could listen to one of the broadcast networks tell you about the depression you were in but could not afford to listen to in a house you no longer owned. This would be like, today, trying to keep up with things on internet. If you had a computer you could always go find someone else’ WiFi.

You cannot take your desktop computer with you to a coffee shop to jump on the WiFi. But if you’re homeless, would you be able to resist selling your laptop for cash?

Russell Lee had a job in 1936, shooting images for the Historical Unit of the FSA which was part of the Works Progress Administration (W.P.A.). If you had a job, even a low paying one, you were “good.”

If you didn’t have a job -then as now- everything was increasingly beyond the consumer’s ability to have. Coming out of the abundance of the 1920′s, as it is coming out of the abundance of the Go-Go 1990s and early 2000s, these were hard -and technologically challenged- times.

Then as now, one could go from being a Have to being a Have Not, in one “Pink Slip” day.

Did radio equal the internet in 1936?

One could conclude that that is just one of the many parallels.

Did Russell Lee have a radio in his troublesome (it often broke down) Ford? Was he stopping to listen to President Rooseveldt and his Fireside Chats, did he listen to the crooner Bing Crosby as he tooled along U.S. 60? It is not clear. Did he listen to the country and western stations on the low watt stations in New Mexico and Texas?

One can only speculate on the type of music or news he heard, if he heard any at all (see the August 18, 2011 post on this web site).

When he got to Pie Town in 1937, he photographed people dancing and singing but all the music was produced by live musicians and there are no radios in any of his pictures from that town. He did photograph other pictures that are now in the Library of Congress that have an inclination to display how the times were getting better and people were, again, able to afford consumer products.

Whether these are government sponsored images/ideas or just an increasing ubiquity of radios is hard to know.

1937 Dodge Sedan, Southern New Mexico

RLR Project ©2011

Article and photograph by Bruce Berman

Garfield, NM —–

It’s going going almost gone. Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. Paint to rust.

The thing about the West, still, is there’s still lots of space, in the land and in the brain. Enough space to not become everything we left behind, a continent or a government (or two) ago. Earth migrants we are, one step ahead of a rabid reality. We have artifacts and clues that this history of ours is circular and not linear. Things like this Dodge remind us that there was another time of economic freak out. Another time of political terrorism. Another time of slogging onward, toward the light (which turned out to arrive at four or five years of the dark: WW II). Funny how the “dark,” also had a lot of light in it. What a battered generation the people from 1930s were: Depression, World War, the Cold War. Yet, they created the “modern era” we have lived in and off of for these seventy some years.

We pine for them and, in some cases -mine- then. But, they are just rust now. “Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it,” said George Santayana. What if you want to repeat it, I ask myself, in my endless mucking around in the dust and rust.

Maybe this car has to fade away so we can move onward. Maybe there has to be no trace of the past to have a truly new future. Or maybe, it’s these artifacts of time that keeps us straight.

Not for me. Not on this day on Russell Lee’s Road. Bullseye! I love stopping and getting involved with these wrecks. I stick my head inside and the gauges are cloudy but the mustiness reaches one’s nose, it’s the past, the family that rode in this car to the local town (Garfield, NM?) is still there, FDR on the radio is still there (I am told many people listened to Fireside Chats on their car radio because they were too poor, or too dislocated, to have one in their house). This car is my barometer, and the forecast is steady, do more of the same, do something with the past, remember then to do tomorrow, keep moving, keep going. Weather the times.

Ashes to rust. Rust to the earth. Earth to what’s next. What’s next to what you make of it.

Russell Lee’s Road is still there, but, if one looks closely, the “forces” that chase us are everywhere, just beyond that beautifully shaped window, just down the road where that 100 acres has been leveled and plotted and the plastic PVC pipe is just waiting for people to come and love the land to death.

But – the saving coup de grace- there’s still space in the West. That’s the only hope for many, as it was for Russell Lee, I suspect: not resolution and redemption, but hope for just a little more time.

This Dodge has had 74 years. There’s a lot of rust. Miracle that it is, it’s still there. So am I. So are you if you’re reading this.

Have a good day, eh?

Sights & Sounds of the Farm Security Administration 19335-1943 Part 1 by the Pare Lorenzt Center

Radio with ornaments and decorations in home of

FSA client (Farm Security Administration) client

near Caruthersville, Missouri, by Russell Lee/FSA

The 1930’s and Cultural Expansion

Part One: Music

Article by Bruce Berman

Russell Lee’s 1930’s –The Great Depression- was a time of hardship and scarcity and fear. One might think that these facts would engender an atmosphere of emotional darkness and gloom. Indeed, in the early years of the Depression -1929-1933- there were few indicators that anything good could come out of this disaster. The Stock Market had crashed, the Dust Bowl had devastated several states, reducing agriculture (and, thus, farming) to an unsustainable means of living, forcing major waves of migration in pursuit of better opportunities. There was political uncertainty as the country moved from the passive but seemingly robust Republicanism of the 1920’s, (in which many Americans had to believe they, to, were too become rich) and the uncertain experimentation of the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt’s bold but unproven neo-Socialism, had not yet been proven.

If one could have stood in the bread lines in America’s largest cities, in the 1930’s, one would have imagined that cultural expansion would be a remote hope. Impossible at best. However, in many ways, the opposite was true: an ill wind blew and blew hard and out of it came  an American cultural expansion that would last for decades. Music flourished, but, not only as an art form but, also, as a social expression. Painting expanded it’s vernacular, moving, on the one hand, into social realism and, on the other, into pure abstraction.  Experimentation was the order of the day. Photography continued to develop as an art form, expanding on the new ground that Alfred Seiglitz had broken and that new, younger photographers like Edward Weston were creating, not to mention, boomed as a commercial and communication media. Russell Lee and the other Farm Security Administration Historical Unit photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein, broke new ground in visual journalism, exploiting the technology of faster films and more mobile cameras to tell the world, in a new visual language, the story of the Depression and its effect on Americans. The FSA “shooters,” directed by Roy Stryker,  amplified the new power of photography to tell, to explain and to motivate. Not inconsequentially, literature experienced a massive expansion, fueled by writers that experienced war (WW I and the Spanish Civil War), boom, and then, ultimately, bust. A powerful idiom arose and it had many voices, from that of Ernest Hemingway to William Faulkner in the south, to Dashiell Hammett in the west to that of John Steinbeck, who not only experienced the Great Depression, but codified it in “The Grapes Of Wrath.”

In many ways, the 1930s were, to paraphrase Dickens, the worst of times and the gestation of some very interesting times.

In music, one of the drivers of this near phenomenon was the emergence and increasing use (and affordability) of radio. Economics led, inadvertently, to an the use of more and more radio-listening and the medium itself guaranteed that there was a wider audience for music listening. Many advertisers switched to radio from newspapers, Spending on radio in the 1930’s was $60 million a year in radio commercials. From the sale of 75,000 radios in 1921, figures rose to 13.5 million in 1930. Radio ownership increased more than two fold in this era, from about 40 percent of families at the beginning of the decade to nearly 90 percent by 1940. It is in this time frame that the great broadcasting networks -NBC and CBS-were created. Radio listeners heard the same programs over the networks and this affected commerce (you could sell a lot to a lot of people with the same message), and politics (you could sell political ideology and politicians to a large audience and people heard the same messages). Radio became an integral part of the lives of Americans. Culture expanded as more and more people could listen to  music, news and entertainment, all of for free, over the airwaves.

a contributing factor to the migration of popular attention from news print to radio (then as now?) was the fact that the press faced scrutiny from the public as many jobless Americans began to examine and criticize newspapers on their content. During this time, many publishers were actively involved in presenting and commenting on political issues and the press, and the public, overwhelmed by 25% unemployment, found little of interest in the squabbling between press giants Robert R. Mc Cormack of the Chicago Tribune on the right and William Randolph Hearst and his publishing empire – San Francisco Examiner and New York Journal- on the left.

Radio was not a new technology but the Depression thrust it into prominence and its lowered consumer cost, smaller units and its ubiquitousness made it the primary source of entertainment and, later news, in the 1930’s.. It brought together the rich and the poor, of every race, nationality or creed in one audience rather than in many separate readerships in the print media. During the Great Depression, radio advertising revenues doubled (while newspaper and magazine profits were halved), because radio could reach a large national audience. Radio continued to focus more on entertainment then news until the World War reversed that trend in the 1940’s.

Radio was new, “cool,” and music was at its heart.

Russell Lee photo of musical couple at home, 1930s

Music expanded on many fronts. One of the richest voices to emerge, that illuminated the American experience of the 1930’s, was Woody Guthrie, a troubadour from Okemah, Oklahoma. His uniquely wry outlook on life, as well as his abiding interest in rambling around the country on the open road, gathering his stories from the people and places that he encountered, created a new and vigorous music, part folk tale, part political screed.

Another powerful musical voice of the times, rooted in the ancient slave calls of the agrarian south but reaching forward to a more political and liberationist sound, was that of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. Lead Belly’s impact on the history of American music is unquestioned and legendary. He was a forerunner of Rock and Roll, a form that emerged twenty years later in the 1950’s. Women were also starting to emerge in  the new mass media cultural age of radio. Ma Rainey, who was a strong force in the previous decade, set the tone for the early 1930′s.

Ma Rainey

These two musicians spoke in the language of the “common man,” but there was other music bubbling to the surface in these troubled times. Many people in this era of worry sought salvation, or, at least relief,  through music and the radio provided it.  So called Big Band music was developing in this era and it was the beginning of “The Jazz Era.” Guy Lombardo and his band, probably more than any other symbolized success and a better day. His music led the Swing Era, but, there were other “Stars,” such as popular bands like Benny Goodman’s and Tommy Dorsey’s. Other popular acts of the 1930s included the Andrews Sisters, Fred Astaire, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Ginger Rogers, Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Shirley Temple, and Ethel Waters.

Music was also a creator of a level playing field in race relations in the 1930’s. More and more through radio, people were listening to music regardless of the ethnicity of its source and it is fair to say that “race music,” was becoming mainstream belying its name. On e of the most popular and listened to songs of the 1930’s was  ”Mood Indigo” (1931), composed by Edward “Duke” Ellington and Irving Mills and performed by Ellington.

Genius in music was not limited to “popular music.” Aaron Copland’s classical and neo classical music was heard in disparate places from theater stage to movie score. Over a long career -his first New York concert was in 1925 and his last public works were done in the 1970’s- Copland’s. One of his most important film scores was done for the 1939 film Of Mice and Men and his seminal film score, Billy The Kid (1938). His Piano Variations, done in 1930, are considered master works in the history of music.

Aaron Copland at work

Because of Copland’s concern that the Depression was limiting people’s abilities to hear and see new classical American music, Copland, beginning in the mid 1930s, made a serious effort to widen the audience for it. He took steps by changing his style when writing pieces for different occasions.  He composed for theater, ballet, and films as well as more traditional concert settings.

The 1930’s, often described as a “wasted decade,” because of its severe economic displacement, was a time of yearning and turmoil and these are fertile seeds for the Arts, and, perhaps for society in general.  Despite the hardships, the 1930s was a robust and churning decade in American music and Art in general. Undeniably, from this decade came “The Great Generation” that made America the leading nation in the world.

A careful observer might find some parallels to the 1930s in terms of a faltering economy, a generalized anxiety, a disappointment with government and, seemingly, a dimming light “at the end of the tunnel.” As the decade unfolds a study of the 1930s could provide, if not a guideline, then, at least, a glimpse of some possible -and positive- outcomes.

What will the ill winds of the 2010s blow? Dust or expansion?

NEXT: The 1930’s and Cultural Expansion/Part Two: Film

Preacher in the park, Portales – July 2011

©Bruce Berman