A Troubled Birth: The 1930s and American Public Opinion

By Susan Herbst

Pollsters and pundits armed with the best public opinion polls failed to predict the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Is this because we no longer understand what the American public is? In A Troubled Birth, Susan Herbst argues that we need to return to earlier meanings of "public opinion" to understand our current climate.

Herbst contends that the idea that there was a public—whose opinions mattered—emerged during the Great Depression, with the diffusion of radio, the devastating impact of the economic collapse on so many people, the appearance of professional pollsters, and Franklin Roosevelt’s powerful rhetoric. She argues that public opinion about issues can only be seen as a messy mixture of culture, politics, and economics—in short, all the things that influence how people live. Herbst deftly pins down contours of public opinion in new ways and explores what endures and what doesn’t in the extraordinarily troubled, polarized, and hyper-mediated present. Before we can ask the most important questions about public opinion in American democracy today, we must reckon yet again with the politics and culture of the 1930s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226813073

Book preview

Cover Page for A Troubled Birth

A Troubled Birth

Chicago Studies in American Politics

A series edited by Susan Herbst, Lawrence R. Jacobs, Adam J. Berinsky, and Frances Lee; Benjamin I. Page, editor emeritus

Also in the series:

Prisms of the People: Power and Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America

by Hahrie Han, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa

The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era

by James M. Curry and Frances E. Lee

Democracy Declined: The Failed Politics of Consumer Financial Protection

by Mallory E. SoRelle

Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics

by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

America’s Inequality Trap

by Nathan J. Kelly

Good Enough for Government Work: The Public Reputation Crisis in America (And What We Can Do to Fix It)

by Amy E. Lerman

Who Wants to Run? How the Devaluing of Political Office Drives Polarization

by Andrew B. Hall

From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity

by Michele F. Margolis

The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Political Behavior Nationalized

by Daniel J. Hopkins

Legacies of Losing in American Politics

by Jeffrey K. Tulis and Nicole Mellow

Legislative Style

by William Bernhard and Tracy Sulkin

Why Parties Matter: Political Competition and Democracy in the American South

by John H. Aldrich and John D. Griffin

Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public

by Donald R. Kinder and Nathan P. Kalmoe

A Troubled Birth

The 1930s and American Public Opinion

Susan Herbst

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

On the cover: Men lining up for a cheap meal during the 1930s. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21     1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81291-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81310-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81307-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226813073.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Herbst, Susan, author.

Title: A troubled birth : the 1930s and American public opinion /

Susan Herbst.

Other titles: Chicago studies in American politics.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Series:

Chicago studies in American politics | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021012759 | ISBN 9780226812915 (cloth) |

ISBN 9780226813103 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226813073 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Public opinion—United States. | United States—

Politics and government—1929–1933. | United States—Politics and government—1933–1945.

Classification: LCC HN90.P8 H495 2021 | DDC 303.3/80973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012759

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my brilliant and wildly imaginative mentor,

James R. Beniger. I got lucky.

Contents

1   Introduction: Birth of a Public

2   President in the Maelstrom: FDR as Public Opinion Theorist

3   Twisted Populism: Pollsters and Delusions of Citizenship

4   A Consuming Public: The Strange and Magnificent New York World’s Fair

5   Radio Embraces Race and Immigration, Awkwardly

6   Interlude: A Depression Needn’t Be So Depressing

7   Public Opinion and Its Problems: Some Ways Forward

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

1  *  Introduction

Birth of a Public

Towering over Presidents and State governors, over Congress and State legislatures, over conventions and the vast machinery of party, public opinion stands out, in the United States, as the great source of power, the master of servants who tremble before it.

James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 1888

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. Can’t nobody wipe us out. Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa.

Ma Joad, The Grapes of Wrath, 1940¹

No one predicted the near-simultaneous appearance of a global health crisis, the resulting crash of economies, a surge in protests across the world over race discrimination, the refusal of a sitting president to accept the outcome of a legitimate national election, and a violent invasion of the Capitol building by insurrectionists inspired by their president. Yet in the years before these profoundly impactful events of 2020 and 2021, we had plenty of other surprises in our politics: the rise of the Tea Party and other novel forms of partisan rage, the election of our first African American president and its varied impacts, flamboyant rejection of empirical reality by cable news figures, a rapid proliferation of conspiracy theories, and the fierce, cult-like populist uprising fueled by a wealthy celebrity real estate developer. We failed to predict Donald Trump’s astoundingly rapid domination of a major political party, his reshaping of the culture inside the US Senate, his tyrannical war against so many truths, and his frightening interventions in the workings of institutions we had typically accepted as supporting the public good—the Justice Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the US Postal Service. Also not predicted was the emergence of a novel incivility in public discourse—its uniquely coarse tone and its loose adherence to facts, both shaped by the linguistic peculiarities of Twitter. All of these current phenomena matter immensely, so academics interested in politics have rushed to press with questions, concerns, and a frantic search for explanations. Pundits and journalists have been vital, trying to parse the events, albeit with varying degrees of thoughtfulness and sincerity. And these phenomena loom large for every citizen as well; they undergird most all daily media content that we watch, read, retweet, and talk about. The bottom line: We live in a period characterized by partisan polarization, cynicism about our institutions, and a generally mean-spirited ruckus so extraordinarily loud that folks from all walks of life fear each other and question the very possibility of democracy.²

The precursors to these phenomena—attitudes, trends, cultural artifacts such as television programs, and conspiratorial websites—were all there in public view, but clearly they were not properly studied. My own scholarly community is partly to blame, and our only excuse is that it was all complex, fluid, and bigger than we thought.

This is a book about how we might do better, not through sophisticated statistical models or more huge attitude surveys, although both are always welcome tools. Anything is worth a try, given what is typically at stake for a nation. Instead, this book grapples with how the public and public opinion—as concepts that undergird this nation and make it vulnerable to antidemocratic movements—came to be. I argue, through the lenses of social and intellectual history, why these fundamental concepts led us into an iron cage of assumptions, biases, and expectations that make us passive, vulnerable to authoritarian behavior of leaders, anti-intellectual, and generally resistant to what should be our citizenly duties. The ways we developed our notions of the public and its sentiments long ago came back to haunt us, and in 2021 we need to understand and face it all.

I draw on work by historians, social scientists, and journalists to underscore that the public and resulting public opinion are moving targets without precise definitions that might last over time. Nonetheless, they are always with us in thought and rhetoric. Terms like these have an exceedingly strong gravitational pull for us because they imply cohesion, even if not unity. And no democratic nation can last without at least some solidity, as well as a deeply felt notion that we exist together in a bounded community. At the same time, we are an extraordinarily diverse nation. The real, empirical fault lines and divisions— race, ethnicity, class, region, religion—have always been there but were masked by our desire to become an American public. As a result of this unbending hope, expressed so beautifully by so many leaders, there simply must be a discernible, coherent, opining public that matters.

Various leaders and institutions had their reasons for creating or reinforcing such fictions, but average citizens found the idea of a coherent public attractive as well. It is inspiring and moving to be part of a generally homogenous whole, whether privileged or not. White Americans, regardless of class, had no real psychic distance to travel: Of course the public was and should be white at its base. But even those who were denied a place in mainstream white America—African Americans, Latinos, Jews, Irish, Chinese, and immigrants of all ethnicities—harbored great hopes that the notion of a public would become increasingly expansive and inclusive. The moments when minority groups crept closer, with recognition of their right to vote or election of members of Congress from their communities, prompted this perpetual hope. After all, we have always strived for a more perfect union; America is a work in progress.

One might object immediately to this thesis: Why, we always recognized different groups and their opinions, whether we let those opinions matter or not in public policy making. From the early days of polling to the present, we see data divided up by race, ethnicity, and income—how many whites like this or that relative to Blacks, or how wealth affects opinions. But these are fleeting moments and are seen as divisions on particular candidates and issues—divisions of attitudes that can and do change (which is why we are subject to continual polls, and why pollsters remain in business). That we have haphazard cross tabs of the public, flying across our screens, is a distraction from the much larger matter: We think there is a public (even if divided here and there, now and then, on this and that) and feel that it is important to be one. If not, how can we call ourselves a nation or see ourselves as citizens? It would make little sense to teach our children the Pledge of Allegiance, sing the national anthem at sporting events, support our soldiers, or celebrate the Fourth of July. These rituals are dear to us, but only because we have been taught to believe in our membership—tortured or not—in a public. The fictional public is, as we see throughout this book, white, rational, informed, participatory, open, and fair. The actual public has always been very different, but this complexity didn’t really work in the early decades of the twentieth century. Division was uncomfortable. Rhetoric, events, and ideas—that might conceal wide fissures in the public—were needed if we were to feel like a coherent whole, and they were pursued in earnest in the 1930s by different actors for different reasons.

This book is also a provocation about looking back to look forward and taking history more seriously, both the tales of political characters and—more unusual, challenging, and annoying for a political scientist at least—the history of popular culture. We will only understand the most dramatic transformations in American public opinion and changes in the shape of democracy itself if we take a different sort of look at the eras that have mattered most in our evolution. Here I choose an obvious one: the 1930s. I will not argue that the 1930s were a discernible canary in the coal mine, somehow holding all the antidemocratic tendencies we see blossoming right now, or that the profound fissures and divisions in the public were masked once and for all during a particular decade. This would just be too easy and too mechanically simpleminded to be helpful. However, to ignore the profoundly important leaders, writers, institutions, entertainments, and tendencies of the Great Depression years would be bizarre as well. I walk the middle path, which seems the most sensible place to be: The Depression years were, for a variety of reasons, a time when our ideas about the public emerged, full force. Some of the ideas have had real staying power. Other notions of the 1930s have not lasted but are still useful in mapping our moment here in the 2020s, my sole subject for the book’s final chapter. Throughout, I try my hand at a mixed-method, wide-ranging meditation on what that period means for us today. It is a path walked in part by historians—students of the past far more erudite than I. It is their extensive work that makes it possible for political scientists to build out our own field in more imaginative, culturally sophisticated ways as we study the strange new reality that is now American politics. While I have read widely about the 1930s across disciplines and conducted my own primary research, much of this book stands on secondary research, and indeed, on the shoulders of many giants in twentieth-century history and social science.³

Famous political observers of the past warned us to take heed of our history, our social life, our cultural sensibilities, our prejudices, our habits, and our flaws as we thought about the public and public opinion. Public opinion is, they argued, a morass of high-minded ideals and the messy realities of the social world on the ground. There is nothing, they argued, more important to understanding American democracy than illuminating what the public is, why public opinion moves as it does, and how both matter in self-governance.

This is not to say that presidents, Congress, or parties don’t matter; of course they do. Yet the character of all institutions is shaped by public opinion, whatever we say that is. It is an unfortunate reality that our institutions are in fact built upon the most difficult-to-understand thing of all—the people and their sentiments. No institution or force in democracy is more foundational, more muddled, or more fluid than public opinion, the uneven ground everything else in democracy is built upon.

So: we were warned about the intensity of focus and imaginative forms of observance we would need to undertake in assessing the evolution of opinion in our democracy. For example, Lord Bryce, the British scholar and ambassador who traveled throughout America in the late nineteenth century, shared the sentiment of John Steinbeck’s fearless matriarch Ma Joad: The public and its sentiments are the foremost features of our democracy, and they are reflective of real, often perplexing lives. A refined gentleman observer of the very highest British social class saw precisely what Steinbeck did decades later, channeling an Okie on her grueling journey west to California: culture and public opinion were manifest in the everyday activities of the people and not only during political campaigns or election years. We will never know public opinion through vote totals, horse-race polling, rally sizes, or fleeting (if harrowing) internet traffic by political activists or conspiracy theorists; these are transient. They will always need to be studied, but within the perspective of more lasting or engrained aspects of cultural evolution.

Both Steinbeck and Bryce had followed a previous observer, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville. In his writings during the years before the Civil War Tocqueville drew a portrait of a public to be feared and exalted—respected for its organic wisdom, for its defects, and for its sheer force. The fluid composition of the American public itself and its social tendencies were hard to pin down, but it was worth trying: Even if murky, public opinion made men and institutions great or could destroy them on a whim. He saw that the earliest settlers and the newcomers were a diverse crew, a mind-bogglingly rich assembly of people, coming from all directions to stake their claim or avoid persecution. It was an awesome thing to behold, that engine driving the so-called American experiment. The experiment was conducted in a gritty laboratory where Native Americans were crushed and the most brutal forms of human bondage were perfectly acceptable in the eyes of so many. The nation evolved; its people came together, came apart, and argued constantly about the nature of America. In any case, Tocqueville was certain that their leaders would do well to keep far more than a finger on the pulse of the people.

Tocqueville and Bryce undertook arduous journeys on horseback and via steamboat, stagecoach, and eventually locomotive. Tocqueville traveled extensively, mostly east of the Mississippi. Bryce went farther, and, in his role as British ambassador to the United States, visited every state. Their two masterworks covering American institutions, founding documents, laws, politics, sentiments, and tendencies—Democracy in America and The American Commonwealth—stood as the most comprehensive and candid assessments of a new nation, written with the special sensibilities of outsiders. After Bryce wrote The American Commonwealth in the late nineteenth century, however, there was an odd and quite astounding lull in generating big ideas and theories about the public and public opinion in America. For decades no driven intellectual, with a bent for keen analytic writing at least, traveled the nation by boat, horseback, or automobile trying to discern the general state of a nation ruled by its varied people.

Until the 1930s, that is, when all of a sudden the nature of the people seemed critically important to many parties—from President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hollywood studios to journalists, municipal leaders, educators, artists, and writers. We simply had to understand the public and its sentiments to try and make sense of the chaos all around. It was the decade of Ma Joad’s escape westward in the midst of the worst economic moment Americans had ever seen. There was an extended, catastrophic series of droughts throughout an enormous section of the west, bank collapses everywhere, staggering unemployment levels, and, by the end of the decade, a growing, ominous sense that the Great War had not been the end of horrific foreign entanglements but was only the beginning. How could a democracy survive the doom evident all around? Who are the people, what drives them, and what do they think? Would they—ever again—believe a president’s rhetoric, trust the government, buy newly invented consumer goods, or fight for their country and its institutions when democracy was serving them so poorly?

I argue that the 1930s are the most important years in understanding American public opinion as we know it today. To all people living during the period, it seemed that they inhabited an extraordinary moment, no matter their role: analyst, entertainer, persuader, or simple American citizen. And it was. So much happened in the 1930s. There was the overwhelming and riveting experience of the Depression, the omnipresence of a charismatic president, the rapid diffusion of our first national broadcast media, the terrifying rise of totalitarianism abroad, and the ceaseless efforts of American industry to solidify a potent consumer culture. The latter seized our attention through new forms of intensive advertising and marketing, shaping the buying public we still are today.

The public and public opinion as we know them now are products of an astonishingly dark moment in American history—dark, formidable, and robust. We are still trapped in the web of ideas about the people—about us—formed in the 1930s, even as we live in a different sort of volatile economy, during a disastrous pandemic we don’t yet fully understand, and in a far different media environment than early broadcasters could ever have imagined. In the chapters that follow, I argue that our contemporary notion of public opinion—how we see its character, the assumptions we make about it, and the dangers it poses—was born during the Great Depression and born there for a reason. Put another way, this is an origin story, an archeology of public opinion as an idea—a profound idea that matters. The bones we uncover in our dig are awfully jumbled, but they are the ones we have.

In our own time we are so polarized on so many dimensions that we can’t help but wonder: Are we even an American people or a public? Were we ever? One of the foremost cultural historians of the twentieth century, Warren Susman, pinpointed the 1930s as the moment we—not actively meaning to—somehow became a people, and here I provide more and varied evidence for his case. I also argue that the public (my conceptual focus here) was a body formed in quite grand but highly problematic fashion, something Susman would likely have agreed with had he lived to see the politics of the 2020s. It was in the 1930s that we were forced together as a public, fighting among ourselves, yet celebrated incessantly in popular culture. We were told that we were a public, from the poetry of Carl Sandburg (The People, Yes) to the movies of a brilliant and intensely ideological Frank Capra. That director’s enormously popular films praised John Doe and Mr. Jefferson Smith, average Americans, naive and good-natured. They were characters that came to the fore not as great or supremely talented men but simply as standard bearers for the honest and cohesive people. It was Professor Susman who found a cruder but equally effective messenger in Ma Joad: The poor folks, the common people, are as deeply defiant and genuinely American as they are wise.

As Susman put it, the 1930s were quite simply the heyday of the people.⁴

But Why, Exactly, Do the 1930s Still Matter?

The 1930s were the authentic birthplace of modern American public opinion. Multiple, quite remarkable forces stand out from that period: the compelling character of FDR’s communicative leadership, the meteoric rise of professional pollsters, the pervasive messaging from America’s industrial giants and their proponents (national and municipal), the exhilarating effects of radio at home and in the workplace, the appeals of early infotainment, and the fascinating start of self-help movements. All of these forces were manifest in wildly different forms—best-selling books, broadcast programs, films, speeches, advertising campaigns, survey data, and World’s Fairs in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. And all these forces foreshadowed, shaped, and twisted the nature of public opinion. In our time, we see some of the more worrisome lasting effects. By understanding the context of their emergence, we add new dimensions to our picture of political culture nearly one hundred years ago, and as important, we trace and dissect the continuing dangers we face in conceptualizing public opinion.

The 1930s was one of our most profoundly trying decades. Only a few years before, during the 1920s, Americans felt the thrilling end of a brutal war and the excitement of a booming consumer economy. But the mood was ruined in short order by an apocalyptic economic collapse and another looming world war. Along with the Civil War period, the 1930s scarred and defined us like no other decade. As so many historians have argued, the years of the Great Depression will always somehow be here, deeply engrained in law, in our array of government departments, in our social welfare benefit structure, in the practices of advertising and marketing. And the 1930s are literally built into our observable infrastructure through the sheer number of public buildings, bridges, roads, and forests in every region of the country.

We have, thankfully, extensive photography, murals, literature, music, correspondence, and precious oral histories all funded by the New Deal. There was even an impressive series of state guidebooks compiled from 1937 through 1941 by armies of writers commissioned by Roosevelt’s Federal Writers’ Project. It was a project that underscored the unity of the people across a vast land. The books inspired middle-class Americans to hit the open road and told them where to go in each of the forty-eight states, who lived there and why, and what to see, eat, and experience.⁵

Yet these creative, practical, artistic, and literary projects, meant to inspire, also grappled with the unavoidably grim nature of current events. It was, after all, the era of rising brutal dictatorships and natural disasters. The cultural historian Lawrence Levine put it well:

America’s mind has seldom strayed too far from that year [1929] of trauma and the decade of depression that followed it. Every economic setback since the Second World War has brought inevitable comparisons with, and pervasive fears of, a return to the conditions that prevailed during the Great Depression. The thirties have become one of the most essential criteria by which we measure our well-being and security.⁶

The sheer misery of the Depression is always with us, in part because scenes of it are so often shown on television and film. There is astoundingly good documentation of American trauma from coast to coast—from urban unemployment and bread lines to desolate, dusty, rural poverty. These agonies were captured in song and prose, in fiction and journalism, but perhaps most powerfully by Walker Evans and other talented photographers of the day, Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, and Margaret Bourke-White among them.⁷

Compounding the anxieties, so visually stunning, was a deep insecurity, a fear of starvation and illness that remains despite a mythology (built by Franklin Roosevelt himself along with his allies) that the New Deal spirit would somehow conquer fear. Fear itself is something we can control if we see things through a proper lens. But the 1930s threw us off balance, and we never quite regained it. We say so often that America is an experiment, yet the 1930s showed us vividly what a failed experiment looks like. The experiment could end with an economy destroyed and a people destroyed as well. Those images so deep in our collective memory don’t just go away.

Figure 1.1. Lining up for a meal. We have seen so many haunting images of men waiting for food and work during the Depression that they are deeply engrained in the American consciousness. Photographs of lines during the period, taken by journalists, federally supported professionals, and amateurs are numerous because they so efficiently communicate the stunning scale of neediness in urban settings. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

In the 1930s terror was felt everywhere, not only in the destitute urban tenement houses, in shanties under bridges where people sought shelter, or on the dilapidated front porches of the South and the Midwest. The economic downturn battered dreams of the middle class, the folks who thought they were doing pretty well in what had been a ceaselessly expanding nation just a few years before. And so people turned their hopes to President Roosevelt, elected in 1932. Roosevelt and his allies were powerful, with the authority to subsidize industries, build programs, and, critically, feed the hungry. Others, like the Radio Priest, Father Charles Coughlin, used the new broadcast medium of radio to argue their own platforms for overcoming the Depression. And still others ignored the church and government, instead promoting human agency and individual gumption as ways to buck up the national mood. Volumes about wars, travel, and myriad nonfiction works were best sellers during the Depression, but books designed to map how Americans could navigate hard times successfully, protect themselves, relax, and enjoy life were consumed with vigor too. Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) did exceedingly well in sales and still does, yet there were other types of social guidebooks like Marjorie Hillis’s Orchids on Your Budget: Or Live Smartly on What You Have (1937), Roger Babson’s Cheer Up! Better Times Ahead (1932), and Edmund Jacobson’s You Must Relax: A Practical Method of Reducing the Strains of Modern Living (1934).⁸ They sold because everyone was asking the same questions: What is an average person supposed to do, practically speaking, in the face of national trauma and hardship? And what does it mean to be an American when you can’t buy what you want, appear the way you’d like, entertain in style, or merely cope in a world where you struggle to feed your family?

Towering over all the filmmakers, radio broadcasters, and self-help pioneers was the reality and the fantasy of a New Deal, in all of its flawed majesty. It was a set of programs but also a flamboyant American promise: that a nation in time of need might be preserved by the federal government itself, working toward cohesion with great humanitarianism. When things were bad enough, the American president and Congress would and should step in to help the desperate, with the enormous authority to move massive resources and establish new institutions, institutions that cared about the people. As historian Richard Hofstadter wrote when he looked back from his university perch in 1961, the New Deal sensibility was

a kind of pervasive tenderness for the underdog, for the Okies, the sharecroppers, the characters in John Steinbeck’s novels, the subjects who posed for the FSA [Farm Security Administration] photographers, for what were called, until a revulsion set in, the little people. . . . Where Progressivism had capitalized on a growing sense of the ugliness under the successful surface of American life, the New Deal flourished on a sense of the human warmth and the technological potentialities that could be found under the surface of its inequities and its post-depression poverty.⁹

Historian Jefferson Cowie noted recently that key to understanding the unique nature of the period was the new emphasis on collective economic rights.¹⁰ Cowie sees empathy for the Forgotten Man as a missing piece in American political thought: Even before the coming of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, the New Deal has been metaphor, analogy, political principle, and guiding light for all that must be returned to the progressive side of American politics.¹¹

Another major reason why the 1930s are so important is how determinative they became for our alliances, our stature, and our behavior as a nation. Ira Katznelson argues that fear overwhelmed American culture on all dimensions, but that Roosevelt did not somehow crush or bury fears. Instead they became central to our world outlook and the driver of our actions as we entered the war and long after. The 1930s forced us to question our confidence about democracy as the best way, relative to authoritarian systems:

With the boundaries and capacities of liberal democracy in question . . . fear defined the context within which political action in the United States proceeded. . . . Fateful and transformative, New Deal decisions were more fundamental, more likely to be irrevocable. What was unclear was whether America’s political institutions could tame fear and produce tolerable risk at least as well as the dictatorships.¹²

Basic human suffering, uncertainty that democratic government could solve problems, and the seeming widespread, global appeal of dictators and demagogues unsettled us. These particular fears emerged at the same time as notions of a resilient, admirable, honest American public (those good common people in Capra’s film, who believed Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith over a corrupt US Congress). It was in the 1930s that fear and anxiety were baked into notions of the public itself, but somehow, hopes and optimism were baked in as well. Fear and optimism stood in high, constant tension with each other. On the one hand, we had much to fear—for ourselves, our families, and our communities. On the other hand, if we held tight to our pioneering spirit and a kindly federal government (Hofstadter’s empathy and sense of human warmth), perhaps we’d make it through the darkness?¹³ This contradictory mix of sentiments characterized a struggling public in the1930s, without doubt.

When a nation is faltering in the face of horrendous economic decline there are threats to democracy from all sides, but in the 1930s, there was no need to imagine alternative systems that might challenge our own. Those alternatives were blossoming right in front of us. A surge toward fascism or communism was believed quite possible for America, and it loomed as a phantom over a struggling federal government, over our belief in capitalism, and over the entire culture. People from all walks of life worried aloud about the imminent annihilation of the United States by other ideological systems. There was melodrama, wildly effective persuasion, and danger presented by nationally prominent demagogic leaders: Governor (then Senator) Huey Long of Louisiana coming from the left and the immensely popular antisemitic Father Coughlin of Michigan coming from the right. These were merely the most flamboyant public threats to President Roosevelt’s vision. As the historian Jon Meacham recently reminded us, there was even a bizarre but real threat from wealthy New Yorkers, who joined the radical fringe, hoping to somehow vanquish Roosevelt. A cadre of men from Wall Street designed a plot to have retired Marine major general Smedley Butler raise an army and capture the federal government. It was the Wall Street Putsch, and the goal was an establishment of a fascist state, one presumably more friendly to the economic elite.¹⁴ Alas Butler was a poor choice, as he turned around and revealed the plot to the FBI. It was serious, and as Congressman John McCormack of Massachusetts noted later, anything was possible given the panicked climate of the times, the frustration with the downward slide of America, and irrational flailing in all directions.

Figure 1.2. Elm Grove, Oklahoma. Dorothea Lange and the photographers of the Farm Security Administration enabled America to see precisely how grim life in rural counties had become. It was extraordinarily important because most city folks and political leaders in urban areas—Roosevelt’s brain trust included—couldn’t easily gauge the real texture of rural poverty many other ways. This photograph was taken in Elm Grove, a town in the Ozarks, in 1936. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

There were fears of dictators and real political plots, and the 1930s were a hotbed for conspiratorial thinking, something resurgent in our own time. Hofstadter famously wrote about what he called the paranoid style in American politics—a long-standing feeling among some Americans that they are persecuted by wily forces trying to gain power and money in nefarious ways. It is a style of mind where individuals are not paranoid in a clinical sense, but in a cultural one: They feel as though while they are patriotic, loyal, and unselfish, there are other people and institutions out to destroy their way of life. Paranoid fantasies have drawn the attention of millions, whether they were fears of the Illuminati in the late eighteenth century, anti-Masonic paranoia in the early nineteenth century, major finance conspiracies in the 1890s about gold merchants, conspiracies about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and so forth. In our day of an internet free to all, it is far easier to spread conspiracies, and so they have become a defining aspect of American politics, even within mainstream political parties (e.g., President Trump’s warnings about a deep state intent on undermining his administration). It was during the 1930s, Hofstadter notes, that paranoid thinking reached a climax: FDR’s New Deal was alleged to put so much of the economy under federal control that it would be easy for socialists and communists to take over the entire apparatus of government. Importantly, Hofstadter notes that the enemy is always sinister, always out to wreak havoc. Destruction is imminent. He wrote:

The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a vast or gigantic conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give-and-take, but an all-out crusade.¹⁵

One need only look at any newspaper or tune into cable news or the internet to find numerous conspiracies of this world-historical magnitude running rampant in American politics. It is in the 1930s that the paranoid style was perfected in its general outlines, used by members of the major political parties, and accessible to the average citizen simply by tuning in to hear the Radio Priest.¹⁶ Or one could go to the local cinema to see a new genre of films about the enemy within—corrupt police, district attorneys, and news media.¹⁷ Conspiracies in American history typically present a dichotomy: It’s us (genuine Americans) versus the un-American people and organizations committed to the destruction of democracy and culture.

While this is not a book about conspiracies, it does force the right questions for this and any meditation about American public opinion. Who are Americans, psychically speaking? Are they rightfully paranoid? Are they dupes? Or do they have that basic, rational, friendly can-do purity you see in a Norman Rockwell scene—characters who could never really go that far awry? All these matters loomed larger than ever in the 1930s, and so they are woven through the chapters of this book in myriad ways. Authors, artists, politicians, journalists, and citizens themselves struggled with defining what was called at the time the American Way. A near-constant self-interrogation about the essential characteristics of Americans was driven in part by the sheer number of immigrants now embedded everywhere, serving as perpetual reminders that the questions mattered. In her groundbreaking book Inventing the American Way, historian Wendy Wall pinpoints the 1930s as a truly remarkable moment when there was, simultaneously, great fear of diversity and the most grandiose celebration of how diversity strengthens our union. We are defined by what we are not—fascists, socialists, communists, antisemites, and fascists—but coming up with what we are has been an overheated conversation that began in earnest