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Popular Culture in the 1930s
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12612 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1987 |
2,955 Words |
| Author
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Paul Fussell
Paul Fussell is professor of English at the University of
Pennsylvania. His books include The Great War and Modern
Memory, which won the National Book Award in 1976; Abroad:
British Literary Traveling between the Wars; and most
recently, Class: A Guide through the American Status System. |
HOPES AND ASHES
The Birth of Modern Times, 1929-1939
Alice Goldfarb Marquis
New York: The Free Press, 1986
274 pp., $22.50
If you can identify Lum and Abner, if you can remember when van Gogh was virtually unknown in the United States, and if you get a clear image of a great white tack and ball when you hear the words trylon and perisphere, you especially will savor Hopes and Ashes: The Birth of Modern Times, 1929-1939. The book is a brisk if spotty social history of the 1930s emphasizing advertising and publicity as the nourishers of popular culture.
Even if you don't date from the thirties, you may be interested to learn that the inspiration for the separate sections of Time magazine (Medicine, Music, Science, Art) was the division of learning among departments at Yale, where Time founder Henry Luce went to school. Or that when Amos and Andy suggested on their radio show that they could use a typewriter, listeners sent them 1,880 machines. That's the sort of data presented with laudable brio by Alice Marquis, a professor of History at the University of California, San Diego.
This book is Marquis' answer to the question, what did people do for distraction and unstrenuous self-improvement before television? "While woolgathering in the library stacks," she says, "I was suddenly struck by the great number of magazines that had died during the Thirties," magazines like Delineator, Judge, Scriber's, the Century, and the Review of Reviews. Her curiosity led her to a large part of the answer: market research and advertising dethroned these magazines in favor of those accurately aimed at newly rich "consumption communities."
A new sophistication - cynicism, some would say - in opinion polling and cunning in advertising are what generated the popular culture of the thirties, when Americans were persuaded that consuming was virtually a patriotic duty and that Halitosis, B.O., and Pink Tooth Brush were grave but luckily avoidable threats to happiness. Popular culture rose not upward from the folk but for the first time descended downward from the commercial fantasy-merchants. To the horror of the genteel, the folk loved it.
Radio
Radio began in the
...
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