The Life and Death of American Communes

  

This survey is not meant to be comprehensive – other references exist for that.  Here enough data are presented to suggest the rich and varied history of American communes, to venture a few generalizations, and to pose some questions. 

 

     Nearly every imagined utopia includes social ownership of the means of production.  Yet attempts to put this appealing idea into practice have foundered.  Small voluntary groups, intentional communities for whom communism in the sense of sharing important assets is an ideal, have espoused lofty goals, but they have often been unstable, with many lasting only a few years.  The exceptional cases with greater longevity are often those with a religious or other authoritarian base.  Meanwhile, many countries that call themselves communist have only replicated the class stratification inherent in capitalism while eliminating democracy in order to maintain the power of the new ruling class.   

     In spite of a history of failure, communes have significant inherent advantages.  The substantial savings that result from the sharing of expenses would surely make collectivism far more common, were it not for the clash of egos, the tendency toward hierarchy, and the rapacious greed that reinforce individualistic systems.  Replacing competitive rivalry with the secure support of a cohesive community could be a powerful inducement to communal living, but such promise has rarely materialized, as many groups have bickered and splintered early on.  This instability has been heightened by the fact that unconventional living arrangements have been always so marginal in America that many participants willing to experiment have been religiously obsessed, eccentric, or artistic, not perhaps the most representative, steady, or industrious of citizens.

     America experienced a great flowering of communes in the nineteenth century, most of which lasted only a short time.  Their inspiration came for the most part from three sources: the Bible, utopian socialists, and humanistic philosophies seeking to free people from concerns about supporting themselves in order that they might devote themselves to aesthetic or intellectual interests.  

     Though ignored by most Christians, the Biblical basis for communism is explicit.  Acts 4: 32 declares that early believers retained no private property, “but they had all things common” with the result that none lacked for anything as “distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” (Acts 4:34).  Over the centuries small groups have tried to realize this principle in practice including religious houses such as monasteries which present a highly disciplined model of communal life.  In nineteenth-century America such groups included the True Inspirationists of Amana, the Oneida Perfectionists, the Shakers, the Separatists of Zoar, and many others. 

     The Amana Colonies in Iowa were among the most successful American communes.  Founded in 1855 by German immigrants of the radical pietist sect, the Community of True Inspiration, which believed they had modern prophets in their midst, the group prospered for almost eighty years.  Nineteenth century observers noted that their villages had no unemployment, no poverty, no crime, and sufficient resources to provide employment to their neighbors as well as charity to poor outsiders who happened to pass through.  Residents of Amana held all the land and buildings in common; they ate in great dining halls and were governed by a council of elders.  With the Great Change, completed in 1932, Amana was reformed as a joint-stock company with each resident receiving shares.  No new prophets had emerged for a half century by that time, and many of the originally severe principles such as the group’s hostility to marriage and children, had relaxed.  Their use of German had been a factor both uniting the residents and separating them from their neighbors until Harding’s Language Proclamation, a reflection of WWI xenophobia, forbade their use of it in the public sphere.  Meanwhile, automobiles, radio, and movies were eroding the colonies’ isolation.  As long as the residents were unanimous in their world-view, they worked together in  harmony; but when dissent became possible, their cooperation weakened and dissolved [1].  Thus the history of the Amana Colonies illustrates both the factors that can sustain a commune and the dissolution likely to follow the loss of a shared focus. 

     Another nineteenth century religiously based commune was Oneida, founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 and lasting until 1881.  Residents were Christian perfectionists, that is, they believed that Christ had returned in 70 C.E. with the destruction of the temple and that a Christian could find perfection in this world, not just in the next.  The group practiced group marriage – Noyes is the first user of the term “free love” [2] -- as well as common ownership of the means of production, and farmed in addition to manufacturing a variety of products so successfully that at one point they employed hundreds of outsiders and spawned four new communities [3].   The community declined when Noyes sickened and died, and his agnostic son  proved an unsatisfactory replacement.  Even with their transgressive sexual practices, the people of Oneida managed to flourish for a generation but only as long as their strong leader was at the helm. 

     The Shakers, or United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, as they called themselves, believed that Christ’s second coming would be heralded by a woman and they regarded their leader Ann Lee as a "manifestation of Divine light."  Though she died, by the end of the eighteenth century the group had adopted new leaders who announced by 1793 that property was to be held in common among them.  Though they required celibacy of all, they increased in numbers, eventually founding eighteen sizable communities with numerous smaller offshoots.  They sold highly-regarded wooden furniture as well as herbs, brushes and brooms, and were highly successful pioneers in selling garden seeds.  Like other religiously motivated communes, the coming of the twentieth century found their spiritual energy waning, while the requirement of celibacy meant they could gain new members only though conversion or the adoption of orphans.  Today three Shakers remain at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village in Maine, one of whom was only recently accepted.

     The community of Zoar in Ohio was established by pietist immigrants from  Germany who in 1819 established a system of collective ownership of the means of production.  Benefiting from a profitable land sale to the Ohio and Erie Canal, they gained a solid financial base and ultimately owned over ten thousand acres of land.  They expanded into small industry, building an iron forge, a sawmill, woolen and cotton mills, and even operating as an area bank where outsiders could deposit money or secure loans.  They were democratic, electing leaders by popular vote by both men and women, though most looked to their charismatic leader Michael Bimeler for guidance.  After his death the community in 1853 seemed to lose much of its energy, though they remained communal until 1898.

     Among the many other religious groups that established communes in  the nineteenth century was yet another pietist group from Germany, the Hutterites who came to the United States  and settled mostly in Montana, South Dakota, and Canada in the 1870s.  They currently have fifteen communities supported primarily by agriculture. 

     Christian mystic Wilhelm Keil founded Bethel in Missouri in 1844.  By 1855 they had 650 acres of farmland and a distillery whose products were in demand among their neighbors.  Eighteen years earlier Keil had led a group from Bethel west in covered wagons to Oregon where they established the Aurora community in 1855.  Both endured past Keil’s death in 1877 until 1883 when collective ownership ceased and the assets were distributed. 

     In 1805 Johann Georg Rapp, a theosophist and Swedenborgian established the Harmony Society with four hundred followers who had left the Lutheran Church and supported themselves with both agriculture and manufacturing, growing in their several locations to over eight hundred members before a third of their members broke away in 1832 including many younger members who objected to Rapp’s recommendation of celibacy.  The group finally dissolved in 1905. 

     Adin Ballou, an early advocate of Christian socialism and anarchism established the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts which lasted from 1843 until 1857.  Though religious in its orientation, this group was more broadly political than many, advocating anarchism, temperance, abolitionism and women's rights, as well as spiritualism.

     Many more thoroughly secular communes were founded as well.  While Christians found a clear Biblical mandate for communism, non-religious thinkers also provided a range of  ideological bases.  During the Renaissance Montaigne had developed the notion of the bon sauvage and in the eighteenth century Rousseau speculated that competitive greed had produced all human suffering [4].  In the nineteenth century some pioneers in the new study of anthropology concluded that early peoples had long lived under a communist system.  The most significant proponent of this view was Frederick Engels [5] whose The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State outlined a fall, resembling that of Adam and Eve in Christianity, from a peaceful state of mutual support and protection to the rapacious and competitive greed of the slave, feudal, and capitalist systems that followed.  In this context a number of what Marx would call utopian socialists – Owen, Fourier, Cabet, Saint-Simon, Bellamy –  set forth plans for creating communist societies not through revolution, but by voluntary associations whose superiority would eventually convince all to participate.  Well over a hundred such “intentional communities” were founded during the nineteenth century in the United States [6].

     Robert Owen, a British textile manufacturer who became a leading early advocate of socialist cooperatives, came to the United States in 1824 and purchased the failing Rappite establishment at Harmony, Indiana.  Owens possessed sufficient resources and prestige that he addressed the American president and congress the following year, declaring that his cooperative system would signal "a new empire of peace and good will to man" leading to "that state of virtue, intelligence, enjoyment, and happiness,...which has been foretold by the sages of past times," fulfilling thereby the destiny of the human race [7].  A good number of Owenite communities were launched in the following decade including Washoba (1825-1829), founded by Fanny Wright for emancipated slaves to earn money with the eventual view of going to Haiti or back to Africa while being managed by white trustees.  The group in Kendal, Ohio, lasted a similar period, while perhaps a dozen others survived for shorter periods.  

   In the early 1840s American disciples of Fourier, in a movement supported by a national organization, the American Union of Associationists and by Horace Greeley, the influential editor of the New-York Tribune, launched more than thirty communes, called phalanxes, though most lasted only a few years.  Perhaps the most successful of these projects  was the Wisconsin Phalanx at Ceresco founded by Warren Chase which functioned from 1844-1850, though adherents continued to advocate controversial ideas such as religious free thought and free love until they were attacked by an irate mob.  A noteworthy later Fourierist community was Silkville, Kansas, established in 1869 by Ernest de Boissière and lasting until his return to France in 1892. 

     Among the more successful non-religious communes were those of the Icarians whose ideology was based on Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie.  In 1848 a group of his followers whose socialism had much in common with that of Robert Owen embarked to establish a colony in  the United States.  They established a number of communities in five states and experienced factional splits over the years, but some of their settlements lasted for considerable periods: forty-six years in Corning, Iowa; eighteen in New Icaria, Iowa; eleven in Nauvoo.  In that location by 1878 there  were reportedly eighty-three residents who adequately supported themselves with agricultural operations.  A visitor describes them as “free from material embarrassment” and standing upon a “solid basis,” [8] while operating under a pure democracy in which decisions are made by the voting. 

     Admirers of Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backwards established the Brotherhood of the Cooperative Commonwealth and a journal called Industrial Freedom to further their egalitarian goals.  Their Equality colony in Skagit County, Washington lasted from 1897 until 1907 when factional disputes resulted in violence.  Four other colonies had been established in  the Puget Sound region including one at Burley, Washington in 1898 which endured until 1912. 

     Other secular utopian organizations included several anarchist communities such as that at Home, Washington (founded in 1898 by George H. Allen, Oliver A. Verity, and B. F. O'Dell) which changed to private ownership in 1909 following attacks and internal dissension over both political and moral grounds.  The Socialist Community of Modern Times, founded by Josiah Warren and Stephen Pearl Andrews, in Brentwood, New York survived from 1851 until 1864.

     A les well-defined third group of communards might be called counter-cultural, like the hip movement of the 1960s.  The most celebrated is certainly Brook Farm which attracted some of the greatest writers in America for a time.  Founded by George and Sophia Ripley in 1841 with “transcendentalist ideals,” the community was supported by a farm as well as a school that drew tuition-paying students.  At various times Brook Farm boasted Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Theodore Parker among its residents.  A similar group under the leadership of Amos Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane started the Fruitlands Commune in 1843, but that venture lasted only seven months.  The Ruskin Colony in Tennessee (1894-1901) was founded by Julius Augustus Wayland.  Among its ventures was a traveling band before the group dissolved amid disputes over free love and financial stress.

     Many of the trends evident in this nineteenth century history persist through the twentieth. Religious motivations continue to be prominent in several of the most viable communities.  A twentieth century German Christian sect, the Bruderhof, was founded in 1920 by Eberhard Arnold.  Though its own origins are associated with university youth and their movement of the 1920s exemplified by the Wandervögel, the Bruderhof long sought to unite with the Hutterites, several times attempting a merger only to split again.  Today the Bruderhof has twenty-four communities and operates a number of thriving businesses, among the most successful being the manufacture of toys and a charter jet service used by businessmen and celebrities.

     The Children of God (now The Family International) was founded in 1968 by David Berg, also called “King,” “The Last End-time Prophet", and "Moses,” is a cult that combines evangelical Christianity with the trappings of the hip youth movement and hypersexuality.  Many members of he public came into contact with a child of God when she approached him on the street to invite him to her commune in an authorized practice called “flirty fishing.”  The group's activities persist today in spite of decades of allegations of physical and sexual abuse.

     Other twentieth century Christian communes were founded by Dorothy Day’s anarchist Catholic Worker movement, whose members live communally and operate a number of collective farms while performing charitable works and advocating pacifism and social justice.   

     Two of the most long-lasting American religion-based communes practiced forms of Hinduism.  Lama was begun by Robert and Barbara Durkee and Jonathan Altman under the spiritual direction of Baba Ram Dass, formerly Timothy Leary’s colleague Richard Alpert, who had become a disciple of Neem Karoli Baba, a devotee of Hanuman, though the present approach to spiritual practice at Lama is eclectic.  The commune is off-grid and derives its income from both agriculture and summer programs for outsiders.  

     The Krishna Consciousness group under the leadership of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founded New Vrindaban in West Virginia in 1968 which has managed to continue operations in spite of serious scandals including fraud and murder by cult leaders.    

     Among the very few twentieth century communes with a political ideology was Jersey Homesteads, a Jewish collective farm developed by Benjamin Brown who also started a similar group in Utah.  Meant to resettle unemployed garment workers, Jersey Homesteads aimed to have both agricultural and manufacturing arms.  In spite of support from Albert Einstein and Ben Shahn who painted a mural for the school.  Opposed by the garment workers’ union but supported by the Roosevelt administration, the project lasted from 1936-1940. 

   Among the most successful communes without a well-defined ideology, The Farm was founded by Stephen Gaskin in Tennessee in 1971 with a hundred followers.  Though in the active management of the commune Gaskin was advised by  a Council of Elders and later a Board of Directors, he remained a commanding influence until his death in 2014.

     The East Wind Community was established in 1974 in the Missouri Ozarks by people interested in  the ideas of behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner.  They continue today to support themselves through a number of enterprises, including the sale of sandals, nut, butters, and hammocks. 

     Drop City was an early commune of the second “hip” wave.  Established in 1960 by four students as a venue for avant-garde art to which all were welcome, the location became known primarily for the buildings constructed of junked cars.  They never had any plan for an economic base, and the policy declaring the commune "forever free and open to all people" attracted many transients.  Drop City’s public face reached a peak in June of 1967 when crowds attended a Festival of Joy on the site, leaving founder Gene Bernofsky so disgruntled he remained in his dwelling and departed never to return at the event’s conclusion, though he later said that he had expected to spend his life there.  The other original members left during the next two years, abandoning the property to whoever wished to stop off there.  By 1973 the location was virtually unoccupied, though it was not until 1979 that the land was sold. 

     Another arts-oriented “liberated zone” was Druid Heights in Marin County founded in 1954  by anarchist lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow.  Alan Watts, Kenneth Rexroth, and Gary Snyder spent time there before the land was acquired by the National Park Service in 1977.

     Slab City was initiated by squatters on an abandoned army base in southern California where several large-scale art installations were created.  Today the spot has become an off-grid rv park where many live – thousands during the summer -- simply to avoid rent.   

     The New Buffalo commune was founded by poets Max Finstein and Rick Klein in 1967.  Residents kept some livestock and grew crops, living in tepees and adobe huts, but never achieved anything close to self-sufficiency.  Though Finstein left after just over a year to found The Reality Construction Company, those whom remained persisted in the location until the early seventies and the land remained collective until 1982 when Rick Klein assumed ownership.  In 1990 the New Buffalo Bed & Breakfast, called “the Far-Out Inn” by the Los Angeles Times, opened.

     Communism has several powerful advantages over private ownership.  Cooperation is surely a key to the enormous success of homo sapiens.  In prehistoric times for hunter-gatherers sharing was the rule.  In economies based on farming and manufacturing, collective ownership of the means of production leads to production based on people’s needs rather than profit.  Living collectively is significantly more efficient than each family unit looking after its own dining and housing.  Further, one might expect a strong emotional advantage in the entire community’s striving for mutual support rather than competitive rivalry.

     Yet communes have typically failed to thrive.  From the histories of the chief attempts in America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, certain significant factors emerge.  The anomalous position of such groups surrounded by a free enterprise economy multiplies their challenges, though this disadvantage is difficult to quantify.  “Forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old,” in the language of the Preamble to the  I. W. W. constitution, presents problems in  a capitalist environment.  The business relations of communal societies required their dealing with profit-oriented railroads, wholesalers, shippers, and meatpackers, and, just as small farmers have always been at the mercy of banks and corporations in spite of owning their own means of production, isolated groups have few resources to compete with corporations many times their size possessing immense wealth and political influence.

     The pressures of operating within a non-socialist, indeed, often an anti-socialist country were not financial alone.  In a land where private property is to many a divinely-protected meant that the collective alternative had little appeal for many Americans whom perceived it as “foreign,” “un-American.”  This suspicion was bolstered by the fact that, for instance, many of the religious communards of the nineteenth century were German immigrants and an outsize proportion of Communist Party membership during the ‘thirties was Jewish.

   A major challenge for intentional communities is always attracting and retaining residents.  During the nineteenth century, for many Americans even sustainable subsistence farming was an aspiration and the promise of regular meals attractive.  Similarly, in the twentieth century, though hip communes drew many college-educated youth, they were also an alternative for homeless people, runaways and the addicted.  The more prosperous communes provided a secure material base, often accompanied by high-sounding religious or social ideals, yet once other options became more viable, the appeal of collective farms suffered.  Young people who wished to make their fortune or even simply to live in a big city were drawn away by the many options available in contemporary society.

     What might substitute for an authoritarian leader or a dogmatic religious belief system?  Counter-cultural enthusiasm or commitment to revolutionary ideals has not generally proven an adequate motivator.  Particularly in contemporary American culture in which affluence is the principal marker of prestige and having more than one’s neighbor is perceived as success, egalitarian systems have much to overcome.  Love for one’s partner and one’s family is considered desirable, but we have little experience with a genuine active love of community.  Even social support for the ill, needy, and aged is controversial and true economic democracy has never been considered a goal even by politicians labeled liberal.  Yet a utopia that realizes the slogan “one for all, all for one” has been conceivable to some in every generation, including a few who have been willing to try to build such a system, pioneers who may be honored if a future time ever learns better than our own to place cooperation before competition.  The positive bonds that would then join people together as members of a single family, brothers and sisters who share common interests and can best work in unison to achieve the happiness of all would then replace the waste inevitable with profit, exploitation, and internecine rivalry.  In the end Proudhon was correct in maintaining that property is theft [9], but the crime of stealing the labor of others is unlikely to be even recognized, mush less halted, in any future foreseeable from here. 

        

 

 

 

 

1.  The familiar Amana appliance brand was established in  the colonies shortly after their conversion to a capitalist corporation. 

2.  Noyes also advocated what he called “male continence,” avoiding ejaculation and pursued eugenic schemes.

3.  The Oneida silverware brand originated in the commune, but, like the case of Amana refrigerators, nation-wide commercial success occurred after the group became a corporation.   The other Noyesian communes were in Wallingford, Connecticut; Newark, New Jersey; and Putney and Cambridge, Vermont.

4.  In The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.  Engels had drawn on the work of Lewis Henry Morgan who said in The League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee or Iroquois that the native Americans “carried the principle of ‘living in common to its full extent. Whatever was taken in the chase, or raised in the fields, or gathered in its natural state by any member of the united families, enured to the benefit of all, for their stores of every description were common. They had regular hours for cooking through the whole establishment, and whatever was prepared was free to all.” (p. 318)  Kropotkin regarded early societies as anarchist rather than communist.   See his Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which uses the example of the San people of southern Africa as evidence.

5.  For Montaigne, see especially his essay “On the Cannibals.”  For Rousseau, his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men.  The “noble savage” idea is influential in Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe as well as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in America.  Even Pope found that the native Americans lacked “the Christians thirst for gold” (“An Essay on Man”). 

6.  The classic study of such communes, written by a long-time resident at Oneida who personally visited most of the sites abut which he writes is William Alfred Hinds’ American Communities (1878).  The Communistic Societies of the United States (1875) by Charles Nordhoff and John Humphrey Noyes’ History of American Socialisms (1870) are also valuable sources.  More modern references include Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680-1880 (1951).  For the twentieth century the best references are Timothy Miller Communes in America, 1975-2000 (2019) and Yaakov Oved Two Hundred Years of American Communes (1988).  The Foundation for Intentional Communities maintains a global list of collective organizations, including communes, coops, cohousing arrangements, and others.

7. William Alfred Hinds, American Communities, p. 67.

8.  Oakley C. Johnson, ed., Robert Owen in the United States (New York, 1970), p. 51.

9.  From his What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in (1840).  Proudhon was, of course, referring to the means of production, not to personal property such as clothes or books. 

Theory and Practice in Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money

 

 

     Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money is often regarded as the exemplary proletarian novel due to its author’s lifelong loyalty to the American Communist Party and his theoretical manifesto “Toward Proletarian Art” [1].  He receives thereby a secure place in literary history, but one little valued or dismissed altogether by many critics.  He is often blamed but sometimes praised for non-literary factors, the fellow travelers of the ‘thirties and since admiring him for his politics while anti-Communists are all but certain to denounce him for the same reason.  Discernment of the true merits of his work is ill-served by such a non-aesthetic and  reductive standard [2].   

     Those who think little of Gold’s fiction and regard it as mere agitprop without aesthetic value are influenced, of course, of the practice of what was officially recognized as “socialist realism” by the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 which required that fiction must be proletarian, typical, realistic, and partisan.  The policy was reinforced and tightened in the 1946 Zhdanov Doctrine which dominated Soviet culture until the fall of the USSR, resulting in the government’s acceptance of much art of a pedestrian character and suppression of more nonconformist work.

     This rigid management of the arts was far from inevitable after the Bolshevik victory.  In 1920 Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner published "The Realist Manifesto," arguing for artistic freedom and some prominent Bolsheviks, notably Trotsky, always maintained that writers should have a free hand [3].  The blossoming of certain arts, particularly poetry, film, and graphic design, before Stalin’s assumption of power implies an alternative development that might have been possible under a government calling itself communist. 

     Well before the narrow mandates that dominated Soviet art for decades, Gold published his theoretical essay “Toward Proletarian Art.”  His ideas are best understood in their original context, as a reaction to his mentor Max Eastman whose collection Colors of Life (1918) opened with a prefatory  essay on “American Ideals of Poetry.” 

     Eastman, an editor of The Masses which had declared itself an unreservedly revolutionary journal,  felt he ought to apologize for writing personal rather than political poems, acknowledging with some diffidence the “crimsoned waves” of protest against the capitalist system.  For him “the essence of life” can be found only in the personal, not in “monotonous consecration to a general principle.”  Noting the conflict between a formalist tradition in American literature descending from Poe which aims at crafting beautiful art objects and a more expressive lineage from  Whitman which for him encourages “the free expression of emotion,” he advocates for “a certain adjudication between them which a perfectly impersonal science might propose.” 

     Gold, too, in “Toward Proletarian Art,” in spite of the title, expresses an ambivalence toward explicitly political writing, unwilling to abandon either the goal of a socially revelatory literature or artistic independence.  He is able to articulate the juncture more adeptly than Eastman, however, due to his undeniably working-class origins in the tenements of the Lower East Side, which Jews Without Money describes so unforgettably. 

     Wishing no less than Eastman to strive toward the presentation of a realism of consciousness, he insists that “only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame.  The things of the world are all portals to eternity ”  For each individual “Life’s meaning was to be found only in the great or mean days between each man’s birth and death, and in the mystery and terror hovering over every human head.”  For him that nexus of experience out of which artist creation arises is centered in the circumstances of his childhood.  “All that I know of Life I learned in the tenement.”

     Thus for him there is no contradiction between the personal and the political.  His own solution is authentically individual, true to his own history while at the same time it is collective, reflecting the experience of his whole generation of immigrants.  “I would show only, if I can, what manner of vision Life has vouchsafed me, what word has descended on me in the midst of this dark pit of experience, what forms my says and nights might have taken, as they proceed in strange nebular turning towards new worlds of art.”  For him there is no gap between realism, his autobiography, and propagandizing: each requires the others.  “Only through the symbolism of the world around us and manifest in us can we draw near the fierce, deadly flame. The things of the world are all portals to eternity.”

     The limits of his position are clear in the fact that he is loath to prescribe to others.  After all, he admits that everyone has a story to tell: “Life burns in both camps, in the tenements and in the palaces, but can we understand that which is not our very own?”  To Gold each artist can only offer “the special revelation Life has given them.  I respect the suffering and creations of all artists” which are bound to be “deeper than theories.” 

     There are indications that Gold’s Communist orthodoxy was hardly absolute.  Jews Without Money in fact received a negative review from The Daily Worker which complained about the cover price and called the novel only “semi-proletarian.”  He was according to some sources an “indifferent” party member who rarely appeared at meetings and complained about their “tedium.”  He differed with colleagues who did not wish to include sports coverage in the paper, and, after denouncing swing music in accordance with the approved line, he reversed himself when many jazz fans wrote to object. 

     He is even willing to use the quasi-religious language more characteristic of mystics, Symbolists, and Aesthetes.  “Only an artist understands art,” and for that reason “to censor the poor brute’s murmurings would be sacrilege. Whatever they are, they are significant and precious, and to stifle the meanest of Life’s moods taking form in the artist would be death.”  He speaks of “holy passion” and “artist-saints” and maintains that “the Social Revolution” is “Life at its fullest and noblest,” indeed, it is “the religion of the masses.” 

     Like Eastman he pays homage to Whitman, with the sole reservation that America’s national poet saw no development beyond bourgeois democracy.  This accusation of failure to glimpse the possibility of a socialist future is, of course, accurate, and, while it makes little sense to complain of Whitman for this reason, it does indicate Gold’s values [5]. 

     “Toward Proletarian Art” opens with a description of the contemporary social turmoil as “The Apocalypse” and argues that, since “the old economic order is dying,” surely innovative forms” of art will accompany the new age.  Gold was notoriously critical of other contemporary movements, attacking not only Surrealism and the likes of Gertrude Stein but also the more manifestly humanist writing of Thorton Wilder.  Since the Romantic Era, critics had particularly praised works of introspection and experimentation, but Gold labels all such artists “self-absorbed.”  They are for him The Hollow Men [6].  Such writers, he feels “have all been sick,” as they lack “roots in the people.”  “The art ideals of the capitalistic world,” he goes on, “isolated each artist as in a solitary cell, there to brood and suffer silently and go mad. We artists of the people will not face Life and Eternity alone. We will face it from among the people. We must lose ourselves again in their sanity.” 

     In practice this meant providing a vivid account of life in the tenements, just as Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris had done earlier for other settings.  Some critics have belittled Jews Without Money as a casual unselfconscious memoir, while its admirers have often celebrated it for much the same reason.  The original review in  the New York Times described the novel as having “no story but a stirring panorama of the east side of his childhood.   with a hand as unerring as truth itself . . .  Mr. Gold has captured all of this life with its radii within the net of his words.  It has the deep shadows of a Rembrandt picture, and the high challenge of a Whitman poem.” [6]  The verisimilitude of his depiction of life on the Lower East Side is uncompromising, including its gangs and prostitutes, its anti-Semites and Jewish villains.  Social injustice is countered by the narrator’s mother’s quiet dedication to her family’s survival, while his father never loses his conviction that he can make it in America.  The story is never overdetermined.  There are no heroic radicals, no caricatured bosses, simply a life remembered, and the reader needs no more explicit justification to understand why the working poor might turn from childhood illusions like Buffalo Bill and adult ones like an imminent Messiah toward the redemptive promise of  socialism.

     Yet the books ends with a strident call for revolution in a tone different from anything which has come before. 

     O workers’ Revolution, you brought hope to me, a lonely suicidal boy.  You are the true Messiah.  You will destroy the East Side when you come, and build there a garden for the human spirit.

     O Revolution, that forced me to think, to struggle and to love.

     O great Beginning! 

     A paperback edition of Jews Without Money was published by Avon in 1965 omitted the call for revolution with which Gold concluded his novel.  The fact that this was a blatant example of censorship does not alter the fact that the book loses little without those last five sentences.  If the revolutionary imperative is not implied by the entire narration, it is an aesthetic misstep.

     Just as the conclusion of Jews Without Money seems abrupt, Gold’s theory and practice remain imperfectly harmonized.  He clearly calls for innovative artistic work to match contemporary social changes: “I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past under opposite influences.”  Like Trotsky, though, he shrinks from mandating just what new standards would look like.  Both the commitment to change and the disjunction between ideology and fiction are significant, the first to indicate the author’s passionately held values and the second to remind readers that the political and the aesthetic occupy different realms of culture and neither can dictate to the other. 

 

 

1.  Originally published in The Liberator, vol. 4,no. 2 (February, 1921).

2.  Foe an exception, see Richard Tuerk, "’Jews Without Money’ as a Work of Art,” Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-), Vol. 7, No. 1 (Spring 1988).

2.  For Trotsky, see his book Literature and Revolution.  My essay “Marxism’s Limits” discusses Trotsky’s attitude.

3.  J. Hoberman, “Mike Gold, Avant-Garde Bard of Proletarian New York,” The Nation, May 12, 2021.

4.  This sort of criticism is all to common in recent years.  See the devastating critique of the Norton edition of Emma in James Seaton’s From Plato to Post-Modernism.in which Seaton quotes a feminist criticism of Austen for failing to demonstrate that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.”

5.  This title of one of Gold’s collections of essays turns Eliot’s phrase against itself. 

6.  March 23, 1930, “Boyhood on the Old East Side; Michael Gold Puts Down His Memories of Tenement Life, Pushcart Peddlers and Gang Wars in a Vivid Autobiography.”

Expressionism in Becher’s Abschied (Farewell)

 

Endnotes are in brackets.  For the convenience of those who do not read German, I provide references in endnotes to both the München:Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987 and the Seven Seas translation of 1959.  

                                1924 portrait of Becher by Lajos Tihanyi

    My English copy, an unlikely thrift store purchase, is a 1970 edition of Johannes R. Becher’s Abschied, under the title Farewell, translated by Joan Becker under the Seven Seas imprint based in the Eastern sector of Berlin.  Founded by American Communist Gertrude Gelbin, the wife of German expatriate anti-fascist writer Stefan Heym (born Helmut Flieg) in 1958, who had left the United States in 1952 in protest of the Korean War and McCarthyism.  This company published English books by leftist authors like W. E. B. DuBois, John Reed, Christopher Caudwell, Herbert Aptheker, Philip S. Foner, and Walter Lowenfels, and classics by Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, Cooper, and Mark Twain as well as contemporary German works by Heym, Bruno Apitz, Johannes Bobrowski, and Louis Fürnberg.

*          *          *          *

     The distaste which one must feel for the dictatorial East German and Soviet regimes need not influence the evaluation of artists from these countries, even those who accommodated to tyranny.  Though most critics can see past Stalin to appreciate the virtues of Eisenstein’s movies and Shostakovich’s music, much of the literary output labeled “Socialist Realist” is today ignored.  This prejudice has resulted in the neglect of Americans worth reading (Dahlberg, Ridge, Conroy, Gold), and, even more, of Germans, Russians, and other Eastern Europeans who wrote during the Soviet era without expressing explicit dissidence.  The case of artists who actively embraced totalitarian control over the arts such as the German writer Johannes R. Becher is more troubling yet. 

     Becher is admittedly a difficult man to justify.  After a youth as an avant-gardist, rebelling against the social and aesthetic order, he became a harsh guardian of the party line.  Having written a book of lyrics titled Always in Revolt (Ewig in Aufruhr) in 1920, by 1926 he had submitted to discipline.  A critic observes, “from an intellectual anarchist he turned into a disciplined communist.” [1]  With the introduction of Zhdanov’s reductive “Socialist Realism” in 1934 his work looked ever more suspect and, a refugee in the Soviet Union, he was accused of Trotskyite tendencies and, in his own self-interest, informed on other writers.  In the last phase of his life as Cultural Minister of East Germany, the Warsaw Pact nation with perhaps the most elaborate system of surveillance and informers, he persecuted dissidents very much like himself when young.  He was perennially in shaky mental health and several times attempted suicide. In the end he renounced his lifelong Marxist allegiance in a book Das poetische Prinzip (The Poetic Principle) published only posthumously.  Yet, whatever one might think of Becher’s politics or ethics, his work remains.

     Becker’s Abschied (Farewell) is a typical semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman describing the childhood and youth of a bourgeois boy in the early years of the twentieth century up to the outbreak of World War I.  For the most part the writing is solidly within the nineteenth century Realist or Naturalist model, here modified in two ways: the author’s ideological commitment and vestiges of his Expressionist practice.  The writer’s party membership, not to mention his residence in exile in the Stalinist Soviet Union, leads to the emphasis on socialism in the book’s themes.  The book’s main character seems meant to be an Everyman, typical of his fellow-countrymen.  The radical novelist Sack says as much.

 

 “You know, what you’ve told me about yourself is a real story, an adventure story.  Write it down!  You’ll write it sometime, perhaps after many, many years.  You’re not the only one who’s taking farewell of himself, there are plenty like you, and you’ll all be needed. You could call it ‘Farewell’.  A German tragedy . . . The book will be about yourself, but it won’t be a conventional biography.”  [2]

 

     Yet the petty bourgeois Gastl makes an unlikely proletarian hero.  Far from an idealized worker, he resembles the neurotic author who had been a confused and self-doubting schoolboy with little strength of character.   The reader might wonder why the lost lad is so peculiarly susceptible to the ideas suggested by Hartinger and the Little Jew, why he is fascinated with the “Internationale,” piping up with it inappropriately, why he ultimately decides to avoid service in World War I.  He seems more in Oedipal rebellion against his father than a prospect for a revolutionary cadre.   

     This weakness becomes metafictional with the story of Fanny.  Becher himself when just short of nineteen years old had made a suicide pact with a young prostitute named Fanny Fuss.  He killed her and wounded himself severely, but his father then managed to protect him from prosecution by having him declared insane.  This incident not surprisingly obsessed him for years, but in Abschied his treatment is evasive.  Though many fictional details correspond to the historical ones, even to Fanny’s shop’s location, in the novel Fanny’s character dies at the hands of malicious others after making love with Gastl, thus erasing the issue or reducing it to a simple matter of a sordid demi-monde.  Becher’s own responsibility is absent in this fictional version, though the author’s continuing return to the incident suggests that his treatment is unsatisfactory.  He seems to share some of Hans Peter Gastl’s drifting fecklessness.

     The coterie in the radical Café Stephanie is clearly like him middle class, artists and intellectuals, many of them bohemian in habits, scarcely a promising foundation on which to build a worker’s state, though accurately reflecting Becher’s youthful associations.  Expressionism survives in Abschied only vestigially, in certain extravagantly bizarre characters such as the insane Uncle Carl and the cocaine-addicted psychoanalyst, in periodic dream fantasies and images, and in a constant existential dread lurking in the background. 

     Such moments, though intermittent, carry the narrative’s thematic burden.  In one such passage, a prolonged, visionary dream, tumbling coins gives way to a Last Judgement as familial, academic, national, and apocalyptic authority figures mingle and Hans feels his secret sins are all revealed, though receiving “bad marks” is the only specific offense mentioned.  The boy is left pleading for that change which is the book’s primary motive [3].  But what change does he have in mind?  The possibility of a socialist future is repeatedly invoked, but the desire for change seems more often to be a simple plea for psychological relief.   

     History seems more absurd than dialectically determined when the deranged Uncle Carl fondles a book titled Foundations of the Twentieth Century only to look up in horror.  Feeling he is in the middle of vast contending forces, he calls out “No pardon will be given!” [4]  Here is a despair beyond any socio-economic conditions.

     In a later dream, as he “groped his way into the new life” [5] young Gastl imagines a medieval innkeeper, tortured by the ruling class, an image of the soul battered and defeated by the stresses of the world.  Once again, the figures of the Trinity are present, as is the narrator’s father, the judge, while the Headmaster and even the mad Uncle Carl appear as well in another figuration of the narrator’s stresses, leading him to exclaim “Things must change!” [6] 

     In all these passages Becher is clearly expressing not social outrage but rather existential dread, most familiar prior to Sartre and Camus from Munch’s 1893 The Scream.  The reader finds extreme psychological alienation and scarcely a word about economic injustice.  Witnessing his grandmother’s death he loses any faith in eternity and imagines her singing a sort of blues for him: “Little Hans went off alone to the big, wide world, far from home” [7].  Her decease culminates in  yet another dream in which the dreamer is denounced as a coward, a madman, aboard a runaway train in danger of crashing off a bridge as phantom accusers denounce Gastl for all “the scandalous things you’ve done.” [8]

     As Camus said that the only philosophical question was suicide, for Gastl the specter of the Grosshesseloh recurs as a constant temptation to despair and follow other suicides. [9]  This is the real problem of the novel, not politics.  Even the vision of revolution that appears is entirely phantasmagoric; in the tide of red flags, the message is indecipherable hieroglyphics [10].

     Given Becher’s biography, this psychological theme is unsurprising.  Apart from his suicide pact as a youth when he succeeded in killing his lover but not himself, followed by years of addiction to morphine, Becher continued to struggle with severe depression and attempted suicide several times.  His persecution by both Weimar and Stalinist regimes, his informing on others, and the ultimate ambivalence that led to his apostasy from Marxism, all must have exacerbated his instability and magnified his mental distress.  This inner conflict is the true center of Abschied.

     The fracture in the novel generated by its largely realistic picture of early twentieth century bourgeois Germany and the profoundly alienated sensibility of the protagonist forms in fact the central theme of the book.  Even a utopian social vision cannot soothe the soul of this young misfit.  Bohemian in tendency, he is far more engaging than a heroic worker hero like Pavel Korchagin in Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered.  The contradictions of Becher’s life may have distressed him deeply, but they allowed him to write in Abschied a more nuanced narrative, one as revealing about psychology as about history, arising more from neurotic avoidance and anxious self-doubt than from revolutionary zeal.  The reader need admire neither Becher nor his protagonist Gastl to realize that their characteristics are in part our own. 

 

 

1.  Theodore Huebener in The Literature of East Germany After 1926 (p. 39).  

2.  In German Abschied p. 415, München : Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag edition of 1987; in English translation the Seven Seas edition titled Farewell p.364.  The original text of this passage:  “Was Sie da erzählt haben von dem Anderen, ist ein Roman.  Ein Abenteuerrioman.  Schreiben Sie ihn!  Sir werden ihn schreiben, vielleicht erst nach vielen, vielen Jahren.  Nicht nur Sie nehmen Abschied darin von sich selbst, ihresgleichen sind nicht wenige, und alle werden gebraucht werden, auch solche wie Sie .  . . müsste er heissen – ‘Abschied.’  Eine deutscge Tragödie . . . Sie werden über sich sellbst schreiben, aber dieses “Ich” herkömmlich biographisches sein.”

3.  Abschied 36, Farewell 54.

4.  Abschied p. 86, Farewell p. 80. “Pardon wird nicht gegeben.”

5.  Abschied German 180,  Farewell 162. “So tastete ich mich in das neue Leben hinein.”

6.  Abschied 185, Farewell 164.  “Es wird anders werden!”

7.  Abschied 224, Farewell 200.  “Hänschen klein/ geht allein/ in die weite Welt hinein . . .”

8.  Abschied 236, Farewell 211.  “Wir Wissen um deine Schandtaten.”

9.  Abschied 257, Farewell 229. 

10.  Abschied 353, Farewell 312. 

Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth

 

drawing by Woody Guthrie

 

 

     Amid the Betty Crocker cookbooks and bestsellers from past decades on the shelves of the local Salvation Army store, I was surprised to come across a novel called House of Earth by Woody Guthrie.  As a teenager during the folk song revival I sought out Pete Seeger in a Skokie synagogue and Skip James in a Cambridge coffee house, and became familiar with Woody Guthrie through Folkways records.  I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical novel Bound for Glory in the Dolphin paperback with its quirky offhand drawings by the author and felt a moment of melancholy when now and then I saw a story about the singer’s physical decline and eventual death.  Yet I was entirely unaware of House of Earth which remained unpublished until 2013 [1].  

     I had known that Guthrie was a prolific writer, author not only of several thousand songs, but of a regular column in the People’s World, the West Coast sister publication of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, but House of Earth was a surprise to me. Unlikely as it seems, the book was published by Johnny Depp, who has convinced Harper Collins to make him editor of a new line named Infinitum Nihil after the actor’s production company [2].

     For more than fifty years Bound for Glory has taken a place on my shelves, not with twentieth century American literature, but in the folk/political area of the music books, near the Little Red Songbook of the I.W.W. and The Oxford Book of Ballads.  Guthrie’s importance in American popular music, his influence spreading though Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg, and others to the present day, seemed to me to outweigh his literary credentials.  His role in American politics, too, while righteous, was irrelevant to his admission to the slopes of Parnassus.  

     He did take some pains with his literary style.  Though he cultivated the image of a dispossessed and penniless Okie naïf, Guthrie had in fact been raised in a solidly middle-class home.  His father, rather like Ella May’s father, cast as a villain in House of Earth, was a successful businessman who bought distressed properties, owning at one time thirty pieces of land.  A power in local politics, he served as district county clerk and was said to have purchased the first automobile in Okemah.  He was, in addition, a racist and Ku Klux Klansman who participated in at least one lynching [3].  Furthermore, by the time he wrote Bound for Glory and, later, House of Earth, Guthrie had the aid of Marjorie Mazia, his wife from 1945-1953 and a principal dancer with Martha Graham’s company, a woman at home in New York City artistic circles.  So Woody, no less than his disciple Bob Dylan, cultivated a stage persona of a penniless and rootless wandering troubadour.

     The most prominent element of the character he played and, doubtless, paradoxically the most cultivated aspect of his writing style, is his use of dialect.  Guthrie himself embraced folk expressions and irregular usages as signs of authenticity indicating his membership in an idealized proletariat.  While the non-standard language of a writer like the Nigerian Amos Tutuola is natural, the reader has reason to suspect Guthrie of being self-consciously folksy to create his persona.  He criticized Steinbeck’s Okie speech in Grapes of Wrath [4], yet the reader from another time and place is hardly in a position to judge.  For both writers dialect builds an environment in which the rhetoric of the “uneducated” comes to seem standard and, instead of ignorance, is associated with experience, knowledge, and truth. 

     The second most prominent aspect of Guthrie’s style is its ebullience, extravagance, and plenitude.  He is given to catalogues and lists and what the Middle Ages would have called amplificatio, creating a sense of teeming life, carnivalesque richness of life celebrating itself.  The pattern was set already in Bound for Glory.

 

The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats, whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money . . . Kids of all three colors, and an occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens, took in after cur dogs, clumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped down on the sidewalk with a brand new pair of shoes on.  Ice cream cones was waving up and down the street.

                                (Bound for Glory Ch. V) 

 

In this passage the discussion topics are multiplied until all sense of a given focus is lost; the children are doing so many things that they are doing nothing in particular.  Rather than a concrete and specific scene, the reader is left with a vague impression of a maelstrom of action.  As here, though, while the world may seem a bit out of control, the predominant mood is clearly joyful affirmation.  The expenditure of energy even in privation, whether in work, struggle, or love-making, is redemptive, the only route to full humanity and an abundant experience of life.

     The extravagant rhetoric of Bound for Glory fills House of Earth as well. 

 

“Let it be rotten, Lady . . . Guess it’s got a right to be rotten is it wants to be rotten, Lady.  Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!  Look how many families of kids that little ole shack has suckled up from pups.  I’d be all rickety an’ bowlegged, an’ bent over, an’ sagged down, an’ petered out, an’ swayed in my middle, too, if I’d stood in one little spot like this little ole shack has, an’ stood there for fifty-one years.  Let it \rot!  Rot!  Fall down!  Sway in!  Keel over!  You little ole rotten piss soaked bastard, you!  Fall!” (13)

 

Here the six descriptive terms beginning with “rickety” puff up the passage without adding new information.  They do, however, convey Tike’s prodigious élan vital, his impatient ambition, his delight in food and sex and life.  The reader will little care whether anybody had ever actually said “Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!”  Such an expression is, perhaps, more effective for those who cannot judge its faithfulness to the actual spoken dialect.

     In several passages Guthrie lists brief phrases or single words to build a scene. 

 

Belly band.  Back band.  Neck yoke and collar.  Buckle it up.  Snap it down.  Carry it off and hang it up.  Smokehouse.  Woodshed.  Cow stall.  Manger.  Henhouse.  Big house.  Backhouse.  Cellar.  Tap.  Bolt.  Nut and screw.  Skinned knuckle.  Cut finger.  Burned arm.  Scalded shinbone.  Wheels.  Hubs.  Spokes.  Seat.  Brogans.  Clodhoppers.  Tit squeezers.  (106-107)

 

This passage ends with an elemental sexual image: “The penis of the stud slipping into the mare, and the sweaty hot open womb of the cow as she waited for the bull” (107), but the book’s erotic incidents are by no means limited to livestock.  An extended and explicit scene of joyful marital sexuality, of the sort that the author surely knew could not be published in 1947, occupies nearly half of the book’s first section “Dry Rosin.”  Love-making is a solace available to the poor without charge as well as a powerful way to give assent to life. 

     Why, then, am I placing House of Earth next to Bound for Glory instead of in the neighborhood of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Black Boy?  Because his subcultural vernacular seems more designed to bear the simple significance of uneducated country speech more than it casts new light though its folk poetry on what is being described and the lists of adjectives he piles upon each other never mean much more than the first one, Guthrie’s writing rarely escapes a sameness of tone.  It is an encouraging, inspiriting, optimistic tone, indeed, redolent of vitality and a joyful embrace of lived experience, but it is always much the same.  Indeed, for all his stress on hard times, Guthrie’s music and his prose are both quickened with a tireless optimism that turns a bit flat due to its unchanging tone, its being so insistently positive.  His friend Pete Seeger similarly could not open his mouth without seeming so cheery he approached dangerously close to sounding corny.  He and Woody both could sound child-like and funny and ever sanguine, they could manage to be a bit sentimental, but neither could approach tragedy, ambivalence, or complexity.  Perhaps this simplicity arose as a reflection of a dualistic political vision pitting virtuous workers against wicked capitalists, but what well serves a socio-political polemic is likely to fall short as art. 

     Woody Guthrie wrote our alternative national anthem in “This Land is Your Land” and national anthems have quite properly no place for ambiguity.  Apart from its reductive vision, which, while striving to capture lived experience in a torrent of words, in fact leaves out the difficult questions, the book has other faults.  While the child’s birth that ends the narrative appropriately marks a climax foregrounding the renewal and continuance of the cycle of life, it leaves unresolved other important issues of Tike and Ella May’s life: will they build an adobe house?  Will they ever manage to save some money?  Will they realize why they are exploited?  Furthermore, the repeated earlier references to a pain in Ella May’s breast are clearly meant to foreshadow a cancer diagnosis which never arrives.  Hod the book been publishable, an editor would never have permitted it to stand as it does.

     Yet we must be glad to have it, now available after decades in  manuscript.  Guthrie’s descriptions of nature, owing surely some debt to Steinbeck’s alternating chapters in Grapes of Wrath, are often lyrical and closely observed.  The book is largely dialogue and makes a very speedy read.  Guthrie manages in include as ornaments fragments of bluesy songs he loved.  I will thank Johnny Depp and Prof. Brinkley for bringing those who love Guthrie’s music and admire his politics another artifact of his fertile imagination.  For over fifty years KXQR in New York City has presented a folk music show called Woody’s Children, and, in a real sense, we are all Woody’s children.  With House of Earth many will come to know a bit more about the roots of contemporary American culture.

 

 

 

1.  Guthrie also wrote Seeds of Man which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1976.

 

2.  House of Earth is the imprint’s second publication, following The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.  Brinkley worked on House of Earth as well, and the laudatory introduction is credited to both Depp and Brinkley. 

 

3.  The 1911 murder of Laura and L. D. Nelson.

 

4.   Introduction to House of Earth, Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp, p. xxxi.

 

Note on another Dust Bowl novel

     I have only just learned of Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown, another treatment of the Depression era Dust Bowl by a native of the region with more reason even than Guthrie to know hard times there.  Like House of Earth, Babb’s novel was not published for decades.  According to Ed Vulliamy’s essay “The Vindication of Sanora Babb” in The New York Review of Books for August 19, 2021  Babb, like Guthrie, thought her depiction of the Okies was more realistic than Grapes of Wrath.  She also thought herself a “better writer” than Steinbeck, a claim Vulliamy finds dubious, though his comments on her work are generally laudatory.  For those interested in the era’s writing, Babb’s work (including her memoir An Owl on Every Post) seems required reading.