Smiling Sharecroppers

DISCUSSING the period of the thirties in American writing, Murray Kempton once remarked that no other age produced so many counterfeit Walt Whitmans. He meant that everyone who wanted his thoughts about society to be believed felt compelled to echo the great grey bard: "I am the man, I suffered, I was there...."

Kempton's laconic and somewhat one-eyed observation focuses on a writing style oriented towards "authenticity." No doubt the journalists of the period and the "documentary movement" as a whole swelled the ranks of ersatz "roughs" in Kempton's recollection. If he ignored its virtues, Kempton still managed to define in shorthand the characteristic shortcoming of an abundant and protean genre. The typical documentary article or book was rich with feeling and immediacy but usually short-changed thought and discounted analysis.

Since thirties writers invariably wrote a great deal about complicated and pressing social issues, and since they set great store by their political commitments, the imbalance proved a serious one. It also assured that any future attempt at examining the documentary movement of the thirties in an historical context would be shot through with the problems. Understanding the interplay of politics and culture and of culture and society during the thirties would require a ranging and disciplined historical imagination.

This is the ambitious task that William Stott sets out to accomplish in Documentary Expression and Thirties America. As a literary and cultural chronicle Stott's book is magnificent. But as an analysis that attempts to shed light on the relationship between thirties culture and the period's social and political history, it has serious flaws.

ALTHOUGH HE SKIMPS on documentary films and filmmakers, Stott does ample justice to the period's journalists and photographers. He shows how their work attempted to draw the attention of an insulated middle class to the "portions of unimagined existence" embedded in the lives of the poor, the damaged and the inconspicuous. He makes good use of such writings as Hemingway's reporting for New Masses and Edmund Wilson's for New Republic to illustrate the various strategies of documentary reportage.

These strategies involved exhorting, wheedling or shaming readers into identifying with the plight of the journalists' subjects--the tenant farmers and migrant workers, the victims of the Spanish Civil War. Too often, though, documentary journalists concentrated more on their own responses than on the experience or the social predicament of the people whom they photographed and described. At Stott points out, there was something spurious about Margaret Bourke-White's photographs of smiling sharecroppers that seemed to shout at me, I'm so poor. I don't know how wretched I really am!"

Stott does an equally impressive job pursuing the "documentary motive" as it moved outward from film and journalism to be felt and expressed in remarkably diverse areas of thirties life. He turns to the universities to discover large numbers of social scientists agreeing with the journalists of the period who questioned "the dubious authority of statistics and concluding generalizations." Confronted with the overwhelming proportions of the Depression, they rejected theoretical approaches wholesale and set out after the flesh and blood experience of "real people," the "human meaning" that would somehow make the thirties comprehensible.

As heralds of "participation," thirties sociologists emerge as our own often-dubious forebearers in their passion for authenticity and relevance in scholarship. They invaded the taxidance halls, the boxcars and hobo jungles, becoming, in their words, "as much a part of this social world as ethically possible."

What Stott illustrates is that for most social scientists in the thirties the plight of the poor became an occasion for sentiment. The ubiquitous appearance of middle class values and virtues in the case histories of "representative" men and families among the unemployed characterized a type of superficial "consensus" social science that effaced individuality and sacrificed real insight for the sake of reassurance. The sharp empirical texture and psychological insight gained by participant observation were often undermined by the brittle emotions that academic writers indulged in. Compassions degenerated into pity, and sentiments became substitute for the tough-minded social analysis which the occasion demanded.

These criticisms are not limited to Stott's discussion of the academics. Sentimentality, self-indulgence and a fundamentally exploitative relation to subject matter constitute the salient elements in his critiques of all aspects of the documentary movement.

And his achievement lies precisely here. Applying a humanist's moral and critical standards across the board. Stott breaks through the usual boundaries of literary and artistic studies. He insists on judging the work of journalists, the popular media and the rhetoric of politicians by standards that are normally reserved for more respectable cultural performances.

UNFORTUNATELY, EVEN AN enlarged and responsible vision of humanistic studies may have serious shortsights. When Stott runs up against the interface of thirties culture and thirties society and the bridges between them that he set out to erect, he falls short. Stott's assessment of documentary expression remains primarily an aesthetic one. For all its decency and moral content, it offers us no handles with which to grasp the relationship between the cultural movement and the society in which it flourished.

The problem lies in Stott's own strategy and design. He begins his book with four untypically tedious and redundant chapters that attempt to define "What Is Documentary" and "What Documentary Treats."

Stott's answers do not turn out to be edifying or particularly helpful. They boil down to a few obvious and obviously simplistic statements, distinguishing between "factual" and "human" documents. The latter are those that "inform our feelings" and educate us about society in the only "authentic" possible way. Stott could have used his introductory chapters more fruitfully by examining the social pressures and political concerns and attachments that influenced the work he goes on to chronicle. As it is, we hardly know at times where Stott's appraisals end and the thirties' self-appraisals begin.

So, the doctor has come down with the disease; the historian has fallen prey to the shortsight that he attributed to his subjects. Stott's chronicle is infected with the type of superficial thinking and weak-minded analysis that an overemphasis on "authenticity" and the "universality" of feelings created in the culture of the thirties.

At one point in his account Stott claims that the "documentary imagination" by informing the feelings of Americans "held together a social order rapidly disintegrating." Such arguments are more or less typical of Stott's attempts to link documentary expression to the social issues and conflicts of the thirties. And they reveal very little besides Stott's susceptibility to the period's self-congratulations.

Virtually all of the material which Stott examines was produced by members of a privileged middle class for others of the upper and middle classes about people belonging to the lowest rungs of the class at the bottom. Yet none of them except Agee and a few others wrote as though he or she were particularly aware that "solidarity with the oppressed" involved anything more painstaking than the simple and straightforward feelings that presumably animated one's writing and that one shared with one's friends and cohorts.

Perhaps by pursuing some of the ramifications of simple social facts like this Stott might have provided a more serious understanding of the social context of documentary expression. If one sets out to chronicle and make plain the subtle interplay between a culture and a society, one takes on the additional burden of developing a theoretical framework, a structure of ideas and insights, that is adequate to the job.

In attempting a coherent and illuminating analysis of thirties culture and society Stott founders on the limits of his literary perspective. Nonetheless where he is good--in discussing single examples of documentary expression from within that point of view, and particularly in his lengthy and brilliant appreciation of Agee's and Evan's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men--Stott is superb. His observations on the limitations, superficiality and self-delusions of documentary reportage are incisive. And the recognition that all but the best of documentary writers and journalists treated their subjects as pitiful objects of personal social conscience or else as occasions for autoeroticism bears looking into at a time when the movement's afoot again.