History 261 Section 9B: Documents on the Popular Front (Discussion Project #4)

 

Discussion Project (due at the end of Section 9B): The assignment for Section 9B includes the film Grapes of Wrath, McElvaine, The Great Depression (196-322), and online photographs representing the "social realism" sponsored by federal agencies during the New Deal. For the discussion project, bring to class a one-page (maximum), single-spaced typed analysis of the "social realism" in the populist art of the Great Depression era.

 

Eric Foner argues that the Popular Front--a collection of CIO unionists and civil rights groups, socialists and communists, left-leaning artists and intellectuals--"helped to invigorate New Deal liberalism," expanded the definition of Americanism to include "unionism and social citizenship, not the unbridled pursuit of wealth," and "sought to popularize the idea that the country's strength lay in diversity and tolerance, a love of equality, and a rejection of ethnic prejudice and class privilege" (211-13). Robert McElvaine, in his chapter on "American values and culture in the Great Depression," cites The Grapes of Wrath along with other examples of "social realism" during the Popular Front era as evidence of a new emphasis on "cooperative individualism" over "competitive individualism."

 

For your project, write an analysis of the political meanings of the cultural images in two Popular Front documents:

 

**Grapes of Wrath (dir. John Ford, 1940, based on the 1939 novel by John Steinbeck)

 

**and one of the following exhibits of documentary photographs commissioned by the Farm Security Administration during the Depression

              a. Dorothea Lange Photographs-Migrant Workers (California and Arizona)

              b. Ben Shahn Photographs-Cotton Sharecroppers (Arkansas)

              c. Arthur Rothstein Photographs-Tenant Farmers (Alabama)