Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [3]
The 1930s were Farrell’s great years, not only because his work then found important and enthusiastic appreciation, but because the decade’s special circumstances, all the more significant for being anomalous in twentieth-century American history, corresponded to his deepest artistic gifts and needs. The era of the Great Depression (so called because earlier depressions, as various characters in the final volume of the Studs trilogy repeatedly remark, paled beside it) was the single moment when the United States collectively faced the prospect of catastrophic failure. Studs always thrills to the sight and thought of the American flag because, as he proudly reminds himself, “Old Glory had never kissed the ground in defeat.” Unlike other Western democracies, with the exception of the Civil War, before the Depression, America had suffered no major losses in its short history—no conquest or occupation by foreign powers, no long-lasting economic setback in its ever-growing productivity and affluence, a material prosperity whose benefits, various spokesmen claimed, would one day reach every (white male) citizen, no matter how humble his origins. The 1910s and 1920s, spurred on by the new automobile industry, the years in which Studs’s family finds economic success and he enjoys his own brief moments of glory, saw a peak of American wealth and audacious self-confidence. Europe was finished as a source of funds and fashions—“who could tell us any longer what was fashionable and what was fun?” a cocky F. Scott Fitzgerald asked. It was an “age of miracles” with “a prize for everyone.” America was to set the global example in modern technology and democratic practice.
Then came the stock market crash of October 1929, when the decade seemed, in Fitzgerald’s image, to leap from a window to its death, leaving in its wake one quarter of Americans unemployed, the majority of them the sole breadwinners of their households. Seven billion dollars in depositors’ money disappeared amid the failure of some five thousand banks, while the gross national product rapidly declined to half its 1929 level. The new president, Herbert Hoover, whom Studs’s anti-Semitic father, Paddy, regards as a mere tool of the international Jewish bankers bent on America’s ruin, could do nothing, it seemed, to reverse the collapse of America’s economy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who took office in 1933, would indeed make a difference, but Studs Lonigan’s story, even though Farrell wrote its concluding chapters well into the Roosevelt era, stops in 1931, before FDR was elected.
Some Americans looked abroad for answers, not to democratic Europe, as bankrupted by the Depression as the United States, but to fascist Europe, and to Communist Russia, then attempting under Stalin what seemed to a signifcant portion of the American left the most radical, extensive, and hopeful experiment in collectivist, anti-capitalist, and egalitarian life ever undertaken by a modern nation. People on the right as well as on the left were sure capitalism was doomed. Paddy Lonigan was hardly alone in thinking that an American Mussolini might be the ticket. The all-powerful Chicago newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, whose papers turn up regularly in Studs Lonigan, cautioned his readers in 1934 that “Whenever you hear a prominent American called a ‘Fascist,’ you can usually make up your mind that the man is simply a LOYAL CITIZEN WHO STANDS FOR AMERICANISM.” One 1930s investigator found between 130 and 160 fascist groups in the United States, mainly comprised of lower-middle class Americans like Paddy Lonigan.
More immigrants left the United States than arrived. A Soviet trading company with headquarters in New York received 350 applications a day from Americans wanting jobs in the