In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940-1960
  • William Graebner
Visions of Belonging: Family Stories, Popular Culture, and Postwar Democracy, 1940–1960. By Judith E. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. 2004.

Judith E. Smith's rich, fascinating, and important book explores two decades of stories—novels, plays, films, and television programs, many of them written or produced by those with ties to the 1930s Group Theatre or similar leftist cultural projects, and most of them taking the family as their subject. What the stories share, Smith argues, is an interest in defining, probing, and interrogating the American democratic experience. They all ask, "who belongs" to the American community, and "who doesn't"?

Within this context, Smith divides the stories into three groups. "Looking back" stories, exemplified by Betty Smith's novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), were popular during World War II and featured a nostalgic embrace of ethnic working-class families making the transition to the middle-class mainstream. "Trading places" stories, dominant from 1946 through 1949, were designed to encourage empathy across racial boundaries; some dealt with love across the color line, while others, including Gentleman's Agreement (1947), the film based on Laura Hobson's book, were literally about the "trading" of racial identities. "Everyman" stories emerged in 1949—for Smith, a watershed year—in response to the anti-communist challenge to social and cultural radicalism, and they dominated the 1950s. They featured "ordinary" people—Arthur Miller's Willy Loman, Paddy Chayevsky's Marty—whose troubles were often presented as, and labeled, "universal." Not until 1959, with Lorraine Hansberry's play Raisin in the Sun, was the everyman story recast to accommodate a historically and geographically grounded African American family. Although this framework is not without imperfections ("trading places" is a murky category, the term used to mean several different things), historians will be grateful for its specificity, for its catchy labels, and for its sensible organizing of two decades of American history.

Not surprisingly, Smith approaches her subject through a system of values that allows her to measure and judge the stories she presents. She is critical of stories that emphasize individuals rather than groups, self-help rather than solidarity, the psychological over the social, the private over the public, the universal over the historically specific, the cosmopolitan over the local, masculinity over the autonomous woman, materialist critiques over social ones, and ethnicity over race—indeed, anything over race. Reasonable ideas to be sure, and common enough in the academy, and I seldom disagree with Smith's observations and evaluations. Even so, the application of the same yardstick, in case after case, invites questions. Is every story that does not deal, and deal appropriately, with the African American experience, an effort to elide that experience, to make blacks invisible, to avoid addressing segregation? Is the story of the disabled veteran a postwar staple because the disabled vet "was symbolically, if not socially, less challenging than the black vet" (35)? Is the generalized white ethnicity of the television drama "Marty" (1953) an inadequate "substitute for race" (273)? Should Death of a Salesman (1949) be framed as a work that helped make racial experience invisible?

If Smith finds the glass half empty most of the time, it may be because of the method she uses to find meaning in the stories. Rather than tell the stories and interpret the narratives she constructs, Smith frames the text (knowledge of which is assumed, or presented very briefly) with two kinds of material: biographical treatments (uniformly excellent) that [End Page 97] suggest authorial intent, and multiple reviews that allow the reader to see how "different publics" (310)—usually whites and blacks—interpreted the same text. So, for example, Smith tells us little, directly, about Hansberry's Raisin. Instead, we are asked to find its meaning by aligning the author's life course with the play's critical reception. We learn of Hansberry's long and deep ties with left-wing causes, including opposition to housing discrimination, colonialism, and cultural erasure. And we learn that while black reviewers understood the play as a work of African American social protest against racism, many white reviewers...

pdf

Share