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ONEONEONE Rather than ask, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I should like to ask, “What is its position in them?” —Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” Even the composition conceived in the head and, therefore, physically private, is public in its significant content, since it is conceived with reference to execution in a product that is perceptible and hence belongs to the common world. —John Dewey, Art as Experience If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. . . . A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point. —James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ONE Specific Soil James Agee and the Poverty of Documentary Work James Agee played a crucial role in carrying regional cosmopolitanism from the Depression era to the Civil Rights era. Specifically, his documentary book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, kept alive a conversation about the legacy of rural poverty in America. Such conversations went out of style in America in the 1940s. During that decade, the nation awoke from the New Deal dream of social welfare and found itself in the polarizing atmosphere of the Cold War. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. expresses the effect that this shift had on intellectual life in America. In the introduction to The Vital Center (1949), Schlesinger claims that the “fundamental enterprise” of the New Deal was “re-examination and self-criticism” and that the logical next step was to carry the insight gained from reflection and self-criticism— specifically the insight that democracy can check the excesses of capitalism without also falling to national socialism—into an anticommunist form of liberalism (vii). Hence, the New Deal got old quickly. 2 SPECIFIC SOIL Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Praise) arrived on bookshelves about two years after Congress defunded all New Deal arts projects and four years before half of Europe disappeared behind an iron curtain. The book went unread in the 1940s (barely selling six hundred copies); it became a favorite of Civil Rights activists when it was republished in 1960. This shift in reception reflects a general cultural shift in the country. In the early 1940s, the country was still recovering from the Great Depression and needed the stability of the comforting facts that Praise refused to offer its reader. In 1960, a significant portion of the reading public was gearing up for a new era of efficacy and sought instruction from a text such as Praise, which taught its reader what it felt like to commit oneself to the sites of injustice. To the reader in the 1940s, Praise was an admonishment for not doing enough. To the 1960s reader, it provided a model for how to “feel what wretches feel” (to quote one of the book’s epigraphs). To any reader, the book is a warning about the ethical ambiguities of art about poverty. Such art could become counterproductive. It could reinforce cultural stereo­ types or, worse, assert a geography of economic disparity that might, in turn, be hard to redraw. This interpretation is impossible, however, if Agee gets attached to the Cold War generation. Once Agee is brought into such a fold, Praise loses its status as a corrective to the reductive regional imagination of documentary art. But why is such an erasure troubling? What gets lost when we read Praise as characteristic of the generation of liberals that follows the Depression, a generation too sobered by the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 to give credence to the New Deal dream of social welfare? The answer is that we lose sight of the fact that Agee is doing exactly what the best American literature about poverty does: avoiding what Gavin Jones calls “easy recourse to sentimental or melodramatic neutralization of the poor” that has long plagued political and social discourse on poverty in the U.S. (“Poverty,” 780).1 Agee began worrying about this potential byproduct of art about poverty in 1933 when he wrote a profile of the Tennessee Valley Authority for Fortune magazine. His fears were not allayed when, in 1936, he was asked by the same magazine to spend the summer in Hale County, Alabama, living with three sharecropper families. The result of this fieldwork was an...

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