Black Culture and the New Deal: The Quest for Civil Rights in the Roosevelt Era (review)

Lauren Sklaroff ’s book examines a period in African American cultural history that often falls between the stools of the 1920s New Negro movement and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Her study of struggles over the cultural representation of African Americans in the New Deal era differs markedly from much recent work in African American studies (and ethnic studies more broadly): one searches in vain for accounts of radical experiments in aesthetic form, the articulation of heretofore silenced voices from the militant margins, the refunctioning of mainstream cultural forms for counterhegemonic goals, and the like. Instead, one finds the more sober yet strikingly fresh story of how the middling strata of cultural workers—primarily bureaucrats serving New Deal cultural programs, but also advocacy groups like the NAACP, performers working in the cultural industries, etc.— struggled to liberalize representations of African Americans within the cultural mainstream. Stories about cultural middle ranks tend to lack the punch of accounts of avant-gardes and movements from the margins, and Sklaroff ’s book does become somewhat repetitive in its account of the various straddles and compromises one associates with liberal politics. But the breadth of her account, spanning a wide range of genres, media, and cultural agents, as well as the intensity with which she analyzes the internal tensions within each site, lend the book an unexpected dynamism.

Sklaroff ’s book argues that the cultural programs of the New Deal—including the familiar federal projects for theater, art, music, and writing, but also, especially during war mobilization, offices dedicated to film and radio—promoted progressive representations of African Americans. White liberals and leftists within the New Deal cultural apparatus collaborated with African American leaders, bureaucrats, and artists in a broad-based effort to dispel minstrel-tinged performance traditions and usher in new, more progressive roles for black performers. In doing so, Sklaroff emphasizes, they “worked within the tightest of spaces,” hemmed in by inadequate budgets, racist resistance at the state level, the enforced “unity” of war mobilization, and the rising tide of intolerance of “un-American activities” that lead to HUAC and McCarthyism (2). The book thus offers an ironic narrative in which grand plans for new cultural forms, forums, and styles are diverted, diminished, and frustrated at many points while nonetheless improving the cultural climate for African Americans in heretofore underappreciated ways.

Sklaroff ’s methodological focus throughout is not on cultural products but on processes: rather than the more traditional ideological reading of texts, she offers a peek behind the curtain covering the messy collaborations that produce culture. In this way her work diverges from past studies of similar terrain—Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal (1992), for example—that emphasize the inadequate or falsifying white-authored representations of African Americans in the period. Rather, she reveals the agency (albeit highly constrained) of African Americans as filterers, shapers, and co-producers of the images of blackness consumed by the masses. Her well-chosen case studies recall the wide net cast by the New Deal’s antiracist efforts: on the stage (the Theater Project’s “swingcopated” take on Gilbert and Sullivan, Swing Mikado); in the arena (Joe Louis’s boxing demonstrations for fellow GIs); on the airwaves (the African American variety show Jubilee); and on the screen (the Bureau of Motion Pictures’ promotion of antiracist imagery in Hollywood films). In each case, she underscores the modest victories notched by cultural workers amid political pressure from conservative legislators, hostile elements within the American public, and unimaginative government officials.

Sklaroff ’s account of the African American poet and critic Sterling Brown’s role in the production of the Federal Writers’ Project’s American Guide vividly illustrates the payoff of her approach. Brown was appointed head of Negro Affairs within the FWP in 1936, the highest post held by an African American within the entire Works Progress...