Everything Was Better in America: Print Culture in the Great Depression by David Welky (review)

The Great Depression sparked some of the most important reform movements in American history. In explaining this change, historians have frequently focused on writers and activists on the political left. Surveying what he calls the print mainstream, David Welky notices something else. “Partly consciously and partly unconsciously,” Welky argues, “mainstream newspapers, magazines, and books offered interpretations of contemporary difficulties that urged readers to adhere to ideological roots that drew from deep traditions rather than drift into the perilous seas of reform and perhaps revolution” (4). Distinguishing himself from Michael Denning’s The Cultural Front, Welky sees a mainstream media spreading comfortably conservative messages about faith, family, tradition, resilience, and perseverance.

In attending to how mainstream media could uphold traditional pieties, and undermine pluralist, liberal, or radical alternatives, Welky is undoubtedly correct. Welky’s book is a welcome reminder of how much of the mainstream media reacted to the Depression by seeking to reaffirm platitudes about American democracy, individualism, and traditional values. If his work leaves us wondering how to explain the substantial political reform that did occur, it helps to understand why the reforms were limited in important ways.

The mainstream media Welky investigates includes the newspaper, magazine, and book industries. After surveying each industry, Welky offers sometimes surprising and often interesting case studies. Conventional choices such as Life magazine or The Grapes of Wrath are complemented by analyses of the 1932 Olympic games and the daily comic strip “The Gumps.” In his most interesting chapters, Welky does more than locate conservative messages. Instead, he shows the ways conservative and progressive messages could both proliferate in the same locations. Here he comes closest to recognizing the messiness of cultural production, and his account is persuasive.

Nevertheless, Welky’s overall book is unsatisfying in three important ways. First, he sets too high a bar for what constitutes reform. At times, as in his discussion of the racial and gendered assumptions that filled coverage of the athlete Babe Didrikson, Welky seems to assume that if the New Deal was truly radical then racism and sexism should have disappeared. Second, Welky operates from a fairly vulgar assumption that media content was controlled by the interests of the “great interests of capital” (17). “To alienate big business with talk of revolution was to commit economic suicide,” Welky asserts (12). Yet this assumption is little help in explaining the actual content of mainstream publications. For example, Fortune magazine, a magazine marketed to big business, called for a “radical capitalism” that would involve the “joint control of industry by workman and employer” (August 1931). Third, Welky treats an emphasis on family and family-based security as entirely conservative. Yet “conservative” invocations of family often provided a basis for radical criticism of an existing order that failed to protect families.

Recently, Nick Salvatore and Jefferson Cowie have argued that the New Deal era’s liberal reforms marked a “long exception” from the conservative, individualist norms in American life. Welky goes even further, claiming liberal reforms were mere “howling winds” etching the face of an enormous iceberg made up of the nation’s underlying conservatism (5–6). This goes too far. Welky helps us understand the limits of reform; he leaves us wondering, however, how any reform was even possible.