Fiction and Fact: Bess Streeter Aldrich’s The Drum Goes Dead and the Hard Times of the 1930s

This essay discusses the relationship between fiction and historical fact in Bess Streeter Aldrich’s Christmas story, The Drum Goes Dead, set in the Midwest in the Great Depression years. The story’s time frame was approximately 1934 to 1937 and reflects Depression-era realities in Aldrich’s home town of Elmwood, Cass County, Nebraska, and the neighboring farming area. Prime strengths of Aldrich’s fiction are her use of historical fact and her talent for description. A close reading of the descriptive passages in her narrative reveals the environmental and economic problems that bedeviled the fictional town of Bellfield and the real Elmwood in the mid-i93os. What emerges is a view of life in a small town and rural setting in the years 1934–37. Because we are now three-quarters of a century from the last of the Depression, that period has long since lost its immediacy, yet keeping—or regaining—balanced perceptions of the 1930s is essential. Grassroots narratives hold much promise in keeping that era a vital part of our historical consciousness.

Fiction and Fact

My initial reading of The Drum Goes Dead was the casual result of my interest as a historian in Bess Streeter Aldrich’s novels. This interest grew out of an awareness of the broader relationship between literature and history which Dr. Robert Harper cultivated in his American literature survey courses when I was an undergraduate at the Municipal University of Omaha (now the University of Nebraska Omaha) nearly sixty years ago. As a history major this gave me a subtle lesson in the need to learn from other disciplines.

Later, at the University of Nebraska Omaha, I taught a history of Nebraska course. My assigned readings included historical fiction, most commonly Bess Streeter Aldrich’s A Lantern in Her Hand, and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! or One of Ours.¹ In addition to the instructional value, having two novels on the reading list helped to keep the cost of the books for the course reasonable. Late in my career, I taught a graduate seminar, “The Prairie Novel as History,” in which we sought to relate fiction and fact. One of the required readings was Aldrich’s The Rim of the Prairie. Part of my motivation was a growing sense that as academe had evolved, learning tended to be segmented into three- and five-credit-hour blocks despite distributional requirements to foster breadth of curiosity. As a teacher, I came to see the need to encourage students to relate what they had learned in one course or class to a similar situation in a new setting, thereby further mitigating the downside to an otherwise logical system of academic structuring. In short, I moved toward encouraging what is now called “thinking outside the box.”

Using the intersection of fiction and fact took an interesting turn in 1986 when the Nebraska Committee for the Humanities invited me to work with the Cass County Museum in Plattsmouth in developing an exhibit. Then museum director Don Hill and I quickly concluded that A Lantern in Her Hand, written by a former Cass County resident, provided an ideal template for our work. This proved true, and pointed to the potential value of historical fiction in a nonclassroom setting.

Asking questions about the relationship between fiction and fact in historical novels is not new. For example, previous scholarship on Plains literature in this journal has addressed the topic of fiction and fact, particularly as it applies to Willa Cather’s fiction, and especially concerning O Pioneers!. Historian Robert W. Cherny has shown the influences upon Cather in the 1890s that probably shaped her negative view of Populism and William Jennings Bryan. She expressed this perspective most prominently in her treatments of Lou Bergson and Frank Shabata, two of the least admirable characters in that book.²

Fig 1.

Bess Streeter Aldrich, Courtesy of Nebraska State Historical Society. RG3263–1-10...