The Emotional Life of the Great Depression by John Marsh (review)

What two things do John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the films of Shirley Temple, the board game Monopoly, the Empire State Building, and the Isaac Asimov Robot series all have in common? They all had their origins in the years of the Great Depression, and they play a role in John Marsh’s analysis in The Emotional Life of the Great Depression. In his introduction, Marsh explains his motives for writing the book. Chiefly, his interest is in more fully describing the suffering experienced by Americans during the period he defines as between the stock market crash of 1929 and the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Previous books about the Great Depression, he complains, only quantified this suffering. By focusing on data such as numbers of those unemployed, dollars lost, and businesses bankrupt, such books, he judges, “only vaguely represent the experience of people who lived out those economic indicators” (9). His determination, then, is threefold. First, to describe that experience of suffering by closely examining and analyzing the emotions that resulted from it. Second, to ask the right response to that suffering, for in his view “feelings are where social change is born” (16). And third, to more fully understand ourselves by understanding this pivotal period, because “to understand it is to understand us” (12). He will accomplish these goals, he promises in the introduction, by examining the period from the viewpoint of politics, economics, popular culture, and literature—as well as social sciences, I would add. Without too much overstatement, I hope, Marsh achieves all his goals with impressive breadth and depth.

Marsh’s book would be of interest to Steinbeck scholars if for no other reason than its portrayal of the historical and cultural context of Steinbeck’s works. Even if he had never mentioned the author or his works, Marsh’s book lays a foundation that places Steinbeck’s works squarely in place at the center of the American experience. But Marsh goes much further by holding up Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as in many ways the epitome of human suffering and the response to it during the Great Depression. His deep analysis of the Joad family in his chapter on the sublime should enrich any reader’s appreciation of the American classic. Marsh also gives a place to Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men in his discussion of friendship in his chapter on love. For all these reasons, I strongly refer Steinbeck scholars to the book.

In his introduction, Marsh goes to great lengths to explain and justify his choice of the six emotions he examines in the central six chapters of his book. He identifies what he describes as the canonical emotions of the Great Depression typically discussed by historians: despair, fear, anger, and—after the 1932 election of Roosevelt—hope. He sees fear and despair, further, as “hyper-canonical” in the sense that they are most commonly the focus of examinations of the period (9). Marsh cautions readers, however, against this narrow view that, he argues, is in some ways superficial and incomplete. As a result, he refines and modifies the list to include three negative and three relatively more positive emotions. The resulting six he labels the “quintessential” emotions of the Great Depression: righteousness, panic, fear, awe, love, and hope. His plan is to examine the political and cultural origins and effects of these emotions, rather than taking strictly a psychological or biological view. And that explains why we see in his book the elements named in my riddle above—Shirley Temple, Monopoly, the Empire State Building, and the Robot series. But readers will quickly see that for Marsh the literature of the period plays a particularly important role because he believes that poets and storytellers, like Steinbeck, present evidence not just of their own views but also the views—and emotions—of others of the period of which they write.

Of the six “quintessential” emotions that Marsh has chosen...