RESEARCH ARTICLE Gendering the Great Depression: rethinking the male body in 1930s American culture and literature

Journal of Gender Studies, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 1, 59–68, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.750237 RESEARCH ARTICLE Gendering the Great Depression...
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Journal of Gender Studies, 2014 Vol. 23, No. 1, 59–68, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.750237

RESEARCH ARTICLE Gendering the Great Depression: rethinking the male body in 1930s American culture and literature Josep M. Armengol* Department of Modern Philology, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain (Received 12 June 2012; final version received 13 October 2012) This article explores the cultural and literary representation of male bodies during the Great Depression in the United States. While the mainstream model of American masculinity has traditionally linked men’s identity to their breadwinning role, this essay shows how the Great Depression caused millions of American males to feel emasculated by their incapacity to provide for their families. It is argued, therefore, that the Roosevelt administration aimed, at least in part, to ‘remasculinize’ America by promoting numerous images of ‘hard’ bodies at work, as may be seen in several New Deal public murals of the time. This remasculinizing effort was complemented by Marxist authors and critics, perhaps most notably Michael Gold, who established a correlation between gender and class by suggesting a dichotomy between hard/masculine/working-class authors, on the one hand, and soft/effete/upper-class writers, on the other. Nevertheless, this study concludes by calling this very binary into question, underlining several counter-images and contradictions that inevitably inform it. If documentary literature questioned Mike Gold’s hypermasculine view of the proletariat by providing images of vulnerable yet dignified male bodies, writers such as John Steinbeck and painters such as Paul Cadmus also problematized, as we shall see, Gold’s masculinist and homophobic rhetoric from particularly interesting and subversive perspectives. Keywords: Great Depression; male body; 1930s; American culture; American literature

Depression and/as emasculation In Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), the sociologist Michael S. Kimmel rightly argues that self-making has traditionally been regarded as the hegemonic ideal of American masculinity. As the historical product of the rise of capitalism and industrialization in the early nineteenth century, the American self-made man was designed from the start to adopt social mobility and economic success as fundamental markers of masculinity. While the model of self-made manhood has taken different forms in different historical periods, the compulsion to prove masculinity through accumulated wealth and social status has remained a central component of American culture from the early nineteenth century to the present day. ‘In the first few decades of the nineteenth century’, as Kimmel himself explains, ‘American men began to link their sense of themselves as men . . . to their economic success’ (1996, p. 7).

*Email: [email protected]

q 2012 Taylor & Francis

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Nevertheless, the stock-market crash of October 1929, which marked the beginning of the Great Depression in the United States, posed a radical challenge to the American dream of self-made manhood. Caught up in wild speculation and euphoria, America had been making, spending, and carelessly playing with money at a record pace all through the 1920s. With the volume of sales on the New York Stock Exchange exceeding 1.1 billion shares in 1928 (Minter 1994, p. 148), the market continued to skyrocket until the fall of 1929. While ominous economic indicators had been there for years,1 nobody seemed willing to recognize the very real dangers of speculation. President Herbert Hoover continued to utter words of assurance after the Crash, insisting that America was ‘sound’. Nevertheless, it became increasingly clear, as Gilbert Seldes famously replied, that America was indeed ‘sound’, but that the sound was ‘hollow’ (Minter 1994, pp. 148 –149). By the winter of 1932– 33, America was undergoing the deepest crisis it had faced since the Civil War. In three years following the Crash, national income, as David Minter (1994, p. 148) elaborates, fell from $81 to $41 billion; 85,000 businesses failed; and over 5000 banks closed, doing away with more than nine million saving accounts. Between 1930 and 1934, industrial production fell by 50%, unemployment tripled, leaving around 16 million people jobless (about one-third of the labor force), and the value of stocks traded on the New York Stock Exchange fell 78%. Unable to pay the rent, many people were evicted and lived in shacks in quickly formed shanty towns called ‘Hoovervilles’, built on garbage dumps, while thousands of hungry men and women had to line up for bread and daily rations at soup kitchens (Minter 1994, pp. 148 –149, Zinn 2005, pp. 387, 391, 394).2 Clearly, then, the optimism ushered in by the Roaring Twenties was ushered out by the Great Depression and the widespread unemployment of the 1930s. While the hegemonic ideal of American masculinity had been based on self-making and economic success, the work-place suddenly turned out to be insecure, unreliable, or simply inexistent. Millions of American men thus felt deprived of their traditionally masculine identities, which they had also associated with their twin identities as household heads and breadwinners (Kimmel 1996, pp. 140– 145). For most men, then, the Depression proved to be emasculating both at work and at home. Besides seeing themselves as impotent patriarchs, unemployed men underwent a loss of status before other men, as well as with their wives and children. Not only did they feel ashamed of themselves for being unable to work; they were usually despised by their own families, too, who saw them as equally ‘unmanly’. ‘Even if contemporary readers would not go as far as to blame women for reemasculating their husbands in some twisted incestuous plot’, Kimmel elaborates, ‘we cannot but feel compassion for men whose twin identities as worker and father/husband, a dual identity expressed in the term “breadwinner”, was suddenly eroded, seemingly beyond repair’ (1996, p. 145). Feeling bereft of the optimism that had characterized the Roaring Twenties, and unable to rely on the market economy which had helped define and assert their manhood, they usually ended up seeing themselves as emasculated patriarchal figures. In Kimmel’s words: Never before had American men experienced such a massive and system-wide shock to their ability to prove manhood by providing for their families . . . With nearly one in four American men out of work, the workplace could no longer be considered a reliable arena for the demonstration and proof of one’s manhood. (Kimmel 1996, pp. 140– 141)

The ‘remasculinization’ of America If, as it seems, the Depression forced many men to give up their faith in the market-place as a proof of their manhood, masculinity had to be reconceived in a number of ways. One

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of the most obvious remasculinization strategies consisted in (re-)turning to the male body and, in particular, the strong, muscular, brawny body of the working-class male. Just as the famous 1936 M-F (Masculinity-Femininity) Test by psychologists Terman and Miles contributed to divorcing gender identity from achievement in the public sphere, redefining masculinity as the gendered expression of a certain inner sense of oneself,3 so too did the Depression help redefine the notion of success away from personal income. Failing money, success might as well be signified by a masculine physique, with physical strength symbolizing strength of character. Coinciding with Charles Atlas’s opening of his first gymnasium in 1927, which turned body-building into one of the most successful businesses even (and especially) during the Depression (Kimmel 1996, pp. 152 –153), American culture during the Depression became increasingly obsessed with muscular, rather than success-oriented, manifestations of masculinity. Marked by the spectacular transformation of a wimpy bespectacled newspaper reporter into an alluring muscular hero called Superman,4 the whole decade was indeed replete with depictions of hard bodies, as evidenced in the large New Deal public murals painted by the artists of the time. Indeed, in 1933, and as part of President Roosevelt’s policies, one million dollars was allocated for the employment of artists within the Civil Works Administration (CWA).5 The idea was to foster a Public Works of Arts Project (PWAP) to employ needy artists, at hourly wages, to create murals, sculptures, prints, and paintings to embellish public buildings. For the first time in history, artists, as Barbara Haskell (1999, p. 226) rightly notes, were officially recognized as performing a valuable service to the community, just as their art was expected to go beyond mere aestheticism and connect with the social and political problems of the day. Because of the allegiance to the ideals of community, self-reliance, and hard work as sources of national pride and endurance (Haskell 1999, p. 226), many artists turned to ‘the people’ as a source of national strength. Instead of glamorous or affluent characters, the heroes of the age thus became ‘the common people’, representing simplicity, purity, resilience, and integrity. Even F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby (1925), began to study the writings of Karl Marx, describing Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night (1934) as ‘a communist-liberalidealist, a moralist in revolt’ (Bruccoli 1981, pp. 347– 348). Since art was meant to be democratic and accessible to the public, it is no wonder, then, that most of the murals, painted on the walls of post office and justice buildings across the country, were centrally concerned with depicting working-class male bodies at work. In so doing, they celebrated the muscular potency of the working-class male body, which was contrasted (implicitly at least) with the flaccid, enervated, and emasculated bodies of both middle- and upper-class males. The ideal male body for the Roosevelt administration, as Melosh (1991) has argued, was located within images of working-class men, particularly farmers and laborers. She describes the ideal male form in her analysis of Allen Thomas’s mural ‘Extending the Frontier in Northwest Territory’. ‘The powerful lines of the man’s body, shown in the arduous work of plowing’, she rightly notes, ‘accentuate masculine strength; his body angles resolutely toward the horizon’ (1991, p. 33). It was the image of masculinity as strong, muscular, and hopeful that, she insists, acted as the national image of masculinities at the time. A similar example is provided by Conrad A. Albrizio’s bestknown mural ‘The New Deal’, dedicated to President Roosevelt. Like the ‘Extending the Frontier’ painting, this mural offers another representation of working-class males at work, their muscular bodies constituting yet another symbol of (national) strength and endurance in hard times. While President Roosevelt insisted on preserving not only ‘the bodies of the unemployed’ but also their moral strength and integrity ‘from destitution’, it might be argued, therefore, that preserving the bodies of the victims of the Depression became part

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and parcel of the very same effort made by the New Deal administration to preserve their manhood, which Roosevelt beautifully defined as ‘their self-respect, their self-reliance, and courage and determination’ (Roosevelt 1935). This remasculinization of American culture was reflected in literature as well. Proletarian fiction, which was on the rise throughout the 1930s, was centrally occupied with gender concerns, particularly the opposition between the ideal of ‘masculine toughness’ personified by the working-class male and the ‘feminine softness’ symbolized by the man of the leisure classes (Penner 2011, p. 29). This dichotomy becomes nowhere clearer, perhaps, than in several writings by Michael Gold, a Marxist literary critic and the author of Jews Without Money (1930), the working-class memoir that made him famous during the Depression. In 1930, Gold published an article in The New Masses titled ‘Proletarian Realism’ in which he shows his overt contempt for the leisure classes and what he sees as their moral and spiritual bankruptcy. More specifically, he explicitly draws on a gendered binary which ends up associating the genteel literary tradition with sickliness and effeminacy, and Proletarian fiction with vigor and masculinity.6 Thus, authors of Proletarian fiction are seen as ‘bold’ and energetic youths writing about ‘real’ conflicts in a direct and unsentimental manner, whereas genteel writers such as Proust are seen as affected, oversentimental, idle, and even depraved masturbators, whose work is equated to ‘merely confectionery’ (Gold 1972b, p. 206). It follows from this that Gold sees literature (and class) in clearly gendered terms, pitting the ‘tough’ fiction of the proletariat against the ‘effete’ tradition of the middle and upper classes. Based on a ‘hard/soft’ binary, what Penner terms Gold’s ‘macho criticism’ (2011, p. 3) may thus be said to align class and gender in fairly obvious ways, transforming the male writer into a Marxist ideal and using gender a as a political weapon to promote his own class interests. So, authors such as John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell, Sinclair Lewis, or Clifford Odets, all of whom write about the working class and class conflicts, tend to be praised by Gold, whereas others, such as Henry James or Thornton Wilder,7 are dismissed as belonging to a ‘feminine’ tradition. Hence his famous plea for an unambiguously ‘masculine’ literature and literary criticism, based on bold social criticism, away from the effete genteel tradition: O Life, send us a great literary critic . . . Send us a giant who can shame our writers back to their task of civilizing America . . . Send us a poet who loves the masses . . . Send . . . a man of the street. Send no mystics – they give Americans the willies. Send no coward . . . Send us a man fit to stand up to skyscrapers . . . Send us a joker in overalls . . . Send a Bolshevik. Send a man. (Gold 1972a, pp. 138– 139)

Obviously, Gold establishes here a more than explicit connection between masculinity (‘Send a man’) and Communism (‘Send a Bolshevik’), which seems to be understood as the very epitome of virility. His promise of utopian (socialist) renewal goes hand in hand with the myth of phallic potency. Indeed, the association of the working-class male with the obviously phallic image of the skyscrapers may be said to transform the Proletarian writer into a phallic symbol himself. Ultimately, then, Gold’s criticism clearly argues for a remasculinization of American literature absorbing the virile energy of the masses as a remedy for the feminization of the upper classes, the ‘boudoir bards’ and ‘minor Oscar Wildes’ who claim that ‘art is never useful’ (Gold 1972a, p. 133). Given its celebration of socialism as a remasculinization strategy, it is little wonder that Gold’s theses were highly influential during the 1930s, when millions of American men felt suddenly emasculated by the harsh reality. Depression literature spills with heavily ‘masculine’ fictions by and about working-class males, including Proletarian novels about coal-miners (Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs, 1929), steel-workers

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(Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace, 1941), or bricklayers (Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete, 1939). Some texts, like Conroy’s The Disinherited (1933), incorporate changing settings, moving from coal-mines to railroad shops to rubber plants. In all these novels, the working-class protagonists are portrayed as ‘tough’ guys resisting stoically as victims of a brutal political economy. Clearly, their hard bodies do themselves become symbols of moral integrity and strength vis-a`-vis economic injustice. As Minter suggests, ‘the Great Depression threatens to engulf everything except the counterforce of angry protest that “these bodies” exemplify’ (1994, p. 187). Hard versus soft bodies: counter-images and contradictions From what has been argued here, it would appear that the Great Depression caused men to feel emasculated and so America simply set out to ‘remasculinize’ them by providing images of hard bodies, as seen in several New Deal public murals and Proletarian texts of the time. However, the image of masculinity during the 1930s is, as we shall see, far more complex and contradictory than it may seem. One finds a number of alternative images throughout the 1930s that qualify, and even contradict, the tough-guy image that appears to have pervaded the decade. For instance, one cannot forget the great relevance to the period of documentary literature, which tried to record the effects of the Depression on ‘the suddenly visible poor’ (Minter 1994, p. 197) and, in so doing, provided numerous images of vulnerable, though dignified, bodies. A curious combination of pictures and literary texts, the documentary project, funded by the Roosevelt administration as part of its New Deal policies, was based on the joint collaboration of writers and photographers of the first rank, whose words and photographs commented on one another. In books like Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell’s You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor’s An American Exodus (1939), or Walker Evans and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), hundreds of images and words were devoted to depicting, and celebrating, American bodies afflicted by deprivation, hunger, and the worst effects of the Depression. Aiming at social criticism and responsiveness, documentary literature became a political weapon that served different though interrelated purposes (Haskell 1999, p. 242). First of all, it served to create a socially responsible, not merely ornamental, art that communicated through a language understandable to ‘the people’. For example, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a photo-essay book produced by the photographer Margaret Bourke-White and the novelist Erskine Caldwell, became the decade’s most influential protest against the tenancy practice, as well as a powerful indictment of Southern tenant farming (Haskell 1999, p. 242). If Hollywood movies offered several imaginary avenues of escape, documentary literature showed what Hollywood did not show, underlining the discrepancies between America’s ideals and its realities (Minter 1994, p. 153, Haskell 1999, p. 242). Even more important to our purposes here is documentary literature’s alternative bodily representations, which moved away from the (hegemonic) model of Proletarian muscularity found in most New Deal public murals. While focusing on skinny rather than muscular bodies, documentary photographs avoided representing the afflicted working-class bodies as objects of ridicule, or even pity, but rather rendered them with both respect and pathos. For instance, photographers such as Dorothea Lange, in famous pictures such as ‘Migrant Mother’8 or ‘Migrant Farm Families’,9 managed to elicit beauty, as Haskell (1999, p. 242) rightly notes, from even the humblest and most battered of bodies by conveying dignity and respect for the process of survival. While it is true that documentary literature radically questioned the American

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myth of plenty by focusing on the suffering of the neglected and voiceless poor, such works exemplified as well the dignity, energy, and endurance of the working-class body. If, as it seems, documentary literature radically undermined ‘Proletarian musculinity’ by providing alternative images of male (and female) bodies, the (hegemonic) tough-guy Proletarian model was also problematized from different but equally subversive perspectives.10 While Michael Gold praised John Steinbeck’s best-known novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) in the New Masses as evidence that the ‘proletarian spirit had battered down the barricades set up by the bourgeois monopolists of literature’ (quoted in Minter 1994, p. 190), it must be remembered that Steinbeck’s male characters can hardly be said to embody the pattern of muscular Proletarianism defended by Gold. In reality, neither Tom Joad, the protagonist of Grapes, nor George and Lennie, the protagonists of Of Mice and Men (1937), his second most famous novel about the Depression, appear to conform to this model. Rather than embody hypermasculinity, most of Steinbeck’s male characters do actually seem to opt for a softer, less aggressive, more ‘feminine’ pattern of manhood based on tenderness, sweetness, companionship, and (working-class) solidarity with each other. This alternative model of manhood is clearly reflected in Steinbeck’s bodily representations. Of Mice and Men, for example, depicts George as ‘quick’ and sharpfeatured but ‘small’, whereas his mentally disabled traveling companion, Lennie, is referred to as ‘a huge man’ but also as ‘shapeless of face’. Furthermore, Lennie’s ‘wide’ shoulders are described as ‘sloping’, as he walks with his arms ‘hung loosely’ and dragging his feet ‘the way a bear drags his paws’ (Steinbeck 1937, p. 4). If George’s superior intelligence is qualified by his physical smallness, Lennie’s superior physical strength is similarly diminished by his awkwardness as well as his mental disability. While George and Lennie are depicted as antithetical characters from a physical (and psychological) viewpoint, their physical (and intellectual) differences are shown to be far less significant than their comradeship, with George acting as a surrogate father to the mentally disabled Lennie. If 1920s American culture had been obsessed with keeping one’s physical appearance and the body beautiful,11 Steinbeck’s works, set in the context of the Depression, move from individual to social and communal values, and, in so doing, they celebrate the strength and resilience of ‘the people’ above and beyond the individual body and its external image. Far from embodying ‘musculinity’, Steinbeck’s literary figures may be old and crippled, as in the case of Old Candy in Of Mice and Men, or even mentally disabled, as in the case of Lennie, but they are united by the more important values of friendship, emotional connection, community-mindedness, and, above all, their shared working-class status. Only these seem to offer Steinbeck’s characters a respite from the effects of economic marginality. As Lennie tells George, ‘guys like us got no family’, although ‘we got each other, that’s what, that gives a hoot in hell about us’ (Steinbeck 1937, p. 104).12 I would like to conclude this section by turning to the painting of Paul Cadmus as yet another (counter-)example of male bodily depictions in Depression America. If, as we have seen, Steinbeck’s literature problematizes stereotypical views of the Proletarian male body as hypermasculine (and heterosexual), Cadmus’s New Deal murals make even more explicit the plurality, complexity, and contradictions surrounding the representation of male bodies in 1930s American culture. Most murals commissioned by the Roosevelt administration as part of their New Deal policies depict, as has been argued, the hard bodies of laborers, sharecroppers, and farmers as symbols of national strength, moral integrity, and resilience during the Depression.

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Like other muralists and needy artists, the gay painter Paul Cadmus signed on as an employee of the federally funded Public Works of Art Project. However, his first major work for the PWAP was the infamous ‘The Fleet’s In!’13 which can hardly be said to uphold the traditional American ideals promoted by Roosevelt. In this canvas, a group of well-built, muscular, handsome sailors on leave are drinking with prostitutes and transvestites, with a gay couple also attending the party. It is little wonder, then, that when Admiral Hugh Rodman saw the picture of these corpulent, strong, and virile men in tight clothing getting ‘too friendly’ with each other, he ordered the immediate removal of the painting from an exhibition of government-sponsored paintings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art on the grounds of obscenity. Paradoxically, though, Cadmus’s name was splashed across newspaper headlines as a result of this scandal, which contributed to launching his career as a ‘serious’ artist.14 Even more important, perhaps, is Cadmus’s highly subversive re-view of the New Deal public murals. For, even if he adopted the dominant image of ‘musculinity’ promoted by the Roosevelt administration, his painting was banned for making explicit the obviously homoerotic aspect underlying such representations of male bodies. What Cadmus’s painting reveals is that Depression America seemed incapable of separating masculinity from heterosexuality, gender from sexual orientation, excluding homosexual desire from the very definition of ‘Americanness’. However, because Cadmus continued to present himself as simply an ‘observer’ rather than a participant, he was commissioned a series on ‘Aspects of Suburban Life’ (1936) by the Treasury Relief Art Project as murals for a post office in the Long Island suburb of Port Washington. In their crude depiction of the working class (vis-a`-vis the leisure classes), most of these paintings – including the best-known ‘Golf’15 and ‘Main Street’16 – would indeed seem to be in line with New Deal policies. However, Cadmus’s ruthless critique of the snobbism of the new rich,17 and especially of socio-economic inequality, caused his works to be deemed by members of the Treasury Relief Art Project as ‘unsuitable for a federal building’. Interestingly, much of the social criticism inherent in these paintings springs, once more, from Cadmus’s bodily representations. In ‘Golf’, for example, the new rich are depicted as a group of chubby golfers who seem more interested in smoking cigars and showing off their wealth than in the sport itself.18 Moreover, two of the male characters are clearly gay, directing all their attention at the young, handsome, and muscular caddy. The fact that the caddy wears a poorer man’s clothes, and even has holes in his shoes, emphasizes the distance between his social class and theirs. Once again the painter draws on visible bodily differences to highlight social differences, pitting the beauty of the Proletarian body against the ugliness of the overweight upper class. Unlike his licentious portraits of sailors, Cadmus’s suburban series would seem to focus really on the struggling working class and economic marginality. However, Cadmus was fired by the government after painting these pictures for a post office mural that was never completed. Subsequently classified as one of the great American realists, he was dismissed by the New Deal administration for his stark realism, for unabashedly depicting poverty and, especially, social (as well as sexual) differences in the most realistic ways. Paradoxically, then, he seemed to lose his job for doing exactly what he was commissioned to do. For, even if the (official) discourse of the Roosevelt administration asked the publicly hired artists to record, paint, and write about what they saw, it is clear now that they always expected certain things to be kept hidden, certain red lines not to be trespassed.

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Conclusion From what has been argued here, it would appear that the Great Depression caused millions of American males to feel emasculated by their incapacity to provide for their families, since the mainstream model of American masculinity had traditionally been equated with the breadwinning role. As has been argued, the Roosevelt administration tried to ‘remasculinize’ American culture by promoting numerous images of ‘hard’ bodies at work, as may be seen in several New Deal public murals of the time. This remasculinizing effort was also complemented by Marxist authors and critics, perhaps most notably Michael Gold, who established a direct relationship between gender and class by suggesting a dichotomy between hard/masculine/working-class authors, on the one hand, and soft/effete/upper-class writers, on the other. Nevertheless, this binary may also be problematized. If documentary literature questioned Mike Gold’s hypermasculine view of the proletariat by providing images of vulnerable yet dignified male bodies, writers such as John Steinbeck and painters such as Paul Cadmus also questioned, as we have seen, Gold’s masculinist and homophobic rhetoric from particularly interesting and subversive perspectives. While Steinbeck challenges Gold’s hypermasculine discourse by presenting alternative images of ‘soft’ and even ‘feminine’ working-class male characters, Cadmus goes even further, establishing a correlation between working-class ‘musculinity’ and homoeroticism. In so doing, Cadmus not only questioned the heterosexism underlying most of Gold’s theses but also, and more importantly, highlighted the blatant homophobia of the 1930s, when the association between virility and heterosexuality still remained widely accepted as the norm. Furthermore, in pitting the beauty of the Proletarian body against the ugliness of the overweight upper class, Cadmus kept drawing on bodily differences to highlight class differences, skilfully using the body as a marker, and a denounce, of social inequalities. That he was finally dismissed by the Roosevelt administration reveals nothing but the subversive force of his art. Notes 1. As David Minter reminds us, ‘farm income and industrial wages remained low throughout the twenties, and by 1929, with 35 percent of all personal income going into the pockets of 5 percent of the population, even the middle class was showing signs of stress’ (1994, p. 147). 2. On the Crash of 1929, see also Galbraith (1955); on the Great Depression, see Cowley (1980), Schlesinger (1957), Bird (1966), Wecter (1948). 3. As Kimmel explains, the M-F scale aimed to measure ‘gendered behaviors, attitudes, and information by which parents could plot their child’s “mental masculinity and femininity” – the successful acquisition of gender identity’ (Kimmel 1996, p. 150). This test was also posited as an early diagnosis of ‘sexual deviance’ and, therefore, as a first step towards its ‘cure’. For a critique of this model and the gender biases and stereotypes on which it was based, see Kimmel (1996, pp. 150– 152), Penner (2011, pp. 40 – 49). 4. Interestingly, it was Atlas’s advertisements for his physical fitness programs that graced the first issue of Superman in 1939 and virtually every issue since (Kimmel 1996, p. 154). 5. On Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal policies, see Leuchtenburg (1963). 6. The genteel tradition of American letters ‘maintained that literature should respect decorum and the polite social dictates of upper-class society’ (Penner 2011, p. 4). See also Penner (2011, pp. 33 – 37). 7. In a 1930 book review column of the New Republic, Gold actually attacked Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1928) for its refined, decorous, effete style, explicitly linking this style to the effeminacy of the upper classes. For an analysis of Gold’s viciously homophobic attack on Wilder as a (homosexual) poet of the ‘parvenu’ leisure classes, see Penner (2011, pp. 25 –29). See also Penner (2011, pp. 39 – 40) for an analysis of the recurrent association between homosexuality and the upper classes, particularly between gayness and the reckless hedonism of the Roaring Twenties, as well as the anti-gay reaction of the 1930s. Throughout the

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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1930s homophobia gained force due to the homosexual’s association with the self-indulgence of the 1920s, which was believed to have plunged the nation into the Great Depression. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/index.html The term ‘musculinity’ is borrowed here from Tasker (1993), who applies it to the representation of the action heroes in 1990s Hollywood cinema. See Requena-Pelegrı´ (2013). In this respect, it seems paradoxical, to say the least, that Michael Gold’s masculinist and homophobic biases did not prevent him from selecting Steinbeck as a paradigmatic example for working-class virility and masculinity, for the love between George and Lennie poses a radical challenge to traditional (hetero)normative masculinities and gender relations. Indeed, Steinbeck’s fiction is as male-centered and homosocial as homoerotic. As Slim, one George’s fellow ranchers, tells him: Funny how you an’ him string along together . . . Hardly none of the guys ever travel together . . . they just come in and get their bunk and work a month, and then they quit and go out alone. Never seem to give a damn about nobody. It jus’ seems kinda funny a cuckoo like him and a smart little guy like you travelin’ together. (Steinbeck 1937, p. 40)

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

http://www.history.navy.mil/ac/cadmus/cadmus.htm See Spring (2002), Eliasoph (1995). http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id¼3605 http://www.flickr.com/photos/charmainezoe/5374852315/ See, for example, ‘Polo’: http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id¼3606 http://americanart.si.edu/collections/search/artwork/?id¼3605

Notes on contributor Josep M. Armengol obtained his PhD in English from the University of Barcelona, Spain, with the thesis ‘Gendering Men: Theorizing Masculinities in American Culture and Literature’ (2006). A renowned masculinity scholar, he has lectured and published extensively on masculinity studies, especially on literary representations of masculinity, in prestigious academic journals such as Signs, Men and Masculinities, the Hemingway Review, and Journal of Men’s Studies, amongst others. His latest books include Debating Masculinity (2009), Richard Ford and the Fiction of Masculinities (the winner of the 2010 Literary Scholarship Prize awarded annually by the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies), Men in Color: Racialized Masculinities in U.S. Literature and Cinema (2011), and Queering Iberia: Iberian Masculinities at the Margins (2012). He is also an international advisory editor for the academic journal Men and Masculinities (Sage Publications), as well as co-editor of the ‘Masculinity Studies’ series at Peter Lang. Currently, he is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain, where he is working on a new book on masculinities in African American fiction.

References Bird, C., 1966. The invisible scar. New York: D. MacKay Co. Bruccoli, M.J., 1981. Some sort of epic grandeur: the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Cowley, M., 1980. The dream of the Golden Mountains: remembering the 1930s. New York: Viking. Eliasoph, P., 1995. Paul Cadmus at ninety: the virtues of depicting sin. American arts quarterly, 12 (2), 39 – 55. Galbraith, J.K., 1955. The great crash, 1929. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Gold, M., 1972a. America needs a critic. In: Michael Folsom, ed. Mike Gold: a literary anthology. New York: International Publishers, 129– 139. Gold, M., 1972b. Proletarian realism. In: Michael Folsom, ed. Mike Gold: a literary anthology. New York: International Publishers, 203– 208. Haskell, B., 1999. The American century: art and culture, 1900– 1950. New York: Whitney Museum of Art/Norton. Kimmel, M.S., 1996. Manhood in America: a cultural history. New York: Oxford University Press.

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